Aleijadinho

Antônio Francisco Lisboa ( or 1738 – 18 November 1814), better known as Aleijadinho (), was a sculptor, carver and architect of Colonial Brazil, noted for his works on and in various churches of Brazil. Little is known with certainty about his biography, which remains shrouded in legend and controversy to this day, making the research work on his life very arduous. The main documentary source on Aleijadinho is a biographical note written only about forty years after his death. His trajectory is reconstructed mainly through the works he left behind, although even in this context his contribution is controversial, since the attribution of authorship for most of the more than four hundred creations that exist today associated with his name was made without any documentary evidence, based only on stylistic similarity with documented pieces.

All of his work, including carvings, architectural projects, reliefs and statuary, was carried out in Minas Gerais, especially in the cities of Ouro Preto, Sabará, São João del-Rei and Congonhas. The main monuments that contain his works are the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Ouro Preto and the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus of Matosinhos. With a style related to Baroque and Rococo, Aleijadinho is considered almost by consensus as the greatest exponent of colonial art in Brazil by Brazilian critics and, surpassing Brazilian borders, for some foreign scholars he is the greatest name of Baroque in the Americas.

Biography

Little is known about the life of Antônio Francisco Lisboa. Practically all the data available today are derived from a biography written in 1858 by Rodrigo José Ferreira Bretas, 44 years after Aleijadinho's death, allegedly based on documents and testimonies of individuals who had known the artist personally. However, recent criticism has tended to consider this biography largely fanciful, part of a process of magnification and dramatization of his personality and work, in a romanticized manipulation of his figure whose aim was to elevate him to the status of an icon of Brazilianness, a mix of hero and artist, a "singular genius, sacred and consecrated", as Roger Chartier described it. Bretas's account, however, cannot be completely discarded, since being the oldest substantial biographical note on Aleijadinho, most of the later biographies were based on it, but the information it brings needs to be seen with some skepticism, being difficult to distinguish what is fact from what has been distorted by popular tradition and by the writer's interpretations. Biographies and critical studies carried out by Brazilian modernists in the first half of the 20th century also made biased interpretations of his life and work, increasing the amount of stereotypes around him, which are still perpetuated today in the popular imagination and in part of the critics, and are explored both by official cultural instances and by tourism agencies in the cities where he left his production.

The first official news about Aleijadinho appeared in 1790 in a memorandum written by captain Joaquim José da Silva, complying with the royal order of 20 July 1782, which determined that notable events, of which there was certain news, that had occurred since the foundation be recorded in an official book of the Captaincy of Minas Gerais. The memorandum, written while Aleijadinho was still alive, contained a description of the artist's most notable works and some biographical indications, and was partly based on it that Bretas wrote ''Traços biográficos relativos ao finado Antônio Francisco Lisboa, distinto escultor mineiro, mais conhecido pelo apelido de Aleijadinho'', where he reproduced excerpts from the original document, which was later lost.

Early years

Antônio Francisco Lisboa was the son of a respected Portuguese master builder and architect, , and his African slave, Isabel. In the baptismal certificate, cited by Bretas, it appears that Antônio, born a slave, was baptized on 29 August 1730, in what was then the town of Vila Rica (currently Ouro Preto) in the parish of Nossa Senhora da Conceição de Antônio Dias, with Antônio dos Reis as his godparent and being manumitted on the occasion by his father. The birth certificate does not contain the child's date of birth, which may have occurred a few days earlier. However, there are strong arguments that currently lead to considering it more likely that he was born in 1738, as his death certificate states the date of his death as 18 November 1814, adding that the artist was then 76 years old.Kato, Gisele
"Um Mistério Chamado Aleijadinho"
In ''Revista Bravo!'', Editora Abril, s/d. p. 1 The 1738 date is accepted by the Aleijadinho Museum, located in Ouro Preto, and according to biographer Silvio de Vasconcelos, the original manuscript by Bretas, found in the archives of the Archdiocese of Mariana, refers the birth to 1738, warning that the date corresponds to that recorded on Aleijadinho's death certificate; the reason for the discrepancy between the dates in the manuscript and the booklet that was printed is unclear. In 1738 Aleijadinho's father married Maria Antônia de São Pedro, an Azorean, and with her he gave Aleijadinho four half-siblings, and it was in this family that the artist grew up.

