Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomblé Gods in Modern Brazil

By Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla

Sacred art flourishes today in northeastern Brazil, where European and African religious traditions have intersected for centuries. Professional artists create images of both the Catholic saints and the African gods of Candomblé to meet the needs of a vast market of believers and art collectors.

Over the past decade, Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla conducted intense research in the states of Bahia and Pernambuco, interviewing the artists at length, photographing their processes and products, attending Catholic and Candomblé services, and finally creating a comprehensive book, governed by a deep understanding of the artists themselves.

Beginning with Edival Rosas, who carves monumental baroque statues for churches, and ending with Francisco Santos, who paints images of the gods for Candomblé terreiros, the book displays the diversity of Brazilian artistic techniques and religious interpretations. Glassie and Shukla enhance their findings with comparisons from art and religion in the United States, Nigeria, Portugal, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, and Japan and gesture toward an encompassing theology of power and beauty that brings unity into the spiritual art of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 20, 2017
• ISBN: 9780253032065

Henry Glassie

Henry Glassie, College Professor Emeritus at Indiana University, has written many books, three of which — Passing the Time in Ballymenone,The Spirit of Folk Art, and Turkish Traditional Art Today — were named notable books of the year by the New York Times. He has won many awards for his work, including the award for a lifetime of scholarly achievement from the American Folklore Society and the Haskins Prize of the American Council of Learned Societies for a distinctive career of humanistic scholarship.

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AN INTRODUCTION

AT THE END WE WALKED UP THE LADEIRA DO CARMO to say goodbye to Izaura. She had just finished painting a new image of São Roque that Edival carved and a Portuguese customer wanted to buy, and she gave us a ride out to the Feira de São Joaquim, so we could say farewell to Jorge and Samuel. We found them both in their workshops, making iron images of Ogum. After warm hugs, they all asked when we would be back. When this book is published, we answered, we’ll return to give copies to all the book’s artists. Projects like this, from beginning to book, always take about a decade of work.

This one began one sweet evening in Salvador when we went to hear a friend of ours, Zéu Lobo, play in a café. His voice flowed over his guitar’s rhythmic complexity, and we were hit by an idea. His songs, the popular classics of the national repertory, were hymns of praise to Brazil. We had already been talking with artists in Brazil, mainly to gain information useful for comparison in projects we had going in other places, in the United States and in the Yorubaland of Nigeria. But suddenly a project in Brazil took shape. We would seek artists who created images of Brazil, paintings and sculpture that, like Zéu Lobo’s songs, enfold a Brazilian idea of Brazil. Brazilians love their place, a tropical country blessed by God, in the words of País Tropical, one of the standards of Brazilian popular music. We find the country enticing because of its people, and we were off on a quest.

Ethnographic work of the kind we do is like photography. The informational photograph focuses clearly on its subject in context, inevitably pulling in random and productively disruptive facts, while intentionally excluding other things. Brazil is vast. To step back for a long shot and focus on the whole nation would yield a view so hazy that it would lack the fine detail the writer needs and obscure the individuals, the real people with their real names and words and works, from whom deep understanding expands. Having been around Brazil, casually learning a bit about artists and art, we chose to restrict ourselves to the Northeast.

The Northeast, poor and agricultural by contrast with the rich and industrial South, is where Native, European, and African cultures first fused into something new and Brazilian. The Northeast fits into the regional mosaic of the nation as the source of religious, musical, and artistic traditions — all of them distinctively Brazilian and some of them conspicuously African in origin — that have spread over the country to become markers of national identity. Artists in the Northeast work to meet the needs of their neighbors and they find profitable markets in the South, in Rio and São Paulo.

In motion on the land, thankful for efficient public transportation, we came to feel that two of the states of the Northeast, Bahia and Pernambuco, offered a sufficiency of diversity, enough variety in setting, urban and rural, and enough variety in population, in race, class, gender, and age, to serve as generally representative. Those states still make a place plenty spacious; people in Bahia like to say that their state is as big as France, which it nearly is. So, our story of Brazil centers in the Northeast and our story of the Northeast centers in Bahia and Pernambuco. Such focusing and exclusion makes ethnographic endeavor feasible.

