Seará-Grande, the Geneva of the Sertões: a baroque landscape transliterated in the circulation of Jesuits, Flemishes and Portugueses

• Grant number: 22/12753-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2023
• End date: December 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Architecture and Town Planning - Fundamentals of Architecture and Urbanism
• Principal Investigator: Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira Bueno
• Grantee: José Ramiro Teles Beserra
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 21/06538-9 - Baroque-açu: Portuguese America in the art geography of the global South, AP.JP2

Abstract

In Brazil, the Baroque reached its greatest expression in the arts and religious architecture, as evidenced by the expressive traditional historiographical production, concerning and restricted, to the study of the examples built in the rich and great centers of the colonial administration. Alheada, the art and religious architecture of the Sertões do Norte, slumbered veiled from studious eyes, which is easily verified by the almost complete lack of bibliography related to the geographical area in question. It is a hybrid architecture, coined in the synthesis of several factors of social, economic and geographic order. Its existence and relevance need to be revealed and proclaimed precisely because of its uniqueness, linked to the main genitive factors that gave it meaning: the circulation of men, institutions, ideas and forms through networks of connections in a global perspective; and the transculturation of these ideas, transliterated in a new territory, mediated by the technical, social and economic possibilities of the new landscape of the Brazilian sertões in formation. In order to do so, given the scarcity of documents and literature, it will be necessary to carry out a reading of the remaining artistic-architectural collection from the perspective of landscape archeology, tracing it in its various interpretations as a primary source, physical architectural document, through an empirical observation approach, taking -o as a vernacular object that translated technical and symbolic predicates resinified from the colonizer's world view and the circulation of ideas in global connection, under a Braudelian perspective of the world-economy and of the long term, backing up the idea of a sertão extended to the dimension of the world, in its transoceanic and continental connections. In an approach taken from Ginzburg, primary sources little explored in architectural studies will still be worked on, but which proved to be fruitful for the indirect understanding of the socio-cultural processes that made possible the consolidation of the country's architectural culture: cartography, artistic spoils, post-mortem inventories and evidential documentation, especially inquisitorial processes, which may reveal details of the daily life of the producing agents, as well as the conditions and logistical possibilities of the movement of ideals and techniques in a global network. (AU)