On the Portuguese-Brazilian Practices of Representation of the Seventeenth Century (1580-1750)

Abstract

Nowadays, the Portuguese-Brazilian representations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are stylistically classified as "baroque". The classification is anachronic, for it generalizes, in a transhistoric fashion, the neokantian, positivist-romantic conception proposed as a deductive pattern of description for the art of the seventeenth century, by Heinrich Wölfflin in his works Renaissance and Baroque (1888) and Fundamental Principles of the History of Art (1915). As practices pertaining to Ancien Régime, the Portuguese-Brazilian representations are not "baroque" and the deductive usage of the "baroque" category for classifying them is not historically pertinent. In the present text, I deal with representations in a historical sense and I propose that it is useful to examine the historical specificity of the practices in those centuries considering the material and institutional conditionings, the bibliographical as well as the rhetorical-poetic and theological-political codes of these representations. I believe it is obvious that the colonial past is not something positive, that can be just simply recognized. I briefly recollect here that as presented in this text, it results from a particular reconstitution, i.e., the colonial past to which I schematically refer to is represented as a verisimilar construct, produced by my usage of materials from Portuguese and Brazilian files.