Two writers especially attract attention even in the feast of interest which Portuguese prose in this century offers so abundantly. The son of a distinguished Dutch illuminator and painter settled in Portugal, Antonio de Hollanda, who painted Charles V at Toledo and may have illuminated the Book of Hours of Queen Lianor, FRANCISCO DE HOLLANDA (1518-84), born in Lisbon, painter, illuminator, and architect, in his short treatises _Da fabrica que fallece á cidade de Lisboa_ and _Da sciencia do desenho_, showed an enthusiasm for his subject almost out of place in the Portugal of the second half of the sixteenth century. Indeed, he nearly ran into trouble with the Inquisition by seeming to make painting ‘divine’, but prudently altered the passage. His curious and celebrated treatise _Da Pintvra Antigva_ (1548) is written in a style which may be rather rejoiced in than imitated, for, as he tells us, he was more at home with the brush than with the pen, but it is full of ingenious and original remarks. The first part deals in forty-four brief chapters with painting generally, and opens with a fine passage describing the work of God as the greatest of all painters. The second part contains the _Quatro dialogos_, in the first three of which he records the conversations of Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo, Lattanzio Tolomei, and himself in the church of St. Sylvester or in a garden overlooking Rome; conversations which, despite their Portuguese dress, bear the stamp of truth and will retain their fascination so long as interest in art endures. Francisco worked first in the household of the Infante Fernando and then in that of the Archbishop of Evora. In 1537 he set out on a journey to Rome by land (Valladolid, Barcelona, Provence), and in Italy remained from 1538 to 1547. His friendship with Michelangelo continued after his return to Portugal, as a letter from Hollanda to Michelangelo in 1553 proves. The last part of his life he spent in the country between Lisbon and Sintra among the Portuguese whom he had called _desmusicos_, and despite his comfortable circumstances--he received a pension of 100,000 _réis_ from Philip II--he must often have looked back with regret to the fullness of those nine years in Italy. But his countrymen, thanks largely to the scholarly researches and studies of Dr. Joaquim de Vasconcellos, are now fully alive to his merits. And, indeed, even in the sixteenth century a passage in Frei Heitor Pinto’s _Imagem da Vida Christam_ sets him side by side with the great Italian.[535] PHILIPE NUNEZ, who professed as a Dominican in 1591, wrote on painting in the next century: _Arte poetica e da pintura e symmetria_ (1615). A work on music by ANTONIO FERNANDEZ of about the same date, _Arte de Mvsica de canto dorgam e canto cham_ (1626), consists of three treatises which do not profess to be original. MANUEL NUNEZ DA SILVA wrote on the same subject in his _Arte Minima_ (1685).