Francisco de Holanda's four dialogues have been of interest to art historians as a Renaissance treatise on art theory and practice featuring Michelangelo as an interlocutor. The dialogues are the second part of a much longer text, Da Pintura Antiga (1548), following the first book of forty-four expository chapters. Generations of scholars have discussed whether Holanda may have recorded ideas that he heard in conversations with Michelangelo. Holanda also made more than one hundred drawings of antiquities and other things he had seen while traveling to Rome. These drawings have never been published at full scale or in full color so they have remained largely unknown and scarcely studied.

Beginning with examination of the media and techniques of the original drawings, this study identifies graphic sources for some of the folios to show that Holanda's project was more complex than merely sketching what he saw. Like his text, his drawings involved a process of research and the selection and adaptation of sources. An overlooked self-portrait in one of these drawings is a linchpin of a more complex interpretation of the meaning and function of the drawings: this artist identified himself as a scholar.

Considering the drawings in relation to the text, and both works in relation to the contexts of their making, this study concludes that the drawing-book and the treatise were parts of a multi-media campaign aimed at what Greenblatt called "self-fashioning." To this end Holanda used Roman antiquity as a framework, but the artist/author was the central subject matter of both the treatise and the drawings. He aimed at elevating the status of all artists in Portugal, and was particularly concerned with improving his own unlucky career.