between the said and the unsaid

lilia m. schwarcz and lúcia klück stumpf

A gathering of people met on the sidewalk in front of the iconic Louvre building, designed by João Artacho Jurado (1907-1983) in the 1950s. But the movement, still small, didn’t yet stand out amongst the commotion of downtown São Paulo on a Saturday afternoon. In fact, on the outside, everything seemed normal. But one needed only to enter the lobby of the building, adorned with its impeccable pink and blue tiles, to realize that something unusual was about to happen. A familiar melody echoed through the hallway, transforming what seemed like an encounter by chance of individuals into a cohesive audience. But separated from the private space by an imposing iron gate, the audience still couldn’t quite make out where the music was coming from, or who was playing it. It was unmistakably a military marching song, the type of music that usually imposes an attitude of solemn respect. This was not the case, but rather a clue as to what was about to happen.

Unexpectedly, as the music grew louder, some of the participants gathered for the ‘happening’ began to sing softly along to the melody, almost without noticing. Listening more closely, it was finally easy to recognize the refrain that calls the “brave Brazilian people” to “die for Brazil.” It was the Anthem of Independence, which solemnly gives Brazilians no choice but to “leave the country free.”

When the gates finally opened, the scene having been set by the music, the image placed before us – mounted around the staircase, at the back of the hall – finally, and immediately, invaded everyone present. At that moment, memory, always at arms with history, emerged the victor. A diffuse memory of something known mostly by color and, therefore, deserving of little reflection, like the refrain of an anthem sung from school days.

Putting two and two together, a painting came to mind, one that has long inhabited the national memory, the one that portrays the Proclamation of the Independence of Brazil, the one that has a captive place not only in textbooks but also in our collective visual imaginary. It’s unnecessary to know name of the artist, the year in which it was painted, or the conditions of its creation to recognize the image that materialized figuratively at that moment.

The musicians, in the foreground, performed the Guard of Honor. Arranged in a semicircle with their backs to the audience, they kept their eyes toward the top of the stairs, which in this case replaced Ipiranga hill. As if swords, they held up their instruments in a gesture of salutation to the group. On the steps, at the center of the scene, it was possible to identify a certain Pedro I, who made the famous “cry” of Independence, with the trumpet his weapon, flanked by his entourage. This group, with neither uniforms nor instruments, wore hats and other props that distinguished them from ordinary citizens – we, the audience, watching the scene unfold. In the conception of Lais Myrrha, the artist who staged this performance, the audience was present in the role of the people who “watched everything, bestialized”. ¹ In fact, it was with the same attitude, and in a way consistent with a scenario that became both icon and symbol in Pedro Américo’s painting. The “people,” represented on the left-hand side of Americo’s canvas, have no active role in the historical scene, serving, in the artist’s own words, as a “mere accessory” to “complete the linear harmony of composition.” ² In the scene that took place in 2017, the public played a supporting role; in the painting, completed in 1888, this role is played by the oxen carter leading his bulls. He, like all of us, observes everything, but understands nothing.

The role of the Fine Arts in the creation of Brazilian visual identity during the Second Empire

The painting representing the act of the Proclamation of Independence of Brazil by D. Pedro I on the banks of the Ipiranga river on September 7th, 1822 was the last work commissioned under the imperial regime. It was also the last painting by Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Melo (1843-1905), one of the most famous Brazilian painters of the 19th century under the first Empire. So not to begin this story with its end, a review of events, as brief as necessary, is merited.

A graduate of the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts (AIBA), an institution at which he later taught, Pedro Américo was still young enough to perfect his craft with European masters, and his studies abroad was based on the “imperial patronage” of D. Pedro II. Along with Victor Meirelles (1832-1903), Pedro Américo is among the most responsible for the construction of an official visuality for the Second Brazilian Empire (1840-1889), as we shall see.

