General Overview
This text was originally written by the respective coordinator for the print edition as a general introduction to the volume for the part of the globe in question; the possibility of updating it was left to each author’s discretion. It is complemented by texts from the same author concerning each of the geographic subdivisions in which the volume’s entries were grouped.
Foreword: Discoveries, Identities and Heritage
In one of his best known poems, Carlos Drummond de Andrade said, "We need to discover Brazil!” This is an interesting statement since it directs our attention once again to the invocation of the symbolic element that lies at the very origin of Brazil: its "discovery'! Discovery is a word that is particularly dear to both Brazilians and Portuguese alike. Yet what is particularly significant in Drummond's words is the idea that discovery should be seen less as a question of delving into the past and more as a continuous method. Therefore, the realisation that we need to discover Brazil (all of us and not just the Brazilians) is certainly not an evocation or even an ironical statement relating to the episode of its historical discovery. It is rather a bold recognition of the fact that the process of continuous discovery is, in itself, a part of the making of history and that it is something that must be done.
Hence it is necessary to continuously (re)discover history, and to do so in a much broader sense. To a certain extent, this is how we came to form the very concept of heritage. We all know that it was the risk of actual physical loss that gave rise to the contemporary concept of heritage, with the idea of associating classification and inventory with the safeguarding and protection of both movable and immovable property. This process led us to adopt a museological attitude not only towards objects, but also, in some ways, towards architecture itself, which began to be seen didactically as a kind of large, full-scale museum. More important than this, and more crucial for the notion that was finally established, was the new view that was formed of History itself. Contemporary history is founded upon the revolutionary sign of change. During the Renaissance, an awareness of historical time was acquired by immersing oneself in the past. The interpretation of the present was achieved by emulating the ideal of Antiquity. In the contemporary age, the present has become an obsession, as is demonstrated by the very way in which we interpret the contemporary period. Contemporary refers to our time, the time we live in, the time which we cannot escape from, but which forever escapes from us through its continuous changes. The idealisation of the present looks towards the future, to what is to come, but its anchor is rooted in the past.
As Horta Correia puts it so well, "for the contemporary man, the past functions as an awareness of what is irreversible, what is irredeemable, what is lost. Consequently, it functions as a primary category of identity, a sine qua non of identification. We are thus firmly convinced that, without the existence of material or spiritual traces from the past, there is no memory and that, without memory, it is impossible to build the future for the simple reason that there is nowhere in which to root the present.” (Correia, 2007:3).
It is the very pertinence of memory that directs us to both the title and the aims of this work. The purpose of the project as a whole is, insofar as possible and inasmuch as our present knowledge will allow this, to identify the Portuguese Heritage around the World: Architecture and Urbanism. This volume in particular focuses on the Portuguese Heritage in South America. The title is correct and appropriate to its legitimate intentions, but it is nonetheless problematic. It is problematic because one might wonder to what extent Portugal has the right to claim its own heritage in the world, considering that the world does not belong to that country. Perhaps it is a false problem, yet nonetheless it is important to address it, because the heritage which will be presented in this volume is also quite legitimately claimed as Brazilian heritage.
Indeed, there is another potentially problematic aspect to be found in the way in which we have formed our contemporary concept of heritage. It is the fact that this concept is based on the very same foundations as the idea of a collective memory that serves as the main support for the different national identities that have established themselves in the meantime. Our romantic impulses have associated the "spirit of the people” with this legacy from the past, so that the formation and shaping of modern nations cannot be separated from this ideological characteristic. Each nation claimed for itself what it considered to form part of its collective identity, acknowledging its own idiosyncrasies and searching in the most varied fields of culture for specific "genetic” lineages that would mark out their difference. Although it might seem contradictory, this quest for a national identity is nothing more than the other side of the same coin. Because it is also the awareness of the inevitability of change and loss, or, in other words, the essential perception of contemporaneity that leads each community to search in the past for the foundations of its individuality and therefore of its very existence.
Although it is not historically possible to dissociate the process from its ideological foundations, the fact is that this affirmation by different peoples of their own separate identities was crucial for their gaining another kind of awareness, because each people's search for its roots led to the gradual discovery of a common core.
This process is crucial, for, to a large extent, it is responsible for the increasing pertinence of the concept of heritage. Self-awareness is an essential part of personal identity, and such awareness inevitably owes a great deal to the memory of the individual, who sees himself in time and space, and in the past, present and future. In the same way, the awareness of what is commonly shared is a fundamental part of the concept of heritage, and it is essential for our being able to internalise the need to preserve our collective memory in both time and space (Oliveira, 2008:19). Historically, In the course of our becoming collectively aware, the idea of what is understood to be "common” has gradually expanded. If the first level of what is "common” is the family, the next is the city, then the nation, and then humankind. This can be seen in our ever-expanding mechanisms for the preservation of our memory.
We have gradually moved from the restricted notion of a monument to the broader concept of a world heritage that we all share today. Furthermore, the very concept of heritage has widened to include not only different elements of our immaterial culture, but also ecological con - cerns. Once again, it is the notion of an imminent loss that has caused us to develop our sense of a responsibility towards the future, And it is not by chance that this convergence between our cultural and natural heritage has accelerated in particular since the Second World War, at a time when other phenomena (genocide and the atomic bomb) have revealed their potential for destruction.
The fact that we are evoking in this work the "Portuguese heritage around the world” is an unequivocal sign of this process. Because the world has since expanded and eliminated Portugal from these different areas, this heritage has taken on a non-national character and become universal instead. We are not referring here to a Portuguese heritage because it belongs (or once belonged) to the Portuguese, but because it forms part of the Portuguese cultural heritage in the broad sense of the term. In other words, it is a heritage that is of Portuguese origin, not because the Portuguese bequeathed it to other cultures, as a kind of legacy, but because these other cultures now share it and carry it as part of their cultural baggage. We must therefore not interpret this expression as a feeling of nostalgia or as an evocation of a once powerful and glorious past that no longer exists, but, on the contrary, as the overcoming of this material loss and the discovery of the virtual link to its culture. Above all, to that culture that was formed within a context of long voyages and discovery.
And so we return to Drummond's poem: "We need to discover Brazil!” This sentence echoes the discourse of the modernists from the famous Modern Art Week of 1922, which, from the point of view of Brazilian history, was the crucial moment that served to develop an awareness of the importance of heritage, with Drummond himself being one of the leading figures.
It was precisely during the commemorations of the centenary of Brazilian Independence, and sometime after the end of the monarchy, that Brazil once again raised the question of its identity with a certain degree of pertinence. The new generation wished to know who they were in terms of their relationship both with the past and the present. The Modern Art Week, held in São Paulo from 11th to 18th February, 1922, was the quintessential expression of this questioning/affirmation. This is an important aspect, because the generation of artists who showed themselves, at this event, to be committed members of the avant-garde and who had adopted modernism as the form of their aesthetic affirmation was the same one that claimed its right to have a memory. The ingenious formulation of the anthropophagic manifesto - 'Tupi, or not tupi that is the question' - encapsulated the paradox of a young nation searching for its identity when it needed, as the modernists suggested, to 'devour' its history in a symbolic form of cannibalism. In other words, they needed to find the foundations of their culture and identity, by claiming their right to a heritage in its broader sense.
