A circulação dos saberes nas pinturas de Manoel da Costa Athaíde, Manoel Victor de Jesus e Joaquim José da Natividade: uma análise histórica e matemática sobre as produções artísticas na Capitania de Minas Gerais (século XVIII e primeira metade do XIX)

Abstract

This research is limited to the years 1762 and 1841, a period in the artists' trajectory and intense production of paintings in the Captaincy of Minas Gerais. Anchored at the intersection between different fields of knowledge, that is, History of Education, Mathematics and History of Art, we chose as our research object to carry out a historical and mathematical analysis of illusionist paintings, taking educational events as a starting point. We selected works by Manoel da Costa Athaíde, Joaquim José da Natividade and Manoel Victor de Jesus, three artists from Minas Gerais who used the method of painting three-dimensional images. Through seeing and hearing, the exchange of experiences were incorporated, presenting different artistic canons that are, in some way, present in the sacred paintings of lay religious associations and make up the spectrum of analyzes of the documentation of artists and other personalities who owned books. The daily life of painting workshops and drawing practices were environments that consolidated the appropriation of knowledge, methods and knowledge by artists. The method of painting gained development with regional characteristics and different appropriations from what was circulating in print, creating something new for the representations of images in Portuguese America. Innovation occurred through empirical and innovative methods to solve problems that required artists to acquire knowledge of mathematics and geometry. When studying artists' practices and mathematical knowledge, we come across the social context in which they were produced, that is, how social, economic, religious and political aspects determined the production of images. We identified documents (inventories and libels) that presented important clues about the conflicts and disputes in the universe of artists from the Captaincy, and constituted sources for analyzing the artistic canons of the 18th and 19th centuries that circulated in Gerais. The painters' documentary sources also led us to identify the perspective method present in the inventories of owners who were not linked to painting, such as the military José Maria Veloso and the bookstore owned by Cônego Luís Vieira da Silva. The research path, situated within the scope of Cultural History studies, was based on important theorists, such as Roger Chartier, who helped with conceptual reflections on the representation, appropriation and circulation of knowledge, both for the paintings and for the books present in the Portuguese America. From Serge Gruzinski, with the concept of cultural mediators, we discuss the expansion of religious culture in the colony through sacred paintings; for the investigation into the different dimensions of non-school education in the Colonial period, Thaís Nívea de Lima e Fonseca and the members of the research group CEIbero – Culture and Education in the Iberian Empires, were the theorists with whom we spoke. Through the formal study of works of art and mathematics, we seek to analyze the cultural and creative process in which painters had unique experiences and distinct appropriations of knowledge, identifying the volumetry of images, the pictorial genre trompe-l'oeil and anamorphosis and the indicators of three-dimensionality, used as tools to persuade the faithful in these illusory spaces proposed in the works of Magno Moraes Mello, Cláudia Regina Flores, Michael Baxandall, Giulio Carlo Argan, Ernst Gombrich and Laura Carlevaris.