All of the art of the Northeast, the lace and pottery and sculpture, can be read as implicitly Brazilian, but we chose to focus on the explicitly Brazilian, the overtly representational. Not that we identify art with the pictorial, the representational. As everyone should, we appreciate the abstract aspect of modernism as it developed in the first half of the twentieth century. Even more we admire the art of Islam in which the possibilities of abstraction in art, in calligraphic karalama and geometrically figured textiles and ceramics, have been explored for more than a millennium. And still more we reject, as a figment of class prejudice, the division of art from craft by medium. All art requires craft; all craft holds a potential for art. Art is not to be defined universally by medium; the medium is a factor of chance: some are fated to paint, others to sweat at the forge. Nor is art defined by the eye of the beholder, the rhetoric of the auction catalog, or the fat purse of the patron. We follow Kandinsky, Leach, Coomaraswamy, and Suzuki in defining art by sincerity and passion — by the devotion of the creator. Devotion can yield, artistic action can yield, the representational or the abstract or the utilitarian, and often enough all of that at once, but looking for art that — among other things — is intended to evoke Brazil, we sought the representational.

This book’s portion of Brazil

In some places, of course, in Muslim Pakistan or Protestant Appalachia, our representational focus would leave little to consider. But not in Bahia and Pernambuco. At work, we quickly recognized a distinction among the artists between sacred and quotidian representations. Our goal from the start was a book about both, but once it came our time to write, it is this simple, we had met too many people, taken too many pictures, recorded too many interviews. The artists were unsuspicious, gracious, and grateful for the attention. A few of them had been interviewed briefly before during surveys reported in handsome Brazilian publications, but we lingered and let the recorder run. We came back, came back again, and the artists thanked us for letting them say what they wanted to say. So, awash in data, we split the results, imagining a future book on the quotidian, on painting in Pelourinho, sculpture in Alto do Moura, and woodblock prints in Bezerros. Quotidian imagery will appear from time to time, providing pertinent context, but this book is centered on the sacred, a subject significantly complex since the Brazilian sacred is both European and African. That’s what makes it distinctively Brazilian. There are two simultaneous and interlinked traditions of faith and creation that artists shape and reshape by transforming earthly materials into celestial images. Out of one tradition the Catholic saints appear, from the other come the African gods of Candomblé. This book is about that.

Allow us to introduce ourselves. We are a married couple, both of us professional folklorists trained in anthropology, inheritors of the traditions of Boas and Synge. Together we combine ethnographic experience in the United States, and in Ireland, England, Sweden, Italy, Turkey, India, Bangladesh, Japan, and Nigeria — as well as Brazil. Pravina was raised in Brazil. Portuguese was her first language, and she conducted all the interviews in Portuguese, transcribed them in Portuguese, and then we carefully translated the transcriptions into English to preserve the distinctive qualities of individual speakers. The interviews, as you will see, provide the book’s foundation. Pravina’s parents were born in India, she speaks the Portuguese of São Paulo like a native, and she was always taken for Brazilian. Henry was sometimes mistaken for a gaúcho from the South. His Portuguese, though, is a sort of botched Italian, useful for reading, worthless in conversation, but having completed lengthy ethnographic surveys of traditional art, one in Turkey, the other in Bangladesh, Henry possesses the intuitive confidence of an old hand in the field, knowing when to stop and stay, when to get up and go. Between us, the work went smoothly and swiftly.

Pravina had done fieldwork in Brazil in 1996, 1997, and 1998, gathering data for her research on dress and bodily adornment, but the information in this book comes from our times together in Brazil, in 2007, 2009, 2014, 2015, and 2016. We did it all together, planning each day together and getting swept away together by chance encounters. As much as a project and its book can be, this one was collaborative, a thoroughly enjoyable joint venture.

Our work convinces us that material culture — culture made material, materials made art — opens an oblique but fruitful entry to religion. Written texts are never enough, even among the people of the book, and certainly not enough in religions like Hinduism and Candomblé that lack a single master text — religions in which images and ritual acts, not inscribed doctrine, are basic to religious experience. Coming in through the workers who make the artifacts of the sacred, we are not distracted by the arguments of the theological elite, but settle comfortably among the majority, the common folk of faith. By not concentrating on written texts as though we were the literary critics of scripture, by not concentrating on only one of Brazil’s religious traditions as most writers do, and by featuring sacred art and the words of the artists themselves, we offer a corrective to the study of religion.

That is one of our goals. Another is to describe a robust tradition of art making — not one teetering on the brink of extinction, nor one holding interest for only a tiny band of anointed experts, but robust: practiced by a great many artists, not hobbyists but working professionals, and appealing to a wide and diverse popular market. And finally, for us, it will be enough to introduce you to a few of the artists at work in Brazil today, some of them now our dear friends.