Among the intellectuals from the modern movement, Mário de Andrade is probably the one who best represents this quest for what he called Brasilidade ('Brazilianness'). He wished to find what truly characterised the country. And he regarded this process as a true exercise in discovery, deliberately changing the very sense of the word, which was so greatly beloved by the nation. The whole group participated in this process, in one way or another, but he more so than the others, because he devoted his time to engaging in genuine voyages of discovery. His journeys into the interior of the country, during which he photographed everything he could and gathered information on music and folklore, are legendary. The so-called Viagem de Descobrimento do Brasil (Journey in Discovery of Brazil), which Mário de Andrade undertook in 1924, taking the modernist group with him to Minas Gerais, was particularly famous. This movement can be partly credited with promoting the baroque culture of Minas Gerais, gaining recognition for the work of Aleijadinho and his mestiço art, as well as promoting the tradition of baroque music and festivities, while basically proposing a fresh look at baroque art itself.
The enthusiasm that he felt in these years was as crucial as the association that he developed with a sort of cultural reserve, which was projected mainly into the interior of Brazil. Into the interior of the São Paulo region, where Mário Andrade travelled every weekend, looking for the houses of bandeirantes and discovering the rural architecture from the colonial period; into the towns of Minas Gerais, which had remained isolated and thus evoked the baroque period; and into every region of the Brazilian interior, which - in contrast with the coast, where all the main urban centres were located - appeared as an unknown country to the country itself.
This is a particularly important aspect because the inland towns were, to a certain extent, regarded as innately suited to becoming conservation centres - not only with regard to their cultural traditions (festivals, music, etc.), but also in terms of their popular arts, crafts and architecture. Therefore, from the outset, the interest shown in the conservation of all these centres was intended as a way of not only preserving the site itself, but also the city as a cultural centre. And all of this was effected long before the guidelines were published for the protection of the immaterial heritage, which were already implied in the modernist view of the world.
It was therefore this intellectuality associated with modernism that - despite the more restricted political environment of the 1930s - lay behind the creation in 1937 of what is known today as the Instituto do Património Histórico e Artístico Nacional (iphan) (National Institute for Historical and Artistic Heritage). This institute was the first of its kind to be founded in Latin America and was based on a preliminary draft presented by Mário de Andrade (1936), later reworked by Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade, who became its first director. Since then, iphan has carried out exceptional research work, and has been responsible for surveying, inventorying, preserving and restoring the Brazilian heritage. Despite the numerous difficulties and political vicissitudes it has faced, as well as the more or less positive assessments made of its interventions in different regions and contexts, it is without any doubt largely because of the work that iphan has undertaken over the years that we can nowadays enjoy an important overall perspective of the heritage built in Brazil during the colonial period.
The list of cities and buildings to be found in the index to this volume was largely based on this research work. Altogether, 210 municipalities and roughly 690 buildings are listed. The list is certainly incomplete, but many examples that might hypothetically have been included in the list have not survived the passage of time and the most varied forms of deterioration and/ or destruction. Others have possibly not even been identified and their heritage value may possibly still be awaiting discovery. And yet others might have been destroyed, even after attempts were made to protect them. Nonetheless, the "sites and monuments” listed in this volume - to use the vocabulary now enshrined in the field of heritage - represent a sample fraction of the long process involved in the material construction of Brazil.
Modes of knowledge: inventories, records and history
A common feature of all heritage studies is the priority given to identifying the objects that are to be preserved. Without the recognition of heritage, it is impossible to safeguard it. We are talking here of a genuine act of reconnaissance and recognition, insofar as it is necessary to have prior knowledge of the objects in question before we can effectively identify their heritage value. Therefore, the role played by inventories in heritage studies is indisputable.
But, while inventories represent the methodological basis for studying heritage, there is, at their origin, a whole series of texts whose different types and categories also call for the application of the same principle of listing and identification. We could, in fact, return to the various types of records and lists that have always been used to identify groups of objects for the most diverse purposes. History makes particular use of these kinds of documents, ranging from the lists of ships' cargoes to the property listed in wills, or catalogues of books. The main purpose of these texts is, on the one hand, to ensure that there is a document that can be used as a basis for stocktaking and, on the other hand, to ensure that - by being kept separately from the objects themselves - this can then serve as a document confirming one's knowledge of those stocks. Effectively, these texts are intended to be records (another of the names that they are given) of existing realities and confirmation of our knowledge of them. These texts serve mainly to confirm the existence of things and to validate that same existence for those who cannot see them.
In the case of Brazil, we might consider how important these types of texts were, not only for retracing its history, but, above all, for increasing our knowledge of the place. The letter from Pêro Vaz de Caminha to King Manuel I already listed certain features to describe a landscape which had to be recognised by those who had never seen it. Since then, the whole process of exploring and occupying the land was undertaken accompanied by reports and records that successively added to people's knowledge and thus also made it possible to gain control of the territory and to put it to good use. In this sense, and repeating the idea expressed in the quotation from Drummond that introduced this text, we will all agree that Brazil was not discovered in 1500. It could not have been. Brazil was gradually discovered (and revealed) in its entirety over the course of the three centuries of its colonisation. In fact, this lengthy process involved not just one, but indeed a whole series of discoveries.
Each of these successive discoveries was to be presented and confirmed from a documentary point of view. This is an important fact because it can be said that the literal construction of Brazil took place at the same time as its construction in terms of texts and images. It was necessary to describe, list and send reports to the king about his overseas heritage. This heritage was known about at the court through texts, maps and drawings. But, in addition to the actual documents produced during the process, it is important to draw attention to its accompanying historiographical production.
The texts produced by the historiography of the colonial period are extremely valuable sources for identifying the cities and buildings that were built during the construction of Brazil. To a greater or lesser extent, they also provide important data for unravelling the mechanisms involved in the commissions that were made for building work, discovering those who were responsible for the design and construction of buildings and understanding some of the aesthetic choices that they made. They are particularly important as syntheses that reveal the way in which areas were settled and, in this sense, the information contained in them is particularly valuable in terms of the contribution that it makes to our memory, and therefore of great importance for our interpretation of their heritage value.
The most famous texts, the first few of which date back to the late 16th century, are, as we know: the Historia da Provincia de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil, by Pero de Magalhães Gandavo, printed in 1576; the Roteiro Geral, ou Tratado Descritivo do Brasil by Gabriel Soares de Souza, written in 1587, and disseminated in manuscript form from Madrid, but only printed in the 19th century; and the Tratados da Terra e da Gente do Brasil by the Jesuit Fernão Cardim, dating from the 1580s and the 1590s.
The most important historiographical text from the 17th century is História do Brasil by Frei Vicente do Salvador, completed in the period of the 1620s and 1630s, but which would also remain available only in manuscript form until the 19th century, although 18th-century scholars were entirely familiar with it. Despite the fact that they were not exactly historical texts, it is important to mention the reports compiled by Diogo de Campos Moreno (still in the early 17th century), and in particular the Livro que dá Rezão do Estado do Brasil, illustrated with maps by João Teixeira Albernaz, of which there is more than one manuscript copy. These atlases, produced during the period of the Iberian Union, formed part of the "Relaciones Topográficas de Castilla e Geográficas de las Índias” which consisted of a whole series of surveys commissioned by the Spanish kings in order to form an idea of the maritime dimension of their empire. They are particularly important for our understanding of the coastal area of Portuguese America, since they combine textual information with drawings of the territory itself and include valuable material data, especially in matters relating to defence. The specific title of one of these reports by Diogo de Campos Moreno is precisely Relação das praças fortes, povoaçois, e cousas de importância que Sua Magestade tem na costa do Brazil...No anno de 1609.