The Royal School of Sciences, Arts and Crafts, as it was then called, later renamed AIBA, was founded on August 12th, 1816 by decree of King Dom João VI. It was in this year that a colony of French artists, led by Joaquim Le Breton, came to Brazil, giving rise to a formal system of an academic or neoclassical arts instruction, as well as to European moldings. ³ The so-called “French Artistic Mission,” a designation rejected today because it induces a misunderstanding of the nature of this initiative, was composed by artists such as landscape painter and miniaturist Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, the genre and historical painter Jean-Baptiste Debret, and the architect Grandjean de Montigny, among others. ⁴

If it is true that the establishment of the colony of French artists in the Brazilian Court during the reign of D. João VI shaped the artistic formation in the country throughout the nineteenth century, it is also important to note that it was only with the arrival of D. Pedro II to the throne, in 1840, that AIBA began to play a central role in the creation of a national visuality completely allied and aligned with the Crown. The Emperor, who kept his diary within plain sight, always said that when the construction of the country’s independence had been completed, it would be necessary to create a nationality. To this effect, he invested in writers, scientists and painters who would attempt to draft a certain identity for this Empire, surrounded by republics on all sides. It was in the Second Empire, and counting on the active participation of the monarch, that the development of institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts, the Pedro II School, and the Brazilian Historical and Geographical Institute – central to the process of formation of Brazilian national identity – began to foment in a programmatic manner. ⁵

D. Pedro II invested resources and attention to painting through the promotion of the state patronage system, particularly after 1855, when Manoel Araújo Porto-Alegre (1806-1879) assumed directorship of AIBA and implemented a reform in its statute that formally placed the Academy at the service of the Empire. ⁶ In that same year, 1855, the young Pedro Américo began his artistic training in this institution, having recently arrived from the city of Areia, in the interior of the province of Paraíba, his native city.

At first, the iconography of the Empire of D. Pedro II was built around the strengthening of the figure of the monarch, beginning with the diffusion of his portraits, in addition to tropical nature indexes, which differentiated Brazil from the European Courts, away from the Portuguese metropole, and especially from the other Latin American republics surrounding the Empire.

At this stage, therefore, there were many representations that associated D. Pedro II with tropical nature, on the one hand, and the universality of his monarchy on the other. Nature, during that time, represented first and foremost an “imaginative landscape.” In it stood out the exuberant local vegetation, symbolized mainly by pineapples and palm trees, but also the native population – that is, the idealized natives, since the enslaved population had to be systematically made invisible.

This was the “imperial package”, which emphasized the same tropical landscape and elided what it needed to forget, or by the same token, to camouflage. This type of iconography remained dominant until 1864, with the beginning of the Paraguayan War, a conflict that would drag on until 1870, and demonstrated a definitive watershed in the history of the Empire. In fact, it marks both the peak and the beginning of the decline of the monarchical regime. ⁷

The War lasted considerably longer than had been anticipated, its financial and human tolls immense, and with the conflict the figure of the Emperor was losing its centrality, coming to share the scene with anonymous heroes and more ordinary figures. It is in this context that the grand genre of battle painting developed greatly in Brazil, especially so from the brushes of Pedro Américo and Victor Meirelles. These two painters were the protagonists, even if involuntarily, of the greatest artistic controversy ever known in the country during the National Fine Arts Exhibition of 1879. ⁸ The simultaneous exhibition of two of the greatest paintings made in Brazil, namely Pedro Américo’s Battle of Avaí (1877) and The Battle of the Guararapes (1879), by Victor Meirelles, generated a commotion in the Empire’s capital. In the months during which the exhibition hung, press coverage of the Court devoted itself almost exclusively to the defense of one or the other painter. The partisans of one artist spared no ink in their attacks against the other. The fine arts experienced in the year 1879 its most prestigious moment in the history of the Brazilian Empire.

Independence or Death! A wager on the memory of the First Empire

Independência ou Morte!; The Shout of Ipiranga; The Cry of Ypiranga; the Proclamation of Brazilian Independence. There are various names attributed to this painting that created a kind of collective visual memory from the moment Brazil became a nation independent from Portugal. Much more varied, however, is the quantity of differing media in which this image was and is still reproduced today: postcards, coins, stamps, dishes, films, novels, advertising pieces, textbooks, etc. Curiously, the original canvas hangs on the wall of the building/monument that has housed the Paulista Museum since its first public exhibition to the Brazilian people, on the day of the museum’s inauguration, September 7th, 1895, where it has since remained. Not even now, when the building is closed for structural reforms that demanded it be almost completely emptied. ⁹ They have been inexorably united, the building/monument and the painting, since their genesis.

