The culture of Brazil has been shaped by the amalgamation of diverse indigenous cultures, and the cultural fusion that took place among Indigenous communities, Portuguese colonizers, and Africans, primarily during the Brazilian colonial period. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Brazil received a significant number of immigrants, primarily of Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, and German origin, which along with smaller numbers of Austrians, Arabs, Japanese, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Chinese, and Koreans gave a relevant contribution to the formation of regional cultures in Brazil, and thus contributed to its current existence as a plural and racially diverse society.
Bandeirantes were settlers in Portuguese Brazil who participated in exploratory voyages during the early modern period to expand the colony's borders and subjugate indigenous Brazilians. They played a major role in expanding the colony to the modern-day borders of independent Brazil, beyond the boundaries demarcated by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas. Bandeirantes also enslaved thousands of indigenous people, which ultimately played a major role in the genocide of Indigenous peoples in Brazil.
Antônio Francisco Lisboa, better known as Aleijadinho, was a sculptor, carver and architect of Colonial Brazil, noted for his works on and in various churches of Brazil. With a style related to Baroque and Rococo, Aleijadinho is considered almost by consensus as the greatest exponent of colonial art in Brazil by Brazilian critics and, surpassing Brazilian borders, for some foreign scholars he is the greatest name of Baroque in the Americas.
Tarsila de Aguiar do Amaral was a Brazilian painter, draftswoman, and translator. She is considered one of the leading Latin American modernist artists, and is regarded as the painter who best achieved Brazilian aspirations for nationalistic expression in a modern style. As a member of the Grupo dos Cinco, Tarsila is also considered a major influence in the modern art movement in Brazil, alongside Anita Malfatti, Menotti Del Picchia, Mário de Andrade, and Oswald de Andrade. She was instrumental in the formation of the aesthetic movement, Antropofagia (1928–1929); in fact, Tarsila was the one with her celebrated painting, Abaporu, who inspired Oswald de Andrade's famous Manifesto Antropófago.
José Oswald de Souza Andrade was a Brazilian poet, novelist and cultural critic. He was born in, spent most of his life in, and died in São Paulo.
Victor Meirelles de Lima was a Brazilian painter and teacher who is best known for his works relating to his nation's culture and history. From humble origins, his talent was soon recognized, being admitted as a student at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts. He specialized in the genre of history painting, and upon winning the Academy's Foreign Travel Award, he spent several years training in Europe. There he painted his best-known work, Primeira Missa no Brasil. Returning to Brazil, he became one of emperor Pedro II's favorite painters, joining the monarch's patronage program and aligning himself with his proposal to renew the image of Brazil through the creation of visual symbols of its history.
The creation of art in the geographic area now known as Brazil begins with the earliest records of its human habitation. The original inhabitants of the land, pre-Columbian Indigenous or Natives peoples, produced various forms of art; specific cultures like the Marajoara left sophisticated painted pottery. This area was colonized by Portugal in the 16th century and given the modern name of Brazil. Brazilian art is most commonly used as an umbrella term for art created in this region post Portuguese colonization.
The roots of Brazilian sculpture have been traced back to the late 16th century, emerging soon after the first settlements in the newly discovered land. Through the following century, most of the sculpture in Brazil was brought from Portugal and displayed Baroque features. The Baroque style would flourish within the religious culture of the country and would remain predominant until the first decades of the 19th century. In the 19th century, sculptural activity decreased, but it later revived when both the government and the public took a new interest in the art. Modernism fomented a period of intense research into a new language of sculpture, with great achievements, and the contemporary sculpture of Brazil enjoys worldwide respect.
The Baroque in Brazil was the dominant artistic style during most of the colonial period, finding an open ground for a rich flowering. It made its appearance in the country at the beginning of the 17th century, introduced by Catholic missionaries, especially Jesuits, who went there in order to catechize and acculturate the native indigenous peoples and assist the Portuguese in the colonizing process. In the course of the Colonial period, expressed a close association between the Church and the State, but in the colony there was not a court that would serve as a patron of the arts, the elites did not bother to build palaces, or to help sponsor the profane arts, but at the end of the period, and how the religion had a strong influence on the daily lives of everyone in this group of factors derives from the vast majority of the legacy of the Brazilian Baroque period, is the sacred art: statuary, painting, and the work of carving for the decoration of churches and convents, or for private worship.
