Art and Progress. Portuguese Colonial Representations in the Great World Exhibitions

In the mid-19th century, an ambition for universality, a desire to spread knowledge of the benefits brought by industrialisation, and faith in progress meant that a need arose to create an exhibition structure that could bring together the new urban experience – and so the great exhibitions were born. The ‘Universal Exhibition’ became a platform where the results of development on various levels, and in different registers, could be exhibited in a compact fashion. It brought under one roof the most glorious aspects of the 19th century. Exhibiting everything from agriculture to mining, from machinery to art, it brought the public a view of the human cosmos immersed in a new movement, finding its raison d’être in one of the main identifiers of the age: the birth of the phenomenon of the masses.