The Baroque in Brazil was the dominant artistic style during most of the colonial period, finding a receptive ground for a rich flowering. It made its appearance in the country in the early seventeenth century, introduced by missionaries Catholics, especially Jesuit, that there went to catechize and acculturate the indigenous natives and assist the Portuguese in the colonizing process. Throughout the colonial period there was an intimate association between the Church and the State, but as in the colony there was no court that served as patron, as the elites did not bother to build palaces or sponsor the profane arts until the end of the period, and since religion exerted enormous influence in the daily life of all, from this set of factors derives that the vast majority of the Brazilian baroque legacy is in the sacred art: statuary, painting and work of carving for decoration of churches and convents or for private worship.
The most typical characteristics of Baroque, usually described as a dynamic style, narrative, ornamental, dramatic, cultivating the contrasts and a seductive plasticity, convey a programmatic content articulated with refinements of rhetoric and great pragmatism. Baroque art was an essentially functional art, doing very well for the purposes it was put to serve: in addition to its purely decorative function, facilitated the absorption of Catholic doctrine and traditional customs by the neophytes, being an efficient pedagogical and catechetical instrument. Soon the most skilled pacified Indians, and then the blacks imported as slaves, exposed massively to the Portuguese culture, from mere spectators of their artistic expressions passed to producing agents, being responsible, mainly the black ones, by great part of the baroque produced in the country. They and the popular artisans, in a society in the process of integration and stabilization, began to give the European Baroque new and original features, and for this reason it is considered that this acclimatization constitutes one of the first testimonies of the formation of a genuinely Brazilian culture.
Visual arts
Production system
The social condition of the artists and the circumstances of their performance in colonial Brazil are still the subject of controversy. It is not known exactly whether his activity remained subordinate to the statute of mechanical and craft arts or whether it was already considered part of the liberal arts. It seems that a corporate form similar to the guildprevailed until the advent of the Empire, organized as follows: the master was at the top of the hierarchy, was ultimately responsible for the works and for the training and habilitation of new apprentices; below was the officer, a trained, but ungraded professional to take out major works; Next came the helpers, the young apprentices, and the slaves were at the base. There is also good evidence to believe that while there had been some progress in the social status of artists near the end of the Baroque, manual laborers like them, where many slaves were included, still faced an ingrained contempt on the part of the elites.
Thematic groups
The painting and sculpture Baroque developed as coadjutoras arts to obtain the full scenic effect of sacred architecture, the church where all specialties conjugavam efforts in search of an impact kinesthetic sweeping. Since baroque art is essentially narrative, it is worth mentioning the main thematic groups cultivated in Brazil. The first is drawn from the Old Testament, offering didactic visualizations of the cosmogenesis, the creation of Man, and the foundations of faith given by the Hebrew patriarchs. The second group derives from the New Testament, centered on Jesus Christand his doctrine of Salvation, thematic elaborated through many scenes showing his miracles, his parables, his Passion and Resurrection, elements that consolidate and justify Christianity and differentiate it from the Jewish religion. The third group revolves around portraits of Church officials, the ancient patriarchs, martyrs, saints and saints, notable clerics, and finally comes the thematic group of the Marian cult, portraying the mother of Jesus in his multiple invocations.
Painting
As in all arts, the Catholic Church was the greatest patron of colonial painting. For the Church, painting had the basic function of assisting catechesis and confirming the faith of devotees. The need to be easily understood by the uneducated people meant that drawing prevailed over color. Drawing, in the conceptualization of the time, belonged to the sphere of reason and defined the idea to be transmitted, and color provided the necessary emotional emphasis to the best functional efficiency of drawing. In this way, all baroque painting is figurative, rhetoricaland moralizing. Each scene brought a series of symbolic elements that constituted a visual language, being used like words in the construction of a phrase. The meaning of such elements was, at the time, public domain. The images of the saints showed their typical attributes, like the instruments of their torment, or objects that were attached to their career or illustrated their virtues. For example, St. Francis might appear surrounded by objects associated with penance and the transience of life: the skull, the hourglass, the rosary, the book, the scourge, and the cilice.