In the 18th century, it is important to mention the academies. In 1730, Sebastião da Rocha Pitta, a "baiano” (native of Bahia) from the Academia dos Esquecidos, published his História da América Portuguesa, desde o ano de mil quinhentos do seu descobrimento, até o final de 1724. In 1797, Frei Gaspar da Madre de Deus, from the Academia dos Renascidos, published his
Memórias para a História da Capitania de São Vicente, hoje chamada de São Paulo in Lisbon. In the following century, and during the royal family's stay in Brazil, the work A Corografia Brasílica, ou relação histórico-geográfica do Reino do Brasil by Father Manuel Aires do Casal was published in Rio in 1817.
Each of these texts presents a mixture of political and geographical history. The history of the region's conquest and colonisation - with an account of the corresponding activities of the colonial administrators - is as important as the description of the territory, which includes mention of its geographical characteristics as well as its typical fauna and flora and the produce that was obtained through the cultivation of the land. All of the authors described and characterised the material changes that were made as a result of the constructions that were being built. The areas of exploration were identified, along with the major rural settlements and the towns and cities that were built there. These were mentioned not only as being the administrative headquarters of the different regions, but were also shown to be the mainstays for the whole organisation of the territory. In many cases, significant information was provided, particularly about their urban layout and the buildings that they contained.
Gabriel Soares de Sousa described Salvador by saying that the "streets were laid out in good order” and provided important information about the rural architecture in the first years of the settlement of this region. In turn, Frei Vicente do Salvador complained of the low level of penetration deeper into the territory, using the now famous statement that the "Portuguese, while being great conquerors of lands, fail to make proper use of them, contenting themselves with scratching away at the coastal area like crabs” (Salvador, 1982:59). More than a century later, Frei Gaspar da Madre de Deus spent entire chapters discussing the importance of the foundation of São Vicente by Martim Afonso de Sousa and dealt directly with the questions raised by Frei Vicente do Salvador about the concentration of urban centres along the coast. He showed a clear understanding of the problem, saying that it was a matter of basic safety - since the exploration of the interior involved confrontation with heathens - as well as a necessary commercial strategy, in order to guarantee a rapid outlet for goods. He claimed that "these were the reasons why settlers firstly occupied the coastal area before occupying the hinterland; and why [the king] also foresaw that sooner or later the coast would have to be well populated, with the settlers spreading along it, and that this made it difficult to enter into the countryside, which should be left until a future date, when the land closest to the ports was already full and well cultivated” (Holanda, 2000:96). But, it was Aires de Casal who, in 1817, presented Brazil as a cohesive and complete territory, clearly formed by its towns and cities.
In his work, the Portuguese territory in America was described for the first time as a whole, including all of its provinces, even Cisplatina (present-day Uruguay) and Cayenne, which at that time were under the control of the Portuguese crown. The territory was described in physical terms - with history serving as a unifying element - from the time of its discovery to the effective establishment of the kingdom of Brazil, raised to that status by King João VI. Each region was depicted through the identification of its formation and settlement. All of them belonged to the kingdom and the kingdom was reflected in them, in their natural characteristics, products and towns. In the dedication that he made to the king, the author reaffirmed this relationship: "The geographical description of the vast Kingdom that Providence has entrusted to Your Royal Highness in America is the subject of the work that I respectfully offer to Your Royal Highness, in many chapters” (Casal, 1976:15).
The work of Aires de Casal can be interpreted as the corollary of the process of territorial occupation and construction that resulted in the formation of Brazil. The text literally presented the history of that area and depicted Brazil as a unified whole that stood out from the rest. It was the kingdom that providence had entrusted to Portugal in America. It was the part of the continent that had been allotted to Portugal, after its implicit division in the Treaty of Tordesilhas. This aspect is important for introducing another question that is also implicit in this present text that I am writing. As has been said, the aim of this volume (clearly expressed in its title) is to present the heritage of Portuguese origin in South America. Nonetheless, we have clearly been talking about Brazil since the second sentence of this text. This procedure has been adopted because in fact the territorial locus of the urban and architectural heritage of Portuguese origin in South America is in itself Brazil. In effect, this is a reciprocal relationship. Brazil, as a territory, is the result of the historical process of the occupation and settlement of an area that gradually came into existence through the material construction of its cities and architecture(s).
But, just as its discovery was not completed in 1500, the territorial unification of Brazil was also naturally the result of a continuous process. Nonetheless, I believe we can say that this unity was always longed for. We might even say that, as a contemporary and autonomous political entity, Brazil stands as the unequivocal proof of what this territorial unity has come to represent, particularly if we compare it with all the other nations in South America that were formed from the former Spanish territories. Brazil possesses the most extensive continuous territory in South America and almost all of it corresponds to what was, or was intended at a given moment, to be, the "Portuguese America”
I say almost all of it because the original aim was to occupy an area from the River Amazon to the River Plate, including the Colónia do Sacramento, which, at the time when Aires de Casal wrote his work, had once again been reincorporated into the territory by King João VI, although it would be lost again in 1828, six years after the independence of Brazil. We shall return to this city-fortress and the crucial role it played in the formation of the territory of Portuguese America later on. For the time being, it is merely important to draw attention to the special place that the Colónia do Sacramento held in the construction of what we might call the imaginary of the territory. Despite its loss, it is still the exception that confirms the rule of the desire for unity. For that very reason, and dispensing with all other possible ideological considerations, we have included the Colónia do Sacramento in the list of cities established in the South of Portuguese America, along with all the other cities that are now part of Brazil. Having been lost and reconquered so many times, it is interesting to see how the material remains of the Portuguese presence there form part of the much vaster whole of the colony's other memories, as Ramón Gutierrez so clearly explains in the text he devotes to the subject. It is also important to immediately clarify that, for similar but entirely opposite reasons, we did not include in this work the Jesuit missions of the Sete Povos das Missões, which have been classified as World Heritage. These missions are now part of Brazilian territory, but it would not be historically accurate to see in them any kind of Portuguese heritage, as they were founded by Spanish Jesuits and were only definitively incorporated into Brazil after independence
It is also important to address the question of chronology. For reasons that can be easily deduced, the independence of Brazil in 1822 was the historical landmark that we adopted for the selection of what should or should not be included in this work. This became our criterion, with the exception of two contemporary cases - which can also be explained - the Real Gabinete Português de Leitura (1887), in Rio de Janeiro, and the Portuguese Embassy in Brasília (1978). Naturally, it would not be appropriate to continue to identify the country which, since its independence, has asserted itself politically as a new nation with Portugal. Nonetheless, because of everything that we have just said, it may also be easily deduced that, from the point of view of the creation of the country's forms and material production (including its architecture and urbanism), the mere date of independence does not in itself necessarily represent a complete break with the past. Cultural consolidation is a lengthy process and the creation and mutation of artistic forms are governed by vast and complex criteria, which cannot be subjected to exclusively national interpretations. Notwithstanding, it must be recognised that most of the historiography written about art has based its interpretations on political and geographical criteria.
Recognitions and Discussions: Art History, Architecture and urbanis
The emergence of a history of art from the colonial period in Brazil coincides, to some extent, with the same chronology that gave rise to the Serviço do Património Histórico e Artístico Nacional (SPHAN) (Department of National Historical and Artistic Heritage). Over the course of the 19th century and the first few years of the 20th century, there was a widespread belief that the major landmark in the cultural emancipation of Brazil had been the arrival of the French mission, under the patronage of King João VI. The transfer of the court and the arrival of French artists had introduced Brazil into the world of culture. Until then, Brazil had been a rural colony and all of its production had been of a rural nature. The academic education, which was based on the French system, and the eclectic artistic production of the late 19th/early 20th century both helped to reinforce this impression.
