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The art historian Aarão de Lacerda was born on 23 March 1890 in the parish of Bonfim, Porto, into an upper-middle-class family, whose social advance followed by way of higher education. His mother, D. Josefina Cândida Moreira de Lacerda, was the daughter of a distinguished royal tutor in Lamego, while his father, Aarão Ferreira de Lacerda, who held a PhD from the University of Coimbra, was a lecturer in zoology in the Academia Politécnica do Porto, later incorporated into the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto. The child would grow up in a privileged and highly cultured environment, attending both primary and secondary school (liceu) in the city of Porto before travelling to Coimbra to study in the Faculty of Law, where he gained a bachelor’s degree, with distinction, in 1912. Returning to his native city he was nominated first officer of the Secretariat General of the University of Porto and opened his own legal business, but quickly recognized that such a career would not satisfy his greater propensity for cultural and artistic studies. This was not unconnected with his close association with Joaquim de Vasconcelos and the tertúlias around the Renascença Portuguesa, the movement that was invigorating intellectual life in Porto at the beginning of the twentieth century. There he met various significant figures in the world of arts and letters who influenced his thinking and his interest in new areas of knowledge.
If Joaquim de Vasconcelos had been crucial since his youth in sharpening his artistic sensibility and introducing him to new areas and criticism of art, Leonardo Coimbra had also stressed philosophical speculation through his familiarity with the work of Bergson and new trends in aesthetics, alongside recent developments in Archaeology and Ethnography, centred around the journal Portugália, which they engaged with for a better understanding of Portuguese art. And so in 1916 Aarão de Lacerda returned to the University of Coimbra, enrolled now in the Faculty of Letters to study Historical and Geographical Sciences, where he consolidated his choice of specialist field in Aesthetics and History of Art, a course he studied in the final year under the supervision of Dr Teixeira de Carvalho. In his memoirs he was lavish in his praise for this teacher and his regard for the course of studies he ran, regarding him as his mentor by reason of his erudition and his openness to discussion of aesthetic and artistic questions, as a result of the close connection between them. In the opinion of António Cruz, he was “the most valuable of the disciples of Quim Martins, his true and faithful follower, his successor” (“Aarão de Lacerda – o professor, o artista e o historiador da Arte”, 1984, p. 100).
