[Footnote 25: This prayer of Columbus, which is printed by Padre Claudio Clementi in the "Tablas Chronologicas de los Descubridores" (Valencia, 1689), was afterward repeated, by order of the Sovereigns of Castille, in subsequent discoveries. Hernando Cortez, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, Pizarro, and others, had to use it officially.] [Footnote 26: It is very much to be regretted that Christopher Columbus' intentions in this respect were not carried out because the Protectors would have certainly decreed that a marble statue should be erected to commemorate so great a gift, and we would then possess an authentic portrait of the discoverer of America, which does not exist anywhere. Nor do I believe that the portrait of Columbus ever was drawn, carved, or painted from the life. There were doubtless painters already in Spain at the close of the fifteenth century, such, for instance, as Juan Sanchez de Castro, Pedro Berruguette, Juan de Borgona, Antonio del Rincon, and the five artists whom Cardinal Ximenes intrusted with the task of adorning the paranymph of the University of Alcala, but they painted only religious subjects. It is at a later period that portrait painting commenced in Spain. One of those artists may have thought of painting a portrait of Columbus, but there is no trace of any such intention in the writings of the time, nor of the existence of an authentic effigy of the great navigator in Spain or any other country. We must recollect that the enthusiasm created by the news of the discovery of America was far from being as great as people now imagine, and if we may judge from the silence of Spanish poets and historians of the fifteenth century, it produced less effect in Spain than anywhere else. At all events, the popularity of Columbus lasted scarcely six months, as deceptions commenced with the first letters that were sent from Hispaniola, and they never ceased whilst he was living. In fact, it is only between April 20, 1493, which is the date of his arrival in Barcelona, and the 20th of May following, when he left that city to embark for the second expedition (during the short space of six weeks), that his portrait might have been painted; although it was not then a Spanish notion, by any means. Neither Boabdil nor Gonzalvo de Cordova, whose exploits were certainly much more admired by the Spaniards than those of Columbus, were honored in that form during their lifetime. Even the portraits of Ferdinand and Isabella, although attributed to Antonio del Rincon, are only fancy pictures of the close of the sixteenth century.