Hall of Honor of the Paulista Museum. Source: Museu Paulista Archive. Photographer: Helio Tegnon

Contrary to what one might imagine, Pedro Américo did not receive an order for the painting. He had to insist, alongside the commission in charge of the construction of the building, that his proposal to create the painting idealized to adorn the Hall of Honor of the Monument be accepted. This was as late as 1885, and the political crisis surrounding the Empire pierced sharply into Américo’s popularity, as he was so intimately tied to the Sovereign. Américo supported his defense in the fact that the architect hired to design the building, the Italian Tommaso Bezzi (1844-1915), was a foreigner, and it would not be correct to delegate the principal immortalization of the founding gesture of the nation exclusively to a non-Brazilian. This strategy proved effective with the São Paulo press; counting on the support of writers and, later, of the population. Américo was called to São Paulo in January 1886 to sign the contract that would guarantee him the payment of 30 contos de réis for the execution of the historical work that was to be delivered in up to three years. ¹⁰ Soon after, the painter went to Florence, where his family resided and he lived out most of his life. His aim was to paint in the land of the great masters works that would extol the birth of the young tropical nation.

It was also in Florence, in the halls of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, that Pedro Américo performed the solemn inauguration of painting on April 8th, 1888. In addition to the presence of Emperor Pedro II and his family, the painter and his work occasion the visit of several other monarchical figures, among them the Queen of Serbia, the Queen of England and the Empress of the Indies. Using an unusual strategy, Américo prepared a libretto to be distributed at the time of the painting’s presentation. The text, signed and dated April 1st, 1888, was divided into two sections: The Fact, in which the artist discusses the historical feat of September 7th, 1822, using various sources to reconstitute the event starring D. Pedro I; and The Painting, in which he makes an interesting defense of the artist’s craft, differentiating his work from that of the historian.

Pedro Américo, *O brado do Ypiranga* or the *Proclamação da Independência do Brasil*. Libretto, 1888. Source: Museu Paulista Archive.

Few know today, because history and memory are not composed of the same substance, that it was the painter himself that, with this publication, shed light on the famous controversies surrounding the scene as he depicted it. The artist recorded in his libretto that D. Pedro I rode, on the famous occasion, a “bay-colored donkey, or small beast” and not a portentous horse. Américo also referred to the “gastric distress” that the Prince Regent experienced on the trip. He further pointed out that the Honor Guard, given the unofficial motive of the trip, would be wearing their “small uniforms” rather than full regalia. And in affirming and publishing these data that today are repeated as jokes about its falsity when we refer to the painting, Américo predicted that the artist values more “the demands of aesthetics than the uncertainties of tradition,” for “reality inspires and does not enslave the painter.” ¹¹

Far from what one imagines, Américo did not have a naive position before the canvas. The work was a task meant to elevate the Empire, to rescue the memory of the main event, which took place in the state of São Paulo. For this very reason, he explained in the libretto, if such occurrences were worthy of the historical record, they were, however, “impervious to the contemplation of posterity.” For him, the artist must be faithful only “to the science of the beautiful” ¹² and nothing more. ¹³

Temporal misfortunes

In the brief interval of time that separated the painting’s first exhibition, reserved for the royal families of the Old Continent in April 1888, and his arrival in Brazil in July of the same year, D. Pedro II made his most daring maneuver in an attempt to guarantee the reign of the House of Braganza. On May 13, 1888, Princess Isabel signed the “Golden Law,” which declared, in a single article, the end of slavery in Brazil. Revista Ilustrada, directed by the republican agitator and abolitionist Angelo Agostini, affirmed that now, for the first time, the Independence of Brazil should be truly celebrated. The same publication, based in Rio de Janeiro, regretted, however, that Américo had dispatched his painting directly to São Paulo, without first exhibiting the painting in the capital of the Court. Perhaps painstakingly to comply strictly with his deadlines, thus avoiding any argument that would hinder his financial recompense, the painter, unprecedentedly, stopped showing his work to the public at large as soon as he arrived from Europe; this time he preferred to hand it directly to those who had rights to it – that is, the commissioners.

The artist could not foresee that after being properly offered up to fate, the large box that wrapped the painting and its frame would be held hostage to a series of adverse circumstances. The building/monument, commemorative of Independence, suffered from a lack of resources and political will that followed the Republican coup led by Deodoro da Fonseca on November 15th, 1889. Facing the new political regime, the Monument in honor of a founding feat of the Empire – and the nation – needed to be redefined. Thus, even though construction was completed in 1890, the Paulista Museum, located on the top of Ipiranga hill, was only inaugurated five years later. ¹⁴ It was only then that Américo’s painting, completed and delivered in 1888, could finally be admired by the Brazilian people: on September 7th, 1895. At that time, however, there was already a temporal and thematic gap, which dampened the spirit and attention of the audience. Américo’s great, pretentious painting garnered, on this occasion, merely a few discouraged comments.

