The second phase of evangelical religious visual culture (1932-1960): the Brazilianization of foreign visual cultures

• Grant number: 20/16134-0
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: June 01, 2021
• End date: April 30, 2024
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Theology - History of Theology
• Principal Investigator: Helmut Renders
• Grantee: Helmut Renders
• Host Institution: Diretoria de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa. Universidade Metodista de São Paulo (UMESP). Instituto Metodista de Ensino Superior (IMS). São Bernardo do Campo , SP, Brazil
• Associated researchers: Etienne Alfred Higuet ; Jens Michael Baumgarten

Abstract

Visual culture is one of the privileged fields for the analysis of structures and historicity of religious practices. The proposed project starts from the hypothesis of the existence of a proper and articulate Brazilian Protestant material and visual culture. Since the end of the nineteenth century, there has been an awareness of the performative force of religious visual culture which has led Brazilian Protestantism to explore its pedagogical and ritualistic dimension through the widespread diffusion of properly religious images in bibles, ecclesiastical magazines, and xylographs with religious content for public and private use in Sunday Schools, services, the homes of its membership and for the propagation of its religious convictions. The research focuses on the second phase of the emergence of this religious visual culture, its origins, transpositions and characteristics. In response to this, the present research proposes to join the international theoretical efforts around the discussion of the so-called iconic (BOEHM, 1994), pictorial (Mitchell, 1994; BOEHM and MITCHELL, 2009, pp. 103-121) or visual turn (BREDEKAMP, 2011) together with multangular theories that favor a joint investigation into the creation, use, reception and representation of the expressions of visual culture above mentioned (GILLIAN, 2007) as part of the visual religious culture (TIMM, 1990; Morgan, 1998, 2005 , 2010, 2012; PLATE, 2002; TIRAPELI, 2001). As an evolution in relation to the first part of the project, (FAPESP 2015 / 13737-7) we propose an increase in the types of objects to be investigated, the reading of the researched objects in the perspectives of art historians like Erwin Panofsky, Aby M. Warburg, and David Morgan´s no concept of an "generative entanglement", to analyze and "read" more specific aspects of religious art in comparison to works of art, from the perspective of the Studies of Religion. This phase of the project is based on the hypothesis that in this phase the diversification of the evangelical visual culture begins with the creation of its first true "icons" with two distinct tendencies: (a) the creation of a trans-confesisonal or trans-denominational "icon"; (b) the creation of "icons" that are still used today or for the identification of confessions or denominations or of groups of them (Protestants, Pentecostals), forming a well-defined field of analysis, which not only can, but must be studied and explored. (AU)