In Sao Paulo, on November 6, 1925, Tarsila do Amaral writes to journalist Joaquim Inojosa, in Recife:
My job has been huge lately. From April to now I have about 10 new paintings, almost all finished. Gone are the days when a Paquita would smile on canvas with 8 hours of brushstrokes. I work today with Fra Angelico's patience so that my painting is beautiful, clean, shiny like a Rolls coming out of the workshop.[1]
This paragraph has interesting information: firstly, the reference to the speed with which Tarsila used to produce her paquitas – allusion to the “Spanish women”, already commented on in a previous article[2] –; then the time it now took to carry out his new productions, which required the perseverance of a 15th-century friar-artist.
These references suggest that, in the case of her first paintings, Tarsila produced them with a speed of action that subjugated the integrity of her production to concerns that were not exactly pictorial. At that speed with which he painted his paquitas, Tarsila now opposed the artisanal delicacy of more traditional painting with the aim of gradually updating her language, transforming painting into an object “beautiful, clean, shiny like a Rolls”.
Painting like a friar (or a nun) of the Renaissance and, at the same time, associating the deliberate absence of any manual index in his paintings to the finish of an automobile – the Rolls –, is to remove the brand of authorship from them, equating the painting with a mechanical, industrial product. And this aspiration, it is known, Tarsila absorbed from one of her main parameters found in Paris, the production of the French painter Fernand Léger who bet on a painting committed to the indices of modern society: the industrial object, the window, the poster and the photograph[3].
Despite the letter to Inojosa dating from November 1925, Tarsila did not start the “cleaning” there alluded to until that year. The intention of associating his painting with an industrial object dates back to 1923. And, being from that year his Self portrait (manteau rouge)[4], this work can be understood as a symbol of Tarsila’s transformation as an artist and as a woman: it is when she stops producing “modern” paintings, portraying herself as a willful Spaniard and starts to project herself as a great lady producing a A special kind of painting, an elegant and restrained synthesis between the calm and sobriety of a Fra Angelico and the anonymous asepsis of an industrial object.
Tarsila, therefore, no longer chooses the audacious paquita as a projection of herself. Now that he has actually become professional, the parameter becomes a man, an almost holy man, a Catholic hero, Fra Angelico. No Angelica Kauffmann or Sofonisba Anguissola, or any other professional painter of the past (which, most likely, Tarsila is not even known). Not even Marie Laurencin – one of the most prestigious artists on the international scene at the time – and her “so feminine” painting could serve as a parameter. The ideal now was to unite the “cleanliness” of industrialized products and Léger's modernist painting with asceticism, with devotion to art, understood as a kind of religion, worthy of Fra Angelico.
This new situation faced by Tarsila is interesting: the moment when, finally, she understands what the art of her time could be – impersonal, shiny like an automobile – her main parameter becomes a male artist of the first Renaissance. That's why in Self portrait (manteau rouge) she projects herself as a kind of apparition: distant, hieratic, almost an ultramodern saint.
A still mysterious image? No doubt, but now with an almost divine mystery, no longer entirely carnal, like most of her self-portraits as a Spaniard. In Self portrait (manteau rouge), the option for the modern – verifiable in the angulations of the image – is mixed with its traditional representation. More than “cubist” – as they came to describe him – Self portrait (manteau rouge) it is a typical work of synthetic realism, only possible after the Cubist experience. A realism that counts, it is true, with a certain angular “freedom”, but whose centralized composition is indebted to the great tradition of portraiture.
Self portrait (manteau rouge) must be understood as the passport to his definitive entry into the environment of modern painting, through a work conceived within the parameters, not of the historical avant-gardes, but of the Return to International Order: modern, but subservient to the dimension of neoclassical beauty, supposedly timeless. , based on “noble simplicity and a serene grandeur both in attitude and expression”, as the German esthete JJ Winckelmann wanted, still in the 18th century[5].
