Manoel da Costa Athaide (Mariana MG 1762 - Idem 1830)
Painter, gilder, incarnator, carver.
He is considered an important artist in the Baroque Mineiro. In his work, references are observed to the models of the Bibles and European catechisms, such as the engravings of Jean-Louis Demarne (ca.1752 - 1829) and Francesco Bartolozzi (1727 - 1815). Form with the painters Bernardo Pires da Silva (17-- - 17--), Antônio Martins da Silveira (17-- - 17--), João Batista de Figueiredo (17-- - 17--), among others, the so-called Mariana School. His most outstanding works are the paintings in the Church of the Third Order of São Francisco de Assis de Ouro Preto, carried out between 1801 and 1812; and those on the ceiling of the chancel of the main church of Santo Antônio in the city of Santa Bárbara, from 1806; the Panel A Última Supper, at Colégio do Caraça, executed in 1828; the painting of the ceiling of the chancel of the main church of Santo Antônio, in the city of Itaverava, 1811, and that of the ceiling of the chancel of the Church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário de Mariana, from 1823. In the period from 1781 to 1818, embodies the images of Aleijadinho (1730 - 1814) for the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos, in Congonhas do Campo. According to critic Lélia Coelho Frota, the artist would have used his four children as models for the making of the angels who adorn the various ceilings and panels he executed and his wife for the execution of the Mulata Madonna, portrayed on the ceiling of the Church of the Third Order of Saint Francis of Assis de Ouro Preto.
Critical Comment
Manoel da Costa Athaide stands out as one of the main names in Rococo Mineira painting from the early 19th century. Like the artists of the time, his activity as a painter encompasses the exercise of gilding and incarnation of images and decorative elements in carvings, parietal and panel paintings, but fundamentally decorative painting of church ceilings and ceilings. The oldest news about his work as an artist dates back to 1781 and refers to works of painting and gilding of altarpieces. However, it is already entering the 19th century that he carries out major works such as the incarnation of the wooden statues of the Passos da Paixão, carved by Aleijadinho (1730 - 1814) and his studio, the retouching of the ceiling painting of the Nave and the painting of the Chapels of Passos do Horto and Prison at the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus dos Matosinhos, in Congonhas do Campo, between 1799 and 1819. His most successful work is again carried out with Aleijadinho, in the Church of São Francisco de Assisi, in Ouro Preto: between 1801 and 1812, Athaide paints the ceiling of the nave of the chapel representing the Assumption of the Virgin as a central theme, bequeathing us one of the most perfect examples of the perspective painting of the colonial period Brazilian.
Son of Portuguese, it is not known for sure how Athaide's artistic formation takes place. His father, Luiz da Costa Athaide, eventually appears in the books of records of religious orders as a provider of unspecified services, and it is likely that he has contributed to the formation of his son. According to the historian Carlos Del Negro, the similarity between the paintings of João Batista de Figueiredo (17-- - 17--) and Athaide's liner paintings indicate that the first would have been master of the second. However, other names appear associated with the painter, such as that of João Nepomuceno Correia e Castro (17-- - 1795), author, among others, of the painting of the nave of the aforementioned sanctuary (1777-1784) and Antônio Martins da Silveira. (17-- - 17--), author of the pictorial decoration of the ceiling of the chancel of the Minor Seminary of Mariana (1782). Both appear as introducers of the Rococo style in Minas Gerais, whose first phase in the painting covers the period between the years 1770 and 1800. master. In 1818 he received from the Senate of the Chamber of Mariana attested by a professor of the "arts of architecture and painting". With him, he addresses Dom João VI (1767 - 1826) in order to unsuccessfully claim the official creation of the "Civil and Military Architecture Drawing Class and the Art of Painting" in his hometown. Artists-arters of the time, Athaide follows canons imported from Portugal. In general, the scenes to be executed were copied from engravings and prints of missals and sacred books, the artist being responsible only for adapting the image to the space and the technical resources available. For example, in the case of the six panels imitating tile (executed between 1803 and 1804), which represent scenes from the life of Abraham and decorate the chancel of the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi, in Ouro Preto, Athaide copies six engravings of a French edition. of the Bible illustrated by Demarne. This fact represents no demerit to the colonial artist, as his talent reveals himself exactly in the wisdom with which he makes such a transposition, simplifying the original compositions in order to adapt them to the reduced space. In comparison with them, an intimate character is perceived in the treatment of the scenes and a greater expressiveness of the drawing, which eliminates the solemn aspect present in the model. This expressive line that tends to create voluminous and languid bodies, which hardly know right angles and transforms the anatomy of bodies into curved traits, is one of the most striking characteristics of Athaide's work. From the lining, the artist from Minas Gerais follows a rococo inspiration scheme prepared in the middle of the second half of the 18th century, in Minas Gerais: medallion in the form of a "replaced frame" framed from rockets and placed in the center of the ceiling, being supported by massive elements Architectural (Pilastra, Column, Arch and Curvilinear Pediment), which are based on the middle part of the real walls of the church. The illusory architectural space tends to be filled with angels, biblical figures, shells, lassocks, bouquets of flowers and other delicate motifs that are attached to each other by curves and counter-curves, giving lightness and rhythm to entire composition. Likewise, the artist's palette, rich in shades of red, blue, white, yellow, sepia and brown, should be understood according to the standards of the period. The high artistic value of Manoel da Costa Athaide lies in the technical superiority of his achievements, marked by the perfect design of perspective and bodies in foreshortening, by the chromatic harmony and by the aforementioned highly expressive design. However, the artist was also known for his angels and mulatto virgins, whose inspiration he would have found in his companion and his children.
