'Indians' and Druids

Manuel Joaquim de Melo Corte Real, Nóbrega e seus companheiros (Nóbrega and his companions), 1843, oil on canvas, 222.5 x 323.2 cm, Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Source.

This huge painting (over two metres high and three metres wide) hangs in the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro. I saw it in May 2018, during my first trip to Brazil, and I was immediately drawn to its dramatic subject and dynamic composition. The painter is Manuel Joaquim de Melo Corte Real (?-1848), and the title in Portuguese is Nóbrega e seus companheiros, or Nóbrega and his companions. In 1843, Corte Real submitted the painting to the Exposição Geral de Belas Artes (General Exhibition of Fine Arts), which is similar to the Royal Academy's annual summer exhibition in London – artists in Brazil would send their work to a large exhibition held in the school of fine arts in Rio.

Today, Corte Real's painting is troubling in its depiction of a 'savage' indigenous tribe. After first landing in Brazil (as the territory would later be named) in 1500, Portuguese colonisers discovered that the natives practised anthropophagy (cannibalism) – an indication of their perceived immorality which must be swiftly stamped out through diligent missionary work. Indigenous peoples came to be defined by their anthropophagy, and were typically depicted as bestial subhumans who needed to be 'civilised' by their European conquerors.

Padre António Vieria (1608-97) 'preaching' to indigenous men. Source.

The title of Corte Real's painting refers to Padre Manuel (or Manoel) da Nóbrega (1517-70), a Portuguese Jesuit priest who arrived in Brazil in 1549. He was involved with the founding of several Brazilian cities including Salvador, Recife and São Paulo (where there is a square named after him). Corte Real was evidently memorialising him as an important figure in the country's colonial history. Together with several other missionaries, Nóbrega set about converting indigenous peoples to Christianity. Naturally, the priests encountered a lot of resistance. As Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling have observed:

Catechism and civilisation were central to the whole colonial project [...] [The Jesuits] were eventually called 'the soldiers of Christ', and that is how they ended up, a veritable army of cassock-clad priests, fighting the Devil and at the ready to save souls [...] Missionary work in Brazil was seen as dangerous – after all Pedro Correia had been devoured by the Carijó Indians in 1554, and Dom Pedro Fernandes Sardinha [...] had been eaten alive by the Caeté Indians in 1556 [...] The best thing to do was to indoctrinate these people, who, unlike the natives of the East, 'lacked any faith or religion'.[1]

When Corte Real's painting was exhibited in 1843, it was accompanied in the catalogue with a description of the incident which the artist had depicted:

The historian of the Jesuits in Brazil reports that, wanting these missionaries to destroy the nefarious custom of anthropophagy [cannibalism] among the Gentiles, they dared to take from the hands of women, and from the stove already lit, the corpse of an Indian they were preparing to be devoured; the savages hesitated for a moment by such boldness; but soon afterwards they went to pursue the priests, forcing them to retreat to the village of São Salvador da Bahia; and it narrowly escaped being plundered on that occasion by a few thousand of these enraged cannibals.[2]

All this I learned later (and am still learning, as Brazil's history is long and complex). My immediate reaction to Nóbrega and his companions when I saw it in Rio was that it reminded me of a British Pre-Raphaelite painting that I know very well: William Holman Hunt's Converted British family:

William Holman Hunt, A converted British family sheltering a Christian missionary from the persecution of the Druids, 1849-50, oil on canvas, 111 x 141 cm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Source: Art UK.

Begun in 1849 and exhibited at the Royal Academy the following year, Hunt's painting depicts an imagined incident from early British history, when Christianity was brought to Britain by the Roman missionaries in the first centuries AD. The lengthy title explains it all: 'A converted British family sheltering a Christian missionary from the persecution of the Druids'. The tension between the old and new religions is a violent one in Hunt's picture: things probably won't end well for the second missionary who is being captured outside the hut. He looks towards the hut in desperation, but we are to suppose that, as a true Christian, he won't betray his comrade inside. This is a painting about brotherhood, sacrifice and charity – and, one could argue, the demonisation of the Celtic, pre-Christian inhabitants of the British isles, romanticised by eighteenth-century antiquarians who helped to create our modern-day conceptions of 'The Druids'. Christians saved lives and spread peace; Celtic Druids practised weird pagan rituals and performed human sacrifice by moonlight in their stone circles.

Detail of Hunt's Converted British family. Source.

Hunt's conceit of contrasting violent, bloodthirsty 'savages'[3] with heroic, peaceful Christians chimes with Corte Real's Nóbrega and his companions, which explores a similar theme. Curiously, the two paintings were created within ten years of each other. Of course, it is impossible that Hunt could have seen or known of Corte Real's work, which has never (I think?) been exhibited in Britain. Brazil and Pre-Raphaelitism are never thought of in the same sentence. Corte Real's visual style is not Pre-Raphaelite; it does not have the painstaking natural detail and scorching brightness of Hunt's painting.