Most of the Brazilian baroque paintings were done in tempera or oil on wood or canvas, and inserted in the carving decoration. Some rare examples of the technique of frescoing in the Monastery of São Bento in Rio and the Church of Terésios in Cachoeira do Paraguaçu survive, but there is no record of popularization of the technique. From the outset ex-votos were common, and in the eighteenth centurywould become even more widespread. They were as a rule a rustic invoice, ordered by the devotees to popular craftsmen, or performed by the people themselves, paid for some grace received or in pledge of some promise. The ex-votos had an important role in the first development of colonial painting because they were a frequent practice, which is explained by the still wild scenery where the settlements were organized, where there were no dangers of various orders, against which the invocation of the celestial powers for help and protection was a constant.
From the initial period some of the earliest Brazilian painters who know something are worth mentioning: Baltazar de Campos, active in Maranhão, produced canvases on the Life of Christ for the sacristy of the Church of St. Francis Xavier; João Felipe Bettendorff, also in Maranhão, decorated the churches of Gurupatuba and Inhaúba, and Frei Ricardo do Pilar, active in Rio with a technique that approaches the Flemish school, was the author of a celebrated Lord of Martyrs. Lourenço Veloso, Domingos Rodrigues, Jacó da Silva Bernardes andAntonio Gualter de Macedo worked in several places between Pernambuco and Rio de Janeiro. Frei Eusebio da Soledade, considered the founder of the Bahian school, may have studied with Frans Post and Albert Eckhout, Pernambuco court artists of John Maurice of Nassau, during the Dutch domination of the Northeast.
The eighteenth century saw flower painting in almost every region of the country, forming the germs of regional schools and surviving greater numbers of individual identities known. By now a vast amount of engravings were circulatingEuropean works, that reproduced works of celebrated masters or offered other iconographic models. These engravings were the main source of inspiration for the Brazilian colonial painters, several studies have already documented their massive appropriation of such models, adapting them to the needs and possibilities of each place. They even served them as a school, since there were no formal art academies and few artists were well prepared. Of these, almost only the educated missionaries in Europe, the first teachers of painting of Brazil. However, since this imported iconographic collection had a very heterogeneous profile, made up of images from different periods and styles, Brazilian baroque painting has an equally dynamic and multifaceted character, and it is not possible to study it from a prism of unity and formal coherence.
Statuary
The Baroque originated a vast production of sacred statuary. An integral part of religious practice, devotional statuary found space both in the temple and in the private home. Cabral had already brought a statue of Our Lady of the Navigators with him, and the first pieces left of the country were of Portuguese import, coming with the missionaries. Throughout the Baroque the importation of works continued, and many of those still existing in churches and museum collections are of European origin. But since the 16th centurylocal schools of sculpture began to be formed, mainly composed of Franciscan and Benedictine religious, but with some secular craftsmen, who worked mainly the clay. The first images of baked clay created in Brazil that are safe news are authored by João Gonçalo Fernandes, dating from the 1560s and who fortunately survived the time. This was the technique in which the native could contribute more actively, teaching the white techniques of ceramic painting and knowledge about natural pigments such as tabatinga and tauá that had dominated for millennia. The Indians also collaborated as santeiros, especially in the reductions of the south and some of the northeast, and in these cases, many ethnic Indian traces are often found in the faces of the images, as can be seen in some of the sculptures of the Seven Peoples of the Missions. The Jesuits already gave preference to wood, which from the end of the seventeenth centurywould also predominate, also determining changes in the shape of the pieces. The technique of the time required that the pieces of clay be modeled compactly, with a low relief and without projected parts, that could easily break during the cooking. Wood, on the other hand, enabled sculpture with open, fluttering and dynamic forms, much freer in three-dimensional space. Most of the Brazilian baroque statuary was eventually created in polychrome wood. The clay was used mainly at the beginning, although it was never abandoned, and the stone was rare occurrence, more reserved for the decoration of facades and public monuments.