Pedro Américo died not many years later in Florence, where he retired in more or less self-exile, with the forced return of the royal family to Portugal after November 15th, 1889. The artist did not see and could never imagine the importance that his painting would gain in the formation of the national imagination. For it was Afonso d’Escragnolle Taunay (1876-1958), director of the Paulista Museum in the year of the celebration of the Centenary of Independence, in 1922, who transformed Independence or Death! into a historical document to be read as a credible representation of the emergence of an independent Brazil. Taunay, a renowned historian in the first half of the twentieth century, known for being prolific and quite assertive, removed from Américo’s image his connection with the Empire, asserted by the painter himself at the time of its inauguration, giving it the status of historical (and almost Republican, because citizen-created) testimony. ¹⁵ The project was successful and to this day the work is insistently reproduced and often received acritically by the public.

Pedro Américo, Drafts for *Independência ou Morte!*. Source: Museu Paulista Archive.

Between the said and the unsaid: Pedro Américo enters the Louvre

Time to return to the twenty-first century and the opening of this essay. In the building full of references that, at least allegedly, refer to the largest artistic ensemble in the world, ¹⁶ the museu do louvre pau-brazyl cast light on a troubled Pedro Américo. In proposing a reflection on the erasure of the artist in the space-time that separates the creation of a draftsman’s plans to the building’s final execution, the curators invited artist Lais Myrrha to perform the artistic action to which we referred in the introduction.

The relations and tensions between history and memory, monument and photography, memories and forgetfulness make up artist Lais Myrrha’s repertoire, as dense as it is diverse. The time, immanent and inexorable, understood in all its variables, is the essential matter with which the artist dialogues. In the whole of her work, positive history, represented here by Pedro Américo’s academic painting, is opposed by the fleeting moment of photography, which democratizes memory, in this case, when fixed on the wall of the public lobby – the ultimate, lasting action.

The nation’s foundational narrative, which has its best representation in the gestures of D. Pedro I and as recorded by Americo’s brush strokes, because it has already reached a cliché status, was first recorded to then be deconstructed. ¹⁷ We heard that afternoon the “Ainda Pendência” [Still Pending] not only of our achievement as a nation, but also of an art that seeks the remembrance of time not lived, but forever longed for. It’s funny to think that Pedro Américo was taken to the Louvre for the moment of the event that he never intended to portray. It is as if the painting remained stuck in a verist posture that he never wanted to represent. It was so in 1888, when the painting became too imperial to be presented in a republican context, as it was in 2017 when the performance questioned less the political act itself than its monumental representation.

Painting was born to lie, and so to speak the truth – this was the academic project advocated by the painters of the School of Fine Arts. Américo’s painting, for that matter, could be realistic in detail, but not in the sum of its parts. It is a document of official history, collective memory deliberately constructed – even if this was not the painter’s intention. In a process that focuses on absences, disruptions, physical and sound deconstructions, Myrrha produced from Américo’s work the anti-monument. ¹⁸ In it, it’s the silence that cries out. Between the said and the unsaid of history, it was the Cry not sounded by the trumpet of an improbable D. Pedro I that echoed in the memory of that afternoon of November 18th, 2017.

Strange is the destiny of this painting that was born to exalt (and thus hide), and which lived on to become a photograph, as it never was or intended to be.

This text was originally published in the book where is pedro américo? (museu do louvre pau-brazyl, 2018) and revised in June 2021.