We begin in Salvador da Bahia …

The Cathedral. Terreiro de Jesus, 2015

Church of the Third Order of São Domingos, 2009

Nossa Senhora da Conceição. Church of the Third Order of São Francisco, 2007

São Francisco. Church of São Francisco, 2014

Salvador, 2016

Pelourinho, 2007

1

THE HISTORICAL CENTER

SOUTH OF THE POINT CLOSEST TO AFRICA, the coast slips west, receding to break at a deep bay. There, in the middle of the sixteenth century, Salvador was established as the first capital of Brazil, the first transatlantic episcopate of the archbishopric of Lisbon. Portuguese mariners had already sailed around Africa to India and crossed the black ocean to kneel on the Brazilian shore. The wish for wealth was the wind behind them. Now Salvador, rising like Lisbon above the sea, would be a port for commerce, exporting the yield of the land — first brazilwood, the source of red dye that gave the country its name, then sugar, then tobacco, then cacao — while importing enslaved Africans to work the plantations of the fertile interior. Their descendants made Salvador the most African of Brazilian cities.

The capital shifted to Rio de Janeiro, far to the south, in the eighteenth century, but Salvador remains the largest city of the Northeast, the capital of the vast state of Bahia. A city of maybe three million, Salvador da Bahia spreads north and south of the old city along the Bay of All Saints, running down to the windy beaches of the Atlantic.

Encysted in the metropolis, the old city, called by its people Pelourinho or the Centro Histórico, is a precious assembly of colonial architecture, a destination for tourists, a center for the maintenance and development of black consciousness, a place of constant drumming, of African snacks and weak beer, a market for art. Pelourinho, lifted to catch the sweet sea breeze, occupies two hills and the dip between them. The southern hill carries along its crest a long double plaza. The Cathedral stands above the bay at one end, the church dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi stands at the other.

Stand there; the church of the passionate saint, the Igreja de São Francisco, presents you a face of composed rationality: a bilaterally symmetrical unit, at once double (each half mirroring the other) and triple (a nave flanked by towers). Geometric ornament, obeying the Ruskinian rule of order, reinforces the formal logic, tracing the edges of the whole and its parts. Curves surge and coil in opposition above the windows, achieving climax in the spirals that curl back and sweep up to join at the cross above the saint’s statue.

The same rational pattern governs the facade of the Cathedral, built for the Jesuits a generation earlier. It also shapes the faces of the other churches in Pelourinho (as well as most of those in Brazil and many in Portugal that share their historical era). But there is an exception. To the left of the Church of Saint Francis, and also under construction during the first decade of the eighteenth century, the Church of the Third Order, the Franciscan lay brotherhood, exhibits a facade more Spanish than Portuguese, a facade so richly carved and encrusted with figurative decoration that it beguiles the eye, distracting attention from the undergrid of symmetry that the other churches raise clearly to the surface.

Return to the Church of Saint Francis and come in. The rigorous symmetry of the facade continues to control the interior, its form and ornament, but cross the entry bay beneath the loft and before you the chapels along the nave, the lateral altars, and the high altar in its deep recess burst with an exuberance of carved wood and gold leaf, a gilt, glittery, bubbling abundance in which details — the lush foliage and chubby cherubs — are lost and a golden frame is shaped for the polychromed images of saints. Female saints line on the left, male on the right. Nossa Senhora da Conceição, Our Lady of the Conception, stands in front on the left, Santo Antônio on the right. Between them, São Francisco embraces the Christ of the Crucifix above the altar in the middle, precisely on axis with the front door. That door opens on the midline of the facade that rises through another statue of the saint to the cross at the crest. Internally and externally, in plan and elevation, the line of the center binds it all into union.

Back inside, the golden glow of the deep interior contrasts with the cool sheen of the blue-and-white tiles revetted to the walls of the entry bay. They tell the life of Saint Francis, their people dressed in the fashion of the place and time of their creation, Lisbon in 1737. Comparable tiles carry Biblical scenes along the corridor by the sacristy. In the convent to the right of the church, around the courtyard of the cloister, tiles painted for meditation evoke virtues and wealth, life’s course and inevitable end.

Church of São Francisco, 2016

Azulejos is the Portuguese for the tiles, technically like Italian maiolica, and when José Saramago, the Portuguese Nobel Laureate, generously took his readers on a journey around his country, he paused to praise the azulejos that brightened ecclesiastic interiors. In Lisbon, calling the museum for azulejos a precious place, Saramago said that to understand azulejos is to understand what it means to be Portuguese. He didn’t expand, but a guess would be that azulejos reveal a character both sophisticated and earthy, combining painting based on Renaissance principles with the worker’s muddy labor. Nor did Saramago mention what moved us most when we were in Lisbon in 2013: the Sant’Anna shop in a grim industrial neighborhood where, working to commissions from churches, a master named Maria da Graça designs and paints suites of azulejos with sacred scenes in blue and white. The old traditions are long in the passing.

