Atlantic Masters: Three Early Modern Afro-Brazilian Artists

Abstract

Brazil received the largest number of Africans enslaved into the Americas: nearly five million by some estimates. Thus, Brazil became the world’s largest slavocracy. But slavery was not the only experience available to Africans and Brazilians of African descent in slavery-era Brazil. Numerically, Afro-Brazilians dominated the arts in colonial Brazil. However, very few of those artists and artisans, many of whom were enslaved, are known by name today. Free Afro-Brazilian artists, such as Aleijadinho, Mestre Valentim, and Teófilo de Jesus, on the other hand, fared far better. In this article, I turn to these three mixed-race artists’ works and what little is known of their lives, not only as exemplary Afro-Brazilian artists but also as some of the most important artists of Brazil’s late colonial period, where they had the greatest impact on the artistic developments in their home regions. These artists’ careers thus illustrate how artists of African descent contributed to and defined urban and sacred spaces in the early modern Atlantic. This is therefore an invitation to look at Afrodescendants’ role in early modern art beyond the anonymity of slavery and static representation.

Racial Democracy, Visibility, and the History of Colonial Brazilian Art

“…His father was a white man and mother an enslaved African woman, and he has been the subject of countless books, articles, and exhibitions, as well as television shows and films. Many of the other well-researched artists of colonial Brazil were also of mixed race with a white father and Black or pardo mother (see Valerio 2023 in this special issue). 2 Despite Lula's mention of slavery, discussions of Brazil's racially mixed population often gloss over the violence that initiated and fueled this racial mixing: white men sexually assaulting African and Indigenous women.…”