As we have seen, the Modern Art Week of 1922 led to a change in this situation. Nonetheless, it is worth mentioning that, some years before (but in the same context that had preceded the celebrations of the centenary of Brazilian Independence), a movement had begun with the aim of creating a national architectural style. This movement emerged in São Paulo, in the 1910s, thanks to the efforts of the Portuguese architect Ricardo Severo, who proposed a promotion of the traditional Portuguese-Brazilian architecture. In the 1920s, the movement gained greater strength in Rio de Janeiro, being renamed as the neo-colonial style by its patron, Doctor José Mariano Filho. Among the various activities proposed by the leader of the movement in Rio de Janeiro were special study trips promoted by the Brazilian Society of Fine Arts. In 1924, Lúcio Costa formed part of the group of architects who travelled to Mariana, Diamantina, São João del Rei and Ouro Preto, for the purpose of studying the buildings of these cities and drawing up an inventory of architectural details in order to organise a dossier on the country's traditional architecture. The aim was to find something that would provide a basis for the development of a "national” style.
It should be recalled that it was also in 1924 that Mário de Andrade took the modernist poets to Minas on the famous journey to "discover Brazil'! Lúcio Costa reported that his critical interpretation of the neo-colonial movement began during that trip, on which he joined the group from the Brazilian Society of Fine Arts, and, shortly afterwards, we find him joining forces with the modernists as one of the founders of SPHAN.
The purpose of the neo-colonial movement can be partly explained by its roots in a figurative and nostalgic historicism that was linked to the eclectic culture of that period. In this sense, the movement could not truly adhere to the modern values that were beginning to estab - lish themselves, and it may even be said to have been, in essence, a genuinely reactionary movement. The movement's commitment to what could be interpreted as a continuity of the Portuguese tradition brought with it a series of other even more complex factors that there is not enough room to discuss here, nor is it our intention to examine the ideological values on which these were based. But, in any case, it seems to us to be important to note that a rediscovery of, and return to, the architecture of the colonial period took place as part of this search for Brazilian roots and the affirmation of a national identity.
This return to colonial architecture began in the 1920s/1930s, but the systematic and continuous publication of studies was itself to begin precisely in 1937 with the foundation of SPHAN and the concomitant creation of its magazine. Along with the other publications of this institution, the Revista do Serviço do Património Histórico e Artístico Nacional (Review of the Department of National Historical and Artistic Heritage), did in fact lay the foundations for a series of texts about the history of art dating from the colonial period in Brazil. In the programme outlined in the very first issue, Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade provided us with this very clear statement of intent: "The publication of this magazine is not a form of propaganda launched by the Department of National Historical and Artistic Heritage (...). Its main purpose is to spread knowledge about both the valuable art and history of Brazil and to persistently contribute to their study. (...) This review will attempt to meet this proposed aim without claiming to publish any definitive or complete studies, as it considers that, in many respects, studies of this nature in Brazil are still at a very early stage” (Revista, 1937).
There is unanimous agreement that it was under the auspices of SPHAN that important and pioneering research into colonial art and architecture was both promoted and produced. Several seminal texts for the development of different themes were published in the review, particularly in its first few issues (1937-1947), edited by Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade. Among others, we can mention articles by Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade ("Contribuição para o estudo da obra do Aleijadinho”), Mário de Andrade ("A capela de Santo António”), Lúcio Costa ("A arquitetura dos jesuítas no Brasil”), Luís Saia ("O alpendre nas capelas brasileiras”), Paulo Tedim Barreto ("Casas de Câmara e Cadeia', "O Piauí e sua Arquitetura”), Gilberto Freyre ("Casas de residência no Brasil”), Joaquim Cardoso ("Notas sobre a antiga pintura religiosa em Pernambuco”), Sérgio Buarque de Holanda ("Capelas antigas de São Paulo”), Hannah Levy ("A pintura colonial no Rio de Janeiro”), D. Clemente da Silva Nigra ("Francisco Frias de Mesquita engenheiro-mor do Brasil”), Carlos Ott ("Os azulejos do convento de São Francisco da Bahia”), Artur César Ferreira Reis ("O Palácio Velho de Belém”), José Wasth Rodrigues ("A casa de moradia no Brasil Antigo”) and Robert Smith ("Documentos Baianos”). Other works were also published, besides this review. One of the most important events was the publication of Afonso Arinos de Melo Franco's book Desenvolvimento da Civilização Material no Brasil in 1944. This book brought together a series of lectures that Afonso Arinos had given in 1941, addressed precisely to the technicians working at the newly-created institute. According to the first-hand account of Lúcio Costa, the working environment at SPHAN was "highly academic” It had the atmosphere of a very special university, since many of the first studies and classifications of monuments were the result of study trips led by Mello Franco de Andrade, bringing together artists, architects and intellectuals who gradually discovered the heritage of colonial Brazil: Lúcio Costa in the region of the Missions; Curt Niemuendaju in the hinterland of Bahia; Rescala in Ceará; Edgard Jacintho in the hinterland of Mato Grosso and Goiás, among others.
From 1940 to 1960, it was the foreigners' turn to discover Brazil. There were three authors who played a fundamental role in the internationalisation of studies on colonial art in Brazil: the Frenchman Germain Bazin, the Englishman John Bury and the American Robert Chester Smith.
Germain Bazin was the author of L’Architecture Religieuse Baroque au Brésil, a monumental work in two volumes published in the original language in 1956 and 1958. In 1965, Bazin wrote O Aleijadinho e a escultura Barroca no Brasil, which was published in Brazil in 1971. Whereas Bazin's work was widely disseminated from the very start and was well received in Brazilian and Portuguese academic circles, the texts by John Bury remained largely unknown until the publication of an anthology of his articles in 1991, edited by Myriam Andrade Ribeiro de Oliveira. His first texts on Brazil date from 1948: two brief articles on Aleijadinho, published in Boletim Shell. He wrote his main essays in the 1950s: "Jesuit Architecture in Brazil” (1950); "Estilo Aleijadinho and the Churches of 18th-Century Brazil” (1952) and, most important of all, "The Borrominesque Churches of Colonial Brazil” (1955).
Robert C. Smith is the best known of the three authors, but his work is the most widely dispersed, not only due to the broad range of themes that interested him, but also due to the fact that his studies were published in the form of various articles spread around a number of different publications. A compilation of Smith's extensive bibliography was recently made in the catalogue published by the Gulbenkian Foundation to coincide with a major exhibition held in his honour in 2000. Among the works that he wrote on colonial architecture in Brazil were: "The colonial architecture of Minas Gerais in Brazil” (1939), "O carácter da arquitetura colonial no nordeste” (1940), "Jesuit buildings in Brazil” (1948), "Arquitetura colonial bahiana: alguns aspectos da sua história” (1951), "The seventeenth and eighteenth century architecture of Brazil” (presented at the International Colloquium on Luso-Brazilian Studies held in Washington in 1950, and published in 1953), "Arquitetura colonial” (1955) and "Arquitetura civil do período colonial” (1969). There are two texts on Portuguese urbanism in Brazil, which will be mentioned again later on: "Colonial towns of Spanish and Portuguese America” (1955) and "Urbanismo colonial no Brasil” (1958). In addition to these works, there is a long list of other titles, mainly relating to Portugal on themes that include architecture, tiles, drawing, engraving, painting and sculpture, showing a particular interest in wood carving, furniture, jewellery, gold and silverware and porcelain, among other subjects.