View toward the high altar. Church of São Francisco, 2014

Saint Francis receives his mission. Azulejos, Church of São Francisco, 2014

October fourth is the feast day of Saint Francis of Assisi, and on that day in 2014 the crowd — more black than white, more poor than rich — came early. During the week before, a small image of the saint stood on a barrow for carrying in a corridor to the side. Today a life-sized statue stands left of the aisle that runs down the center of the nave. Some on entering, women most often, touch the stigmata on the saint’s bare feet, pray, then pose beside him to have their photos snapped.

The church is full, every seat taken, men standing in the aisles to the side, and things begin with an invitation for all Franciscos and Franciscas to come forward. They do, and the congregation sings Happy Birthday, shouting Viva São Francisco at the end. In a pleasant, familiar manner, the priest tells the story of the saint’s life, how he was born rich in Italy, renounced wealth, preached to the poor, and founded the Franciscan Order and the Third Order for his lay followers; for us, we are told, he is a holy guide and the Pai da Ecologia, the Father of Ecology. Now the brothers enter, blessing the people, left and right, accompanied by the bishop who delivers a sterner sermon on the life of the saint, and everyone joins in song, requesting Saint Francis to intercede on behalf of the sick, the youth of the Northeast, and world peace.

An hour has passed. At the end of the service, the Franciscan brothers leave the church and turn right, leading the procession with a cross, a replica of the Crucifix in the chapel of San Damiano where Francis knelt to be told by the crucified Christ that he should restore the house of God. The event, pictured on the azulejos of the entry bay in his church in Salvador, set Francis on the life of poverty and service that ended with his death in 1226. Behind the cross, the procession pauses at the gate of the Church of the Third Order, gathers the image of the saint, now standing amid flowers on the shoulders of four strong men, and with a brass band following and the congregation trailing after, makes the first of the left turns in its counterclockwise march.

São Francisco, 2014

At the gate of the Church of the Third Order

Waiting in his church

At the Cathedral

The procession for São Francisco returns from the Cathedral

Behind the cross, his people bring São Francisco home, 2014

The band behind the saint is playing the triumphant Battle Hymn of the Republic — Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord — when the procession emerges from a dark back street and enters the broad plaza of the Terreiro de Jesus, the Church of the Third Order of São Domingos on their left, the Church of São Pedro dos Clérigos on their right, and proceeds to the Cathedral. There they stop in respect, then turn left again and enter the narrow plaza of the Cruzeiro de São Francisco, coming jubilantly home to the church of the saint.

Another hour has passed. The statue carried on the procession, now looking backward, is taken down the aisle and placed beneath the image of Saint Anthony, the saint’s Portuguese friend and follower. The statue faces the people. In chorus they respond, Saint Francis is here, three times, Saint Francis is here.

Precious objects from the altar are wrapped and boxed, the candles are snuffed, the priest has gone. A few linger in thought by the processional image, touching it softy, praying silently, stiffening to have their pictures taken.

A community in motion on the festa of Saint Francis, the procession circled the plazas, marking out the territory of the southern hill of the Centro Histórico. From that ridge, streets roll down and converge at another open space, the wide Largo do Pelourinho that narrows as it submits to the hill’s steep descent. The Largo makes a place for squads of drummers to practice, for politicians to stir the throng, for tourists to rest from bewilderment. They might be from France or Argentina, they could be elderly African Americans on tour, but they are mostly Brazilians from the south, Rio or São Paulo, for whom Bahia fills a slot in their national vision as New England or the Appalachian South, as southern Louisiana or northern New Mexico do for North Americans — a site of deep history and authentic tradition.

The Largo’s uphill wall is made by the City Museum and a big blue building, once a bank, now given to the writings of Jorge Amado, Brazil’s most widely known novelist. Translated into nearly fifty languages, Amado’s lively works are displayed inside. On the front steps Amado posed with José Saramago for a photo in 1996. Seven years after Amado’s death in 2001 (and two years before his own; both men lived deep into their eighties), Saramago wrote that Amado’s place is no less violent than Iberia and his characters are flesh for damnation, but there is an innocence in his storms and a portrait of Brazil in his tales of ethnic depth and diversity.

