From the time of Dom João I., whose daughter, Isabel, married Duke Philip early in the fifteenth century, the two courts of Portugal and of Burgundy had been closely united. Isabel sent an alabaster monument for the tomb of her father's great friend and companion, the Holy Constable, and one of bronze for that of her eldest brother; while as a member of the embassy which came to demand her hand, was J. van Eyck himself. However, if he painted anything in Portugal, it has now vanished.
There was also a great deal of trade with Antwerp where the Portuguese merchants had a _lonja_ or exchange as early as 1386, and where a factory was established in 1503. With the heads of this factory, Francisco Brandão and Rodrigo Ruy de Almada, Albert Dürer was on friendly terms, sending them etchings and paintings in return for wine and southern rarities. He also drew the portrait of Damião de Goes, Dom Manoel's friend and chronicler.
It is natural enough, therefore, that Flanders should have had a great influence on Portuguese painting, and indeed practically all the pictures in the country are either by Netherland masters, painted at home and imported, or painted in Portugal by artists who had been attracted there by the fame of Dom Manoel's wealth and generosity, or else by Portuguese pupils sent to study in Flanders.
During the seventeenth century all memory of these painters had vanished. Looking at their work, the writers of that date were struck by what seemed to them, in their natural ignorance of Flemish art, a strange and peculiar style, and so attributed them all to a certain half-mythical painter of Vizeu called Vasco, or Grão Vasco, who is first mentioned in 1630.
Raczynski,[6] in his letters to the Berlin Academy, says that he had found Grão Vasco's birth in a register of Vizeu; but Vasco is not an uncommon name, and besides this child, Vasco Fernandes, was born in 1552--far too late to have painted any of the so-called Grão Vasco's pictures.
It is of course possible that some of the pictures now at Vizeu were the work of a man called Vasco, and one of those at Coimbra, in the sacristy of Santa Cruz, is signed Velascus--which is only the Spanish form of Vasco--so that the legendary personage may have been evolved from either or both of these, for it is scarcely possible that they can have been the same.