O Aleijadinho e a Arquitetura Tradicional / The Little Cripple and Everyday Architecture
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The Little Cripple and Everyday Architecture
by Lucio Costa / Introduction and English translation by Catherine Seavitt Nordenson
Introduction
The architect Lucio Costa (1902–1998) is well-known as the author of the urban master plan for Brasília, the modernist federal capital of Brazil, initiated by President Juscelino Kubitschek (1902–1976) in 1956. Inaugurated just four years later on the high central plateau of Brazil, Brasília fulfilled the utopian nineteenth-century dream to move the nation’s capital from the coastal city of Rio de Janeiro to the interior of the country. Costa’s 1956 typewritten competition entry for the Plano Piloto of Brasília is an influential text of the modernist period. Less well known, however, is his broader body of critical writing on national patrimony, historic preservation, and architectural pedagogy. Much of this writing was drafted during Costa’s thirty-three-year tenure as a member of SPHAN (Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional), Brazil’s national agency for historic patrimony and preservation. From 1939 through 1972, he was a public servant of this agency, housed within the Ministry of Education and Culture.
Figure 1. Nineteenth-century imaginary portrait of Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as “O Aleijadinho,” by Euclásio Pena Ventura.
Courtesy/cortesia Arquivo Público Mineiro/Museu Mineiro, Belo Horizonte.
The text presented here, in both the original Portuguese and my English translation, “O Aleijadinho e a Arquitetura Tradicional” / “The Little Cripple and Everyday Architecture,” is one of Costa’s earliest published texts, written when he was just twenty-seven years old, and predates his service at SPHAN by ten years.[1] Appearing in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Jornal on June 24, 1929, the essay was included in a special edition examining the arts and culture of the interior Brazilian state of Minas Gerais (Figures 1 and 2). The newspaper’s editor at the time was Rodrigo Mello Franco de Andrade (1896–1969), a passionate mineiro who would create SPHAN as a new agency in 1937, appointing Costa as his director of research in 1939. The vast body of work attributed to “O Aleijadinho” or “the little cripple,” the diminutive nickname of the seventeenth-century baroque sculptor Antônio Francisco Lisboa (1738–1814) who lost the use of both hands to leprosy, was quickly landmarked and protected by SPHAN. Yet in this early text, Costa reflects on the mythologizing of Aleijadinho and questions whether his sculptural legacy was reflective of the true character and spirit of everyday seventeenth and eighteenth-century Brazilian architecture.
Figure 2. Cover of the special Minas Gerais edition of O Jornal, June 24, 1929, edited by Rodrigo Mello Franco de Andrade.
Courtesy/cortesia Arquivo Público Municipal de Ouro Preto.
Who was Aleijadinho? A singular anomaly? A fictive creation of his first biographer in 1858, Rodrigo José Ferreira Breitas (1814–1866)?[2] An idol of the early modernist Brazilian artists who sought a creative force native to Brazil?
Perhaps the better question is who, indeed, was Lucio Costa? In 1930, just a year after the publication of this essay, Costa would sever his relationship with his admired mentor, the architect José Marianno Filho (1881–1946), and break from the eclectic neocolonial architectural style he had previously embraced. Rejecting tradition, Costa would radically transform the conservative Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro during his short-lived directorship from 1930–1931. He shifted the academy’s architectural education toward the new modernist style emergent in São Paulo since the 1922 Semana de Arte Moderna. Yet, during the subsequent decades, even during the construction of Brasília, Costa would return time and time again to reflect on the legacy of Brazil’s colonial architecture. He catalogued the architecture of the Baroque period in Brazil, landmarked scores of historic colonial and Jesuit missionary buildings through SPHAN, and continued to research and write extensively about Aleijadinho, wholeheartedly embracing his talent and importance. He would even admiringly compare his former student and protégé Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) to the “Little Cripple.” Through the lens of the past, Costa saw the future.
The Little Cripple and Everyday Architecture
by Lucio Costa
The case of Aleijadinho, the “Little Cripple,” has been well studied, discussed, and even mythologized.[3] Much has been said and indeed, exaggerated. We wish to create a lovely story, memorializing a poor leper who was able to transform his misfortune into a marvel of amazing statuary. The misery ended, but the stones remained (Figures 3 and 4).