Largo do Pelourinho. Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado to the right, 2014

Jorge Amado was born in 1912, the son of a cacao planter in southern Bahia. Several of his novels, notably the popular Gabriela, are set there and they track the region’s history. But for Amado, Bahia’s heart beat most audibly right here, in Pelourinho. One of the novels he set here, exactly in this place, Tent of Miracles, just might be his best. Its hero, Pedro Arcanjo — the Eyes of Xangô, a self-taught black folklorist who had read Franz Boas — can be imagined walking the Largo, from his work on the Terreiro de Jesus above, down to the Shoemakers’ Hollow at the bottom. On his walk he would pass on his right the Igreja da Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Blacks. Amado called it the Slaves’ Church and used it as the setting for the central episode in Shepherds of the Night.

Built for a lay order of men and women of African descent, Pelourinho’s blue Church of Our Lady of the Rosary exhibits a scaled-down version of the form of the Church of Saint Francis. Internally it is less opulent than the one Amado called the Golden Church, but it is hardly austere. Azulejos run on the walls from the entry through the nave. Their neoclassical style, more French than Italian, dates them later than the tiles of the Franciscan churches, accurately locating the construction of this church toward the end of the eighteenth century. Above us, the wooden ceiling carries a beautiful painting of Our Lady of the Rosary. She appears on the tiles of the walls and stands in a glass case above the Four Evangelists on the high altar. Even when Rosário’s church is empty, its special character is revealed by the polychromed wooden saints in the nave; half of them are black. Black, too, are the figures in the Stations of the Cross. The sound of the drums makes it clearer when the church is full.

Led by São Benedito, the procession for Rosário returns down the Largo, 2014

Now it is the day of her festa and Rosário’s procession, following the cross, is returning down the Largo. The tall image of Our Lady of the Rosary, standing amid flowers on the shoulders of men, turns and enters. The congregation sings Ave Maria, the drums begin, herbs dipped in water spatter blessings on all, and ladies dance up the aisle in the swinging, swimming motion of the devotees in Candomblé services.

Black Catholic lay orders, irmandades like that of Rosário dos Pretos, nurtured the development of Candomblé out of African precedents early in the nineteenth century. The first places of collective worship — casas, roças, terreiros — were built in the country nearby, and as Salvador expanded they fell well within the city’s limits, conveniently connected today by the municipal bus lines.

Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, 2015. The Carmo complex rises beyond on the skyline.

In three noble old houses, all in Salvador — Casa Branca do Engenho Velho, Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, and Gantois — a distinct Candomblé tradition took shape; it was not the only one, but the one, based in Yoruba practice, that was taken north to Pernambuco and south to Rio to become dominant in Brazil. All of Salvador’s oldest terreiros sit on a hill and gather white buildings around a big barracão, where the priestess or priest, the mãe or pai de santo, has a seat, the drums beat, and the devotees circle in dance. Their performance proceeds like the zikr or sema of the Sufi, a counterclockwise ring in motion. Shifts of rhythm cue actions that acknowledge different orixás, the deities of the pantheon. Then the gods descend; there are convulsions of mystic union, changes of costume, crescendos of mimetic action, and the service concludes with hugs and feasting.

Phased dance centers the religious ceremonial, and at other times, away from the terreiro, drums awaken bodily memories and Candomblé is remembered in movement. Just now Nossa Senhora do Rosário has returned from her counterclockwise circuit of Pelourinho, and the ladies welcome her home with a familiar, habitual, implicitly sacred dance.

From the steps of Rosário’s blue church on the slant, you walk down to the Shoemakers’ Hollow. The road on the right leads away to a long commercial street that curves below the heights. Cross over, climb the Ladeira do Carmo, and you will pass steps on the left. They rise to the church — built in 1718 on the Rua do Passo — that served as the backdrop for a famous Brazilian film. Based on the play by Dias Gomes, first performed in 1960, the film is also titled O Pagador de Promessas (The Payer of Promises: The Keeper of Vows). It begins with the vow, then follows the man of faith as he drags a cross to town and lugs it up these steps only to be denied entry to the church because his vow was made in a Candomblé terreiro. Around him characters gather, decent black folks, devious white ones, and a drama of multiple conflict unfolds, intercut with splashes of local color, spectacular dances and scenes shot in Pelourinho’s Franciscan churches. At the end, the man of faith lies dead on the steps, and his body, spread on the cross, is borne by simpatico black men into the church.