According to Bretas, Aleijadinho's knowledge of drawing, architecture and sculpture was obtained from his father and perhaps from draftsman and painter João Gomes Batista. From 1750 to 1759, he would have attended the boarding school at the Seminary of the Franciscans Donatos of the Hospício da Terra Santa, in Ouro Preto, where he would have learned grammar, latin, mathematics and religion. Meanwhile, he assisted his father in the work he carried out at the Church of Antônio Dias and the , also working with his uncle Antônio Francisco Pombal, a carver, and . He collaborated with José Coelho Noronha in the work of carving the altars of the Mother Church of Caeté, his father's project. His first individual project dates back to 1752, a design for the fountain in the courtyard of the in Ouro Preto.

Maturity

In 1756 Aleijadinho may have gone to Rio de Janeiro accompanying Friar Lucas de Santa Clara, the transporter of gold and diamonds that were to be shipped to Lisbon, where he may have been influenced by local artists. Two years later, he would have created a soapstone fountain for the Terra Santa Hospice and soon after launched himself as a self-employed professional. However, being a mulatto, he was often forced to accept contracts as a day laborer and not as a master. From the 1760s until close to his death, Aleijadinho produced a large number of works, but in the absence of supporting documentation, several have a controversial authorship and are strictly considered only attributions, based on criteria of stylistic similarity with his authenticated production. With his father's death in 1767, Aleijadinho, as a bastard son, was not contemplated in the will. The following year, he enlisted in the Infantry Regiment of the Brown Men of Ouro Preto, where he remained for three years, without discontinuing his artistic activity. During this period, he received important commissions: the design of the façade of the , in Sabará, and the pulpits of the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, in Ouro Preto.

Around 1770 he organized his workshop, which was in full expansion, according to the model of craft guilds or medieval guilds, which in 1772 was regulated and recognized by the Chamber of Ouro Preto. Still in 1772, on 5 August, he was received as a brother in the Brotherhood of São José de Ouro Preto. On 4 March 1776, the governor of the Captaincy of Minas Gerais, Dom Antônio de Noronha, following the instructions of the viceroy, summoned masons, carpenters, locksmiths and blacksmiths to join a military battalion that would work on the reconstruction of a fort in Rio Grande do Sul. Aleijadinho would have been obliged to answer the call, even traveling to Rio de Janeiro, but then he would have been dismissed. In Rio, he arranged for the judicial record of the paternity of a son he had with Narcisa Rodrigues da Conceição, a mulatto, a son who was named, like his grandfather, Manuel Francisco Lisboa. She later abandoned him and took the child to Rio de Janeiro, where he later became an artisan.

Until then, according to Bretas, Aleijadinho had enjoyed good health and the pleasures of the popular parties and dances, but from 1777 onwards, signs of a serious illness began to appear. Over the years the illness deformed his body and hindered his work, causing him great suffering. To this day, as Bretas recognized, the exact nature of his illness is unknown, and several diagnostic proposals have been offered by various historians and physicians. Even with increasing difficulty, Aleijadinho continued to work intensively. On 9 December 1787, he formally assumed the role of judge of the Brotherhood of Saint Joseph. In 1790, captain Joaquim José da Silva wrote his important memorandum to the Chamber of Mariana, partially transcribed by Bretas, where he gave various data about the artist, and, witnessing the fame that accompanied him by then, greeted him as:

Final years and death

In 1796 Aleijadinho received another commission of great importance, for the realization of sculptures of the ''Via Sacra'' and the Prophets for the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus of Matosinhos, in Congonhas, considered to be his masterpiece. In the 1804 census, his son appeared as one of his dependents, along with his daughter-in-law Joana and a grandson. Between 1807 and 1809, with his illness being at an advanced stage, he closed his workshop, but still carried out some work. From 1812 onwards, his health deteriorated further and he began to depend heavily on the people who cared for him. Aleijadinho moved to a house near the in Ouro Preto, to supervise the works that were in charge of his disciple Justino de Almeida. By this time, he was nearly blind and his motor skills were greatly reduced. For a brief period he returned to his old home, but soon had to settle down at his daughter-in-law's house, who, according to Bretas, took care of him until his death on 18 November 1814. Aleijadinho was buried in the Mother Church of Antônio Dias, in a tomb next to the altar of Our Lady of the Good Death.