“Thus we see that Aleijadinho had the spirit of a decorator, not of an architect. The architect sees the whole ensemble, and subordinates the detail to the whole; Aleijadinho sees only the details, and loses himself in those details.”
But this is not enough. There is no point in studying how Aleijadinho perfected his technique or which guidelines he traced. There is no point in consulting history, archives, or rare papers to determine what was or was not made by him—for our myth states that every carved stone in Minas Gerais is a work of Aleijadinho. This brings to mind the celebrated voyage of Chateaubriand to the United States.[4] Knowing the length of his stay and the number of cities he claimed to have visited, not even a train traveling at one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour could have made this possible. The arithmetic is unforgiving—a simple mathematical calculation can destroy deep convictions.
Figure 3. Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, Congonhas do Campo, 1800-1805. Photo by João de Almeida Ferber, ca. 1930.
Courtesy/cortesia Arquivo Público Mineiro.
Chateaubriand—the friend of the underhanded Récamier, herself of somewhat suspect purity—exaggerated massively, but in the end he apologized.[5] Likewise, our poor Aleijadinho is not to blame, for in fact he was a master builder, contracting numerous assistants who did the bulk of the work. He took the most interesting projects for himself, those that were the most important. In part, this explains the quantity of portals, pulpits, and so on, that are attributed to him. And this presents a significant advantage, nourishing the magical illusion held by every town in Minas Gerais, each proudly believing that it possesses a stone carved by the divine leper.
What seems to me most worthwhile—and this has never been done—is an examination of Aleijadinho’s work from a purely architectural point of view.
Figure 4. Aleijadinho, statue of the prophet Jonas at the Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, Congonhas do Campo. Photographer unknown, ca. 1940.
Courtesy/cortesia Arquivo Público Mineiro.
Despite the influence of his work during the colonial period, and its profound influence on those who study our historic architecture today, we must strive to vanquish the silence since that time, a slumber of almost two centuries, during which we lost the sound principles that were unknowingly pointed in the right direction. And it is from this perspective that the figure of Aleijadinho diminishes in prominence, returns to its true proportions, descends from the throne, and comes to speak to us here on earth, unaffectedly.
“The essential is elsewhere. These ordinary characteristics are unrelated to Aleijadinho’s work, and it is here that we find the genuine spirit of our people. This is the everyday essence that shapes our unique national identity.”
Thus we see that Aleijadinho had the spirit of a decorator, not of an architect.[6] The architect sees the whole ensemble, and subordinates the detail to the whole; Aleijadinho sees only the details, and loses himself in those details. At times this leads him to unintended, strained, and unpleasant solutions. His marvelous portals could be transported from one church to another without harm, for the simple reason that they have nothing to do with the rest of the church to which they provide entry. They are an entirely separate thing. It is as if they were alien to the rest of the church. Aleijadinho rarely concerned himself with the base, the volume of the towers, the massing of the façade. He just kept creating (Figures 5, 6, and 7).
Figure 5. Igreja de São Francisco de Assis, Ouro Preto, 1766-1794. Photographer unknown, ca. 1940.
Courtesy/cortesia Arquivo Público Mineiro.
Figure 6. Aleijadinho, partial view of the portico and sculpted medallion of the Igreja de São Francisco de Assis, Ouro Preto. Photographer unknown, ca. 1940.
Courtesy/cortesia Arquivo Público Mineiro.
Figure 7. Aleijadinho, detail of the baptismal font, Igreja de São Francisco de Assis, Ouro Preto. Photographer unknown, ca. 1940.
Courtesy/cortesia Arquivo Público Mineiro.
One has the impression that he sculpted while delirious, venting his immense pain and anger, unintentionally projecting a tortured and repressed soul into his work. He chiseled and shaped the stone with an ailing sensuousness. He elaborated it with volutes, fillets, and flowers, all those forms that he dreamed of without being able to touch. And although Freud’s psychoanalysis can be quite tiresome, we cannot help but think of his embodied repression when we consider the tragedy that was Aleijadinho. Those rare architects who have truly studied the architecture of our colonial period understand the difficulty of the disconnected motifs he created. Indeed, Aleijadinho was never in agreement with the true spirit of our architecture. Our architecture is robust, solid, massive; everything he made was slender, delicate, fine, almost ornamental. Our architecture is defined by tranquil and quiet lines; everything that he left behind is tortured and anxious. Our architecture is sturdy, rigorous, simple, unpretentious. For Aleijadinho, everything is volatile, lavish, convoluted, and a bit precious. Accordingly, it is as if his work is out of tune with the rest of our architecture. It is a sharp note in a slow and solemn melody. Hence the difficulty of adapting it, molding it to the rest. His oeuvre eludes, escapes; it is unique. He was unique.