Keep climbing the Ladeira and you will arrive, winded, at the open space on the brow of the northern hill, the Largo do Carmo. The street will continue, passing merrily painted houses on its way to the plaza of Santo Antônio, but standing in the Largo do Carmo, atop the second hill, you have traversed Pelourinho. Things finish in balance. On the southern hill stand the Church and Convent of São Francisco, with the Church of the Third Order next door. Before you on the northern hill stand the Church and Convent of Nossa Senhora do Carmo, with the Church of the Third Order of Our Lady of Carmel next door.

Within the small compass of Pelourinho there are nine grand churches. Archival records are clearer on the foundation of the church as a social entity than they are on the erection of the church as an edifice. The Cathedral was first, founded in the same year as the city, 1549. The Church and Convent of Our Lady of Carmel were founded in 1585, the Church and Convent of Saint Francis in 1587, the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Blacks in 1685, and, in 1723, the Church of the Dominican Third Order was the last to be founded. Now as for building. Work began on the Cathedral in 1657, more than a century after its founding, and continued until 1707. That was the first. Last came the Church of the Carmelite Third Order, built between 1803 and 1855, but that late date was the consequence of the original church burning in 1788. So the dates of construction, ranging from the beginning to the end of the eighteenth century, demarcate a period of robust building (and therefore of religious zeal and abundant funding) that was not interrupted by the shift of the capital from Salvador da Bahia to Rio de Janeiro in 1763.

The Church of the Franciscan Third Order, with its fancy facade and azulejos depicting secular scenes, might be counted as a wayward cousin; the other churches belong to a close family. Within the frame of symmetry, they differently reconcile fecund curves with vertical aspiration, responding to baroque and neoclassical urges, but all are based on a single architectural type. All face the street, sharing a symmetrical facade set between towers, though the second tower on three of them remains uncapped. The doors of the towers give into corridors that provide for lateral circulation and lead to the sacristy at the back, behind the high altar. The central front door opens into the entry bay beneath a loft. Then after a cross passage the nave runs forward, and after a second passage or a truncated transept, space contracts, allowing for altars to the side of the deep chancel where the high altar rises.

Columned and arched, carved and gilt, the high altar was built, like a baldachin, as an independent, internal architectural unit. (That Brazilian practice made it possible for a golden altar to be moved from Olinda in Pernambuco to the Guggenheim in New York, where it stood tall in the spiral — and humbled the later works — during a lavish exhibition of Brazilian art in 2002.) In Salvador, the usual program for the high altar positions Our Lady centrally in a glass case above the Four Evangelists and below the Crucifix.

Church of São Pedro dos Clérigos, 2016

Church of the Third Order of São Francisco, 2015

Matriz da Rua do Passo, 2014. The setting for O Pagador de Promessas

Painting on the ceiling of São Pedro dos Clérigos, 2007

The inevitability of death. Azulejos, Convent of São Francisco, 2016

Santo Antônio. Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos, 2014

Nossa Senhora do Carmo by Edival and Izaura Rosas. Sacristy, Church of the Third Order of Nossa Senhora do Carmo, 2014

Laudable concerns for historic preservation have slowed the momentum of change, but the internal decoration of the churches abides in a perpetual state of revision — these are, above all, locations for religious action. Despite alterations, though, especially during the nineteenth century, the art of the interior concentrates, now as in the beginning, at three points: the painting on the ceiling, the azulejos on the walls, and the polychromed wooden statues of saints. There are usually three saints on pedestals, in niches, or in fully developed chapels on each side of the nave, one apiece on the side altars at the front, and another, say, six on the high altar. Like as not, there are more in the nave, since new images arrive to accompany old ones over time, and there are surely others in the sacristy and probably in the corridors too. Let’s say, for we have counted, a minimum of fourteen, a norm around twenty-four. The churches of Pelourinho combine into a magnificent museum of sacred sculpture, preserving works that, like the carpets on the floors of old mosques, remember the past and provide resources for future creation.

Polychromed wooden statues of saints: our prime purpose in this chapter, now at an end, has been to sketch a setting for the modern masters of carved and painted saints, Edival and Izaura Rosas. Husband and wife, they have worked for thirty-five years in Pelourinho, meeting the challenges and expectations of history in masterpieces that can be found in churches and collections, not only in Salvador, nor only in Brazil, but as well in Portugal, Italy, Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and the United States. Come with us, then, a few steps down the Ladeira from the Largo do Carmo.

