Jesuíno do Monte Carmelo (Santos SP 1764 - Itu SP 1819)
Painter, architect, sculptor, flesh-tint painter, gilder, woodcarver, master of toreutics, musician, poet.
Of mixed race, he was the son of Antônio Gueraldo Jácome and Domingas Inácia de Gusmão, niece of the Brazilian Jesuit priest Bartolomeu Lourenço de Gusmão, known as the Flying Priest. In 1781, Jesuíno Francisco de Paula Gusmão moved to Itu and lived among local clergy. During the construction of the Igreja Matriz Nossa Senhora da Candelária, he worked as a helper to the painter José Patrício da Silva Manso, becoming his assistant and disciple. In the city of São Paulo, in 1796, he painted the nave ceiling of the Church of the Third Order of Nossa Senhora do Carmo and the panels of the former Convent of Santa Teresa, which now belong to the collection of the Museu de Arte Sacra. Widowed after a brief marriage that produced five children, he entered religious life. He was ordained a Carmelite priest in 1797 and took the name Frei Jesuíno do Monte Carmelo. He said his first Mass the following year. In Itu, he painted the ceilings of the chancel and nave of the Church and Convent of Nossa Senhora do Carmo, around 1784, and the side panels of the chancel of the Igreja Matriz de Nossa Senhora da Candelária, dating from the late 18th century. Between 1815 and 1819, he directed the construction of the Church and Convent of Nossa Senhora do Patrocínio, acting at once as architect, master builder, painter and sculptor. He also produced eight paintings for the church and composed sacred music for its inauguration. He died before finishing the work, which was completed by his sons and inaugurated in 1820. In 1945, the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional - Sphan, in São Paulo, published the book Padre Jesuíno do Monte Carmelo, by Mário de Andrade (1893 - 1945).
Critical Commentary
Frei Jesuíno do Monte Carmelo is recognized as one of the leading artists of the colonial period in São Paulo. Of his work as a composer of sacred music, organ builder, woodcarver and architect, only the paintings made in the cities of São Paulo and Itu survive. Of mixed race and humble origins, Jesuíno had two inclinations as a child: the priesthood and painting. Unable to learn the Latin required to be ordained, and needing to work from an early age, he turned to the painter's trade. He trained by observing the few church decorations that existed at the time in his hometown, especially the church of the Carmelite convent in Santos. As he had been devoted to Our Lady of Mount Carmel since boyhood, the Carmelite friars played a fundamental role in his life. The father-master introduced him to music and organ technique. His first important commission also came from the Carmelites: to apply the estofado and flesh tones to the carved wooden images of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, Sant'Ana and São Joaquim. Despite the poor quality of the work, owing to the artist's inexperience, the friars decided to take the 17-year-old to help with work on the order's new church in Itu, in 1781.
While working at the Carmelite church in various capacities - as sacristan, playing the organ at Mass, decorating the altars for feasts - he was hired by the artist José Patrício da Silva Manso to help decorate the newly built Matriz de Nossa Senhora da Candelária in Itu. It is not known for certain which works are solely by the master and which by the assistant. In any case, even in works attributed to Jesuíno - such as the 12 chancel panels - the guidance of José Patrício, the more experienced artist, is unmistakable. As Mário de Andrade (1893 - 1945), the only scholar of the colonial painter's work, observes, the panels show a "borrowed palette", traditional and quite academic, in intense, somber reds and blues. As a set, they are also very uneven, especially in the compositional unity of the scenes depicted.1 This set of 12 canvases is Jesuíno's first work as a painter, albeit as an apprentice.
It is with the decoration of the Carmo Church in Itu (ca. 1784) that Jesuíno reached his first moment of artistic independence. Of this ensemble, the chancel ceiling survives. While he still had in mind the tradition he knew, he blended it with touches of his own temperament. As in the ceiling of the Matriz, painted by him and designed by Silva Manso, he does not treat the subject in receding perspective, choosing instead to place the figures frontally, flattening the natural curve of the ceiling. To bring them together and give unity to the scene,2 he uses a garland of leaves and flowers3 carried by cherubim and seraphim, grouping the six venerable figures and the Carmelite saints in a single space, with the Vision of Our Lady of Mount Carmel at the center. Here the artist frees himself from dark and earthy tones, and his palette brightens. The color scheme formed by the radiance of yellow light emanating from the Virgin's crown, the sky-blue ceiling, the whites, and the shades of red, blue, orange and green in the vestments of the popes as well as in those of the angels and the flowers they scatter, suggests a warm, luminous atmosphere. Curiously, Jesuíno includes, in the lower right of the composition, a single brown-skinned angel, with features similar to those of the white angels.