Figure 8. View from the street traversing the Ponte da Barra, with the Igreja de São Francisco de Assis beyond, Ouro Preto. Photographer unknown, 1927.
Courtesy/cortesia Arquivo Público Mineiro.
And it is for this reason that I do not consider Aleijadinho so indispensable. I find it amusing when people say that without him, our architects have nothing to gain from colonial architecture. The essential is elsewhere. These ordinary characteristics are unrelated to Aleijadinho’s work, and it is here that we find the genuine spirit of our people. This is the everyday essence that shapes our unique national identity. Anyone who has traveled to the interior of the state of Minas Gerais, traversing the historic towns of Sabará, Ouro Preto, São João del Rei, Mariana, and so many others, cannot help but have a sensation of deep suffering upon seeing those traces of a forgotten past that express a character so particular, so much our own. Seeing those ordinary houses, those churches, moving from one surprise to another, we find ourselves content, happy, and reminded of things long past, of things that we never knew, but that are hidden deep inside of us, forgotten (Figure 8). We need someone like Proust to explain this properly.[7]
“What became of those anonymous masters who proportioned the windows and doors so elegantly, and gave the roofs and eaves that beautiful line? And the rest, and everyone else, where are they, the ones who gave all of this to us? They disappeared so suddenly, and then faded away.”
And when one is familiar with Bahia, Pernambuco, and other states as well, we see an overall thread, despite the details that are particular to each region. The spirit and the way of doing things is always the same. Whether in Caraça or Olinda, without knowing anything about history but simply observing our historic architecture, we see that despite its great size, regional differences, and other complications, Brazil is one unique thing. Rightly or wrongly, it was formed at one time, by the same spirit, and from one hand. Crooked, distorted, ugly, so it may be, but it has the same structure, it is one singular thing. Brazil’s colonial architecture expresses this (Figure 9).
Figure 9. Domestic colonial architecture at Rua São José, Ouro Preto. Photographer unknown, ca. 1940.
Courtesy/cortesia Arquivo Público Mineiro.
However, it has been more than a century, almost two, since this ended. It stopped. Everything was going so well; but then all of a sudden it all stopped. It fell apart, and we ended up not understanding anything. But in the end, what became of those individuals who carved rosewood so expertly, who made those beds, those cabinets, and chiseled those antique chair legs? What became of those anonymous masters who proportioned the windows and doors so elegantly, and gave the roofs and eaves that beautiful line? And the rest, and everyone else, where are they, the ones who gave all of this to us? They disappeared so suddenly, and then faded away. It is hard to believe that they could be the same as us, the same people.
This is a minor point, very small, but the same situation occurred with ancient Greece. No one understands how those who live there today could be the descendants of the same humans that created the Parthenon, carved the Discobolus of Myron, wrote the Iliad. It is hopelessly incomprehensible!
In the end, the Greeks had a specimen like our own precocious Americanist Aleijadinho: Alexander the Great, who spread Hellenism—the character and culture of ancient Greece—throughout the antique world. And the seed took hold.
Figure 10. Burial of Raimundo Teixeira Mendes (1855–1927), philosopher, positivist, and creator of the Brazilian flag and its motto “Ordem e Progresso,” at Saint John the Baptist Cemetery, Rio de Janeiro, on June 29, 1927. Photo by Augusto Malta.
Courtesy/cortesia Fundação Biblioteca Nacional/Brasiliana Fotográfica/Fiocruz.
As for us, poor us, the seed disappeared completely. It left us, it ended. But all this is nonsense. The fact is that we now must live in Copacabana. We have to sit in a little wicker chair and hear the record players and radios of our neighbors. Later, we go to the cinema.
