Cunha (Troilo de Vasconcelos da)

His name is today entirely unknown here, but in his own time he won considerable renown as a poet and writer. Those who make deeper studies of our literary history know the pages devoted to him by Diogo Barbosa Machado in the Bibliotheca Lusitana (‘Portuguese library’) and by Costa e Silva in the Ensaio Critico dos Poetas Portugueses. He was born in Funchal in 1654, when his father Bartolomeu de Vasconcelos held the office of governor and captain-general (capitão-general, military governor of Madeira) of this archipelago. He devoted himself to the thorough study of the humanities, displaying his vast learning above all in languages, especially Greek and Latin. He also applied himself to the study of various theological questions, which he chose to treat in his poetry, particularly in the work entitled O Espelho do Invisivel. In it he shows great poetic qualities, but its subject, unsuited to treatment in verse, made the poem difficult to understand and stripped it of the graces that should adorn compositions of this kind. This is so despite, as Inocêncio Francisco da Silva says, the purity of its style and its being little tainted by the faults of the Gongorist school that then dominated our literature.

He rendered into Portuguese the Latin poem of Justin, under the title Justino Lusitano, and left many unpublished works in prose and verse.

He held very important posts, such as that of secretary of the Council of the Three Estates (Junta dos Tres Estados), among others. He died in Lisbon on 4 August 1729.