Master Valentim (Serro MG CA.1745 - Rio de Janeiro RJ 1813)
Sculptor, carver, architect, urban planner.
In 1748, Valentim da Fonseca e Silva is taken by his father to Portugal, where he learns the craft of sculptor and carver. He returns to Rio de Janeiro and, around 1770, opens a workshop in the shopping center. It belongs to the Brotherhood of the Pardos of Nossa Senhora do Rosário and São Benedito. In 1772, he worked with the carver Luís da Fonseca Rosa in the internal decoration of the Church of the Third Order of Nossa Senhora do Carmo, carrying out works until 1800. During the administration of the Viceroy, Dom Luís de Vasconcelos e Sousa (1740 - 1807), between 1779 and 1790, is the main public works builder in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the areas of sanitation, supply and urban beautification, such as the Passeio Público, made in collaboration with the painter Leandro Joaquim (ca.1738 - ca.1798) and with the decorators Francisco dos Santos Xavier and Francisco Xavier Cardoso de Almeida. Between 1790 and 1813, he executed carvings and sacred images for the churches of Nossa Senhora da Conceição and Boa Morte, São Pedro dos Clérigos, Santa Cruz dos Militars and the Third Order of the Minimums of São Francisco.
Commentary Critic
"Son of a Portuguese fidalgote contractor of diamonds and a creole from Brazil",1 the mulatto Valentim da Fonseca e Silva, commonly known as Mestre Valentim, stands out as one of the most original artists acting on the Rio de Janeiro between the last quarter of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century. His "hybrid" style, in which he reconciles baroque and rococo forms with a certain sense of containment and neoclassical sobriety, signals the acculturation processes that have taken place in this city since his proclamation to the capital of the viceroyalty. Among the main names in Brazilian colonial art, such as Aleijadinho (1730 - 1814) and Manoel da Costa Athaide (1762 - 1830), it is the only one to develop, in parallel with the work in churches, works in the field of Civil Art.
In 1748 Valentim is taken to Portugal by his father, where he remains until he is 25, returning to Brazil around 1770. In that country he learns the craft of sculptor and carver. It is not known for sure who their masters are. But it is necessary to remember that during the training period in Portugal, young people witness the development of the Pombaline style. For the Lisbon reconstruction plan, after its fire in 1755, the Marquis of Pombal, then Minister of Finance of Dom José, privileges the more sober architectural and decorative party, excluding the expensive gilded carving. The model followed is Italian art, which, in fusion with traditions of Portuguese architecture, gives rise to the Pombaline churches. The despotic Enlightenment of Pombal soon arrives in the capital of Brazil by the government of the viceroy, Dom Luís de Vasconcelos e Sousa (1740 - 1807). But if in Portugal the Italian taste takes the lead, in Rio de Janeiro the churches with Pombaline facades (as is the case of the Ordem Terceira do Carmo and São Francisco de Paula) do not abandon the gilded carvings of the Luso-Brazilian tradition, opening the way for the development of a version regional of great delicacy and refinement of the Rococo style, mainly by the hands of Mestre Valentim.
The artist's name appears for the first time as a carver in the decoration work of the Church of the Third Order of Our Lady of Carmo, in 1772, as a disciple of Luís da Fonseca Rosa. Despite the eclectic ornamentals of the 19th century, characteristics of the Master Valentine's style are still identifiable. The gilded carving on a light background of the main altarpiece is widely decorated with rococo motifs such as garlands, bouquets of flowers, garlands, bows, cherubs heads, which allow an optical sensation of surface movement. The angels-boys are characterized, among other things, by the rounded face, slightly mulatto features, cheeks and eyebrows, lips with defined contours, thick and short neck, bulging and drooping eyes, abundant hair and strands. marked, signaling the style of Valentine's cherubs. The inclusion of typical Salomonic columns of the Johannine Baroque in the place of straight columns stands out in the set according to a more classicizing rococo taste.
However, it is in the Chapel of the Novitiate of the Order, whose decoration It is executed between 1773 and 1780, which Valentine presents all the elements of his style. It is a hall with a rectangular plan and a vaulted ceiling covered with gilded carvings on a white background, forming an unparalleled decorative unit. The altarpiece is made up of an altar stool in the form of a sarcophagus, with twisted columns in the background, in a game of overhangs that prepares the look at the vision of Our Lady of Divine Love. The decoration is full of rocalhas, garlands, floral garlands, angel heads, which are repeated throughout the space and in the frames preciously "embroidered" in the same motifs. The composition of the carving follows a typical symmetry sense of the Lisbon school, but, in general, it presents solutions of a more intimate than a monumental character. This reveals a certain courtly taste present in the carioca religious carving in the second half of the 18th century, although calmly combined with grandiose elements of the Johannine Baroque. In his last work, the carving for the chapel of the Novitiate of the Church of the Third Order of São Francisco de Paula (in which the artist would have worked from 1801 to 1813), the solutions of more than 20 years previous are repeated. However, the slightly contained, simplified and symmetrical carving, inclining to a certain more classicizing formal compartmentalization, points to the introduction of a neoclassical spirit.
