The Baroque style did not end with Gregório de Matos, Antonio Vieira, and the other writers of the period, but rather extended far beyond the chronological frontiers of the seventeenth century. The Baroque influence remained strong not only in literature but also in architecture and art. In the first part of the eighteenth century, the town of Vila Rica de Ouro Preto became the center of the baroque architecture, sculpture, and other forms of visual arts that characterized the Portuguese Empire at that time.
Neoclassicism, Arcadianism, and the Arcadias
In the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly under the patronage of the Marquis de Pombal, the literature that emerged in Brazil shows the predominance of neoclassicism, the style favored by the Marquis. In his recent book Mecenato Pombalino e Poesia Neoclássica, the Brazilian scholar Ivan Teixeira makes extensive use of archival sources to study Pombal’s relationship with the Portuguese and Brazilian writers and artists of his time. Following in the footsteps of their counterparts in Portugal, many Brazilian intellectuals who wanted the patronage of the powerful Marquis of Pombal wrote encomiastic poems praising his enlightened ideas and his neoclassic style. José Basílio da Gama (1741–95), educated by the Jesuits as a student, wrote laudatory verses to Pombal’s daughter and also produced the epic poem O Uraguai. Basílio’s epic, which was written a few years after Pombal expelled the Jesuits from the Portuguese territories in 1759, conformed to Pombal’s policies and saved the Brazilian neoclassic poet from being persecuted as a Jesuit.
José de Santa Rita Durão was an Augustinian priest who, although born in Brazil, lived in Portugal, where he had problems with the Portuguese elite. Perhaps to gain the sympathy of the members of the court, Durão wrote a wordy and pedestrian epic entitled Caramuru (1781). Durão epic poem praises the Portuguese people for bringing civilization to the Indians of Brazil. The hero of his epic was not a figure like Anchieta, who spent his life teaching the Indians, but a Portuguese sailor named Diogo Álvares Correia, who was saved by Indians after a shipwreck on the coast of Brazil around 1510. Diogo Alvares is transformed into a hero and portrayed as the one responsible for transforming the natives into civilized people.
Arcadianism appeared in Europe as a result of the Enlightenment and the formation of the first academies. The two movements arrived in Brazil almost simultaneously. Abandoning the baroque tradition, the followers of Arcadianism preached a return to the peaceful joys of nature and the purity and simplicity of thought and diction associated with Greek and Roman verse. Although marginalized in a colony such as Brazil, where printing presses were still prohibited, the first gatherings of intellectuals in Brazil occurred during the second decade of the eighteenth century. In 1724, the short-lived Brazilian Academy of the Neglected was founded in Bahia. Other groups of isolated intellectuals gathered sporadically to study and discuss such subjects as literature, history, botany, and zoology. Some of them re-created the Brazilian Academy of the Neglected and the Academy of the Happy Men.
The term Arcadias refers to the neoclassical cultural and philosophical groups that surfaced in colonial Brazil in the last half of the eighteenth century. The adverse intellectual environment in which these intellectuals lived without a press and dissociated from contemporary developments in Europe and from their homeland killed off the first Brazilian academies. It was not until the last decades of the eighteenth century that the Arcadian movement gained strength in Brazil. Following the model of the philosophers of the French enlightenment and the foundation of the Arcádia Lusitana in Lisbon in 1756 under the patronage of King José I (ruled 1750–77), a group of Brazilian intellectuals, including clergymen, lawyers, doctors, and scientists, frequently gathered to share ideas. These intellectuals were known as arcades mineiros owing to the fact that most of them lived in Minas Gerais.
The members of this movement included writers such as Tomás Antonio Gonzaga (1744–1810), Inácio José de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744–93), Cláudio Manuel da Costa (1729–89), and Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga (1749–1814). Many of them had been supported by the Marquis of Pombal. They adopted Arcadian pseudonyms and wrote poetry that associated them with Greek and Roman idyllic poets. However, Pombal fell from power around 1777, as a result of King José’s death and the beginning of the reign of Queen Maria I (ruled 1777–96). The members of the Mineiran Arcadia suddenly found themselves disenfranchised and without a patron. Their poetry became less an emotional escape from reality, and more a catalyst for protest. The dissatisfaction of these intellectuals during the reign of Queen Maria I led them to start a movement to free Brazil from Portugal. This movement, known in Brazil as Inconfidência Mineira, was discovered and harshly quashed by the Portuguese crown. One of the leaders of the groups, Joaquim José da Silva Xavier (1746 –92), known as Tiradentes, was killed, and Cláudio Manuel da Costa died in jail while awaiting trial. The other participants were sent into exile in Africa.
Cláudio Manuel da Costa is generally considered the best poet of the group. His poetry incorporates aspects of both the Baroque and the Neoclassic. His poems were published in Obras (1768) and later in Obras Poéticas (1903), organized by João Ribeiro and published in Rio. Tomás Antonio Gonzaga is considered by Antonio Candido and Aderaldo Castello as a typical representative of neoclassic poets. Like Basilio da Gama, Gonzaga used love as a pretext to affirm himself as a poet. In addition to his poetry, Gonzaga is known as the author of the satirical poem Cartas Chilenas, written around 1787. It is a severe criticism of the corruption and abuses of power of Luis da Cunha Meneses, governor of Minas Gerais from 1783 until 1788. Due to his involvement in the Inconfidência Mineira, Gonzaga was exiled to Mozambique in 1792. In Mozambique he married into an important family of Portuguese colonizers and became a prosperous man. Alvarenga Peixoto and Silva Alvarenga were also exiled to
Africa. Alvarenga Peixoto perished, but Silva Alvarenga survived the exile and in 1797 he was granted a pardon from the queen and returned to Brazil. When the royal family arrived in Brazil in 1808, Silva Alvarenga was working for the journal O Patriota, one of the first magazines published in Brazil. Like the other members of the Mineiran Arcadia, Silva Alvarenga is mostly known for his lyrical poetry. Critics such as Antonio Candido and José Aderaldo Castello consider Silva Alvarenga a pre-romantic poet for his poem Glaura (1799) and for his modern ideas. Silva Alvarenga’s poetic work was published by Joaquim Norberto Sousa e Silva in 1864. The literature written in Brazil during the period that extends from 1792, the year when the Inconfidencia Mineira became public, until 1822, the year of independence, is usually considered inferior, in both content and form, in comparison with the vibrant work produced by the Jesuits and by the baroque and neoclassic writers. Finally, it was with the arrival of the Portuguese imperial family in 1808 that music, literature, and other expressions of European court society were implanted and flourished in Brazil in a way never seen in other parts of nineteenth-century Latin America.
References and Further Reading
1 Albuquerque, Severino J. (1996). “The Brazilian theater up to 1900,” in R. Gonzalez Echeverría and E. Pupo Walker (eds), The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, Vol. 3: Brazilian Literature, Bibliographies, pp. 105–26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2 Alencastro, Luiz Felipe de (2000). O Trato dos viventes: Formação do Brasil no Atlántico Sul. São Paulo: Companhia das letras.
3 Alden, Dauril (1996). The Making of an Enterprise: The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540 –750. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
4 Brandão, Ambrósio Fernandes (1987). Dialogues of the Great Things of Brazil. Trans. and annotated by F. A. Holden Hall, W. F. Harrison, and D. Winters Welker. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
5 Candido, Antonio e Castello José Aderaldo (1974). Presença da literature brasileira: I. Das origens ao Romantismo, 6th ed. São Paulo: Difusã Européia do Livro.
6 Hansen, João Adolfo (1989). A sátira e