Created in Brazil or imported, there would hardly be a house that did not have at least some saint of carved devotion: statuary became a commodity, almost omnipresent, far more common than painting, with large specimens, in size natural or even larger, to miniaturized parts for practical travel use. Salvador in particular became an export center of statuary to the most distant points of the country, creating a regional school of such strength that knew no solution to continuity until the twentieth century. Another important northeastern school was that of Pernambuco, with a high quality production but still little studied. Most surviving works remain anonymous; were not usually signed, and style analyzes often are not sufficient to determine their origin precisely, since iconography followed standard conventions that were worth everywhere and the exchange of works across the country was great, but some names were preserved by oral tradition or by receipts for payment of works. Among them we can mention Augustine of Jesus, active in Rio and São Paulo; Frei Agostinho da Piedade,José Eduardo Garcia, Francisco das Chagas, Cabra, Félix Pereira Guimarães and Manuel Inácio da Costa, active in Salvador; Veiga Valle, in Pirenópolis; Francisco Xavier de Brito, acting between Rio and Minas, Manoel da Silva Amorim, in Pernambuco, Bernardo da Silva, of the Maranhão school, Simão da Cunha and Mestre Valentim, in Rio de Janeiro. At the Minas school, Francisco Vieira Servas, José Coelho Noronha, Felipe Vieira, Valentim Correa Paes andBento Sabino da Boa Morte, among others.
With the sedimentation of national culture around the middle of the eighteenth century, and with the multiplication of more capable craftsmen, there is a growing refinement in the forms and finish of the pieces, and images of great expressiveness appear. However, the importation of statuary directly from Portugal continued and even grew with the enrichment of the colony, since the upper classes preferred finer specimens and more erudite masters. At the same time, the regional schools multiplied, with emphasis on those of Rio, São Paulo, Maranhão, Pará and Minas, where the participation of blacks and mulattoes was essential and where more typical regional characteristics were developed, which could incorporate elements archaic or from several schools in eclectic syntheses. As described by Ailton de Alcântara,”it is in this context that humble but skillful men, drawing on the formal perspective they grasp through their pregnancies, guided only by oral tradition and by the exercise of repetition, will be identified in the environment in which they lived as the makers of saints and various other objects of devotion.” Aleijadinhorepresents the crowning and final great manifestation of the Brazilian baroque sculpture, with dense and masterly work spread in the Ouro Preto region, especially in theSanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, inCongonhas, which has a number of large sculptural groups in stations of the Via Crucis, in polychrome wood, and the famous Twelve Prophets, made of soapstone, on the churchyard.
Golden carving and other sculptural modalities
The golden carving, an essentially decorative form of sculpture, must be approached separately in view of its great wealth in Brazil and its extraordinary importance throughout the development of the Baroque, often acquiring monumental proportions and modifying the perception of the internal architectural spaces. As the structural volumes of the churches always remained quite simple and static, attesting to the longevity and vigor of the tradition of the chan architecture, it was in the decoration of the interiors, in the altarpieces and altars, where the carving dominates, that the Brazilian Baroque could express itself with its strength total and be more “typically Baroque”: sumptuous, extravagant, dynamic and dramatic. It was in the northeast, first in Salvador and in Recife, that gave its first important fruits.Cathedral of Salvador and the Cathedral of São Luís do Maranhão, both descended directly from Mannerism, Baroque carving was formed by updating other archaisms, such as the concentric plenary arches arranged in depth, common in the portals of the Romanesque churches, abundant throughout Portuguese territory, and the twisted colunetas, already existing in the Gothic period. The spaces between these structural elements of the altarpieces, as well as their surfaces, were carved with profuse polychrome and gold-plated ornamentation in the form of branches and garlands of flowers, interspersed in richer examples of angels, coats of arms, insignia, birds, Atlanteans and Caryatids, with great stylistic homogeneity.
