Mestre Valentim (Serro MG ca.1745 - Rio de Janeiro RJ 1813)
Sculptor, woodcarver, architect, urban planner.
In 1748, Valentim da Fonseca e Silva was taken by his father to Portugal, where he learned the craft of sculptor and woodcarver. He returned to Rio de Janeiro and, around 1770, opened a workshop in the commercial center. He belonged to the Irmandade dos Pardos de Nossa Senhora do Rosário e de São Benedito [Brotherhood of the Pardos of Our Lady of the Rosary and Saint Benedict]. In 1772, he worked with the woodcarver Luís da Fonseca Rosa on the interior decoration of the Church of the Ordem Terceira de Nossa Senhora do Carmo, carrying out work there until 1800. During the administration of the viceroy Dom Luís de Vasconcelos e Sousa (1740 - 1807), between 1779 and 1790, he was the main builder of public works in the city of Rio de Janeiro in the areas of sanitation, water supply and urban embellishment, such as the Passeio Público, made in collaboration with the painter Leandro Joaquim (ca.1738 - ca.1798) and the decorators Francisco dos Santos Xavier and Francisco Xavier Cardoso de Almeida. Between 1790 and 1813, he produced carvings and religious images for the churches of Nossa Senhora da Conceição e Boa Morte, São Pedro dos Clérigos, Santa Cruz dos Militares and Ordem Terceira dos Mínimos de São Francisco.
Critical Commentary
"Son of a minor Portuguese nobleman who held a diamond contract and of a Creole woman born in Brazil",1 the mulatto Valentim da Fonseca e Silva, commonly known as Mestre Valentim, stands out as one of the most original artists working in Rio de Janeiro between the last quarter of the 18th century and the early 19th century. His "hybrid" style, in which he reconciles baroque and rococo forms with a certain neoclassical sense of restraint and sobriety, reflects the processes of acculturation that took place in the city after it was proclaimed capital of the viceroyalty. Among the leading names of Brazilian colonial art, such as Aleijadinho (1730 - 1814) and Manoel da Costa Athaide (1762 - 1830), he stands apart as the only one to produce, alongside his work in churches, works in the field of civic art.
In 1748, Valentim was taken to Portugal by his father, where he remained until the age of 25, returning to Brazil around 1770. There he learned the craft of sculptor and woodcarver. It is not known for certain who his masters were. But it should be remembered that during his training in Portugal the young man witnessed the development of the Pombaline style. For the plan to rebuild Lisbon after the 1755 fire, the Marquis of Pombal, then King José's minister of finance, favored a more sober architectural and decorative approach, excluding costly gilded woodcarving. The model followed was Italian art, which, fused with traditions of Portuguese architecture, gave rise to the Pombaline churches. Pombal's enlightened-despotism ideals soon reached the Brazilian capital through the government of the viceroy Dom Luís de Vasconcelos e Sousa (1740 - 1807). But while in Portugal Italian taste took the lead, in Rio de Janeiro the churches with Pombaline façades (such as those of the Ordem Terceira do Carmo and São Francisco de Paula) did not abandon the gilded woodcarving of the Luso-Brazilian tradition, paving the way for a regional version of the rococo style of great delicacy and refinement, mainly at the hands of Mestre Valentim.
The artist's name appears for the first time as a woodcarver in the decoration of the Church of the Ordem Terceira de Nossa Senhora do Carmo, in 1772, as a pupil of Luís da Fonseca Rosa. Despite the eclectic ornamental additions of the 19th century, features of Mestre Valentim's style are still identifiable. The gilded carving on a light background of the high altarpiece is lavishly decorated with rococo motifs such as garlands, bouquets of flowers, festoons of leaves, ribbons and little cherub heads, which create an optical sense of movement across the surface. The child angels are characterized, among other things, by round faces, slightly mulatto features, marked cheeks and under-eye shadows, clearly outlined lips, short thick necks, bulging, drooping eyes and abundant hair with marked strands - the hallmark of Valentim's cherubs. Notable in the ensemble is the inclusion of solomonic columns typical of the Joanine baroque in place of straight columns, in keeping with a more classicizing rococo taste.
However, it is in the Order's Chapel of the Novitiate, decorated between 1773 and 1780, that Valentim displays all the elements of his style. It is a rectangular hall with a vaulted ceiling clad in gilded carving on a white background, forming a unique decorative unity. The altarpiece consists of a sarcophagus-shaped altar table backed by twisted columns, in a play of projections that prepares the eye for the sight of Our Lady of Divine Love. The decoration is filled with rocailles, garlands, floral festoons and little angel heads, repeated throughout the space and in the frames preciously "embroidered" with the same motifs. The composition of the carving follows a sense of symmetry typical of the Lisbon School but, in general, offers solutions more intimate than monumental in character. This reveals a certain courtly taste present in Rio's religious woodcarving in the second half of the 18th century, although calmly combined with grand elements of the Joanine baroque. In his last work, the carving for the Chapel of the Novitiate of the Church of the Ordem Terceira de São Francisco de Paula (on which the artist is believed to have worked from 1801 to 1813), solutions from more than 20 years earlier are repeated. However, the somewhat restrained, simplified and symmetrical carving, leaning toward a more classicizing formal compartmentalization, points to the arrival of a neoclassical spirit.
