The poet and the polymath: two 16th-century Portuguese travellers

In 1866, Dante Gabriel Rossetti visited a London print shop to buy a large canvas of a Renaissance street. He recognised that the bustling scene – black-robed clerics, bargaining merchants, black porters and children teasing a monkey, played out on a wide boulevard in front of a colonnaded row of slightly rickety houses – was Iberian, but could be no more precise. Only in 2009 did scholars identify the street as Lisbon’s Rua Nova dos Mercadores, painted in the late 16th century, and lost like so much of the city in the great earthquake of 1755.

One of the many virtues of Edward Wilson-Lee’s fascinating, elegantly written book is to plunge us into that scene, and to follow a trail outward from this global city across Europe, to Africa, India and beyond. His two guides to this world are Portuguese contemporaries, one a famous epic poet, the other a forgotten archivist and polymath, with two contrasting perspectives on the expanding world they witnessed.

The poet is Luís Vaz de Camões, whose great work, The Lusiads, tells a mythic version of the voyage of Vasco da Gama to India. The archivist is Damião de Góis, who worked for the Portuguese crown and sat for Dürer. He ended his days in mysterious, violent circumstances, after a lifetime of active engagement with the spirits of the age. Wilson-Lee shows Damião popping up at the feet of Erasmus in Freiburg, at the tables of Martin Luther and his right-hand man Philip Melanchthon in Wittenberg, and entertaining the founder of the Jesuit order, Ignatius Loyola, in Padua (Loyola had come to apologise for the behaviour of one of his followers, a Portuguese zealot whom Wilson-Lee identifies as Damião’s nemesis).

Camões, meanwhile, led a much more shadowy, rackety life. He picked fights, fell into debt and spent a good proportion of his life in prison, at home and abroad.