Mannerism in Brazil

also: Brazilian Mannerism

style movement c. 1530-1650 Brazil Portugal

Mannerism arrived in Brazil with Portuguese colonization, and because the colony had no earlier European art to supersede, it became the country's first imported style. For a century the conditions were spare: missionaries and military engineers built the first churches, forts, and colleges, mostly in the austere Portuguese Plain Style (Estilo Chão), whose single-nave Jesuit plan became the template for Brazilian sacred architecture until the nineteenth century. Inside, decoration was richer - carved and gilded altarpieces, panels, and ceilings - and friars among them the Jesuit architect Francisco Dias, sent from Portugal in 1577, gave it form. Mannerist decoration faded by the mid-seventeenth century as the Baroque took over, and later rebuilding stripped most churches of it, so the surviving corpus is small and still poorly studied.

Lead image of the Wikipedia article "Mannerism in Brazil".
Lead image of the Wikipedia article "Mannerism in Brazil".Public domain (credit: Luís dos Santos Vilhena) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Severe, regular façades: square massing, triangular pediments, flat pilasters, belfries set into the façade plane
  • Single-nave church plans with a chancel altar framed by a large arch and lateral chapels
  • Gilded wood retables with straight columns, niches, and geometric ornament, soberer than the later Baroque
  • Grotesque and plateresque-derived ornament in carved portals, sacristy ceilings, and reliefs
  • Plain whitewashed surfaces outside set against richly worked devotional interiors

Key figures

  • Manuel Sanches (fl. 1560) — Jesuit priest who left the first known record of panel painting in colonial Brazil
  • Francisco Dias (fl. 1577) — Jesuit architect sent from Portugal in 1577 to give Brazilian churches proper designs
  • Belchior Paulo (fl. 1587) — Jesuit painter of decorative schemes and Flemish-influenced altarpieces around Bahia

Example works

  • Church of Saints Cosme and Damião (Igarassu) — unknown architect (begun 1535)
  • Olinda Cathedral — unknown architect (1584-1599)
  • Adoration of the Magi (Church of the Magi, Nova Almeida) — Belchior Paulo (c. 1600)

Sources

← Back to the catalog