Manoel da Costa Athaide (Mariana MG 1762 - idem 1830)
Painter, gilder, flesh-tone painter, carver.
He is considered an important artist of the Minas Gerais Baroque. His work shows references to models from European bibles and catechisms, such as the engravings of Jean-Louis Demarne (ca. 1752 - 1829) and Francesco Bartolozzi (1727 - 1815). Together with the painters Bernardo Pires da Silva (17-- - 17--), Antônio Martins da Silveira (17-- - 17--) and João Batista de Figueiredo (17-- - 17--), among others, he forms the so-called Mariana School. His most notable works are the paintings in the Igreja da Ordem Terceira de São Francisco de Assis in Ouro Preto, made between 1801 and 1812; those on the chancel ceiling of the Igreja Matriz de Santo Antônio in Santa Bárbara, from 1806; the panel A Última Ceia [The Last Supper], at the Colégio do Caraça, painted in 1828; the chancel ceiling of the Igreja Matriz de Santo Antônio in Itaverava, from 1811; and the chancel ceiling of the Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosário in Mariana, from 1823. Between 1781 and 1818, he paints the flesh tones and gilds Aleijadinho's (1730 - 1814) figures for the Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos in Congonhas do Campo. According to the critic Lélia Coelho Frota, the artist is said to have used his four children as models for the angels that adorn the many ceilings and panels he painted, and his wife for the mulatto Madonna depicted on the ceiling of the Igreja da Ordem Terceira de São Francisco de Assis in Ouro Preto.
Critical Commentary
Manoel da Costa Athaide stands out as one of the leading names of Rococo painting in Minas Gerais in the early 19th century. Like the artists of his time, his activity as a painter includes gilding and painting flesh tones on figures and carved decorative elements, wall and panel painting, but above all the decorative painting of church ceilings. The earliest records of his work as an artist date from 1781 and refer to painting and gilding of altarpieces. However, it is only well into the 19th century that he carries out major works, such as painting the flesh tones of the wooden statues of the Stations of the Passion carved by Aleijadinho (1730 - 1814) and his workshop, retouching the nave ceiling painting, and painting the chapels of the Passos do Horto and da Prisão at the Santuário do Bom Jesus de Matosinhos in Congonhas do Campo, between 1799 and 1819. His most successful work is again carried out with Aleijadinho, at the Igreja de São Francisco de Assis in Ouro Preto: between 1801 and 1812, Athaide paints the nave ceiling of the chapel with the Assumption of the Virgin as its central theme, leaving us one of the most perfect examples of perspective painting from the Brazilian colonial period.
The son of Portuguese parents, it is not known for certain how Athaide received his artistic training. His father, Luiz da Costa Athaide, occasionally appears in the record books of religious orders as a provider of unspecified services, and probably contributed to his son's training. According to the historian Carlos Del Negro, the similarity between the ceiling paintings of João Batista de Figueiredo (17-- - 17--) and those of Athaide suggests that the former was the latter's teacher. Other names, however, are associated with the painter, such as João Nepomuceno Correia e Castro (17-- - 1795), author, among other works, of the nave painting of the aforementioned sanctuary (1777-1784), and Antônio Martins da Silveira (17-- - 17--), author of the painted decoration of the chancel ceiling of the Seminário Menor in Mariana (1782). Both figure as the introducers of the Rococo style in Minas Gerais, whose first phase in painting spans the period from 1770 to 1800. Although it is not known for certain who the Minas painter's teachers were, Athaide is known to have been a teacher himself. In 1818 he receives from the Senado da Câmara of Mariana a certificate as a teacher of the "Arts of Architecture and Painting". With it, he petitions Dom João VI (1767 - 1826), unsuccessfully, for the official creation of a "Class in Civil and Military Architectural Drawing and the Art of Painting" in his hometown.
Like the artist-craftsmen of his time, Athaide follows canons imported from Portugal. In general, the scenes to be painted were copied from engravings and prints in missals and sacred books, the artist being responsible only for adapting the image to the space and to the available technical resources. For example, in the case of the six panels imitating tilework (painted between 1803 and 1804), which depict scenes from the life of Abraham and decorate the chancel of the Igreja de São Francisco de Assis in Ouro Preto, Athaide copies six engravings from a French edition of the Bible illustrated by Demarne. This is no discredit to the colonial artist, for his talent lies precisely in the skill with which he makes this transposition, simplifying the original compositions to fit the reduced space. Compared with them, one notices an intimate character in the treatment of the scenes and a greater expressiveness in the drawing, which removes the solemn quality of the model. This expressive line, which tends to create full, languid bodies, barely acknowledges right angles and turns anatomy into curved strokes, is one of the most striking features of Athaide's work.
As for perspective ceiling painting, the Minas painter follows a Rococo-inspired scheme developed in Minas Gerais in the second half of the 18th century: a medallion in the form of a "quadro riportato" framed by rocaille and placed at the center of the ceiling, supported by massive architectural elements (pilaster, column, arch and curved pediment) resting on the middle section of the church's real walls. The illusory architectural space tends to be filled with angels, biblical figures, shellwork, interlacing, bouquets of flowers and other delicate motifs linked to one another by curves and countercurves, giving lightness and rhythm to the composition as a whole. 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 great artistic value of Manoel da Costa Athaide lies in the technical superiority of his works, marked by flawless perspective drawing and foreshortened bodies, by chromatic harmony and by the highly expressive drawing already mentioned. The artist also became known, however, for his mulatto angels and virgins, for which he is said to have found inspiration in his companion and their children.