***
That distant and majestic woman, represented in Self portrait (manteau rouge), contrasts and, at the same time, echoes the descriptions of Tarsila's extravagances, who, from 1923 onwards, began to use and abuse the ingenuity of designers Jean Patou and Paul Poiret, responsible for the most original (and expensive) clothes in Paris. in your book Tarsila do Amaral, her work and her time, Aracy Amaral transcribes some testimonies that attest to the interest that Tarsila's outfits – always by the two aforementioned stylists – caused in the elegant scene of the French capital. This is how Sergio Milliet will remember the painter's worldly success:
I remember one night when, at the Ballet de Champs Elysées, the entire audience turned to see her enter her box, with her straight black hair uncovering and enhancing her face and her extravagant earrings almost touching her shoulders softly. brunettes.[6]
Tarsila herself, dazzled, tells her family about her Parisian success: “Yesterday I went with Betita to a ball at the Opera. I was successful as a beautiful woman (…)”[7]. On the other hand, it was not without a tone of veiled disapproval that Georgina Malfatti, Anita's sister, also testified about Tarsila's extravagant vanity:
I remember her at the theater, on the Trocadero, in a scarlet cape lined with white satin, a large black glass hat. In Paris, where people dress discreetly, the vanity of Tarsila dressed by Poiret, next to her Oswald, in a purple shirt, was a sensation.[8]
Despite the fame achieved by Tarsila for having assumed a person extravagant, drawing attention to his clothes and props, we must not forget that from 1923 onwards – and with the only known exception of a photo in the Chap. polloniOf 1925[9] –, most of the known photographs of the artist up to the end of that decade, attest to the emergence of a public image of extreme elegance. A distant elegance, both from the excessive simplicity with which he appears in prosaic scenes of his daily life in previous years, and from his “Spanish version”, visible in some of his photographic portraits and in his self-portraits. On the other hand, even looking at the photographs, it is not possible to attest to all the extravagance of her, so commented on.
In a group photograph taken on board the ship frisia, in December 1923, Tarsila is seen smiling between huge earrings, hair tied back, wearing an elegant and discreetly sophisticated outfit. During the 1924 Revolution, at Fazenda Sertão, the painter appears in a photo wearing the same outfit she was photographed in aboard the ship., months ago. This practice of repeating clothes will be documented again in photographs: in 1926, in the promotional photo of her individual exhibition in Paris, the painter appears with the same dress that she would wear seven years later, during her conference at the Clube de Artistas Modernos de São Paulo, about Soviet poster.
This repetition of outfits blurs the image of a Tarsila just showing off and spendthrift. Despite the family's possessions and access to the most sophisticated consumer goods at the time, from 1923 onwards, the photos began to document the artist's interest in finding a balance between ostentation and discretion, signaling something that was beginning to become increasingly important to her: her production as a painter and the role she should and could play in the Brazilian artistic environment. This repetition of clothes indicates that a less hesitant attitude begins to assert itself in the painter that, instead of continuing to oscillate between the domestic simplicity of dress and her incarnations of paquita fanciful, chooses to exercise her condition as a millionaire with refined taste and an artist sure of her talent now directed towards the constitution of a pictorial work that is at the same time modern, Brazilian and “classical”.
Tarsila, both in art and in life, seems to have heeded the warning that her friend Mário de Andrade gave her in one of the letters he wrote to her in 1923: “I believe you will not fall into Cubism. Take advantage of this only the teachings. Balance, Construction, Sobriety. Beware of the abstract.”[10]
If such guidelines are visible in the artist's production from 1923 onwards, the same can be seen in her new person, with the exception, perhaps, of an occasional occasion when sobriety is replaced by a desire for ostentation.
It is interesting how in that period, Tarsila builds a special self, based on her own expectations and on those that were projected on her by the social and artistic environment that she started to frequent. One new person who, although she has not overcome her dependence, both economically and emotionally, on her parents, seems to be established within a growing self-esteem as a woman and an artist.
***
In 1924 Tarsila produced the first version of her self-portrait[11].
Some authors who focused on this painting were unanimous in associating it with certain sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and promotional photos of the American singer and dancer Josephine Baker.[12]. But this image can also be associated with the posters of the time, which praised the modern woman – the new consumer –, and also with promotional photos of Hollywood actresses from the 1920s – such as Gloria Swanson, Joan Crawford and Mirna Loy, among others.
if we take Danaide, 1909-1910 or even Mademoiselle Pagany II, 1920, works produced by Brancusi[13], the points of contact between these sculptures and Tarsila's self-portrait are, on the one hand, the absence of texture or gestures imprinted there (in this sense, they also recall the Rolls) and the extreme formal synthesis that, in the limit, transforms both the artist's head and the aforementioned pieces by Brancusi into a kind of primordial, archetypal ovoid form.
The same can be said if we compare the self-portrait of the painter with photographs of Josephine Baker and Hollywood actresses. Both the “beautiful, clean and shiny” surface of the photograph and the ovoid shape of the face are equally privileged in all of them, in close-ups that echo and can revive the Femme Fatale from the end of the 19th century. However, if most of these images show the face and neck of the portrayed, both surrounded by other elements, such as jewelry, hands etc., which draws attention in self-portrait is that only Tarsila's ovoid face is on the canvas, centered between earrings, surrounded by the white of the fabric.