1
Reference to the famous phrase by Aristides Lobo because of the reaction of the people regarding the Proclamation of the Republic on November 15th, 1889. See: CARVALHO, José Murilo de. Os Bestializados: O Rio de Janeiro e a República que não foi. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1987.
2
MELO, Pedro Américo de Figueiredo. “O Brado do Ipiranga ou a Proclamação da Independência do Brasil”. In: O Brado do Ipiranga. São Paulo: Edusp, 1999.
3
It is known, however, that long before the arrival of French artists in Brazil there were initiatives to disseminate artistic training in the country, mainly from Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, where the so-called Fluminense School of Painting was developed. On this, among others, see: MIGLIACCIO, Luciano. A arte do século XIX. Exposição Brasil 500 anos. São Paulo: Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2000.
4
On the meanders of the arrival and establishment of the group of French artists in Brazil in 1816 and the rejection of the term “Artistic Mission” see: SCHWARCZ, Lilia. O sol do Brasil. Nicolas-Antoine Taunay e as desventuras dos artistas franceses na corte de D. João. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2008.
5
See: SCHWARCZ, Lilia. O espetáculo das raças. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997.
6
On Manoel Araújo Porto-Alegre’s directorship at AIBA and the Reforma Pedreira, see: SQUEFF, Letícia. O Brasil nas letras de um pintor. Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 2004.
7
See: SCHWARCZ, Lilia. As barbas do Imperador. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998.
8
See: COLI, Jorge. Como estudar a arte brasileira do século XIX? São Paulo: Senac, 2005.
9
Referring to the closure of public access, made out of a sudden, in August 2013, to carry out reforms in the foundations and structures of the Monument-Building, which is still today without the official reopening scheduled.
10
The process that involved the negotiation between the painter and the Ipiranga Monument Commission is detailed in OLIVEIRA, Cecília Helena de Salles. Nos bastidores da cena. In: O Brado do Ipiranga. São Paulo: Edusp, 1999.
11
MELO, Pedro Américo de Figueiredo. “O Brado do Ipiranga ou a Proclamação da Independência do Brasil”. In: O Brado do Ipiranga. São Paulo: Edusp, 1999.
12
Idem, Ibidem.
13
For another readings and interpretations about this canvas see, among others: AVOLESE, Claudia Valladão de Mattos. “Independência ou Morte”, de Pedro Américo: entre a materialidade da obra e a imagem em construção”. In: PICOLLI, Valéria e PITTA, Fernanda (orgs). Coleções em diálogo: Museu Paulista e Pinacoteca de São Paulo. São Paulo: Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2016.
14
It is worth remembering that the monument building was not designed by Tommaso Bezzi to be a Museum. The appropriation of the building to turn Paulista Museum happened only during the republican period. OLIVEIRA, Cecília Helena de. Op. cit. 1999.
15
On Taunay ‘s project for the celebrations of the Centennial of Independence of 1922 and the resignification of Américo’ s painting from the Museu Paulista, see: LIMA JUNIOR, Carlos Rogério. Um artista às margens do Ipiranga: Oscar Pereira da Silva, O Museu Paulista e a reelaboração do passado nacional. IEB/USP, 2015 (dissertação de mestrado).
16
See: GIUFRIDA, Guilherme. VARRICHIO, Jéssica (orgs). a autobiografia da monalisa. São Paulo: museu do louvre pau-brazyl, 2016.
17
The artist Bruno Moreschi (1982-) has developed individual and collective re-readings from this painting of Pedro Américo, which, juxtaposed to the performance of Myrrha, would yield an interesting reflection. We highlight the works present in the project The Museum is closed for works, which brings together a series of artistic experiences from the distance between public and work imposed since the closing of the Museu Paulista in 2013.
18
See: MYRRHA, Lais. Sobre as possibilidades da impermanência: fotografia e monumento. EBA/UFMG, 2007 (mater’s thesis).

Lilia K. Moritz Schwarcz is a professor at the Department of Anthropology at USP, a global scholar and visiting professor at Princeton (since 2011), she is an editor of Companhia das Letras (where she coordinates nonfiction collections). She was a visiting professor and researcher at Leiden, Oxford, Brown, Columbia University Tinker Professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Science Sociales and Princeton. She acted as curator of a series of exhibitions that combine history, arts and anthropology and is currently adjunct curator for stories and narratives at Masp.

Lúcia Klück Stumpf is a PhD student in social anthropology at USP with research on race and art in the 19th century. She completed an internship at the Global History Department of Princeton University. She holds a master’s degree in Brazilian Cultures and Identities from the Institute of Brazilian Studies of USP, with a research on the history of Antônio Parreiras (1860-1936) in the early years of the Republic in Brazil. She is co-author of the book The Battle of Avaí – the beauty of barbarism: the War of Paraguay painted by Pedro Américo (Sextante, 2013).

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between the said and the unsaid