The man, the disease and the myth

Aleijadinho was described by Bretas in the following terms:

Almost nothing is recorded about his personal life, except that he liked to entertain himself in "vulgar dances" and eat well, and that he fell in love with the mulatto Narcisa, with which he had a son. Nothing was said about his artistic, social or political ideas. He always worked under the commision regime, earning half an eighth of gold a day, but he did not accumulate a fortune, rather, it is said that he was careless with money, being robbed several times. On the other hand, he would have made repeated donations to the poor. He kept three slaves: Maurício, his main helper with whom he shared his earnings, plus Agostinho, a carving assistant, and Januário, who guided the donkey he used to go around on.

Bretas reported that after 1777 Lisboa began to show signs of a mysterious degenerative disease, which earned him the nickname ''Aleijadinho'', i.e. 'little cripple'. His body gradually deformed, which caused him continuous pain; he would have lost several fingers, leaving only his index and thumb, and all of his feet, forcing him to walk on his knees. In order to work, he had to have the chisels tied to his stump hands, and in the most advanced stage of the disease he had to be carried around for all his trips — receipts for payments from slaves who took him around survive, attesting to this. His face was also damaged, lending it a grotesque appearance. According to the report, Aleijadinho was fully aware of his terrible appearance, and for this reason he developed a perennially revolted, angry and suspicious mood, imagining that even the praise he received for his artistic achievements were disguised mockery.

In order to hide his deformity, he wore loose-fitting clothes and large hats that hid his face. He also began to prefer to work at night, when he could not be seen easily, and inside a space closed by awnings. According to Bretas, citing what he learned from Aleijadinho's daughter-in-law, in his last two years, when he could no longer work and spent most of his time in bed, one side of his body was covered with sores, and he constantly begged that Christ came to give him death and deliver him from his life of suffering, resting his holy feet on his miserable body. However, testimonies of the time do not agree on the nature or extent of his deformities. says that the version that presents him without hands originated with , who visited Minas Gerais in 1818, and is repeated by many others, but Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, for example, who was there at the same time, mentioned that Aleijadinho had preserved his hands, albeit paralyzed, a version repeated by Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege. The exhumation of his remains in 1930 was inconclusive. The terminal bones of the fingers and toes were not found, but they may have disintegrated after burial, a hypothesis suggested by the state of decay of the larger bones.

Several diagnoses have been proposed to explain this disease, all conjectural, which include, among others, leprosy (an unlikely alternative, since Aleijadinho was not excluded from social life, as was the case with all lepers), deforming rheumatism, yaws, "cardine" intoxication (an unknown substance said to have the power to enhance his artistic gifts, according to an ancient account), syphilis, scurvy, physical trauma from a fall, rheumatoid arthritis, poliomyelitis and porphyria (a disease that produces photosensitivity — which would explain the fact that the artist worked at night or protected by an awning).

The construction of the myth around Aleijadinho already began in the pioneering biography of Bretas, who, despite warning to the fact that "when an individual becomes famous and admirable in any genre, there are those who, lovers of the marvelous, exaggerate indefinitely what is extraordinary in him, and from the exaggerations that succeed and accumulate, a truly ideal entity finally composes", nevertheless, Bretas praised Aleijadinho's achievements against a hostile environment and an overwhelming illness. At the beginning of the 20th century, interested in defining a new sense of Brazilianness, the modernists took Aleijadinho as a paradigm, a mulatto, a symbol of the Brazilian cultural and ethnic syncretism, who managed to transform the Portuguese heritage into something original, and a lot of bibliography was produced in that sense, creating an aura around him that was assumed by the official instances of the national culture.

