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Money Museum

We are what we do.
What’s not done, does not exist.
So, we only exist on days when we do things.
On the days we don’t,
We’re just there.

Padre António Vieira

When Raphael painted The School of Athens, in 1510, in the Room of the Signatura of the Vatican Palace, he perfectly synthetized the times in which he was living. By retrieving the ideas and the men from the past, he (re)invented the present. This is also the time in which Francisco de Holanda (1517-1584) lived – a man unparalleled in Portuguese cultural history. Painter, designer, architect, illuminist, essayist, and idealist, he was an intellectual in the truest sense of the word.
With a background in Humanism, he dedicated his life to drawing, to creating a 'new' city of Lisbon, and to writing. He wrote about the artist and the artist’s role in society, about the art-of-drawing and its virtues, about defence plans for the Lisbon harbour entrance, and above all about the world that he had discovered at the age of 20 (1537) in his journey through Europe, which actually began and ended in the Eternal City.