But the worst is that when we die, we have to go to a horrible cemetery like Saint John the Baptist and remain there, lined up, sandwiched between those white marble horrors, just like the bungalows of Copacabana, forever (Figure 10). Yet in the end, Saint John the Baptist Cemetery does not have a record player, and so it seems that we will have to get used to it.
NOTES
[1] I am grateful to Casa de Lucio Costa, Maria Elena Costa, and Julieta Sobral for their generous permission to reprint this essay by Lucio Costa and my English translation in this edition of PLATFORM. I would also like to thank Levi Medeiros Pinheiro for his help with the translation of my introduction to Portuguese.
[2] See Guiomar de Grammont, Aleijadinho e o Aeroplano: O Paraíso barroco e a construção do Brasil Colonial (Civilização Brasileira, 2008) for her well-researched narrative exploring the parallel construction of nationalism and the history of art and culture in Brazil. I am grateful to Bruno Carvalho for bringing this work to my attention.
[3] Antônio Francisco Lisboa was born in Ouro Preto in 1738 to the architect Manoel Francisco Lisboa and one of his slaves, Isabel. He is said to have suffered from a debilitating disease, possibly leprosy or scleroderma, losing the use of his fingers and earning his nickname “O Aleijadinho” or “The Little Cripple.” He insisted that his assistants strap his sculpting tools to his forearms so that he could continue to work. Aleijadinho’s masterpiece is considered to be the twelve apostles, carved from soapstone, poised along the steps to the porch of the eighteenth-century Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos at Congonhas do Campo. He died in 1814. See Rodrigo José Ferreira Bretas, Antônio Francisco Lisboa, o Aleijadinho, Publicação do Diretoria Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional, no. 15 (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Educação e Saúde, 1951). Bretas’s original biography appeared in two editions of the Correio Official de Minas, on August 19, 1858 and August 23, 1858, with the extended title “Traços biographicos relativos ao finado Antônio Francisco Lisboa, distincto escultor mineiro, mais conhecido pelo appellido de Aleijadinho.”
[4] François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), a young French aristocrat, traveled to the United States while in exile after the French Revolution of 1789; he wrote the romantic novellas Atala (1801), René (1802), and Les Natchez (1793–1799), as well as Mémoires d’outre tombe (1848–1850) and Voyage en Amérique (1826). His precise itinerary remains somewhat controversial. Arriving in Philadelphia in 1791, he claims to have visited Baltimore, New York, Boston, Albany, and Niagara; then traveled to the Gulf of Mexico, returning via the Natchez Trace to Nashville; and finally back to Philadelphia, all in the span of five months. See Raymond Lebègue, “Le Problème du voyage de Chateaubriand en Amerique,” in Journal des Savants 1 (1965): 456–465.
[5] Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Récamier (1777–1849), known as Juliette, was a French socialite whose Parisian salon drew visitors from the elite early nineteenth-century literary and political circles. Chateaubriand was a regular visitor to her salon. See “Récamier, Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde,” in Encyclopedia Britannica 22 (1911).
[6] In the 1990s, while preparing the manuscript for his only book, Registro de uma Vivência, Costa annotated a reproduction of this 1929 essay, scribbling the following statement into the margins regarding this claim: “Incorrect. I was mistaken. Pure ignorance. Focusing only on the beauty of the works of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century, I was not prepared at that time to understand the very high tone of his oeuvre as both architect and sculptor” (translation by the author). See Lucio Costa, Lúcio Costa: Sôbre arquitetura, ed. Alberto Xavier (1962; rpt., Porto Alegre: Editora UniRitter, 2007).
[7] Gilberto Freyre (1900–1987) quotes Costa’s 1929 essay “O Aleijadinho e a Arquitetura Tradicional” in his preface to the second English-language edition of The Masters and the Slaves (1933–1955), but he emphasizes only the domestic colonial mansions of Brazil, not Aleijadinho’s significant work on religious buildings: “The architect Lúcio Costa has given us his impression in the presence of the old mansions of Sabará, São João d’El-Rei, Ouro Preto, and Mariana, the old Big Houses of Minas: ‘How one meets oneself here…. And one remembers things one never knew but which were there inside one all the while; I do not know how to put it—it would take a Proust to explain it.’” See Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. Samuel Putnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986; 2nd English-language ed., rev.), xliii; originally published as Casa-grande e Senzala (1933).