Izaura and Edival Rosas, 2014

2

MODERN MASTERS OF SACRED ART

ACROSS THE STEEP STREET from the Church of the Third Order of Nossa Senhora do Carmo, the door is open. A tour guide says, as he herds his group past, that inside lies a workshop for the repair of old statues. Restoration is part of their mission, but the statues standing along the walls, tall and rich with color, are brand-new. This is Atelier Nós, shop below, apartment above, the place of Edival and Izaura Rosas. People flash by, up and down, but one glimpse and we enter. It is January 9, 2007. Materials matter, and the first thing Edival tells us is that cedar is his wood.

At the time Edival had a place for big projects and teaching at Jauá, in the country outside of Salvador. Ubiraci Tibiriça, Edival’s neighbor on the Ladeira do Carmo, a gentle man and a talented painter, gave us a ride out there a month after we had met Edival. A modest house of two stories faces a big blue pool where Ubiraci and his daughter Tauára enjoy a swim. Next to the house stands a machine shop with a gigantic bandsaw and a sleek power planer — the tools that precede the chisel in creation. An immense robotic apparatus, something like a lathe, fills the front of the shop, a pantógrafo that permits the simultaneous shaping of multiple wooden copies of a master image. Edival installed the machine in 1997 and abandoned it in 2002. It made him feel, he said, like a bricklayer, not an artist, and he has allowed a thick cloud of dust to settle over its mechanized intricacy.

Beside the shop, beneath a shed, lumber is piled, massive squared blocks of pale timber. The lumber is cedar, far better, Edival says, than the oak or pine used in Europe. Cedar is good to carve; it was the medium for the magnificent works made by Native sculptors along the Northwest Coast of North America. Cedar repels termites, Edival says, and as the cedar of Lebanon used in ancient Egypt attests, it can last for millennia. His cedar, the wood in the pile, is Brazilian. It grows quickly in the Mata Atlântica, a damp coastal region, so the fibers are mushy and soft, two weak to support grand sculpture. In the windy, dry Alto Sertão to the west, the trees grow slowly, developing natural defenses; their wood is twisted and hard, strong but difficult to carve. Edival carefully selects wood grown between the Mata Atlântica and the Alto Sertão, so that it will be soft enough to carve, hard enough to stand for centuries.

Carving takes place in the shade, beneath the porch of the house. Edival’s work in progress is a monumental statue of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, the santa he creates most often. With him he has Antônio Gomes, a journeyman carver who makes the pedestals for large pieces, Antônio’s son Victor, and Leandro, a lanky apprentice in training. Edival’s apprentices are not paid, nor do they pay. They learn. Ten have come to him to learn, and four have left him capable of excellence.

Excellence depends on a happy conjunction of factors. Learning is one. Edival does not teach as he learned, but he has given education deep thought, and he holds that a key to successful training lies in the relationship of the master and the apprentice (for whom Edival consistently uses the word discípulo, not aprendiz). This is how he put it while the recorder ran:

"If it is necessary to teach a student — I don’t speak for all people, but, in my conception, the conclusion I have come to since I have taught is that the only valid thing that really functions is the master and disciple relationship. Day to day, it validates each of the people who are trying to follow the art of making sculpture, carving and so forth.

"The result. If I am making a work and the work presents a certain degree of difficulty, what should I do? I am going to use the disciple who has had the greatest opportunity to absorb all that has been passed to him. And I will not select the one of rudimentary skill to contribute to the continuation of difficult work.

"The only thing I can do is to take the most developed disciple and put him to work, and invite the others to watch their companion while he works.

"And in that moment, there will be dialogue among them. They feel better when they speak among themselves than when they speak with the master. Because they feel a bit oppressed in front of the master. And they are on the same level; they are all people who are learning. And they find no difficulty in interlocution, no difficulty in communication.

Edival, Antônio, Victor, and Leandro with Nossa Senhora da Conceição in progress, Jauá, 2007

"This is what I always do. I give a task to the most developed one and ask the others to go and observe. Or simultaneously, I get the others to do something similar. Simultaneously.

"It is not to introduce pressure by saying, That is wrong. I cannot arrive and say, That is wrong, because if the fellow never knew, he is not wrong. He is simply ignorant. He doesn’t know, so he is not wrong. He simply doesn’t have the knowledge.

"I don’t recommend anyone to teach with notes, with a pad and pen, with theories to read and interpret.

"This art, in this world, has always functioned in the relationship of master and disciple. It has only functioned like this; it has only functioned in this way.

Now we have had in our history artists who have developed alone. I am not an exception.

