Damião de Gois and the Arts

Abstract

If he had been free to live permanently wherever he chose, Damião de Gois we know would have stayed in Flanders. From all points of view — personal, professional, intellectual, and avocational — this country was ideal for him. In regard to music especially there was no more congenial place for Gois than Flanders. Here the air was filled with the genius of his favorite composers, Ockeghem and Josquin, who had worked for some time in Antwerp and in Brussels respectively.¹ In these two composers Gois found musical heroes whose paths he himself had tried to follow. He admired them so much that he included two encomiums in Poetry, the one deploring that Ockeghem’s “golden voice” was now silent, the other celebrating Josquin as the “glory” of the temples and the muses.² It is interesting to note parenthetically that the author of the poem to Ockeghem was Erasmus of Rotterdam; Gois printed this encomium under a pseudonym, perhaps because he knew that his friend had not been proud of it in his later years.³