One of the most active elements in the construction of the "Aleijadinho myth" concerns the relentless search for confirming signs of its originality, of its "uniqueness" in the panorama of Brazilian art, representing an event so special that it would transcend even the style of its time. However, this search is a peculiar interpretation of the aesthetic phenomenon that was born during Romanticism in the 19th century, when the creator began to be strongly associated with his creation, the latter being considering an exclusive property of the former, and attributing to the work the ability to display genuine reflections of personality and the individual soul that produced it. This entire set of ideas did not exist, at least not with the importance it acquired, during earlier periods, which excelled in the system of collective and often anonymous creation. Art tended to be considered a product of public utility, the clients determined the approach to be employed in the work, the stories and motifs did not belong to anyone, and the artist's personal voice should not prevail over established formal canons and collective concepts which they sought to convey, nor could the creator, in general terms, claim intellectual property over what he wrote, sculpted or painted.

Aleijadinho's illness also became an important element in this magnified picture. As summarized by Gomes Junior:

The researcher also draws attention to the documentary evidence of receipts signed in 1796, in which Aleijadinho's handwriting is still firm and clear. This is an inexplicable fact if Bretas' biography or the 19th century reports of travelers, such as Luccock, Friedrich von Weech, Francis de Castelnau and others, certainly repeating what they had heard from the locals, claiming Aleijadinho had lost not only fingers, but even his hands, are taken into account. However, according to Bury, from that date his handwriting visibly deteriorated. Chartier, Hansen, Grammont and others have echoed the same arguments as Gomes Júnior; Barretto added that the figure of Aleijadinho is currently a decoy for tourism in Ouro Preto to such an extent that his illness, represented in the books, is "commercialized" in some tourist spots in the city. In the midst of this web of dubious biographical constructions largely consecrated by tradition, several scholars have tried to separate fact from legend, in an effort that began almost at the same time as the mythical image around it was created, with the pioneering writings of José Mariano Filho and Roger Bastide on this topic, later supported by several others such as those of the aforementioned authors.

Iconography

There is no news that Aleijadinho was portrayed in life. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, a small portrait of a well-dressed mulatto, with his hands hidden, was found in the ex-voto house of the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, in Congonhas. The work was then sold in 1916 to the Rio de Janeiro merchant Baerlein as a portrait of Aleijadinho, and after ending up in an antique shop, it was bought by Guilherme Guinle, at which point the authorship of the portrait was attributed to Manoel da Costa Ataíde. In 1941 Guinle donated the portrait to the Public Archives of Minas Gerais, where in 1956 it was rediscovered by historian Miguel Chiquiloff, who began a research of almost twenty years to prove its authenticity. Chiquiloff's conclusion was that the image does indeed represent Aleijadinho, but its authorship was attributed to an obscure painter, Euclásio Penna Ventura.

After that, a great debate was ignited in the press, and public opinion in Minas Gerais was induced to be favorable to the official recognition of the work as an authentic portrait Aleijadinho; the proposal was even the object of a bill that was submitted to the Legislative Assembly of Minas Gerais, but in accordance with an opinion of the State Council of Culture of Minas Gerais, which stated that "due to the absence of supporting elements, it is not possible to make any official pronouncement on the authenticity of the painting referred to in the process", the project was vetoed by the governor. However, the Assembly overturned the government veto and approved Law No. 5,984, of 12 September 1972, recognizing the portrait as the official and unique effigy of Antônio Francisco Lisboa. It is the image that illustrates the opening of this article. Some Brazilian artists have also offered conjectural versions of his appearance, among them Belmonte and Henrique Bernardelli.

Historical and artistic context

Baroque and Rococo

Aleijadinho worked during the transition period from Baroque to Rococo; his work reflects characteristics of both. However, the distinction between them is not always clear, which makes many critics consider them a unit; for these critics, Rococo represents the final phase of the Baroque cycle. Others, in turn, understand Rococo as an autonomous and differentiated current. This debate affects Aleijadinho directly, and sometimes confuses the definition of his personal style and his insertion in the great international aesthetic currents.