Characteristically striving at once for clarity and eloquence, Edival has provided a view into the system of the atelier, where — in Edival’s shop now, in Verrocchio’s then — artists learn more by demonstration and practice than by precept and verbal instruction, forming among themselves an interactive, hierarchical little society.

Good relations with a kind master and industrious colleagues are surely beneficial, but they are less crucial than the learner’s inner qualities. In every person, Edival believes, there lies a latent artist whose expressive capacity will wilt and die among bad conditions or spring to life within the confines of a particular discipline — cooking, perhaps, dancing or sculpture. Edival was born to be a draftsman; his ability to draw proved essential to his success as a sculptor. But not everyone can draw, he says, so he starts his apprentices with the chisel, not the pen, testing them for inherent motor skills.

First they carve a straight vertical line, building in the mind and eye the foundation of the midline. It yields a statue that will stand erect, and it establishes the center from which the design unfolds. And carving the midline will teach the hand to follow the grain, to cut in accord with the fibers in the wood that run vertically. Having chiseled a line resembling an upper case I, the apprentice next chisels strokes running to the right of the midline, first like a gamma, then an F, then an E, learning how different it is to chop across the grain. Last in the sequence comes a B, requiring curving cuts that cross the grain, rise with it, then return.

If an apprentice can’t do that, there’s no hope, but if he can, the artist within him might become a sculptor, and next he will do what Leandro was doing when we were there. He will take a stick of cedar, orient the grain, and while looking at a model — in this case a plaster statuette of the Holy Child — he will learn to think in three dimensions, to transfer visually, chiseling wood away to shape the bulk of the form around the midline.

It will not have escaped you that such a process of design was used to create the churches of Pelourinho. In facade and plan, they mirror from a central line. That line controls the expansive reach for coherent form. A brilliant young potter in the Piedmont of North Carolina, Daniel Johnston, explained how beautiful forms result when you attend to the midline while shaping the contour of one side, which, because the pot spins as it rises, will become the form of a centered, symmetrical whole. The sculptor’s form has its origin in the vertical line with its horizontal extensions in the apprentice’s first test, and finds its conclusion in Edival’s masterpieces that surpass the metrical symmetry of the churches in a stable, balanced dynamism.

Nossa Senhora da Conceição by Edival and Izaura Rosas. 64 cm. tall, 2009

Today Edival is working on Our Lady of the Conception. Her image made by a back country carver from Pernambuco might position her head and clasped hands precisely on the midline and spread her mantle equally to each side. In Edival’s rendition, by contrast, the midline is buried. Her head tilts to one side, her hands to the other, her mantle sweeps up, swings back, and diagonal crosscurrents intersect her vertical lift.

Edival’s ideas arise from within, drawn up from the deep well of memory, and he works to please himself. If he doesn’t like it, he says, no one else will. The inspiration for the work at hand came from the polychromed statue on the high altar of the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição da Praia, down by the waterfront in Salvador. But he has no photograph, no picture before him. He has drawn no plan, has no clay model and pointing apparatus like a stonecarver. He stands before an immerse block of cedar and on its flat face he sketches with a pencil in quick sweeps. The sketch is complete enough to reveal errors of proportion.

All the details will be cut away. What matters at the beginning is the outline of the whole in which correct proportions are trapped. Edival’s outline is usually the result of a freehand sketch made directly on the wood without reference to a model or drawn plan. That’s his norm, and it dovetails neatly with the open commissions he usually receives.

A typical commission came in the summer of 2016, when a priest asked Edival to carve images for the high altar of a new church that would open in the Cabula neighborhood of Salvador as soon as Edival was finished. His charge was to carve a Crucifix to hang above and a statue of Nossa Senhora da Graça to stand below. Both figures would be two meters in height, and the priest said Edival could do whatever he wanted, so long as the image of Our Lady of Grace was immediately recognizable.

Edival was seventy-eight, his back ached, and it was a blessing he said that Wilbert Flores, a carver trained in Peru, had recently come to Salvador to improve his skills. Edival gave him a room in his house in Jauá, and hired him to help with the project.

The commissioned forms of Christ and Our Lady were conventional and familiar. Edival made no plans, and he immediately set to work on the wood with the capable Wilbert beside him. During the process, he said, inspirations — the resources accumulated in the mind — are important, but less important than a premonition, an inner vision of the completed piece, shaped in the mind before work begins and maintained tenaciously over the course of action. In the dialectic of creation, Edival contends that the original intention should prevail over random memories and momentary distractions.

Edival based his inner vision of Our Lady of Grace on a common neoclassical image he shared