Livro de Lizuarte de Abreu.

Accession number:

MS M.525

Title:

Created:

Goa, India, between 1558 and 1565.

Credit:

Part I Purchase, with the assistance of the Fellows, 1963.

Description:

Part I: 19 leaves of texts; Part II: 92 leaves of drawings, varying number of lines (40-51, average 46) : paper, ill. ; 280 x 190 mm

Provenance:

Commissioned by and executed for Lisuarte de Abreu, who wrote part of the text; owned by Sebastião Francisco de Mendo Trigoso (1773-1821) in 1821; Francisco Xavier Bertrand (d. 1872); presented to the Portuguese Viceroy Don Affonso de Bragança (Affonso Henriques, Duke de Oporto, Infante of Portugal, 1865-1920) in India in 1896; deposited by him in the Biblioteca da Ajuda, Lisbon, in 1908; stolen from the Biblioteca da Ajuda ca. 1911, and divided into three parts; the first part of the manuscript (19 leaves) was purchased in Madrid, Spain, by the Conde de Arrochela between 1912 and 1914; the second part of the manuscript (92 leaves) was purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) from Ludwig Rosenthal in Munich, Germany, on May 7, 1912; the Conde de Arrochela's leaves were purchased for the Morgan Library with the assistance of the Fellows in November, 1963; J.P. Morgan (1867-1943). Whereabouts of the third part is unknown.

Notes:

Ms. written and illuminated partly at sea aboard the Portuguese vessel Rainha, and at Goa, between 1558 and 1565 (the last governor mentioned was in office in 1565).
Maritime travel. Part I comprises a group of texts, copied by order of Lizuarte de Abreu, including a diary of the voyage of the vessel Rainha and a shorter description of the same voyage, as well as three pen and ink drawings. Part II is divided into two sections: a) a list of the governors and viceroys of India to 1558 with their full-page color portraits and a list of the first 19 viceroys and governors of Portuguese India with their watercolor portraits; b) watercolor illustrations of fleets of ships, shipwrecks, naval battles and sieges, commissioned in 1550 by the governor Jorge Cabral of Goa.
"We have found in the library of the Casa Cadaval, in Muge, a seventeenth-century copy ... of the Livro de Lizuarte de Abreu, without the drawings. It is contained in fols. 13-27 of a codex, class-mark 'M VI 10 954', and is also followed by a copy of the Livro de Duarte Barbosa, exactly as in the original codex"--Cortesão.
Decoration: 19 full-page portraits [copied from the original standing portraits in the vice-regal palace at Goa]; 45 double-page and 31 full-page drawings in colored ink and watercolor.
Kept in two loose portfolios.

Variant Title:

Livro de Lisuarte de Abreu

Script:

16th-century cursive scripts and Roman capitals

Language:

Portuguese

Resources:

Description/Bibliography

Century:

16th century

Genres:

Dated manuscripts