Painting Naked Truth: The Colóquios of Garcia da Orta (1563)

Abstract

This article aims to reassess the figure of Garcia da Orta and his work, Colóquios dos simples e drogas da Índia (Goa, 1563), a dialogue between Oriental and Western knowledge, by addressing aspects of the author’s origins and education in the Iberian Peninsula. As a member of the Jewish community and the son of refugees, Garcia da Orta was accustomed to frontiers. He was a traveling convert particularly well-prepared for cultural interchange and mediation. As a physician trained in the Humanist universities of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares he was familiar with philological projects based on translation and transculturalism. We thus present the Colóquios as a polyglot materia medica (by analogy with the Polyglot Bible), and his motto painting naked truth as the vindication of an experience which can only be gained away from the center on the periphery.