UC Berkeley

Portuguese manuscript illuminator and art theorist Francisco de Holanda (1517-1585) is the focus of this monographic study. Holanda stands in an ambiguous place within modern art historical scholarship as his treatise, Da Pintura Antigua (1548), is largely utilized as a source in Michelangelo studies. This dissertation aims to expand studies of Holanda into a number of new contexts. It addresses the novel format of Da Pintura Antigua and suggests that this format contributes to how the larger theses and aim of that treatise should be considered, specifically in the context of the reform of religious art in the years between the Reformation and Counter- Reformation. I also address the imperial context of Da Pintura Antigua written as it was within the court of João III. While Holanda’s written and depictive artistic productions are usually addressed within the relatively insular disciplines of aesthetics and art theory, I explore larger geographic contexts. Holanda’s images and texts are tied into the history of science, the activity of navigation and its technologies. Lastly, Holanda’s hexaemeral imagery is placed within the context of medieval traditions of depiction and contemporary cosmological and natural-scientific concerns.