This frame, which had a scenographic character and was equivalent in concept and function to the arches of the triumph of Antiquity, created a niche, filled with a pedestal for the statue of a saint. The base of the altarpieces was a box or table also decorated, which could be replaced by columns of support. The main altarpieces in the chancels could have great grandeur. This specific conformation was given the name of ” Portuguese National Style “, which became the dominant model for interior decoration from the middle of the seventeenth century until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Naturally, there were several interpretations of the model, and the different religious orders adopted their own variations that became typical; Jesuits tended to be more sober, and Franciscans preferred luxuriant luxury. Throughout the National Style the carving in rule little projected in the space, following closely the conformation of the architecture. The ceilings, the National Style crystallized in the formula of ” bins ” or “vaults” a carved work with castings polygonal areas, which were part paintings. Illustrative of this stage are the Golden Chapel in Recife, one of the first in this style, and the Church of São Franciscoof Salvador, one of the richest in Brazil; its luxuriant gilded carving entirely covers all internal surfaces with striking joint effect.
Literature
Educational and linguistic context
Due to the peculiarities of its formation like colony, in Brazil the literary culture cost to develop. Portugal did not make any effort to educate the colonized territories – in fact, by various means he strove not toeducating them, since the great interest was the exploitation of their resources and it was feared that an educated colony could rebel against the central power and become independent. Libraries and public schools did not exist, and what was learned – when it was learned – was an elementary instruction under the tutelage of the Church, especially of the Jesuits, strongly directed to catechesis, and education ended there, with no prospects of deepening or of improving the literary taste unless the pupils ended up joining the ranks of the Church, which would then give them better preparation. Moreover, a large part of the population was illiterate and the transmission of culture was almost entirely based on orality, the press was forbidden, manuscripts were rare because the paper was expensive,lunar and almanacs, compendiums of Latin, logic and legislation, so that in addition to being few readers, there was almost nothing to read. Thus, the sparse literature produced during the Baroque was born mainly among the priests, some of them highly enlightened, or among some noble or affluent family, among government officials, who could afford to study in the metropolis, and was consumed in this same reduced circle. What has been able to flourish in this pauperistic context has broadly followed the European literary Baroque, characterized by exuberant rhetoric, emotional appeal, polysemic discourse, asymmetry, taste for language figuresand contrasts, and by the intensive use of concepts and images related to the other arts and the various bodily senses, seeking a synesthetic effect.
Add to this the fact that until the mid- eighteenth century, when the Marquis of Pombal introduced major reforms in education and sought to homogenize the national linguistic panorama, what was least talked about in Brazil was Portuguese. In the context of a conquered territory whose original inhabitants expressed themselves in a multitude of other languages, the first European settlers had to know them, and they ended up using them on a large scale in public and even in a domestic environment where slaves Indians always circulated and mestizos, often creating hybrid lines, such as the general São Paulo language, which predominated in the south, and nheengatu, which was the lingua francaof the Amazon for a long time. This miscegenation also occurred in the pastoral field, giving literary fruits in original works or translations made by the missionaries to work with the Indians, including sermons, poems and sacred books, as well as technical works such as catechisms, dictionaries and grammars. See note: During the Iberian Union, and under the influence of the neighboring Hispanic colonies, from which came many in search of better opportunities, Spanishalso had significant circulation in southern Brazil and Sao Paulo, but unlike indigenous languages, it did not take root, rapidly extinguished. At some points on the coast, for a brief period, Dutch and French were also heard. The African slaves’ speeches, on the other hand, are to be recorded, were severely repressed, but they were able to survive on a small scale in a covert way, used alone, and at African festivals and rites practiced in the sneakers of whites. Finally, it should be said that the language of scholarship at that time was Latin, the official language of the Church, of Law and Science, and which monopolized the entire higher education system. There was little space for Portuguese to be cultivated with more intensity, being restricted almost exclusively to the official scope, and in addition to rare pioneer writers, some of whom will soon be mentioned, only in the middle of the eighteenth centuryis that Brazilian literature in Portuguese will begin to acquire a richer and more clearly native feature, accompanying the growth of coastal cities, the emergence of the first literary academies and the emergence of the gold cycle in Minas Gerais, but at the same time transition to Arcadism, directing style to the classicist values of economy and simplicity.
