The introduction of Mannerism in Brazil represented the beginning of the country's European-descended artistic history. Discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil was until then inhabited by indigenous peoples, whose culture had rich immemorial traditions, but was in every way different from the Portuguese culture. With the arrival of the colonizers, the first elements of a large-scale domination that continues to this day were introduced. During the founding of a new American civilization, the main cultural current in force in Europe was Mannerism, a complex and often contradictory synthesis of classical elements derived from the Italian Renaissance - now questioned and transformed by the collapse of the unified, optimistic, idealistic, anthropocentric world view crystallized in the High Renaissance - and of regional traditions cultivated in various parts of Europe, including Portugal, which still had in the earlier Gothic style a strong reference base. Over the years the current was added of new elements, coming from a context deeply disturbed by the Reformation, against which the Catholic Church organized, in the second half of the sixteenth century, an aggressive disciplinary and proselytizing program, the so-called Counter-Reformation, revolutionizing the arts and culture of the time.
Due to the fact that the establishment of Portuguese civilization in Brazil started from scratch, there were scarce conditions for a cultural flourishing for almost a whole century. Therefore, when the first important artistic testimonies began to appear in Brazil, almost exclusively in the field of sacred architecture and its internal decoration, Mannerism was already in decline in Europe, and was succeeded by the Baroque in the first half of the 17th century. However, mainly due to the activity of the Jesuits, who were the most active and enterprising missionaries, and who adopted Mannerism almost as an official style of the Order, resisting much in abandoning it, this aesthetic was able to expand abundantly in Brazil, influencing other orders. Nevertheless, the style they cultivated most in the colony was the Portuguese Plain Style architecture (Estilo Chão in Portuguese), with austere and regular features, strongly based on the classicist ideals of balance, rationality, and formal economy, contrasting with other trends in Europe, which were much more irregular, anti-classical, experimental, ornamental, and dynamic. The basic model of the facade and in particular the floor plan of the Jesuit church was the most enduring and influential pattern in the history of Brazilian sacred edification, being adopted on a vast scale and with few modifications until the 19th century. The Portuguese Plain Style architecture also had a profound impact on civil and military construction, creating an architecture of great homogeneity spread throughout the country. As for the internal decorations, including gilded wood carving, painting and sculpture, Mannerism had a much shorter lifespan, disappearing almost completely from the mid 17th century, with the same occurring in the literary and musical fields. Despite its strong presence, most of the Mannerist churches were decharacterized in later reforms, and today a relatively small number of examples survive in which the most typical traces of the Early Architecture are still visible. Their internal decorations, as well as the examples in music, suffered an even more dramatic fate, being lost almost in entirely.
Critical attention to Mannerism is a recent phenomenon; until the 1940s, the style in general was not even recognized as an autonomous entity in History of Art, considered until then a sad degeneration of Renaissance purity or a mere stage of confused transition between the Renaissance and the Baroque, But since the 1950s a great number of studies have begun to focus on it, better delimiting its specificities and recognizing its value as a style rich in proposals and innovative solutions, and interesting in its own right. About the Brazilian case, however, the difficulties are much greater, research is in its initial phase and the bibliography is poor, there are still many mistakes, anachronisms and divergences in its analysis, but some scholars have already left important contributions for its recovery.