Baroque, which emerged in Europe at the beginning of the 17th century, was a style of reaction against the Classicism of the Renaissance, whose conceptual bases revolved around symmetry, proportionality and containment, rationality and formal balance. Thus, Baroque aesthetics excelled for asymmetry, excess, expressiveness and irregularity. Beyond a purely aesthetic trend, these traits constituted a true way of life and set the tone for the entire culture of the period, a culture that emphasized contrast, conflict, dynamic, drama, grandiloquence, and the dissolution of boundaries, together with an accentuated taste for the opulence of forms and materials, making it a perfect vehicle for the Counter-Reformation of the Catholic Church and the rising absolutist monarchies to visibly express their ideals of glory and assert their political power. A correct understanding of Baroque in the arts cannot be achieved by analyzing individual works or artists, but rather by studying its cultural context and the architectural structures that were erected at that time — the palaces and the great theaters and churches — that served as a framework of a "total work of art", which included architecture itself, plus painting, sculpture, decorative and performing arts such as music, dance and theater, as Baroque sought to integrate all forms of expression into an enveloping, synthetic and unifying whole.

In Baroque Europe, the Catholic Church and the courts competed in artistic patronage. The Brazilian Baroque flourished in a very different context, in the period when Brazil was still a colony. The court was across the ocean, in the Portuguese metropole, and the internal administration that it imposed on the land was inefficient and time-consuming. This social space was immediately occupied by the Church through missionaries, who administered, in addition to divine offices, a series of civil services, were at the vanguard of the conquest of the interior of the territory, organized a good part of the urban space and dominated teaching and social assistance by maintaining schools and orphanages, hospitals and asylums. The Church also practically monopolized Brazilian colonial art, with a rare notable secular expression.

Having been born primarily as a reaction against Protestants, who condemned luxury in churches and the cult of images, the Baroque, particularly in Brazil, was a style moved mainly by religious inspiration, but, at the same time, it placed enormous emphasis on sensoriality, captivated by the richness of the materials and forms and by the decorative exuberance, trying to reconcile the illustration of spiritual glories with the appeal to worldly pleasure, seeing this as a particularly apt didactic instrument for moral and religious education. This ambiguous pact, when conditions allowed, created artistic monuments of enormous formal complexity and artistic richness.

In competition with Protestant dissidents, the Catholic clergy sought, in short, to co-opt more followers by translating the abstract meanings of their religion into a highly rhetorical visual language, which had a scenographic and declamatory sense, and which expressed itself full of hyperbole and other figures of speech, which was plastically reflected in the extreme complexity of the carving work and in the agitated and convoluted movement of the statuary, pictorial and architectural forms, which seduced by their sumptuousness and by the easily understandable motifs by the people. At a time when the population was mostly illiterate, Catholic Baroque art was a highly persuasive complement to the verbal catechism. The counter-reformist iconographic program chose the themes, the formal approach and the ways of narrative development of the visual discourse, foreseeing the achievement of a specific affective effect for each work. Privileging the most dramatic moments of sacred history, Christ being flogged, the Virgin with her heart pierced with knives, bloody crucifixes and martyrs in the apotheosis of their tortures multiplied. But that same devotion, which so often adored the tragic, also shaped countless scenes of ecstasy and heavenly visions, graceful Madonnas and sweet baby Jesus, whose appeal to the simple heart of the people was immediate and effective.

The gold cycle

Minas Gerais had the peculiarity of being a more recent settlement area in relation to the Brazilian coast, and there it was possible to build with more freedom, in more updated aesthetics, in this case, the Rococo, a profusion of new churches, without having to adapt or renovate older buildings already established and still in use, as was the case on the coast, which makes them exemplary with regard to stylistic unity. The Rococo ensemble of churches in Minas Gerais is of special importance both for its richness and variety and for being a witness to a very specific phase of Brazilian history, when the region concentrated the attention of the Portuguese metropole for its large deposits of gold and diamonds and constituted the first nucleus of an eminently urban society in Brazil. The formulation of a differentiated artistic language in Minas Gerais was also due to two other important factors: its relative isolation from the rest of the colony and the sudden enrichment of the region with the discovery of the gold deposits. The style typically practiced in Minas Gerais had its main center in the old Vila Rica, today Ouro Preto, founded in 1711, but it also flourished vigorously in Diamantina, Mariana, Tiradentes, Sabará, Cachoeira do Campo, São João del-Rei, Congonhas and a number of other mining towns and villages. When gold began to run out, around 1760, the cultural cycle of the region also began to decline, but that was when its characteristic style, at this point already transitioning to Rococo, reached its culmination with the mature work of Aleijadinho and Master Ataíde. The wealth of the region in the 18th century also favored the emergence of an urban elite interested in art, sponsoring artists and appreciating secular works.California State University
''História de Ouro Preto''
. According to Afonso Ávila,

