António Ribeiro Chiado
Blessed with a remarkable enthusiasm as a scandalmonger, as well as a great ability to imitate gestures and voices, the poet António Ribeiro Chiado (1520-1591) was a merciless social chronicler. He became famous for humorously denouncing the vices of Lisbon and the kingdom. Despite producing work of an uneven quality and not refraining from criticising palace intrigues, he performed his Auto da Natural Invenção (Play of Natural Invention) in front of King João III. An improbable destiny for someone born to a humble family, in the outskirts of Évora, on an unknown date. Expelled from the Franciscan Order after having been arrested, he headed for Lisbon, where he is thought to have led a dissolute life, and adopted the role of merciless satirist.
Ruben A.
Irreverence and narrative deconstruction were essential features of Ruben A., the name to which writer, essayist and historian Ruben Andresen Leitão (1920-1975) answered. These qualities were very much in evidence in the novels O Caranguejo (The Crab, 1954), A Torre de Barbela (The Tower of Barbela, 1965) and also the posthumous Kaos (1982), the latter two of a historical nature. This was the register in which he gave us his greatest work, the biography of King Pedro V (1950), written when he was a professor of Portuguese language and culture at King’s College, London. This interest in the history of Portugal intersected with his leanings towards auto- ction, demonstrated in the volumes of O Mundo à Minha Procura (The World as it Sought Me Out) and Páginas (Pages), written between 1964 and 1970.
Avelino Teixeira da Mota
At the tender age of 23, he impressed his teachers at the Naval School, where he had enrolled four years earlier, in 1939, with a meticulous study on the technical problems of Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe. This was the rst sign of the legacy of Avelino Teixeira da Mota (1920-1982) in the history of nautical cartography and relationships between Portugal and Africa. He made his name with rigorous research and explanations of the facts of the Discoveries, and not in order to glorify them heroically, as prescribed by the Estado Novo regime, despite his having worked for the colonial administration in Guinea between 1945 and 1957. We owe to him the demysti cation of the existence of the School of Sagres.
Bernardo Santareno
His time as a doctor on the cod- shing ships, recounted in the volume Nos Mares do Fim do Mundo (In the Seas of the End of the World, 1959) and made into a theatre play O Lugre (The Lugger) the same year, helped Bernardo Santareno (1920-1980) to de ne more precisely the dramatic breadth of his work. In a rst phase, he considered intimacy and individual freedom, using a naturalistic language. But, starting with the play O Judeu (The Jew, 1966), and in uenced by Brecht, he also embraced epic outlines and strong political commitment. Initiated in writing through poetry, the man born António Martinho do Rosário, in Santarém (from which he adopted his surname), is considered by many to be the greatest Portuguese playwright of the 20th century.
Cruzeiro Seixas
Loyal to the founding principles of surrealism, of which he was one of the pioneers in Portugal, the painter, sculptor and poet Artur Cruzeiro Seixas (1920) always saw this artistic trend more as a way of acting than of looking. The role of dreams as an element of subversion of the everyday has followed his creation since, in the late 1940s, he renounced his brief incursions into expressionism and neorealism. A change that owed a lot to Mário Césariny, a colleague at the Escola António Arroio, who, with Seixas and others (such as António Maria Lisboa and Mário-Henrique Leiria), formed Os Surrealistas in 1949, a dissident collective of the notable Grupo Surrealista de Lisboa.
Nadir Afonso
Rather than resulting from an impulse, artistic creation was to Nadir Afonso (1920-2013) the consequence of a process of investigating the real in the search for the absolute through harmonious mathematical and geometric laws. This approach accompanied the painter through his nearly eight-decade-long career, still being perfected until the nal fractal period, when the lines depicted the great metropolises of the 21st century. A coherent path for an architect who, in 1946, set off for Paris to study painting and ended up working as a colleague of Le Corbusier, the father of modern urbanism. He also had the opportunity to work with Óscar Niemeyer, in São Paulo, between 1951 and 1954.
Samuel Alemão