A composition that, before being associated with the sculptures of Brancusi and/or the beauties of Hollywood and Broadway, establishes direct links with one of the iconographic patterns used by tradition to fix the “true image” of Jesus Christ: the Veil of Veronica, the Vera Icona.
***
There are some legends that deal with the origin of this “true image” – which appeared by miracle on the handkerchief – and on many of the fabrics that claim to be bearers of the original miraculous image – an image produced by the contact of the face of the Son of God on the cloth. One of them claims that this very special portrait would have appeared in Edessa, in northern Syria, during the reign of King Abgar. There are two versions of this legend, pointed out by the German scholar Hans Belting:
On the one hand, it is claimed that King Abgar ordered his painter to make an exact portrait according to the living model, a portrait he received along with a handwritten letter from Christ. On the other hand, it is said that the painter's work was miraculously completed by Christ himself, who left his face imprinted on the fabric.[14].
The version that ended up prospering was the second and this fact would be linked to the importance given to the constitution of the image of Christ not produced by human hands – non manufacture in Latin and achoropoietos, in greek[15] – as a strategy to also, according to Belting, differentiate the images of Christ from the pagan gods, produced by human hands[16].
Another also important legend is the one that credits a pious woman with having given Jesus, during his Way of the cross, a veil for him to wipe his face with. Miraculously, when the lady – Saint Veronica – receives the veil back, the face of Christ is stamped on it.
***
As interesting as the various legends involving the “Achiropita” images of Christ are, here we are interested in paying attention to the one that emerged in Syria and was later sent to Constantinople, where it disappeared during the sack of the city in 1204. 13, several alleged reappearances of the same image will occur in Europe and even in Constantinople. Today it is believed to be the version found in the Vatican or in the Church of S. Bartolomeo, in Genoa.[17].
In fact, what interests us to emphasize is Belting's description of this image of Christ. According to the scholar:
King Abgar's canvas was spread out in innumerable copies and paraphrases. All of them coincided in idea, but in practice they only share a basic scheme that allows wide scope for variations. It could be characterized as follows: […] the images of Abgar are reduced to the imprint of the face and hair on an empty space that the fabric symbolizes.[18]
As the author states, this iconographic pattern will reverberate for centuries, within the scope of Western painting, with significant variations without losing, however, the fundamental characteristics: a man's face with a beard (long or not), almost always with long, straight hair. next to the ovoid shape. An important fact: in the “original” image the face of Christ is without the crown of thorns. This did not prevent, however, that several artists produced the face of Christ with that instrument of torture.
From the Middle Ages onwards, this iconographic pattern spreads, producing distinct variants and, often, intertwining legends about the origin of the Veil. Two works with the title Veronica's Veil – by the Italian Bernardino Zanganelli, produced in 1500, today at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the one attributed to Philippe de Champagne (1640c.), from the Musée de Beaux-Art de Caen – present the same iconographic pattern, the former adding a crown of thorns and a cross behind the depicted head.
Many artists, on the other hand, associated the “true image” of Christ also to the representation of Saint Veronica holding the cloth with which she would have dried the saint's face. An anonymous German painting from the first half of the 15th century – today in Berlin's Alte Pinakotheke, depicts the Saint showing the image of Christ to the angels. In this work, attention is drawn to how the artist has as a model the head of the work preserved in the Vatican. El Greco, in turn, in the second half of the 16th century also painted a work on the same theme, today in the Santa Cruz Museum in Toledo, Spain.
***
Since the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance, artists, by representing the face of Christ, produced self-portraits of interest. Albrecht Dürer, in 1500, carried out Self portrait as Christ, also belonging to the Alte Pinakothek collection. If Dürer was not the first to associate his own image with the Son of God, surely, to this day, his work is the most recognized. In addition to this emblematic work of Western painting, attentive to the fact that some artists, via photography, also used the iconography of the Son of God to develop self-portraits that must be understood as photographsperformances. Among them, perhaps the oldest is the American photographer Fred Holland Day who, in 1898, produced the sequence The Seven Last Words of Christ, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. More recently, in 1972, the plastic artist and performer Italian Luigi Ontani produced the photo-performance Ecce Homo d'aprés Guido Reni, belonging to a private collection in Modena. In Brazil, as far as is known, the artist Rogério Ghomes would have been the only one to associate, in 1996, his own image with the Holy Shroud, in an installation entitled Profane Shroud, now belonging to the Cultural Foundation of Curitiba[19].