According to Rafael Moreira, there was also a proj ect on Brazil that he never successfully brought to fruition: a great book on Brazilian Colonial Architecture, which got no further than the unpublished albums included in Smith's estate, which today belong to the collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's Art Library. In the presentation that he made of the albums and their contents, Rafael Moreira raised the hypothesis that Smith's proj ect had been doomed from the start because of the competition that he faced from Bazin's works, published in 1956 and 1958. According to Rafael Moreira's analysis, "it says a great deal about Smith's character that the plan for his work seemed to be a copy of the Parisian's work, albeit in the form of a photographic negative: a long introduction on building materials and techniques, which, in Bazin's case, enabled him to conclude that indigenous and African forms had managed to survive, whereas for Smith it proved the absolute continuity of Portuguese and European models; and whereas one of them devoted himself exclusively to the study of religious architecture, the other reduced this subject to its bare essentials, focusing instead (perhaps over three-quarters of the book) on civil architecture'! (Robert Smith, 2000:170).
This fundamental observation directs our attention to two important aspects that should be taken into account. On the one hand, the particular context that turned Brazil's colonial art into a field of study that was fought over by international historians. On the other hand, their possible different readings.
As far as the first aspect is concerned, it is useful to follow the analysis made by Hellmut Wohl, who refers to the "fascination that, in the period after the First World War, intellectuals and researchers from the United States felt for what were, at that time, considered to be the peripheral cultures of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America” (Robert Smith, 2000:21). This observation takes into account the view of Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, for whom this sense of identification that North Americans felt with Latin America was indicative of a kind of nostalgia, interpreting the Iberian and Latin American worlds as the survivors of a fundamental archaic order, as places that, unlike America (which was in a constant state of change and disorder), had successfully maintained their authenticity. We could use the same interpretation to explain the interest demonstrated by European historians since, underlying the historiography of European art was a somewhat peripheral understanding of the Iberian Peninsula and, in particular, of its colonies. We must also take into account the fact that broadly coinciding with this chronology was the peak of baroque restoration, which must inevitably have aroused a wider interest in "discovering” the baroque world of the Iberian Peninsula and its colonies.
As for the second aspect, it is interesting to note the more native Brazilian emphasis of Bazin's analysis, mainly shown in his exaltation of the originality of Aleijadinho's mestiço art, which contrasts with both Smith's and Bury's analyses, both of which directly emphasised the formal links with the architectural models of the metropolis. It was Smith who made the categorical claim that in Brazil "the Portuguese succeeded for approximately three hundred years in preserving the tradition of art and architecture from the motherland, with only minimal changes" (Robert Smith, 2000:98). And Bury made a similar claim that was no less emphatic: "These examples make it clear that the study of the art and architecture of colonial Brazil cannot be examined in any significant way in isolation from the Portuguese metropolis. This relationship was so close that, from the point of view of art history, before independence (1822) Brazil must be regarded as having been as much a part of Portugal as, for instance, the Minho” But he then adds, "and, just as we find significant idiosyncratic expressions in the art of the Minho, so we also find remarkable expressions of artistic individuality in Brazil” (Bury, 1991:189).
The studies made by these authors are pioneering and essential approaches to the subject that subsequent generations have used as a basis for their continuation. Possible gaps existing in the available data or more emphatic interpretations are naturally discussed. The studies and initiatives undertaken by the research teams from the regional directories of IPHAN have sought, to a greater or lesser extent, to update the research being undertaken into the buildings under their protection. Similarly, several universities have begun to develop research work in the fields of art history, architecture and urbanism, with continuous programmes of postgraduate study. This has resulted in the publication of a greater number of reviews and of the proceedings of conferences and symposia at which some of the research work was disseminated, as well as in the publication of research theses. Nonetheless, although there has been a considerable increase in the number of studies being written about colonial art and architecture, the truth is that there are still too few publications being produced and, naturally, there is still a great deal left to be written and discovered. Recent years have seen a growth in the number of publications being produced in the area of art and history, which hopefully might help to remedy this situation.
In a very brief review of the most influential syntheses or monographs published since the 1950s, we should definitely mention the following studies: in 1951, O Barroco e o Jesuítico na Arquitetura do Brasil e Subsídios para o Estudo da Arquitetura Religiosa em Ouro Preto, both by Paulo F. Santos; in 1966, Quatro séculos de arquitetura na cidade do Rio de Janeiro, also by Paulo F. Santos; in 1969, Barroco Mineiro by Lourival Gomes Machado; in 1972, Morada Paulista by Luís Saia; in 1975, the first edition of the Atlas dos Monumentos Históricos e Artísticos do Brasil, by Augusto C. da Silva Telles, which was extremely important because of the exposure that it enjoyed nationally. In that same year, the first volume of the Inventário de Proteção do Acervo Cultural ipac-ba was published, a project that was coordinated by Paulo Ormindo de Azevedo. The Inventory was published in seven volumes between 1975 and 2002. This was one of the most important surveys of Brazil's heritage, and these volumes have since served as valuable reference books for various research teams. Another important reference work to be published in 1976 was Arte no Brasil by Carlos Lemos; in 1978 Arquitetura dos Jesuítas no Brasil, by Lúcio Costa and Rio Barroco, by Clarival do Prado Valadares were published; in 1979, Vida e Obra de António Francisco Lisboa, O Aleijadinho, by Sylvio de Vasconcellos; and in 1982, Nordeste Histórico e Monumental, by Clarival do Prado Valadares. In 1983, Benedito Lima de Toledo, wrote the chapter "Do século xvi ao início do século xix - Maneirismo, Barroco, Rococó” in Historia Geral da Arte no Brasil, published by the Instituto Moreira Sales; that same year, Ramón Gutiérrez published his Arquitetura y Urbanismo en Iberoamerica, which also included specific mention of Brazil. In the 1980s, the guides known as Guias dos Bens Tombados were published in some states, such as São Paulo for example, written by Nestor Goulart Reis Filho (1982). In 1987, Maria Eliza Carrazzoni organised the Guia dos Bens Tombados do Brasil. The Barroco review, published by the Universidade de Minas Gerais, also played a very valuable role during the 1980s. Several important studies by Myriam Ribeiro de Oliveira on baroque and rococo art were published in this review. In 1989, Murillo Marx, Myriam Ribeiro de Oliveira, Áurea Pereira da Silva and Hugo Segawa contributed texts on art and architecture in Brazil for the work entitled Historia del Arte Colonial Sudamericano. In the 1990s, a number of studies were published on rural architecture (Esterzilda Berenstein de Azevedo, Arquitetura do Açúcar (1990); Geraldo Gomes da Silva, Engenho e Arquitetura (1999)). In the 21st century, some syntheses/reference works have already been published, involving various authors (Património Construído: as cem mais belas edificações do Brasil (2002), Arquitetura na Formação do Brasil (2006)).
In Portugal, it is only recently that attention has once again begun to be paid to the art of the expanding territories. Studies on art during the colonial period in Brazil began to reappear after the 1980s, a period that saw the publication of several important historiographical syntheses. The collection known as Portugal no Mundo, published by Publicações Alfa (1986-1987), included a special volume devoted to Fortificações Portuguesas no Mundo, edited by Rafael Moreira, which contained a specific chapter on Brazil written by Carlos Lemos. In the História da Arte Portuguesa, edited by Paulo Pereira for Círculo de Leitores (1995), only the Peninsular territory was considered, except in the case of Walter Rossa's chapter on the Cidade Portuguesa, which considered Portuguese urbanism around the world. In História da Expansão Portuguesa, edited by Francisco Bethencourt and Kirti Chaudhuri, and also published by Círculo de Leitores (1998-1999), chapters were included that dealt with the subjects of art, architecture and urbanism in the expanding territories. In the third volume, Rafael Moreira wrote the chapter on "Arte luso-brasileira: modelos, síntese, autonomia'! Also in those same years (1998-1999), Pedro Dias published História da Arte Portuguesa no Mundo in two volumes - one devoted to the Indian Ocean and the other to the Atlantic Ocean - and, in 2004, he published Historia da Arte luso-brasileira - urbanização e fortificação. Recently, two other volumes on Brazil were published, by the same author (Arquitetura Civil e Religiosa/Urbanização e Fortificação) as part of a much broader collection entitled Arte dePortugal no Mundo, published by the Público newspaper.
