LISBOA, Antonio Francisco

At the end of the Baroque era, in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, the greatest artist was a mulatto architect and sculptor. A strange disease that caused the shriveling of his hands and feet earned him the nickname of o Aleijadinho (the little cripple). He built churches, carved altarpieces, and created wood and stone sculptures. The polychromed wood Stations of the Cross in the sanctuary of Congonhas do Campo were carved between 1796 and 1799. These images of Christ are the last great renderings of this theme of the Passion, which had inspired masterpieces for so many centuries.

The Stations of the Cross at Congonhas do Campo consist of sixty-six statues divided among the six chapels or passos; so numerous a group could only have been carried out with the collaboration of a whole workshop. The less important figures, entrusted to helpers, are on the whole rather crude in workmanship. However, the Bad Thief from the scene of the Nailing to the Cross is definitely by Aleijadinho’s own hand. In the muscular body and enraged expression, the talented mulatto expresses the supreme revolt of the man who rejects God’s grace.

Between 1800 and 1805, Aleijadinho executed twelve stone statues of prophets, just over life-size, for the terrace in front of the Congonhas do Campo sanctuary. He took up the old theme of the Dispute of the Prophets, revivifying the exhausted topic by infusing into it an expressionistic force reminiscent of the Middle Ages. For the costumes and figure types he found inspiration in a series of Florentine copper engravings from about 1470, which retained some flavour of the oriental dress worn by the Byzantine contingent to the Council of Florence between 1439 and 1442.