Yet are there similar forces at work here, at least thematically?

One similarity is the way in which both artists chose to depict the central male figures who are being rescued from the 'barbarous natives'. Scholars have already highlighted the complex Christian iconography displayed throughout Hunt's British family. The rescued missionary, clad in red and white, slumps lifelessly in the arms of the elder woman, dressed in Marian blue. Their poses easily evoke the pietà motif – Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus – popular in religious art:

Detail of Hunt's Converted British family

Gerard David, Lamentation, ca. 1515-23, oil on oak, 63 x 62.1 cm, National Gallery, London. Source.

Looking at Corte Real's Nóbrega, we can see a similar analogy to the dead Christ in the naked man being borne away by the Jesuits, his arms outstretched in a cruciform pose:

Detail of Corte Real's Nóbrega and his companions

Images of the semi-nude body of Christ being removed from the cross after the crucifixion are also common in Christian art – the subject categorised as the Deposition. Take this example by Raphael:

Raphael, The deposition (The entombment), 1507, oil on wood, 184 x 176 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome. Source.

Using this parallel between the dead Christ and the dead man – who is explicitly described in the 1843 account as an 'Indian' – Corte Real creates a visual metaphor for the conversion of the indigenous people by Jesuit missionaries: the dead indígena[4] has been saved from the 'nefarious custom of anthropophagy' and thus receives salvation through the Church. Stripped in death of his own religious and social customs – for all we know, he was perfectly willing to be cannibalised by his tribe after his death before the Jesuits interfered – he is transformed into a Christlike figure, a saved soul.

Comparisons between Corte Real and Holman Hunt are not perfect. There are the stylistic and technical variances already mentioned – Hunt's Pre-Raphaelitism versus the academicism of Corte Real's picture. The racial differences between the Christians and 'savages' are far more pronounced, and more problematic, in Corte Real's painting, which has its roots in Brazil's colonial past. Indigenous people were slaughtered or exploited for labour by the Portuguese settlers in the sixteenth century – horrors which we are reminded of more easily when looking at Corte Real's painting than when we look at Hunt's picture. Admittedly, I do not know nearly enough about the spreading of early Christianity in Britain – whether this spread was relatively peaceful, or if it ever reached the same level of appalling violence as when the Portuguese colonised Brazil (this does seem unlikely).

William Holman Hunt, Study for the head of the missionary in 'A converted British family', ca. 1849, reproduced in Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905), vol. 1, p. 195

In his journal for May 1849, William Michael Rossetti described the subject of Hunt's picture as a 'Monk succoured by the ancient Britons in time of persecution'.[5] The word 'persecution' was carried over into the painting's eventual title, suggesting that Hunt had it in mind from the earliest stage of the picture's development as a key concept or theme. Writing this now, I realise that I have never really questioned this title. 'A converted British family sheltering a Christian missionary from the persecution of the Druids' – certainly, we tend to sympathise with the missionaries in the painting as they are undergoing a violent ordeal, yet were the Celts not also 'persecuted' to some extent, their religious beliefs suppressed by the Roman Catholics who had come to convert them? Other historians are better placed to answer that question.

This is all part of a much larger issue than this simple blog post can deal with – indeed, I was somewhat cautious in posting it as it touches on racial and religious issues which I somehow don't feel qualified to comment upon. Still, I hope to have shown that Brazilian art, unfamiliar as it is to most non-Brazilian viewers – is as potent and complex as the British pictures which we're so accustomed to studying. Comparing Hunt's Converted British family with Corte Real's Nóbrega has given me a new perspective on the former, and raises questions of race, religion and empire. It may be a superficial comparison, but it's compelling and may warrant further consideration. I hope to continue these kinds of comparisons in future posts.

Notes

[1] Lilia M. Schwarcz and Heloisa M. Starling, Brazil: A Biography, English edition (London: Penguin, 2018), pp. 26-27.

[2] Quoted in Yobenj Aucardo Chicangana-Bayona, 'Presença do passado no Brasil imperial: a tela Nóbrega e seus companheiros (1843)', Varia Historia, vol. 27, no. 45 (Jan./June 2011) – translated from the original Portuguese using Google Translate.

[3] William Michael Rossetti used the term 'savage' in relation to the Celts in Hunt's painting in his diary on 6 March 1850: '[Hunt] has done the priest's drapery, put in the other priest outside [...] painted [F. G. Stephens's] head for a savage outside, with various others'; William E. Fredeman, ed., The PRB Journal: William Michael Rossetti's Diary of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 1849-1853 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 61.

[4] The term 'Indian', while it may sound offensive to European readers, is still used by many Brazilians today to describe indigenous people in Brazil (including in Schwarcz and Starling's book Brazil cited above). However, some indigenous groups in Brazil have been promoting the term 'indígena' as a better alternative, and I have used it here.

[5] Fredeman, PRB Journal, p. 4 (19 May 1849).