In Los Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, his last novel, Cervantes makes its protagonists order a painting that retells their story in pictures and is meant to be carried with them, and brought up to date, during the rest of their journey. He thus establishes a rich and curious reflection on the powers of image-making in, and with, narrative. Is there any particular meaning to the fact that he conceived of this painter as a Portuguese in Lisbon? This question is approached in this article from the point of view of what Portuguese writers were doing with the relationship between words and pictures in narrative around the time Cervantes himself lived in Lisbon. The conclusions point to a conjoined series of occurrences, both in artistic theory and in narrative practice, that seems to validate the idea that Cervantes derived from Portuguese narrative works certain notions about the desired collaboration between the arts of poetry and painting.