Critiques
"Seen as a whole, Athaide's painting displays the elegance and lightness of the Rococo, yet it shows a taste for the grave expression of feeling and a longing for open-air landscape that are in step with those of Constable and Friedrich, his contemporaries. Like that of every artist of real stature, Athaide's work ultimately refuses to be confined to labels of school or period. It transcends them; it is contemporary with itself. Perhaps it is because work and individual harbor so many contradictions, such as those we have been pointing out, that the former has retained such great reach. (...) Athaide's body of painting reveals the spirit of a liberal intellectual, perhaps an agnostic. (...) Part of the complex phenomenon of social change of the period in which he lived, Athaide not only embodied in his work the extraordinary and original character of the Minas Gerais Baroque in the passage from the first to the second half of the 18th century, but also showed signs of becoming aware, already well into the 19th century, of an ideology that in art increasingly valued the role of the individual and of authorship and creative making as vehicles of disinterested beauty, a stance that had begun with the Renaissance's break with the medieval mindset."
Lélia Coelho Frota
FROTA, Lélia Coelho. Vida e trabalho de Manuel da Costa Ataíde. In: ATAIDE: vida e obra de Manuel da Costa Ataíde. Texto Lélia Coelho Frota. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1982. p. 29.
"ENSIGN of the militia Manoel da Costa Athaide: I, a civilian, salute you in admiration.
Two centuries less one day ago, counted on the calendar, you were baptized in the cathedral of the City of Mariana, but that would have been of no importance had you not later looked up at the ceiling there and noticed the painting by Manuel Rabelo de Sousa. The course was set. You would paint other boards of other ceilings, or more precisely, you would break through the ceiling for a radiant conversation with God.
Ensign who, in São Francisco of Vila Rica, pours down on us, in the blue space of the baroque theater of the sky, the crystalline choral and orchestral praise of the seraphim to Our Lady of the Angels; reporter of the Flight and of the Supper, witness of the Poverello, master of light and of Veronese green, inventor of unknown colors, spreading through twenty churches of Minas 'a beautiful, valiant and spacious painting': I salute you in admiration.
And because, as you leave your little house on Rua Nova behind the Carmo, I always find you walking side by side with the older master Antônio Francisco Lisboa, and because the two of you share the act of imagination and together fix it in matter, in one town after another, because you knew how to love him, the difficult and rare Antônio Francisco, and you manifest the art of two in the unity of creation, I salute you in admiration."
Carlos Drummond de Andrade
ANDRADE, Carlos Drummond. Ataíde. In: ATAIDE: vida e obra de Manuel da Costa Ataíde. Texto Lélia Coelho Frota. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1982. p. 9.
"In the region of Ouro Preto and Mariana, in the early years of the 19th century, the ensign Manoel da Costa Athaide comes onto the scene, leaving us the finest share of ceiling paintings in the most refined Rococo taste, with his mulatto-like figures, 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'. For the Franciscan Third Order of Ouro Preto he carried out a vast decoration that culminates in the nave ceiling (1801-1812), in vivid color with blues and reds, in which the architectural framework gains a diluted lightness in the cut-out shellwork, flowers and angels holding up the enormous cartouche where the Porziuncola appears glorified among a profusion of angel musicians and singers. In the pulpits appear the figures of the Doctors of the Church. Besides the ceiling, Athaide's works there include the chancel panels imitating tiles, the paintings in the nave, the polychromy of the altarpiece and other details. On other, smaller ceilings Athaide created dynamic, very colorful and luminous spaces, as in the two beautiful ceilings of the Santo Antônio parish churches in Santa Bárbara and Itaverava. The first depicts the Ascension of the Lord, in a soft rocaille frame supported by columns, and the second the Coronation of the Virgin by the Holy Trinity, supported by vigorous arcades with pilasters and fluted columns. The ceiling of the Rosário church in Mariana, although badly damaged, retains the master's style. Besides perspective ceilings, Athaide left altarpiece paintings, paintings set into ceilings, such as those of São Francisco in Mariana, and easel paintings, such as the Ceia [Supper] at Caraça, dated 1828, the Batismo de Cristo [Baptism of Christ] in the Mariana cathedral, the Stations of the Cross and various saints."
Olinto Rodrigues dos Santos
PINTURA Colonial. Apresentação Ernest Robert de Carvalho Mange; texto Frederico Morais, Lélia Coelho Frota, José Roberto Teixeira Leite. São Paulo: Instituto Cultural Itaú, 1994. p. 10. (Cadernos história da pintura no Brasil, 7).
Collections
Capela da Fazenda Boa Esperança - Belo Vale MG
Catedral de Nossa Senhora da Assunção - Mariana MG
Igreja da Ordem Terceira de São Francisco - Mariana MG
Igreja da Ordem Terceira de São Francisco - Ouro Preto MG
Igreja de Nossa Senhora do Rosário - Mariana MG
Igreja de São Francisco de Assis - Ouro Preto MG
Igreja de 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 Antônio - Santa Bárbara MG
Museu Arquidiocesano de Arte Sacra - Mariana MG
Museu da Inconfidência - Ouro Preto MG
Museu Histórico do Colégio do Caraça - Santa Bárbara MG
Posthumous Exhibitions
1979 - Belo Horizonte MG - 6th Global Winter Salon, at Fundação Clóvis Salgado
1986 - Belo Horizonte MG - The Six Canvases of Athaide, at Museu Mineiro
1998 - São Paulo SP - The Magical Universe of Brazilian Clay, at Galeria de Arte do Sesi
1999 - Paris (France) - Brésil Baroque: entre ciel et terre, at Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris
Source: Itaú Cultural