Jaguaripe is a municipality in the state of Bahia in the North-East region of Brazil. It covers 863.424 km2 (333.370 sq mi), and has a population of 18,981 with a population density of 18.32 inhabitants per square kilometer. Jaguaripe is located 130 km (81 mi) from the state capital of Bahia, Salvador. Jaguaripe shares a border with the municipalities of Aratuípe, Nazaré, Maragogipe, Laje, São Miguel das Matas, and Santo Antônio de Jesus. It was the first municipality created outside of Salvador, dating to 1693.
The Imperial Academy of Fine Arts was an institution of higher learning in the arts in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, established by King João VI. Despite facing many initial difficulties, the Academy was established and took its place at the forefront of Brazilian arts education in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Academy became the center of the diffusion of new aesthetic trends and the teaching of modern artistic techniques. It eventually became one of the principal arts institutions under the patronage of Emperor Dom Pedro II. With the Proclamation of the Republic, it became known as the National School of Fine Arts. It became extinct as an independent institution in 1931, when it was absorbed by the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and became known as the UFRJ School of Fine Arts, which still operates today.
The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, or the Basilica of the Conception, is a church in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. It is affiliated with the Catholic Church and was built in 1623, making it one of the oldest parishes in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of São Salvador da Bahia. It was the first church built by the first governor-general of Brazil, Tomé de Sousa. The current structure was prefabricated in Portugal and assembled in Salvador; its construction began in 1739 and ended in the mid 19th century. The art historian Germain Bazin classifies the church as Portuguese in design, rather than part of the Bahian tradition of religious structures of the 17th and 18th century.
Mário Xavier de Andrade Pedrosa was a Brazilian art and literary critic, journalist and political activist.
Nicolau Sevcenko was a Brazilian historian, university professor, columnist, writer, and translator.
Brazilian Romantic painting was the leading artistic expression in Brazil during the latter half of the 19th century, coinciding with the Second Reign. It represented a unique evolution of the Romantic movement; it diverged significantly from its European counterpart and even the parallel Romantic movement in Brazilian literature. Characterized by a palatial and restrained aesthetic, it incorporated a strong neoclassical influence and gradually integrated elements of Realism, Symbolism, and other schools, resulting in an eclectic synthesis that dominated the Brazilian art scene until the early 20th century.
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The Sculpture of the Misiones Orientales represents one of the most substantial and valuable surviving legacies of the culture of the Misiones Orientales, a group of Jesuit missions among the Guarani founded in the current Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. At the time owned by Spain, the Misiones Orientales were typical examples of the missionary model developed by the Jesuits in the Americas: an indigenous community fixed in a more or less self-sufficient settlement, and administered by the priests of the Society of Jesus, with the help of the natives. The success of the missions was enormous, being social, cultural, political, economic, and urbanistic projects that were advanced for their time and place. The participation of the Indians was not achieved without difficulties, but thousands chose to live in these settlements voluntarily, being converted to Catholicism and acculturated to the forms and manners of European life, producing large quantities of art, always under Jesuit supervision.
The colonial architecture of Brazil is defined as the architecture carried out in the current Brazilian territory from 1500, the year of the Portuguese arrival, until its Independence, in 1822.
Modernism in Brazil was a broad cultural movement that strongly affected the art scene and Brazilian society in the first half of the 20th century, especially in the fields of literature and the plastic arts. It was inspired by the cultural and artistic trends launched in Europe in the period before the World War I such as Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism and Surrealism. These new modern languages brought by the European artistic and literary movements were gradually assimilated into the Brazilian artistic context, but with elements of the country's culture, as there was a need to valorize the national identity.