Criticism
"Looked together, Athaide's painting displays elegance and lightness of the Rococo, however, expresses a taste for the serious expression of feelings and an outdoor aspiration of the landscape that are synchronous to that of Constable and Friedrich, his contemporaries. holding on to school or period labels. Transcends them, it is contemporary with itself. Perhaps because they harbor so many contradictions, work and individual, like the ones we are pointing out, is that the former was left with such great power of reach. (...) It lets you perceive a spirit of a liberal intellectual, perhaps agnostic (...) inserted in the complex phenomenon of social change from the period in which he lived, Athaide not only corporated in his work the extraordinary and original feature of the Baroque Mineiro in the passage from the first to the second half of the 18th century, but also gave A sign of becoming aware, already in the 19th century, of an ideology that, in art, increasingly valued the performance of the individual and the role of authorship and making creator as the vehicle of the disinterested beauty, a posture that began in the rupture of the renaissance with the mentality Medieval".
Lélia Coelho Frota
FROTA, Lélia Coelho. life and work of Manuel da Costa Ataíde. In: Ataide: Life and Work of Manuel da Costa Ataíde. Text Lélia Coelho Frota. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1982. p. 29.
"Alferes de Milícias Manoel da Costa Athaide: I, paisano, I salute in your admiration.
Two centuries ago minus a day, counted in the leaflet, baptized you in the Cathedral of the Marian City, but that would have no importance if later you did not look there at the ceiling and noticed the painting by Manuel Rabelo de Sousa. The direction had been traced. You would paint other boards from other ceilings or more precisely You broke the lining for the radiant conversation with God.
Ensign who in São Francisco de Vila Rica pours out on us in the space of the Baroque Theater of Heaven The crystalline praise orchestral coral of the serafins To Our Lady and of the Angels; reporter for the Escape and the Supper, witness of Poverello, owner of light and green-Veronese, inventor of unheard of colors, spreading through twenty churches of the mines 'a beautiful, brave and spacious painting': in your admiration I take continence.
And because when you leave your little house on Rua Nova in the back of Carmo, I always find you walking hand to hand with the eldest master Antônio Francisco Lisboa and because you live the two in common the act of imagination and in common the You fix in matter, in one city after another, because you knew how to love him, to the difficult and rare Antônio Francisco, and you manifest the art of two in the unity of creation, I salute your admiration."
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
ANDRADE, Carlos Drumond. Ataíde. In: Ataide: Life and Work of Manuel da Costa Ataíde. Text Lélia Coelho Frota. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1982. p. 9.
"In the region of Ouro Preto and Mariana, Ensign Manoel da Costa Athaide, who bequeathed the best fairness of the lining paintings of the finest rococo taste, came into play in the first years of the 19th century, with his figures amulated, although the painter was white and from a family of Portuguese origin. He was a prestigious painter in his time, appearing in documents 'as a teacher of art and painting'. He executed for the third Franciscans of Ouro Preto a vast decoration that culminates in the lining of the Nave (1801-1812), in colored vivid with blues and reds, in which the architectural plot gains diluted lightness in the cut-out shells, flowers and angels supporting the huge stripe where the porciunculus appears glorified among angels musicians and singers in profusion. In the pulpits appear the figures of the doctors of the church. In addition to the lining, there are works of the chancel imitating tiles, the paintings of the nave, polychrome of the altarpiece and other details. Minor Forros Athaide created dynamic spaces, very colorful and bright, as in the two beautiful ceilings of the Santo Antônio matrices in Santa Bárbara and Itaverava. The first represents the ascension of the Lord, in a soft rocaille frame supported by columns, and the second represents the coronation of the Virgin by the divine Trinity, supported by vigorous arcades with pilasters and ribbed columns. The ceiling of Mariana's Rosary, although very damaged, keeps the master's style. In addition to the linings of perspective, Athaide left altarpiece paintings, paintings in linings, such as those of São Francisco de Mariana, and easel painting, such as the Caraça Supper, dated 1828, the baptism of Christ in the Marian Cathedral, the paintings of Via Sacra and Santos."
Olinto Rodrigues dos Santos
Colonial Painting. Presentation Ernest Robert de Carvalho Mange; Text Frederico Morais, Lélia Coelho Frota, José Roberto Teixeira Leite. São Paulo: Instituto Cultural Itaú, 1994. P. 10. (Cadernos História da Painting in Brazil, 7).
Acerves
Capela da Fazenda Boa Esperança - Belo Vale MG
Cathedral of Our Lady of Assunção - Mariana MG
Church of the Third Order of São Francisco - Mariana MG
Church of the Third Order of São Francisco - Ouro Preto MG
Church of Our Lady of the Rosary - Mariana MG  
Church of São Francisco de Assis - Ouro Preto MG
Church of São Miguel e Almas - Ouro Preto MG
Igreja Matriz de Santo Antônio - Itaverava MG
Igreja Matriz de Santo Antônio - Ouro Branco MG
Igreja Matriz de Santo Antonio - Santa Bárbara MG
Archdiocesan Museum of Sacred Art - Mariana MG
Museum of Inconfidência - Ouro Preto MG
Historical Museum of Colégio do Caraça - Santa Bárbara MG
Posthumous exhibitions
1979 - Belo Horizonte MG - 6th Global Winter Hall, at the Foundation Clóvis Salgado
1986 - Belo Horizonte MG - The Six Screens of Athaide, at the Mineiro Museum
1998 - São Paulo SP - The magical universe of Brazilian clay, at the Sesi Art Gallery
1999 - Paris (France) - Brésil Baroque: Between Ciel et Terre, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris
Source: Itaú Cultural