Poetry
In the field of poetry, the precursor Bento Teixeira stands out with his epic Prosopopeia, inspired by Camões’s classic-Mannerist tradition, followed by Manuel Botelho de Oliveira, author of Parnassos Music, the first printed book of Brazilian born author, collection of poems in Portuguese and Spanish in strict cultist and conceptual orientation, in the poetry of Góngora, and later the friar Manuel de Santa Maria, also of the Camonian school. But the greatest poet of the Brazilian baroque is Gregory of Matos, of great satirical vein, and equally penetrating in religion, philosophy, and love, often with raw erotic charge. He also made use of a cultured language full of figures of language, while displaying classicist and Mannerist influences. It was dubbed The Mouth of Hell for its mordant criticisms of the customs of the time. In his religious lyric, the problems of sin and guilt are important, as is the conflict of passion with the spiritual dimension of love.
Prose
In prose the great exponent is Father António Vieira, with his sermons, of which the First Sunday of Lent Sermon is remarkable, where he defended the natives of slavery, comparing them to the Hebrews enslaved in Egypt. In the same tone is the Sermon 14 of the Rosary, condemning the slavery of the Africans, comparing it to the Calvary of Christ. Other important pieces of his oratory are the Sermon of Saint Anthony the Pisces, the Sermon of Mandate, but perhaps the most celebrated is the Sermon of the Sixtieth, of 1655. In it he not only defends the Indians, but also, and above all, attacks his executioners, the Dominicans, by means of a clever chain of evocative images. His writing was animated by the desire to establish a Portuguese and Catholic empire governed by civic zeal and justice, but his voice was interpreted as a threat to the established order, which brought him political problems and attracted upon him the suspicion of heresy. He also authored the first Utopian narrative written in Portuguese, the History of the Future, where he sought to revive the myth of the Fifth Empire, a Christian and Portuguese empire dominating the world.
Performing arts
Music
The music is the art whose trajectory during the Baroque in Brazil is the least known and least leaving relics – almost everything was lost. From the native musical production only notable works survived from the end of the eighteenth century, that is, when the Baroque was already giving way to the Neoclassical school. Not that there had been no musical life in the colony in previous centuries; however, the scores were lost, surviving no more than 2,500 known compositions, in the estimation of Régis Duprat, mostly dated to the end of the period, but literary testimonies leave no doubt about the intense Brazilian musical activity since the beginning of the Baroque, especially in the Northeast. At the end of the 18th centurythere were more active musicians in the colony than in Portugal, which speaks of the intensity of the practice developed in Brazil.
The first recorded musical activities in the country were linked to catechesis, counting on the active participation of Indians. In some reductions of the south a rich musical life flourished, but in general the music practiced by the missionaries among the natives was quite simple, employing basically the homophonic chant, which was often part of didactic theatrical representations. Shortly later was introduced an elementary instrumental composed basically by the flutes and the wire violas. With the growth of the colony, better material conditions provided a generalized enrichment, appearing choirs, orchestras and schools. That’s when the blacks and the mulattos, who came to dominate the colonial musicians, became much more important, musically. There are several admired reports of travelers on black and mulatto orchestras playing to perfection European erudite pieces. Many of them, in addition to performing, created, and among them came some of the greatest composers of the period, although traces of the original culture of their ethnicity are by no means detected in their production, all oriented to European models.
Since the Church remained the great patron of the arts, it was natural for the proliferation of musical brotherhoods, which came to acquire enormous importance in the musical life of the colony. Some have become very rich, managing to manage full orchestras and own own temples decorated with luxury. Although the brotherhoods spontaneously organized themselves, the musical practice they developed was born of commissions, and was always under the tutelage of the Church, which attributed to each one the responsibility for the musicalization of specific ceremonies and feasts, by hiring its principal master for the execution of music throughout a year. This form of hiring was called watertight, and amounted to a monopoly. At the end of the 18th centurythe auctioning for the contracts was introduced. The forms of sacred music cultivated in Brazil were equivalent to those of Europe: Masses, litanies, motets, psalms, responsories, hymns, among others, and had, like the other Baroque arts, a functional nature: they aimed at stimulating the devotion of the faithful. an important catalyzing and evocative element in a ritualized and spectacularized worship, taking place in the sumptuous setting of the churches or in the colorful and busy outdoor festivities.