Most of the titles mentioned here are concerned with the history of art and architecture, since the history of Portuguese urbanism in Brazil has to be told in a different manner. Although, in the historiography written about the art produced during the colonial period in Brazil, we can find echoes of potentially romantic analyses, it cannot be said that these interpretations were influenced by any prior understanding of the question. To a certain extent, however, this is what has happened in the interpretation of urbanism. I deliberately avoid talking here about prejudice because I do not believe we are dealing with such a phenomenon. I believe that it was the conjunction of a series of factors that, having all come together at the same time, contributed to the emergence of a paradoxical interpretation which denied (or at least considerably underestimated) the role that cities played in the formation of Brazil. This denial had both a quantitative and qualitative dimension. In other words, there was a belief that not only had the Portuguese built few cities (and then only in the coastal area), but that those that they had built were badly organised and could hardly be called cities due to the neglect that they had suffered. This interpretation was based on a comparison with the way in which the Spanish process of colonisation had taken place in America, with the application of modern theories and practices of town planning, as shown by the rational planning of their cities in grid form.
As we all know, the essential core of this interpretation was based on the works written by the generation of the 1930s, particularly the famous paragraph by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in the chapter entitled "O Semeador e o Ladrilhador” included in his book Raízes do Brasil (1936). There, the Spanish are compared to bricklayers and builders of cities, whereas the Portuguese are seen as farmers. "The City that the Portuguese built in America is not a mental product, it does not contradict the picture produced by nature and its silhouette is intertwined with the landscape. No rigour, no method, no forward planning, always this significant sense of abandon that defines the word "desleixo" [neglect or carelessness] - a term which the writer Audrey Bell considered to be as typically Portuguese as “saudade" [a sense of nostalgia or longing] and which, in his opinion, does not imply a lack of energy, but rather an inner belief that fundamentally "it is somehow not worth the effort (...)”” (Holanda, 2000:106).
In order to understand the context within which the text by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda appeared, we must mention the three works that preceded Raízes do Brasil, which are of crucial importance. One of them is the 1928 essay entitled Retrato do Brasil by Paulo Prado (another of the leading names of the modernist movement and a driving force behind the Modern Art Week of 1922, as well as one of the members of the great Paulista coffee oligarchy); another one is the well-known Casa Grande e Senzala: Formação da família brasileira sob o regime de economia patriarcal by Gilberto Freyre, published in 1933; and in the same year the book by Caio Prado Jr. Evolução Política do Brasil, which would be followed in 1942 by the equally famous Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo.
These texts form the basis of modern Brazilian historiography. Note that in all of them, the assumption of the search for an identity is already revealed in the title, through the use of the words "portrait” or "roots” or "formation” (we will return to these words later on, within the context of the effective historiography of urbanism). The most famous of all is the fundamental book by Gilberto Freyre, which represented a great novelty. Exiled in 1930, Gilberto Freyre- like Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (who lived in Germany in the same period) - also had a career which included spending some time abroad. He studied anthropology under Franz Boas in the United States of America, being heavily influenced by his teachings, which drew a distinction between race and culture based on the concept of cultural relativism. In other words, he believed in the idea that culture is the result of the historical, geographical and social specificities of each population, all of which have an equal influence. Freyre uses this analysis as the basis for his theory about Brazilians as being the mixed-blood amalgam of the three races that participated in the nation's colonisation. Together with this work, the second leg of the tripod is represented by the book by Caio Prado Jr., who presents the history of Brazil's formation from a Marxist perspective, based on the business cycles that lay behind the country's formation and development: the sugarcane cycle, the gold cycle and the coffee cycle (which was passing through a recession at that time). He maintained that Brazil's economy had been based since the period of colonisation on a "factory” system, in which the interested party was to be found outside and not inside the country, and that the nation had never been able to manage itself as a producer/consumer, but was simply a supplier for European markets, creating a socio-economic minority and resulting in the formation of an oligarchic structure based on the ownership of property.
There are four pillars on which the theories of all these essays are based:
- the sugarcane mill and plantation and the patriarchal family structure;
- the economic structure of mining and farming (in each of the cycles);
- the political structure based on an oligarchic system controlled by the families of the great landowners;
- the social structure based on the miscegenation of the three races (but always having a white person as one of its elements: white with Indian, resulting in the "mameluco”, of whom the first offspring was the "paulista bravio’’; white with black, giving rise to the mulatto, who came from the environment of the sugarcane plantations and then from mining and the coffee plantations).
What is to be noted here is that obviously there is no place for cities to exist in this theoretical formulation. The whole reasoning is based on the enhancement of the family-based social system, which is seen as exclusively rural. Why is this so? Among other reasons, because the political conjuncture pointed in that direction and because it was necessary to both understand and criticise the persistence of oligarchic regimes (which immediately afterwards were themselves to support the dictatorship). In a way, the plantation owner described in Casa Grande e Senzala is probably more akin to a colonel from the 1930s and 1940s than to the 17th-century patriarch he is meant to represent.
But while we can understand why the Brazilians should accept this picture, what were the reasons for the Portuguese to do so as well? Albeit in an apparently contradictory manner, the view expressed by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda ended up being assimilated, since it highlighted a certain Portuguese originality, which was particularly valued under the scope of art history, where art is considered as the expression of the spirit. This interpretation lies, for instance, at the heart of the work by Reinaldo dos Santos (L'Art Portugais (1938-52), Historia del Arte Português (1960) and Oito séculos de Arte Portuguesa), which laid particular emphasis on the moments of the so-called Portuguese originality, with the development of the Manueline style or the baroque style from the reign of King João V.
In this sense, the telluric analysis of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda would seem to be perfectly acceptable and it was not (at least not at that time) seen as being a depreciative interpretation, but precisely the opposite. The Portuguese did better at building cities not with reason, but rather with the use of their spirit, with poetry (note how important this image still is...). Furthermore, this difference was, above all, a way of distinguishing the Portuguese from the Spanish. Whereas the Spanish had built identical and repetitive cities (in other words, uncreative, in keeping with the Law of the Indians), the Portuguese had built original ones. Naturally, there was also the possibility of an opposite interpretation, which derived from a certain feeling of suspicion: Portuguese colonial urbanism of the Modern Age was always fundamentally compared with the Spanish situation, rather than with other contemporary European examples, which could have offered a series of possible and legitimate analyses that would certainly have been enlightening in many ways.
It is important to underline once again that Raízes do Brasil is clearly an essay about history, or about history and sociology, and that it cannot be interpreted in any way as being a text about the history of urbanism. Nonetheless, it had such a powerful impact that many studies on Portuguese colonial urbanism were consequently left on hold for several years. Also contributing to this state of affairs was the fact that this interpretation was further reinforced and disseminated internationally by such authors as Robert Smith ("Colonial Towns of Spanish and Portuguese America'! 1956; "Urbanismo Colonial no Brasil” 1958) or Georges Kubler (Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their American Dominions, 1500 to 1800, 1959).
