Academies

The taste for academies, so fashionable in mainland Portugal in the 18th century, also made itself felt in Madeira, although some of them were of very minor importance and even of manifest uselessness. In this city there was one called the Assembleia dos Únicos do Funchal, which existed in 1746, as can be seen from the autograph manuscript owned by Dr Álvaro de Azevedo entitled Oração Académica, which Francisco João de Vasconcelos Bettencourt recited on 15 May 1746, the day on which he took up the place of Academician in the Assembleia dos Únicos do Funchal to which he had been appointed. The end of this speech is published on page 787 of ‘Longing for the Homeland’ (Saudades da Terra). There was another academy, devoted to the cultivation of poetry, called the Arcadia Funchalense, to which we have found only two references. One is in the epicedium, on page 80 of the second volume of the Colecção Poética of Francisco Manuel de Oliveira, dedicated to the death of Valisio Alceo, a member of the Arcadia Funchalense. The other is in the sonnet published on p. 31 of the Obras of Dom Aires de Ornelas e Vasconcelos, dedicated to Francisco Xavier de Ornelas, a founding member of the same Arcadia. We cannot establish exactly when the Arcadia Funchalense existed. We know only that Oliveira’s Collecção was published in 1794 and that Francisco Xavier de Ornelas was born in 1748. Its foundation must be later than 1770, given the sonnet’s reference to the ‘profound learning’ of Francisco de Ornelas, who ‘was surpassing the Tullies’. The Funchal Society of Friends of the Sciences and Arts (Sociedade Funchalense dos Amigos das Ciências e Artes), established in this city in 1821, was also a kind of academy; it was short-lived because of the political events of 1823. It held many meetings, at which a number of speeches were given and various papers on literary and historical subjects were read. O Patriota Funchalense (‘The Funchal Patriot’) of 7 September 1822 gives an interesting, if brief, account of it. See also ‘Longing for the Homeland’, p. 794.