However, profane music also experienced rich and sophisticated flowering. Besides being present in many domestic situations, in civic festivities, in official ceremonies, mixing with popular music, reports also accuse the staging of complete operas in Bahia and Pernambuco in the late seventeenth century, as well as in the century following in Rio (1767) and São Paulo (1770) theaters, with a basically Italian repertoire. The Portuguese Antônio Teixeira, who played the satires of Antônio José da Silva, the Jew, of great diffusion and success, although written in Portugal, stood out. The most ancient profane vocal score written in Brazil in Portuguese that lasted was the Cantata Acadêmica Heroe, egregious, learned, pilgrim, in fact only a recitative + aria pair of an anonymous composer, who in 1759 saluted in elegant and expressive music the Portuguese dignitary Jose Mascarenhas and deplored the difficulties he had been through on this earth. His authorship is sometimes attributed to Caetano de Melo de Jesus, a chapel master at the Cathedral of Salvador.
It should include the citation to some other important names. In São Luís, from 1629 the presence of Manuel da Motta Botelho as chapel master has been noted. Frei Mauro das Chagas worked a little earlier in Salvador, and after him came Jose de Jesus Maria São Paio, Frei Felix, Manuel de Jesus Maria, Eusébio de Matos and several others, especially João de Lima, the first musical theorist of the Northeast, polyphonist, multi-instrumentalist and chapel master of the Cathedral of Salvador between 1680 and 1690, and then assuming that of Olinda. One of the main figures of the musical peak of Salvador was Fr. Agostinho de Santa Monica, of great fame while he lived, author of more than 40 masses, some in polycoral style, and other compositions. Caetano de Melo de Jesus, mentioned before, was another great personage in the music of the Bahia capital, author of a School of Organ Song (“organ singing” was understood as polyphonic singing), in two volumes, which although never published, is today considered one of the most notable treatises of musical theory written in the Portuguese language of its time, competing with those of celebrated European musicologists, standing out for its extension, encyclopedic comprehension and erudition”in the various domains of knowledge which, starting from the pedagogical basis of the trivium and quadrivium, virtually encompasses the philosophical and humanistic knowledge available at the time for an accomplished Master of the Cathedral Chapel, ” said researcher Mariana de Freitas.
The other main centers of the time, Recife, Belém and São Paulo, could only maintain a consistent activity from the eighteenth century. Despite its relative delay, the quality of its musical life reached a level that interested even Metropolis experts. Several of his players were named in the Portuguese Musicians Dictionary of Joseph Mazza, among them José Costinha, Luis de Jesus, Jose da Cruz, Manoel da Cunha, Inácio Ribeiro Noia and Luis Alvares Pinto. Many historians classify the work Misfolded Love, produced in Recife in 1780 by Luís Álvares Pinto, as the first drama publicly mounted in Brazil by a native author; and although the piece was not intended to be sung (there is a chorus figured by the song), it has a plot similar to the best serious opera of the time.
Theater and festivities
The first important theatrical manifestations in Brazil occur in the transition from Mannerism to Baroque, emerged as an instrument in the work of catechizing the Gentile. Such are the plays of José de Anchieta, the first and greatest playwright of the sixteenth century in Brazil. His production is part of the Jesuit conception of scenic catechesis, systematized by Father Francisco Lang in his Dissertatio de actione scenica. To formulate its precepts Lang was based on the Italian theatrical tradition in ancient records of medieval mysteries, and on the requirements of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, which provided for “composition of place” for better efficiency of spiritual meditation. In the case of Anchieta, Gil Vicente’s theater was another important reference.