Consequently, the true history of Portuguese urbanism in the Modern Age was to appear approximately thirty years after Sérgio Buarque de Holanda's book, with the essay that José- Augusto França wrote in France in 1962 as his doctoral thesis and later published, also in France, in 1965, and in Portugal in 1966. Actually, Lisboa Pombalina e o Iluminismo by José-Augusto França is not only the founding work of the history of urbanism in Portugal, but also a groundbreaking work in the historiography of modern art in Portugal.
From the specific point of view of the history of urbanism, the possible exceptions prior to this in Brazil were the works by Aroldo de Azevedo, who was a geographer by training and had written various studies, including Vilas e Cidades do Brasil Colonial, (1956), in which one could see the influence in Brazil of the teachings of Jaime Cortesão, who was the great link between Portuguese and Brazilian historiography in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1959, Tito Lívio Ferreira and Manuel Rodrigues Ferreira included in their História da Civilização Brasileira a chapter entitled "Urbanismo no Brasil Província” in which they quoted royal charters relating to the foundation of towns and re-evaluated those interpretations that had denied the existence of colonial urbanism. These documents had been published for the first time in 1938 in Revista do Serviço do Património Histórico e Artístico Nacional, in an article by Paulo Tedim Barreto entitled "O Piauí e a sua Arquitetura'.
In Portugal, it is important to mention the publication in 1956 of a fundamental work, Ensaio de Iconografia das Cidades Portuguesas do Ultramar by Luís da Silveira, and the famous but controversial article by Mário Tavares Chicó ("A Cidade Ideal do Renascimento e as Cidades Portuguesas da India”). Both of these works were the first and admittedly rather timid reactions to the general picture that was painted of a lack of town planning, largely along the lines of the analysis made by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. The text by Mário Chicó in particular hints, albeit somewhat naively, at a possible deconstruction of this picture, pointing out possible links with studies on military engineering.
Approximately ten years after the publication of the Ferreiras' text (which was probably not afforded the appropriate level of dissemination), and approximately thirty years after the publication of Raízes do Brasil, a new study was published on the cities of Brazil, and it is not by chance that it was entitled Formação de Cidades no Brasil Colonial (belonging to the family of books about the formation of Brazil published by Freyre and Caio Prado). This was the study that Paulo Santos wrote for the 5th International Colloquium on Luso-Brazilian Studies, held in Coimbra in 1968. Making use of some of the examples and documents used by Manuel Rodrigues Ferreira, Paulo Santos attempted to reconcile the traditional view of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda with a revised version of that work, presenting a model for the formal classification of cities and admitting that some had been planned, while others had not. It is clear how important the iconographic survey conducted by Luís da Silveira (1956) was for Paulo Santos, as well as Chicó's text on the cities of India published that same year. But what is also clear is that the bibliography that dealt with Spain as a whole was the same one that served as the basis for establishing a comparison with Portugal. The main methodological reference for this interpretation was, in particular, the Resumen Historico del Urbanismo en Espana (1954) by Torres Balbas and Chueca Goitia.
Also in 1968, the work by Nestor Goulart Reis Filho entitled Contribuição ao Estudo da Evolução Urbana do Brasil 1500-1720 was published. Nestor's work is completely different from the one written by Paulo Santos. His approach sought to identify the social and economic features that gave rise to the city and, in particular, he directly confronted the paradigm of its denial by categorically stating the importance of the urban formation of Brazil. According to what he says in his methodological notes, Weber's theory served as an anchor, but not as a closed analytical model. This explains why he dispensed with using the concept of a city (which Weber defined according to the idea of a bourgeoisie that sought to maintain its various forms of production and consumption) and used the concept of urbanisation, attempting to identify the formation of cities with the social process, and mainly focusing on the formation of an urban system rather than on the scale and size of each urban centre in itself. In fact, this interpretation made it possible to go beyond the denial of the existence of cities in Brazil that the previous generation had defended. They saw Brazil as Europe's rural rearguard (as a mere supplier of products and not as a consumer) and, in this sense, there were no real urban centres (since there was no urban economy). Reis Filho broke away from this reductive interpretation and defended the unequivocal existence of a policy of urbanisation, resulting from the convergence of economic factors and the intentions of the coloniser. He presented the different phases in this chronology, beginning with an initial phase in which the role played by the donatories was fundamental for the creation of urban centres and, after the activity of the General Government in 1549, there came the direct intervention of the crown. It was at this point that there began to arise a clear distinction between the towns of the donatories and the cities of the king, which is one of the main features of his analysis. He then presented the third phase, occurring mainly from the second half of the 17th century onwards, when the Crown began to take responsibility not only for the cities, i.e. for the main urban centres, but also for the creation and expansion of the urban network, "taking upon itself the numerous responsibilities of urbanisation” (Reis Filho, 2000:71), which required the recruitment of ever more technical workers, a phenomenon that Reis Filho identified with the appearance of the military engineers. The book includes a chronological table showing the foundations of towns and cities from the period of the territory's discovery until 1720, when he claims that the system was already well established and began to be managed more and more by the Crown.
The late 1970s saw the publication in the United States of the work by Roberta Marx Delson, New Towns for Colonial Brazil (1979), in which she undertook a pioneering analysis of Pombaline urbanism in Brazil and carried out the difficult task of dismantling the "myth of the unplanned Brazilian city” for the benefit of the American public. (Delson, 1997:1)
Returning once more to Portugal, in the 1980s, the work by José Eduardo Horta Correia, Vila Real de Santo António Urbanismo e Poder na Politica Pombalina (1984), finally brought together the Portuguese and Brazilian bibliographies on the history of urbanism. On the one hand, he continued the study by José-Augusto França, presenting what could be identified as the work that, in itself, represented a synthesis of the so-called Pombaline urbanism. On the other hand, he linked both this work and the reconstruction of Lisbon that had preceded it with the long process of learning and subsequent realisation that had been made possible by the urbanisation that accompanied expansion. He then created the concept of a "Portuguese School of Architecture and Urbanism” which has since been made use of in several subsequent studies.
Despite its having been usefully added to in recent years, this general outline of the bibliography relating to architecture and urbanism shows that it is still far from representing a comfortable situation in terms of knowledge. Today, we are only more aware of just how little we do in fact know, and of the fact that there is still so much more to be studied and learned. This aspect is fundamental for presenting the aims of this present work. We mentioned earlier that the aim of the project as a whole is to identify in the best possible way, and insofar as our present knowledge will allow, the Portuguese Heritage around the World: Architecture and Urbanism and, in the particular case of this volume, the Portuguese Heritage in South America. It is important, once again, to underline that it really is a case of going as far as our present knowledge will allow us. In this sense, it is entirely legitimate for us to admit on principle that what one will read here is not in itself original. This is not our aim. But the relative lack of fresh information about each item is countered by the novelty of this systematised gathering together of information on such a wide geographical scale and ultimately the possibility that this allows us to make comparisons between the different data that are juxtaposed in this way. This is something that we are now able to do not only for the cities and buildings included in this volume, but also over the course of the three volumes as a whole, which does in fact make this a truly global study. This is probably the main merit of this project. And in this sense it is extremely interesting to consider that the three volumes all together will provide us with a reading and understanding of a much greater whole, in which the historically unquestionable and common denominator of the presence and action of the Portuguese around the world can be seen in all of its enormous complexity and richness. Because, despite the overlapping and sharing of an identity, there is also a great deal of diversity. And one thing does not contradict the other, but rather the opposite. Perhaps we may find various lines of connection that, since they share what we may call the same basis, result in more or less related forms at the various points of the network, occurring at different times and with their own different dynamics.