In the field of civic art, the artist carried out both public embellishment works and sanitation and water supply projects, doing work originally assigned to military engineers. His main patron was the viceroy Dom Luís de Vasconcelos e Sousa. Of all his works, the most striking is undoubtedly the ensemble formed by the Passeio Público (1783), Rio's first leisure garden, and the Chafariz das Marrecas [Teal Fountain] (1785, destroyed in 1896). His design reflects the Enlightenment ideas of well-being, civility, hygiene and progress that were to turn the Brazilian capital into a modern city. The project also symbolizes nature mastered by human reason and action.
Mestre Valentim produced both the baroque-style plan, in the shape of an irregular hexagon crossed by tree-lined avenues (the main straight one having Guanabara Bay as its vanishing point), and the fountains, decorative elements, gate and portal. Several artistic currents are present in the ensemble: the baroque, in the dynamic, scenographic structure of the garden and the sculptural elements of the portal; the rococo, in the curves and countercurves and floral stylizations of the cast-iron gate2 and in the metal sculptures of Echo and Narcissus (both now in the Jardim Botânico do Rio de Janeiro); and the Enlightenment spirit of cataloging and ordering nature, in the landscaping and the naturalistic depictions of animals. As a whole, the work marks the beginning of a tradition of non-religious public sculpture and of urbanization as a way of embellishing the city.
Widely recognized in his time, Mestre Valentim occupies a transitional place in the history of Brazilian art, in which artist and technician-craftsman, past and future, religious and secular art, baroque and rococo, classical and nativist spirit coexist harmoniously in his work.
Notes
1 According to Manuel de Araújo Porto Alegre, Mestre Valentim's first biographer.
2 Mestre Valentim introduced the art of cast-metal sculpture in Brazil and owned the most important metalworking (toreutics) workshop in Rio de Janeiro.
Critiques
"(...) But the most important proof that there was a collective surge of Brazilian racial identity lies in the rise of the mulatto. The Colony, solely by force of its economic circumstances, and without the slightest political intervention by Portugal, had for two centuries been enriching itself with some artistic achievements. (...) new artists begin to be born in the Colony who distort the overseas lesson without any possible systematization. And among these artists the mulatto shines brightly.
Caldas Barbosa and Mestre Valentim are mulattos. Leandro Joaquim, of the same period and one of the best painters in Rio, is also of mixed race. Father José Maurício Nunes Garcia (1767-1830), very much a mulatto, is the most remarkable of our colonial musicians. (...) And Aleijadinho is yet another mulatto. These examples are enough to understand this side - not dominant, but intensely visible - of how the Brazilian race was asserting itself at that moment".
Mário de Andrade
ANDRADE, Mário de. Aspectos das artes plásticas no Brasil. 3.ed. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia, 1984. (Obras completas de Mário de Andrade, 12). p. 13. [Texto escrito originalmente em 1928 e publicado no livro O Aleijadinho e Álvares de Azevedo. Rio de Janeiro: R. A. Editora, 1935.].
"The high point of 18th-century sculpture in Rio de Janeiro was reached by Valentim da Fonseca e Silva - Mestre Valentim -, the greatest sculptor of colonial Brazil after Aleijadinho. (...) All his work is in Rio de Janeiro. (...) He also carried out several architectural (...) and urban projects, such as the plan for the Passeio Público, 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 in the Passeio Público a garden of illusion, with a terrace of tiled benches, pavilions adorned with paintings by Leandro Joaquim (six of which are now in the Museu Histórico Nacional), fountains in the shape of alligators and birds, an iron coconut palm, four stone staircases, bronze statues (...), two pyramidal obelisks and an imposing gate".
José Roberto Teixeira Leite
ARTE no Brasil. São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1982. p. 246-248.
Posthumous Exhibitions
1984 - São Paulo SP - Tradition and Rupture: A Synthesis of Brazilian Art and Culture, at Fundação Bienal
1988 - São Paulo SP - The Afro-Brazilian Hand, at MAM/SP
1997 - Brasília DF - Herança Barroca [Baroque Heritage], at Museu Histórico e Diplomático - Palácio Itamaraty
1997 - São Paulo SP - Herança Barroca [Baroque Heritage], at MAB/Faap
1998 - São Paulo SP - The Magical Universe of the Brazilian Baroque, at Galeria de Arte do Sesi
1999 - Paris (France) - Brésil Baroque: entre ciel et terre, at Musée des Beaux-Arts
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. Black in Body and Soul, at Fundação Casa França-Brasil
2000 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - Brazil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. Baroque Art, at MNBA
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brazil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. Baroque Art, at Fundação Bienal
2000 - São Paulo SP - Brazil + 500 Rediscovery Exhibition. Black in Body and Soul, at Fundação Bienal
2000 - São Paulo SP - The Angels Are Back, at Pinacoteca do Estado
2001 - New York (United States) - Brazil: Body and Soul, at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
2004 - Rio de Janeiro RJ - The French Artistic Mission and the Origins of the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes Collection, at MNBA
Source: Itaú Cultural
