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.
David Horspool
The poet and the polymath: two 16th-century Portuguese travellers
Edward Wilson-Lee examines the world through the eyes of Luís de Camões and Damião de Góis, and finds their views very different

Comments
Don't miss out
Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.
UNLOCK ACCESSAlready a subscriber? Log in