In the scope of civil art, the artist carries out both public beautification works and sanitation and water supply, performing work originally by military engineers. Its main applicant is the Viceroy, Dom Luís de Vasconcelos e Sousa. Of all his works, the most striking, undoubtedly, is the set formed by the Passeio Público (1783), the first leisure garden of the carioca, and the fountain of the marrecas (1785, destroyed in 1896). His project refers to the Enlightenment ideas of well-being, civility, hygiene, progress, which should transform the Brazilian capital into a modern city. Such a project also symbolizes a nature dominated by man's reason and action.
Master Valentim performs both the Baroque-style risk in the form of an irregular hexagon cut by alleys (the main one in a straight line has as its vanishing point the Bay of Guanabara) as for fonts, decorative elements, gate and portal. As a whole, several artistic aspects are present, such as the Baroque, in the dynamic and scenographic structure of the garden and in the sculptural elements of the portal; the rococo, in the curves and counter-curves and floral stylizations of the cast iron gate2 and in the metal sculptures of Eco and Narcissus (both are currently in the Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro); and the Enlightenment spirit of cataloging and ordering nature in landscaping and in the naturalistic representations of animals. As a whole, the work represents the beginning of a tradition of non-religious public sculpture and urbanization as a way of beautifying the city. Technician-craftsman, past and future, religious and secular art, baroque and rococo, classical and nativist spirit coexist in harmony in his work.
Notes
1 According to Manuel de Araújo Porto Alegre, the first biographer of Master Valentine.
2 Mestre Valentim inaugurates the art of molten metal sculpture in Brazil, being the owner of the most important toréutical workshop in Rio de Janeiro.
Criticism
"(...) but the most important proof of That there was a collective outbreak of Brazilian raciality, it is in the imposition of the mulatto, the colony, by virtue of its economic circumstances, solely, and without the slightest political intervention in Portugal, had been enriching itself with some artistic achievements for two centuries. (...) they begin born in the colony, new artists who deform the overseas lesson without possible systematization. and among these artists the mulatto shines a lot.
Caldas Barbosa and Mestre Valentim are mulattos. Leandro Joaquim, from the same time and the best painters in Rio, is also a mestizo. Father José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830), a very mulatto and the most notable of our colonial musicians. (...) And Aleijadinho is another mulatto. These examples are enough to understand this side, not dominant, but intensely visible, of how the Brazilian race was imposed at the moment."
Mário de Andrade
ANDRADE, Mário de. Aspects of the visual arts in Brazil. 3.ed. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1984. (Complete Works by Mário de Andrade, 12). p. 13. [Text written originally in 1928 and published in the book O Aleijadinho and Álvares de Azevedo. Rio de Janeiro: R. A. Editora, 1935.].
"The 18th century sculpture in Rio de Janeiro was reached by Valentim da Fonseca e Silva - Mestre Valentim -, the greatest sculptor in Brazil colonial, after Aleijadinho. (...) His work is all in Rio de Janeiro. (...) He also carried out several architectural (...) and urban projects, such as the Passeio Público plan, made in collaboration with the painter Leandro Joaquim and the decorators Francisco dos Santos Xavier and Francisco Xavier Cardoso Caldeira. In the purest landscape tradition of the time, he created a garden of illusion on the Passeio Público, with a terrace of tile benches, pavilions adorned with paintings by Leandro Joaquim (six of which are now in the National Historical Museum), Fountains in the form of alligators and birds, an iron coconut tree, four stone staircases, bronze statues (...), two pyramidal needles and an imposing gate".
José Roberto Teixeira Leite
Art in Brazil. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1982. p. 246-248.
Posthumous exhibitions
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, at the Bienal Foundation
1988 - São Paulo SP - The Afro-Brazilian Hand, at MAM/SP
1997 - Brasília DF - Baroque Heritage, at the Historical and Diplomatic Museum - Palácio Itamaraty
1997 - São Paulo SP - Baroque heritage, at MAB/FAAP
1998 - São Paulo SP - The magical universe of the Brazilian Baroque, at the SESI Art Gallery
1999 - Paris (France) - Brésil Baroque: between Ciel et Terre, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. Black with body and soul, at Fundação Casa França-Brasil
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. Baroque art, in the MNBA
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brazil + 500 rediscovery show. Baroque Art, at the Bienal Foundation
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brazil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. Black with body and soul, at the Bienal Foundation
2000 - São Paulo SP - Os Anjos are back, at the Pinacoteca do Estado
2001 - New York (United States) - Brazil: Body and Soul, at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
2004 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - French Artistic Mission and the Origins of the National Museum of Fine Arts Collection at MNBA
Source: Itaú Cultural
