André Falcão de Resende

Portuguese poet and magistrate, born in the city of Évora. He was Garcia de Resende's nephew and André de Resende's cousin. He studied Arts in Évora and graduated in Canon Law in Coimbra in 1570. A municipal judge in Torres Vedras, he lived in Madrid between 1581 and 1588. Influenced by ancient and contemporary writers, including Camões, with whom he was friends, he cultivated the various poetic genres of the Renaissance in Portuguese and Castilian. His works written in Portuguese only began to be edited in 1849. In his texts, which already show stylistic influences of the Baroque, the themes of life's disillusionment and the awareness of the ephemeral are present, redeemed in Man by contempt for the world and religious experience. His works include Microcosmografia e Descrição do Pequeno Mundo Que É o Homem, several texts that are part of the Catálogo Razonado (poems organized by Garcia Peres), and Ode a Martim de Castro de Rio, Senhor de Barbacena (1823). A moralist poet and adversary of the Reformation, his religious poem Microcosmografia was long attributed to Camões. His work remained unpublished until the 19th century. He died a victim of the plague.