Short answers, pulled from the story.
Francisco de Holanda (c. 1517-1585) was a Portuguese artist, architect, and art essayist who served as a court painter for King João III and King Sebastião of Portugal. He wrote Da pintura antiga in 1548, the first treatise on painting produced anywhere on the Iberian Peninsula, and later authored the first essay on urbanism in the Iberian Peninsula.
Francisco de Holanda spent time in Italy from 1538 to 1547 and gained access to Michelangelo through Vittoria Colonna, a prominent figure of the Italian Renaissance. The second part of his treatise Da pintura antiga contains four dialogues reportedly held with Michelangelo in Rome, in which Francisco communicates the essence of Classicism and the contemporary artistic movement there.
Francisco completed Da pintura antiga in 1548, Do tirar polo natural in 1549, and two works in 1571: Da fábrica que falece à cidade de Lisboa and a treatise on the usefulness of drawing. His illustrated manuscript De aetatibus mundi imagines was worked on between 1543 and 1573. He also produced the Antigualhas de Roma, a visual record of Roman antiquities.
Francisco de Holanda designed the facade of the Church of Our Lady of Grace, the Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Graça, in Évora, Portugal. The commission put his Italian Renaissance training directly into built form and made him a practitioner as well as a theorist of the Italianate style.
Francisco de Holanda's visual language drew on Neoplatonism, Christian Kabbalah, and Lullism. He represented the Holy Trinity through geometrical figures and emphasized the contrast between ideal incorporeal forms and what he called imperfect copies in the terrestrial zone. He also advocated for cosmography and astrology as part of a painter's education alongside geometry, mathematics, and perspective.
In his 1548 treatise Da pintura antiga, Francisco de Holanda attributed the Saint Vincent Panels to a specific painter. That attribution became a point of ongoing scholarly debate about the authorship of one of the most important works of fifteenth-century Portuguese painting.