Outside the scope of painting and photo-performance, in recent years, in theater or in other manifestations, black actors and trans actresses have represented the figure of Christ - an artistic and cultural phenomenon that must be deepened.[20].
From the survey carried out in the field of painting, the only artist to portray herself as Jesus Christ was the North American Erwin Gaela who, in 2003, produced Self portrait as Jesus Christ, an oil on canvas diptych, belonging to the artist's collection.
If Gaela was the only female artist to portray herself as Jesus, it was not possible to find in this iconographic tracing any artist – of any genre – to portray herself as the Veil of Veronica, which makes the self-portrait of Tarsila do Amaral becomes even more special, not only in the field of Brazilian art, but of international art as a whole.
***
The fact that Veronica's Veil contains an image produced by contact takes us back to photography and how it was seen from the 19th century onwards, as if constituted from the mechanical touch of light on the object, without human hands - a kind of miracle. The French scholar Philippe Dubois, when explaining the belief about the mimetic dimension of photography, during the 19th century, establishes an interesting relationship between it and Veronica's Veil:
The photography in them [in the conceptions of photography during the 19th century] is considered to be the most perfect imitation of reality. And, according to the discourses of the time, this mimetic capacity comes from its own technical nature, from its mechanical procedure, which allows an image to appear “automatically”, “objectively”, almost “naturally” (according only to the laws of optics and chemistry), without the artist's hand intervening directly. In this, this “aquiropita” image (sine manu facta, like Veronica's veil) is opposed to the work of art, the product of the artist's work, genius and manual talent.[21].
***
Aracy Amaral, in the book cited, before taking a direct stand on Tarsila's habit of copying her paintings to eventually redo them (as in the case of self-portrait 1924), attentive to the artist's taste and practice in copying her paintings, keeping them at risk. The author reflects on the practice of many artists to develop “autocopies”, works in series or even works with progressive differentiation. For her, Tarsila was not in any of these groups: “Tarsila, however, […], does not fit, neither within what could be defined as a “series of works” nor as works in process […]. What we notice most in her is an attachment to certain forms […] or certain structures […][22].
Tarsila's interest in forms that she had created in one or another work, or in structures of occupation of the plastic field that she had achieved in the conception/production of one or another work, will make her not only copy those works that had most interested her, but most of them. This is how Aracy Amaral speaks about the case:
In addition to the autocopies in Tarsila, the phenomenon of “tracing”, a habit that comes from her lack of knowledge of drawing (prior to the study with Pedro Alexandrino) does not fail to appear as a resource that the artist uses to preserve drawings and paintings that are they sell and that they keep with themselves, as a girl used to keep a “risk” of embroidery to be repeated eventually.[23]
Without delving into the apparently obvious relationships between the practice of the “decal” with the gifts of a marriageable girl, raised by Aracy, I draw attention to the possible relationship between the photograph and the decal in order to remove the “risk” from an image. After all, both procedures are configured through contact. And the interesting thing is that self-portrait seems to have been produced from the copy of the photographic portrait of the artist, over which she leaned over to copy it on a tissue paper, to later enlarge the image on a sheet of paper and, later, on the final canvas.
I suppose that already in this process of moving from photography to painting, the artist practiced a knowledge that she must have acquired through readings or conversations with more experienced artists: the fact that, in translating photography into painting, the “correct” is to leave aside the descriptive aspect of the photographic image to invest only in its synthesis - a question that, in the 1930s, Tarsila will explain in a chronicle[24].
But we must not forget: if Tarsila's portrait had descriptive indices, being a photograph, it maintained the same qualities of a Rolls: it was beautiful, clean and shiny. It kept these characteristics of an industrialized object. Tarsila dried up the descriptive dimension of the photographic portrait, but transferred the cleaning of the photographic surface to the canvas: in self-portrait what we see is a synthetic and centralized image, with no more evident index of the artist's “hand”. That is, from a human hand, which means that, in visual terms, self-portrait functions as an image that is not the product of human hands, an image achiropita.