After his wife's death, the artist went to São Paulo in 1795, charged with decorating the Carmelite churches in the capital. Of the work he carried out there, only the ceiling painting of the Church of the Ordem Terceira do Carmo, his most significant work, can still be seen. He returned to an austere color scheme in the 24 figures of the nave ceiling. He never gives way to Baroque movement; his figures are hieratic and their gestures suggest a restrained rhythm.
He began studying Latin and was ordained in 1797 (though, because he was of mixed race, with the proviso ex defectu natalium), and from then on was known as Frei Jesuíno do Monte Carmelo. His artistic output declined after his ordination.
He returned to Itu in 1797. He was shaken by his failed attempt to join the Third Order of Nossa Senhora do Monte Carmelo. Around 1800, he began to conceive the congregation of the Fathers of Patrocínio. He gained local support, and even that of Dom João VI (1767 - 1826), to build the Church of Nossa Senhora do Patrocínio in Itu. He improvised as architect and drew up its plans (the original façade was remodeled in eclectic taste in 1894). He was assisted by his sons, all of them clergymen. His last works, the most dramatic of his artistic output, are the eight life-size canvases of Carmelite saints decorating the church's side aisles. He composed music for its inauguration, but died in 1819 before seeing it finished, which happened a year later. According to Mário de Andrade, Frei Jesuíno do Monte Carmelo is the prototype of the artist of colonial Brazil, far more intuitive than learned, situated "in between legitimate folk art and legitimate learned art".
Notes
1 For Mário de Andrade, the panels can be divided into two series, according to their artistic quality and subjects: six tall canvases on the life of Mary and six wide canvases telling the life of Jesus. The first would have been designed by José Patrício da Silva Manso and the second by Jesuíno. However, both would have been painted by the disciple and later retouched by the master.
2 As Mário de Andrade observes, "Jesuíno does not know how to narrate, or does not care for that literary possibility, which belongs more to drawing than to painting. Jesuíno's drama, when well expressed, will never lie in the plot of the scene, but in the psychology of the figures". This gives rise in the artist's work to a gallery of portrait figures (sometimes of his own sons) combined with stock figures (especially female ones).
3 On the festoon of foliage and flowers, Mário de Andrade states: "In fact, Jesuíno is using, if not creating, a decorative 'Brazilianism'. This is a very Brazilian way of adorning, very traditional among us, using greenery and flowers with lavish prodigality, bordering on naivety and bad taste. It is a delight that gives this ceiling an unusual appearance, with the cheerful flavor of a village fair".
Critiques
"[...] in spirit, and consequently in style as well, he departs boldly from the spirit and style of the European art he imagined he was following. But he is far from proposing any Brazilian synthesis either. He is always Baroque, but a Baroque without style. Nor is he a Romantic, a forerunner of European Romanticism, as any patriotism might readily suggest. [...] Within the Baroque, however, the work of Father Jesuíno do Monte Carmelo represents a lesser cultural reality. One clearly perceives the man's strength. Some of his figures, even groups, such as the ceiling, are admirable in creative power, originality and beauty. But Jesuíno remains in that uneasy in-between space between legitimate folk art and legitimate learned art. There is something irregular, something . . . something even base in his work, which has none of the forces, forms and inevitabilities of folk art. Yet Jesuíno does not become learned. He is popularesque. And quite urbanized at that. So we are always obliged to see him as what he aspired to be, a cultivated painter! And within that, he is the cultivated man with no tradition behind him, the cultivated man who did not learn enough, the cultivated man without culture. In this too he confirms his place in the group of Brazilian artists of the colonial period, and represents more sharply than most of them what the national artistic culture of his time was. In this sense he even becomes a prototype. [...]"
Mário de Andrade
ANDRADE, Mário de. Padre Jesuíno do Monte Carmelo. São Paulo: Martins, 1963. (Obras completas de Mário de Andrade, 16). p.201-202
Collections
Acervo da Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo/Brasil - São Paulo SP
Igreja da Ordem Terceira de Nossa Senhora do Carmo - São Paulo SP
Igreja e Convento de Nossa Senhora do Carmo - Itu SP
Igreja e Convento de Nossa Senhora do Patrocínio - Itu SP
Igreja Matriz de Nossa Senhora da Candelária - Itu SP
Museu de Arte Sacra - São Paulo SP
Posthumous Exhibitions
1988 - São Paulo SP - The Afro-Brazilian Hand, at MAM/SP
1994 - São Paulo SP - A Critical Look at the 19th-Century Collection, at Pinacoteca do Estado
1998 - São Paulo SP - The Magical Universe of the Brazilian Baroque, at Galeria de Arte do Sesi
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brasil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition, at Fundação Bienal
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brasil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. Black in Body and Soul, at Fundação Casa França-Brasil
Source: Itaú Cultural