The role of the brotherhoods in the social life of Minas Gerais, to which Aleijadinho connected through the Brotherhood of São José, which served mainly mulattos and attracted many carpenters, was important. They were organizations that sponsored the arts, fostered the spirit of Christian living, created a network of mutual assistance for their members, and dedicated themselves to caring for the poor. Many became very wealthy, and competed in building temples decorated with luxury and refinement, boasting paintings, carvings and statuary. It is also considered that the brotherhoods had a political side, acting in the construction of a social consciousness in an environment dominated by the Portuguese elite. At the time when Aleijadinho worked, Minas Gerais was in a state of political and social agitation, strongly pressured by the Portuguese Crown, which wanted the gold from the mines at any cost, and due to this intolerable pressure it became the headquarters of the Minas Gerais Conspiracy. It is documented that Aleijadinho had contact with one of the conspirators, Cláudio Manuel da Costa, but his political views are unknown.

Sanctuary of Congonhas

His crowning achievement was the ''Twelve Prophets'' at the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus of Matosinhos at Congonhas. A wealthy businessman, Feliciano Mendes, had built the church to fulfill a vow made while he was desperately ill. Between 1800 and 1805 Aleijadinho sculpted the twelve soapstone figures by having his assistants strap his hammer and chisels to what remained of his hands, which did not at this point include fingers. Since he no longer had feet to stand on he had pads strapped to his knees up which he would climb the ladders needed to get him off the ground. The Twelve Prophets are arranged around the courtyard and stairway in front of the church.

File:Aleijadinho - Profeta Isaías - Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos - Congonhas.jpg, Isaiah, Congonhas
File:Aleijadinho8.jpg, Baruch, Congonhas
File:Aleijadinho9.jpg, Jonah, Congonhas
File:Aleijadinho - Detalhe do profeta Habacuc - Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos - Congonhas.jpg, Habakkuk, Congonhas
File:Statues in Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos 015.JPG, Hosea, Congonhas
File:12 Profetas - Congonhas - Minas Gerais - Brazil 03.jpg, Daniel, Congonhas
File:Congonhas santuario matosinhos.jpg, Sanctuary of Bom Jesus of Matosinhos, Congonhas

At the bottom of the stairs is a long courtyard that is bounded by half a dozen pavilions. In each of the pavilions is a scene from the Passion of Christ. There are sixty-six life-sized figures carved in wood from 1780 to 1790, beginning with the Last Supper and ending with the Crucifixion. The main figures, Christ, Peter, James, John, the Good and Bad thieves, Mary Magdalene, and Mary, mother of Jesus are carved by Aleijadinho while the other figures, Roman soldiers, on-lookers and lesser figures were carved by his assistants. The figures were later painted by Manoel da Costa Ataíde, who also painted (1828) the ceiling of Lisboa's Church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Ouro Preto. One of the figures watching the crucifixion is believed to be a portrait (or self-portrait) of Aleijadinho.

Melo (see sources) writes that the prevailing religious ideals at that time were, "associated with the ideas of pain, acceptance of suffering and reflection on the passion of Christ through visual reminders of His wounds."

References

Citations

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External links

Aleijadinho
at ''Encyclopædia Britannica''
{{Authority control

Brazilian architects
Brazilian sculptors
Rococo sculptors
1738 births
1814 deaths
Brazilian people of Portuguese descent
Deaths from leprosy
Brazilian Roman Catholics
People from Minas Gerais
People from Ouro Preto
18th-century Brazilian artists
19th-century Brazilian male artists
Rococo architecture in Brazil
Portuguese colonial architecture in Brazil
Brazilian slave owners
Rococo architects
Brazilian people of African descent
Culture in Minas Gerais