Contexts and criteria: categories and Geographie
Those working on the project were asked to prepare texts (not just fact sheets), summarising the current state of knowledge about each of the sites and/or monuments selected for inclusion in this book, and providing the information necessary for understanding the historical role that they played in the areas to which they are or were related, as well as their intrinsic heritage value. The decision to write short texts to convey this information has further reinforced one of the project's strong points, which is the clear emphasis that it gives to the historical concept. Our aim was to do something more than just describe the formal characteristics of buildings or cities, by presenting not only their material aspects, but also their history, contextualising their presence in the places where they are to be found and emphasising the role that they played and still play there.
We naturally do this with the best of intentions, but we have to recognise some of the risks that may be inherent in adopting such a procedure. The first and most obvious one is the obsolescence of information. In view of the restricted time span of the items covered by the project, there are fewer possibilities of our discovering new ones that might be included in our list. But there is always the possibility of finding new data, which could help to fill in some of the gaps and correct possibly erroneous information, and this is a hypothesis that we would welcome quite readily. We have to accept this intrinsic "deficiency” with humility, knowing that, in its own particular time, each work contributes to our knowledge with the knowledge of its time.
Those who agreed to work on this volume, and whom I would like to thank for their excellent efforts, did not have an easy task. First of all, because, as was said earlier, we are largely dealing with a bibliography that is constantly being added to, and, in reality, we still know very little. Some dates, as well as some of the names of the architects, artists and commissioners of buildings, are missing, but these buildings themselves still serve as documents. Moreover, one of the greatest difficulties that they faced must certainly have been to compile the brief articles that I asked them to write. In fact, the extensive list of sites and monuments that are already classified as heritage in Brazil meant that the texts written for each one necessarily had to be quite short. Consequently, the authors had to make a great effort to synthesise the information provided in their texts, which is not always an easy thing to do. It is important to clarify that, although I was aware that the presentation of each item would have to be kept very short, I do not see that any other option was possible. Considering that the limit to the number of pages in a volume is not flexible, in order to include more information on certain buildings or sites it would have been necessary to take away some of the information provided about others. In our view, this would have been an even greater loss, as the aim was not to select the most beautiful, best preserved or most important monuments, but, insofar as possible, to show them all together, as a whole. This does not mean that we had to abandon the criteria relating to their heritage value, presenting them merely because they are remnants from the colonial period. Not at all. As was said earlier, the list of cities and buildings that form the index of this volume was compiled by taking into account a very considerable and valuable body of research and, above all, the important preservation work that has already been undertaken. All, or almost all, of these items are listed properties at a federal, state or local level. And I dare say that those which are not should be.
It is naturally a shame that the articles could not be longer, but the truth is, I must admit, that both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of the sites and monuments as a whole are important in themselves. Not that this should be considered surprising. The cities and buildings presented here are the material evidence of a presence that lasted for three hundred years. Such a presence asserted itself in this territory precisely through these material elements. Therefore, their relatively large number is also a relatively small one, since it represents a selection. The first selection was made by history and time, as there were other buildings which may well have existed alongside them that have not in fact survived. Then, after this, came the selection made by the criteria that we use for the projection of our memory, which have chosen to preserve these buildings and not others.
Now that the reasons for the choice have been explained, it is necessary to explain the order of the presentation of the different items. As we know, this built heritage is not distributed in a uniform manner across the whole territory, because its domination and occupation was a gradual process, with regions being reached at different times and under different conditions, as well as displaying distinct geographical characteristics that required specific strategies for the consolidation of their control. Consequently, there is an obvious disparity between the huge number of sites and monuments to be mentioned in both the coastal area and at the heart of the mining area and the relative emptiness of the Amazon basin and the western inland region. Such unevenness was a reality of the colonial period and, in some ways, it continues to be the case even today, mirroring the socio-economic diversity of Brazil's different regions. Nevertheless, when one looks at the overall picture, it can be seen that, at root, the methodologies used were largely similar for the whole territory. If we disregard the different investments that were made in financial terms and make, for instance, chronological rather than territorial interpretations, this unity becomes even more visible, particularly in the most basic architectural categories, and undeniably so in the case of urban settlements.
And it was through history that we returned to geography, naturally recognising their inseparable relationship, particularly in the colonisation of Portuguese America. The sub-areas were therefore organised according to a criterion designed to match the data from the historical process with the geographical interpretation of the territory. Therefore, the first sub-area is named The Coast, which encompasses the East-Northeast region; the second is The South which corresponds to the Southeast-South region. Then comes The Hinterland which covers the Centre-West region and finally The Jungle, which includes the North. Each name is obviously meant to refer to a geographical identity that is effectively matched by the process of the territory's construction. The colonisers began by occupying the coastal area, then advanced southwards, later penetrating into the hinterland and finally consolidating its dominion over the Amazon jungle.
Each area corresponds in a way to different periods of activity and each of them has its own particular specificities in terms of its built heritage, although, as has already been said, it is not possible to deny the relative unity of the whole that we have been talking about. These aspects will be stressed in the introductory texts presenting each sub-area. Nonetheless, it is important to mention beforehand that the aim of these brief presentations is not to summarise the information to be read in the specific texts about the different sites and monuments. Such a task would not be at all possible, nor would it fit into the few pages that have been assigned for this. Moreover, it would be impossible for it to be either a brief account of the colonisation of Portuguese America or a brief history of colonial art in Brazil. The aim is merely to present some of the continuities that can be noted among the different sites and monuments of each region or even among those that are common to two or more regions. The broader categories (military architecture, religious architecture and civil architecture) will therefore be the guiding threads behind the discourse used in the introductory texts to each sub-area.
Within each sub-area, the separate items will be placed in alphabetical order by municipality. This is the criterion that will be used for the whole collection. For this particular volume, it seemed useful, in the case of each municipality, to identify the present-day Brazilian states to which they correspond, in order to make it easier to locate each urban centre geographically, given the huge size of each sub-area.
The historical background and urbanistic context are first explained for each municipality. This is then followed by the texts relating to the selected monuments, which are organised according to their respective categories: military architecture, religious architecture, equip- ment and infrastructure, houses and rural architecture. In each category, the buildings have been listed in chronological order so that, when reading the information about each municipality, the reader will be able to form a picture of the successive nature of their construction. It is important to state once again that the identification of the municipality is intended to serve as the guiding thread for the reading of the text, referring to the actual area where buildings were built and showing how, together, they came to form cities. The aim is not to isolate monuments. Nonetheless, in some instances when this seemed appropriate, the articles refer directly to the selected buildings in their respective categories without the inclusion of any text to explain their urban context.
As was said earlier, the main purpose of this project is to provide accurate, updated and systematised information about a vast group of cities and buildings that serve as the material evocation of a presence: both the cultural presence of Portugal in the world and vice-versa. This relationship is always a reciprocal one and the pertinence of this shared memory is what unites us in this task. I should therefore like to address a very special word of thanks to Professor José Mattoso, Professor Mafalda Soares da Cunha and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation for the trust that they placed in me to act as the coordinator for the production of this volume. I also wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to all those who compiled the different articles and who, in this way, effectively wrote this book.
It can be said that the end of the historic discovery of Brazil by Portugal implied the selfdiscovery of Brazil by the Brazilians. Let us therefore hope that the line from Drummond's poem can now be read in an even more universal manner. And let us hope that this book may be of some help: "We need to discover Brazil!”