Mannerism
Mannerism emerged in Italy as a natural evolution of the Renaissance, which had flourished between the 14th and 15th centuries, spreading a return to the classicist aesthetic ideals of formal balance, economy of means, and moderation in expressiveness, ideals that were associated with the highest moral values. The Renaissance reached its full objectives in the so-called High Renaissance phase (c. 1480–1527), usually delimited by Leonardo da Vinci's mature work and the Sack of Rome in 1527, producing an art of great dignity, stability, and solemnity, which had in a nature purged of its transitory imperfections, in the primacy of reason over subjectivity, and in the production of the consecrated masters of the past its ideal foundations. However, the imitation of nature was loaded with formalism and idealism, it proposed the presentation of a utopian world, where Good reigns on Earth under the benevolent power of Heaven, and differences are annulled under a great homogenization of culture and way of life, where people follow a pure and altruistic ethic. In fact, one of the Renaissance artists' concerns was to offer educational models of conduct, which could transform society and give it lasting happiness. If this ideology was the mainstay of the great art produced in this period, it was at the same time artificial, divorced from everyday reality, being cultivated in a period of almost incessant wars and major socio-political crises. In this context, two crises were especially dramatic: the bloody Sack of Rome in 1527, one of the culminating points of a complete reorganization in European geopolitics, which definitively struck down Italy's political and economic primacy on the European scene, and the Reformation begun in 1517, which split the once monolithic Christianity into two different sects, which until then had been the most important factor in preserving Europe's cultural and religious unity, and which had given Italy singular international political influence as the head of Christianity.Hauser, Arnold. História Social da Literatura e da Arte, vol. I. Mestre Jou, 1972-82, pp. 483-489Edelman, Murray. From Art to Politics. University of Chicago Press, 1995. p. 20Tatarkiewicz, Władysław. History of Aesthetics. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006, pp. 151-152Lohr, Charles. "The Sixteenth-Century Transformation of the Aristotelian Division of the Speculative Sciences". In Kelley, Donald & Popkin, Richard (eds). The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Springer, 1991, pp. 49-57
Then, Mannerism is, first of all, the fruit of these profound changes in Italian society, and if before the classical values of the High Renaissance could still preserve a façade of cultural unity and of an optimistic and peaceful world, in a short time even art was no longer able to sustain it, appearing works that were ambiguous, agitated, questioning, not infrequently cynical, hedonistic, irrational, hermetic, precious and frivolous, and even bizarre, obscure, fantastic and grotesque. Therefore, Mannerism confronted Classicism advocated and that had proven to be an ideal too high to be materialized, presenting the world as a place of conflicts, contradictions, uncertainties, insufficiencies, and dramas, where violence, falsehood, and cruelty were habitual political methods, religious dogmatism subjugated consciences and wills, hunger, wars, and epidemics were constant threats, and simple survival was for the vast majority of people a poignant and pressing challenge.Hauser, pp. 476-505Edelman, p. 21Criticos, Mihaela. The Ornamental Dimension: Contributions to a Theory of Ornament. New Europe College Yearbook. Special ed. 2004, pp. 185-219 It was not by chance that Giulio Argan defined Mannerism as "the triumph of practice over theory".Custódio, José de Arimathéia Cordeiro. "A arquitetura de defesa no Brasil Colonial". in: Discursos Fotográficos, 2011; 7 (10):173-194
But there were other factors. The Renaissance had its own contradictions, and while on the one hand it preached respect for the production of the great masters of the past as models of perfection to be imitated, on the other it had long been proposing that artists deserved to be equated with intellectuals, with the result that in the High Renaissance artistic individualities were significantly strengthened and the figure of the genius emerged, a creator who more than gaining independence from the rules, in fact established new rules and became in turn a new model. This cultivation of individualism and freedom of thought and creation, combined with a period of great general insecurity and the collapse of previously solidly established and very homogeneous standards, contributed to make Mannerist art highly personalist, much freer from the bonds of the ancient canons, making room for a pulverization of the general style in a multitude of personal, local and regional derivations, which were close to or far from Classicism in very different degrees.Benevolo, Leonardo. The architecture of the Renaissance. Routledge, 1978, pp. 231-232; 479; 483; 501-502Apud Silva, Filipe Rocha da. Variações sobre o Maneirismo. Estudo comparativo entre o Século XVI e o presente, vol. I. Tese de Doutorado. Universidade de Évora, 2005, p. 13 In a second stage, the Catholic reaction to the Reformation, the so-called Counter-Reformation, which wanted to moralize and discipline customs and the clergy, reaffirm the dogma and regain the lost faithful, changed the context.Serrão Vítor. "Impactos do Concílio de Trento na arte portuguesa entre o Maneirismo e o Barroco (1563-1750)". In: Gouveia, António Camões; Barbosa, David Sampaio e Paiva, José Pedro (coords.). O Concílio de Trento em Portugal e nas suas conquistas: olhares novos. Centro de Estudos de História Religiosa, 2014, pp. 103-132
Throughout the evolution of Mannerism, the classical reference, in fact, was not eliminated from art, but rather it was tested, discussed, relativized, disarticulated, transformed, and even combated, but it remained the basis on which later advances emerged, adapting it to a new social, political, and cultural universe.Tatarkiewicz, p. 154Hauser, pp. 471-474 In Vítor Serrão's summary,