Igreja dos Enforcados: architecture, politics and religion in the debate of the Neobaroque

• Grant number: 12/10730-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2012
• End date: July 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Art Fundamentals and Criticism
• Principal Investigator: Jens Michael Baumgarten
• Grantee: Bruno Bontempo
• Host Institution: Escola de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (EFLCH). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus Guarulhos. Guarulhos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The main object of this research consists in the Church Santa Cruz das Almas dos Enforcados, in the city of São Paulo. The analysis intends to understand the iconography of the church via its related documentation and bibliography in a way to combine the initial motivations for the construction of the church and the intentions of its reconstruction, as well as its controversial sequence of partial destructions and modifications. The aim of this research is to present an adequate approach to the cultural phenomenon of retrieving the tradition as a kind of value in São Paulo in the early stages of modernism. Despite the fact that it seems to be a church of little importance that served for the spiritual service of the slaves and the poor condemned to death and that was demolished and reconstructed in the 1920s, it helps to construct the contradictory notion of "brasilidade" (Brazilianity) with its reuse of colonial elements, and therefore offering a contribution to the debate on Baroque and Neobaroque in Brazil. The project intends to work with an approach that has its fundaments in the Brazilian and international historiography of art, like the contemporary discussions about the Neobaroque and the function of the local in the global and vice versa. This should help to identify in the aesthetic configuration of the building the mechanisms of legitimation as well as the historical contexts of the church's trajectory.(AU)