As mentioned, these evident relationships between the self-portrait de Tarsila and the “True Icon” were not detected by scholars of the artist's work. Even Aracy Amaral, when reflecting on this painting, seems to describe a photograph, although he claims that Tarsila “runs away” from photography when she produces her work. A photograph or Veronica's Veil:
However, this repetition of the self-portrait also implies a certain narcissism, a “loving oneself well” that is also characteristic of Tarsila. Self-portrait – always the cover of his catalogues – however escapes the sweetness of the natural expression of the photo and transposes a transfigured image, figée in the elliptical shape of the face of cold and unreal color, almost a mask of untouched and preserved beauty.[25]
Tarsila do Amaral must have noticed the similarity between the result of her painting and the Holy Shroud that she, as a Catholic, knew. Seeing herself as Christ might have filled her with narcissistic pride because somehow that self-portrait signified an “evolution” of her self-image: from a Paquita inconsistent with a nun, an ultramodern saint dedicated to the cause of art. And from the sumptuous saint to Christ himself, incarnation of God icon.
References
Books
– AMARAL, Aracy. Tarsila her work and her time🇧🇷 São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva/Edusp, 1975. Vol.1.
– AMARAL, Aracy. Tarsila do Amaral. Buenos Aires: Finambras Foundation, 1998.
– AMARAL, Tarsila do Chronicles and other writings by Tarsila do Amaral (org.: Laura Taddei Brandini. Campinas: Editora Unicamp, 2008.
-BELTING, Hans. Image and cult. A history of the image prior to the age of art. Madrid: Akel SA, 2009
– DUBOIS, Philippe. the photographic act🇧🇷 Campinas: Papirus, 1994.
– GOTLIB, Nadia Battella. Tarsila do Amaral the modernist, 2nd. São Paulo: Editora Senac, 2000.
– MICELI, Sergio. Foreign national: social and cultural history of artistic modernism in São Paulo🇧🇷 São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003.
– POLLOCK, Griselda. Vision and difference. Feminism, femininity and art histories🇧🇷 Buenos Aires: Fiordo, 2015.
– SARTUNI, Maria Eugenia (Coord.Ed.). Tarsila. Raisonné catalogue. São Paulo: Base 7 Cultural Projects/Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2008. 3 vol.
– WINCKELMANN, JJ. Reflections on ancient art. Porto Alegre: Movement; Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, 1975, p. 53.
Articles
– , CHIARELLI, Thaddeus. “The caipirinha and the French: Tarsila do Amaral and the devouring of modernity via Fernand Léger. IN https://artebrasileiros.com.br/opiniao/conversa-de-barr/a-caipirinha-e-o-frances-tarsila-do-amaral-e-a-devoracao-da-modernidade-via-fernand-leger/
– CHIARELLI, Thaddeus. “The self-portraits of Tarsila Part 1: the Spaniard” IN https://artebrasileiros.com.br/opiniao/conversa-de-barr/autorretratos-tarsila/
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[1] – Letter from Tarsila do Amaral to Joaquim Inojosa, 6.11.1925. apud AMARAL, Aracy op.cit. page 176.
[2] – “The self-portraits of Tarsila, part 1: the Spaniard”, in https://artebrasileiros.com.br/opiniao/conversa-de-barr/autorretratos-tarsila/
[3] – On the presence of Fernand Léger’s work in Tarsila do Amaral’s production, see, among others, “The caipirinha and the French: Tarsila do Amaral and the devouring of modernity via Fernand Léger. IN https://artebrasileiros.com.br/opiniao/conversa-de-barr/a-caipirinha-e-o-frances-tarsila-do-amaral-e-a-devoracao-da-modernidade-via-fernand-leger/
[4] – National Museum of Fine Arts Collection, Rio de Janeiro.
[5] – WINCKELMANN, JJ. Reflections on Ancient Art. Porto Alegre: Movement; Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, 1975, p. 53.
[6] – Sergio Milliet, “Artist of our Earth – III – Tarsila”, The State of S. Paul, 17, 06, 1943. apud AMARAL, Aracy, on. cit. “Decantatore 84” (Presenze grafiche).
[7] – Letter dated 4.2.1925 from Tarsila do Amaral to her family. In AMARAL, Aracy. Op. cit. p.161
[8] – Testimony from Georgina Malfatti to Aracy Amaral. In AMARAL, Aracy. Op.cit. p.161.
[9] – Photo reproduced in – “The self-portraits of Tarsila, part 1: the Spaniard”, in https://artebrasileiros.com.br/opiniao/conversa-de-barr/autorretratos-tarsila/
[10] – Mario de Andrade. Letter to Tarsila do Amaral, on June 16, 1923. IN AMARAL, Aracy. Op. Cit.368. If we look at Tarsila's entire pau-brasil phase, it will be seen that she obeyed her friend, insofar as Tarsila constitutes the paintings of that phase, always seeking balance, construction and sobriety. On the other hand, and within this “classical-modern” universe so dear to São Paulo's modernism. According to Aracy Amaral (op. cit. P.121) in 1929, this is how the artist would refer to her trip to Minas: “... . Return to tradition, to simplicity”.