The plots were usually drawn from the Bible and from Catholic hagiography, and the story of the Passion of Christ along the Way of the Cross was one of the most important. The pieces of Anchieta already show one of the characteristics of the baroque religious theater that would remain throughout the following centuries, the syncretism, with personages retired of several historical periods and mixed to legendary figures. In the Auto de São Lourenço, for example, appear the Roman emperors Décio and Valeriano, angels, the saints Sebastião and Lourenço, an old woman, Indian boys and demons, and in this mixture it becomes clear, as Karnal pointed out, the purpose of “relativizing time and space in function of the divine frame of reference, which is eternal and absolute. concomitant and, despite the existence of a history of salvation, true values are not historical or linear. ” In the seventeenth century the form of the sacred theater developed, enriched scenery and stage accessories, and the target audience is no longer primarily the Indian, but the entire population.
In the beginning there were no theater houses, and the place for such representations was usually the open air, in the plazas before the churches, or along the processions, with the help of mobile scenarios installed on floats accompanying the route. The processions in particular relied on lively popular participation in an integrated movement between actors and the public. Often used puppets or sacred images of a special type, the rock statues, dressed as people and articulated so that they could adapt to the action that unfolded, where they played a fundamental evocative role.
In addition to the sacred representations organized by the Church and the brotherhoods, theater was present in the official scene in the form of praises to civil and military authorities and other ceremonial plays, usually with rhetorical texts blended with classical allegories and biblical references. But profane theater also happened as spontaneous entertainment, whether in the public space or privately, where puppetswere of frequent use and improvisation, a practice. Salvador was the first stage of this popular theater; soon other centers also indicate its occurrence, being frequent the use of Portuguese mixed with Spanish and native vernacular. Although this theater of the people was prized for spontaneity and had an eminently folkloric character, it often used ready-made texts from Lisbon, since the press was forbidden in Brazil. These texts, translated and edited in an obscure and amateurish way in the Metropolis, were usually poorly made adaptations of famous scholarly works, and sold at low cost in the likeness of cordel literature, with a good market. Just as they were already adulterated and “popularized”, they lent themselves to many other adaptations and improvisations according to the possibilities on each occasion.
The profane erudite theater would only begin to flourish with the stabilization and enrichment of the colony, the standardization of the linguistic norm and the advance of the colonization towards the interior. In this phase, from the middle of the XVIIIth century, the construction of several houses of spectacle by the coast begins and in some interior centers, like Ouro Preto and Mariana. They mainly served to represent pieces of music, operas, melodramas and comedies. At the same time, the desire for professionalization of the Brazilian theater, until then with an amateur and popular basis, appeared, with the result that the itinerant tablados give place to the fixed auditorium. The repertoire was still largely imported from Europe, with works by Molière, Goldoni, Corneille,Voltaire, but some national ones appeared and the music satires of António José da Silva, the Jew, gained enormous popularity. Despite the great popularity of theater in Baroque Brazil, the actors, who included many mulattoes, were placed among the lower classes of society.
Of the baroque theater houses of Brazil, the oldest still existing is the Municipal Theater of Ouro Preto, from 1770, which is also the oldest in the Americas still in use. Another important example survived in Sabará, the second oldest in Brazil still active. In Rio there are records of older theaters, such as Padre Bonaventura’s Opera House, erected possibly in 1747, which did not survive. However, the stories describe the richness of their scenery and costumes, the use of puppets, and their complex stage machinery, an essential equipment for the creation of the special effects so much appreciated in Baroque staging. Father Bonaventura himself ruled the spectacles. Another theater was erected in Rio around 1755, the Teatro de Manoel Luiz; in it the activity of one of the first professional set designers of Brazil, Francisco Muzzi, and a repertoire with pieces by Molière, Goldoni, Metastasio, Maffei, Alvarenga Peixotoand especially the pieces of the Jew. It worked until the arrival of the Portuguese royal family to Brazil.
It is considered that the scenic inheritance of the baroque remains to this day in syncretic popular expressions of long and rich tradition that survive in various parts of the country, such as the litanies, the conga, the suits of Kings, and even is visible in the modern carnival, a party associated with the religious calendar and one of the contemporary popular expressions that update the lush scenography of the height of the theater and the baroque parties.
Source from Wikipedia