[11] – There are three versions of this self-portrait. THE Self portrait I, painting, Artistic-Cultural Collection of the Government Palaces of the State of São Paulo; self portrait II,1926, painting, Private collection, São Paulo and Self portrait III, 1924, graphite and gallic iron ink on paper, Private collection, São Paulo.
[12] – I draw attention to the text already quoted by Aracy Amaral and to the Foreign National: social and cultural history of artistic modernism and São Paulo, Sergio Miceli (São Paulo: Cia das Letras, 2003).
[13] - Danaid belongs to the Tate Liverpool collection and Mademoiselle Pagany II to the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro.
[14] – BELTING, Hans. Image and cult. A history of the image prior to the age of art. Madrid: Akel SA, 2009Op.cit. P.278.
[15] – In Portuguese it would be Aquiropita or Achiropita. As you know, in the city of São Paulo there is a church called Nossa Senhora Achiropita. It makes reference to the miraculous image of the Virgin Mary, also not produced by human hands, which would have appeared in Rossano in southern Italy. On the subject read: https://www.achiropita.org.br/a-paroquia/historia-da-paroquia/porque-achiropita
[16] – BELTING, Hans🇧🇷 Op. cit.278.
[17] – For more details, see BELTING, H. on. cit.
[18] – BELTING, Hans. Op. Cit.279.
[19] – In 1997, on the occasion of Rogério Ghomes’ participation in the seventh edition of the Havana Art Biennial, I wrote the following text for the artist’s catalog, “The Profano Shroud: the production of Rogério Ghomes in the context of contemporary Brazilian photography”, later republished in: GHOMES, Rogério. I need to believe that when I close my eyes the world is still here. Londrina: State University of Londrina, 2017
[20] – In the fields of performance and theater, in recent years Brazil has seen an escalation of prejudice (and aggression, including physical aggression) against trans actresses who played Jesus Christ, as was the case of Viviany Beleboni who, in the Gay Pride Parade in São Paulo, in 2015, he performed the figure of Jesus. Renata Carvalho, lead actress in the play “Evangelho Segundo Jesus, Rainha do Céu, by British author Jo Clifford, at the end of the last decade was prevented from taking her show in some Brazilian cities. On the subject read: ego,globo.com/famosos/noticia/2015/09/Viviany-beleboni-e-esfaqueada-e-assustada-fala-em-suicidio e entertainment.uol.com.br/noticias/redação/2018 /04/05/who-is-renata-oak-the-trans-actress-who-dared-incarnate-jesus-christ.htm. The representation of Jesus as a woman and also as a young black man caused protests at the 2020 Rio Carnival, when the drum queen of Mangueira,…., paraded as Jesus woman in the same parade in which the School presented a float with the image of a Jesus as a young black man. hypeness.com.br/2020/02/mangueira-e-grande-rio-se-destacam-com-jesus-negro-e-defesa-do-candolle/
[21] – DUBOIS, Philippe. the photographic act. Campinas: Papirus, 1994, p. 27. (Italics are by the author of the book). In time: Dubois, in a note, goes a little deeper into the relationship between the “aquiropita” image and the photograph: “Let us remember that the Veil of Veronica (or, if one prefers to be more historical, the Holy Shroud of Turin) can be considered , with its “negative print”, with its “impressive effect of realism”, with its relic and fetish value, as a kind of prototype of photography: an image obtained by direct impregnation of the model on the support, without any intervention of the hand in the emergence of representation (…)” – p. 54, note 5. In time: not for nothing, in Catholic countries, Santa Veronica disputes with Santa Luzia the post of patron saint of photographers.
[22] – AMARAL, Aracy. Op.cit. p. 229.
[23] – IDEM, p. 231.
[24] – In 1936 Tarsila reflects on the differences between painting and photography and on how the painter should discern the details of the photographic image that should be transferred to painting and those that needed to be suppressed. “Peter Alexandrino”. Diary of São Paulo, 17, November, 1936. In AMARAL, Tarsila. Chronicles and other writings by Tarsila do Amaral. Organization Laura Taddei Brandini. Campinas: Unicamp Publisher, 2008. page 163 et seq.
[25] – IDEM, p. 227. The italics are mine.
