Mannerism in Brazil

The introduction of Mannerism in Brazil represented the launching of the cornerstone of the artistic history of European descent. Discovered by the Portuguese in 1500, Brazil was inhabited by indigenous peoples, whose culture had rich immemorial traditions, but was different from Portuguese culture. With the arrival of the colonizers, the first elements of a large-scale domination began to be introduced. In that century of founding a new American civilization, the main cultural current in Europe was Mannerism, a complex and often contradictory synthesis of classical elements derived fromItalian Renaissance – now questioned and transformed by the collapse of the unified, optimistic, optimistic, idealistic and anthropocentric worldview crystallized in the High Renaissance – and of regional traditions cultivated in various parts of Europe, including Portugal, which still had in the earlier Gothic style a strong base of reference. Over the years the current was increased by new elements from a context deeply disturbed by the Protestant Reformation against which the Catholic Church organized in the second half of the sixteenth century an aggressive disciplinary and proselytizing program called the Counter Reformation, revolutionizing the arts and culture in general at the time.

Due to the fact that the implantation of the Portuguese civilization in Brazil began from scratch, there were scarce conditions for a cultural flourishing throughout almost a century. In this way, when the first artistic testimonies of some figure in Brazil, almost exclusively located in the field of sacred architecture and its interior decoration, began to appear, Mannerism was already in decline in Europe, being succeeded by the Baroque in the first half of the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, due mainly to the activity of the Jesuits, who were the most active and enterprising missionaries, and who adopted the Mannerism almost as an official style of the Order, resisting much in abandoning it, this aesthetic could expand abundantly in Brazil, influencing other orders. However, the most cultivated part of the colony was the Chão Style, with austere and regular features, strongly based on the classicist ideals of balance, rationality and formal economy, in contrast to other currents in vogue in Europe, which were much more irregular, anticlassical, experimental, ornamental and dynamic. The basic model of the facade and in particular the low floor planof the Jesuit church was the most enduring and influential pattern in the history of Brazilian religious construction, being adopted on a vast scale and with few modifications until the nineteenth century. The Chão Style also had a profound impact on civil and military construction, creating an architecture of great homogeneity throughout the country. As for interior decorations, including gilt carving, painting and sculpture, Mannerism experienced a much shorter permanence, disappearing almost completely from the middle of the seventeenth century, occurring the same in the literary and musical fields. Despite such a striking presence, much of the Mannerist churches were decharacterized in later reforms, surviving today a relatively small number of examples in which the most typical features of Chã Architecture are still visible. Its internal decorations, as well as the testimonies in music, suffered an even more dramatic fate, losing themselves almost in their entirety.

The attention of criticism to Mannerism is a recent phenomenon, until the 1940s, the style in general was not even recognized as an autonomous entity in the History of Art, considered until then a sad degeneration of the Renaissance purity or a mere stage of confused transition between the Renaissance and the Baroque, and for that reason the description of its legacy still is buoyant of imprecisions and controversies, but since the 1950s a great series of studies began to focus on it, better delimiting its specificities and recognizing its value as a rich style of proposals and innovative solutions, and interesting in its own right. On the Brazilian case, however, the difficulties are much greater, the research is in its initial phase and the bibliography is poor, there are still many misconceptions, anachronisms and divergences in its analysis, but some scholars have already made important contributions to its recovery.

Architecture

Churches: First phase
Due to the sacred character of the vast majority of the larger buildings erected in the colony, the influence of the aesthetics cultivated by the different religious orders was decisive for the conformation of the Brazilian architectural Mannerism, having in the Jesuits and, to a degree, more active representatives. The first nucleus of important activity was the Northeast, standing out the cities of Olinda, Recife and Salvador. A little later nuclei were formed in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. The Jesuits formed an Order typified by the great general culture and the pragmatism and adaptability of its members to the local contexts. Its buildings adopted as a basic model the Portuguese Mannerist slope known as Chã Architecture, characterized by functionality and adaptability to multiple uses, ease of construction and relatively low costs, and can be practiced in the most varied contexts. The great versatility and practical feasibility of the Chão model served both the interests of the Church and the Portuguese State, at a time when both were closely united through the system of patronage, the religious being important agents in the organization and education of society and also in the process of construction of the overseas empire. Another aspect, the style Manueline, much more complex and refined, with a strong emphasis on the Gothic heritage and incorporating Moorish influences, had no significant impact outside of mainland Portugal. Nor has the most ornate and dynamic version of Italo-Portuguese Mannerism flourished in Brazil, except for a rare exception, which left important monuments in Portugal, such as the Church of St. Vincent de Fora and the Church of Grace of Évora, and in the colonies of the East, where they stand out for their ornamental richnessBasilica of Bom Jesus in Old Goa and the Church of the Mother of God in Macao, among others. The Cathedral of Santa Catarina de Goa, on the other hand, is very similar in its austerity and balance to the ground standards adopted in Brazil.

The basic plan of the Chão style was defined by a single rectangular nave, without transept and without dome, and with a main chapel in the background, where was the main altar, delimited by a great arch of cruise, whose ends could be installed two secondary altars or none at all. Especially important buildings could have three naves or other secondary altars installed in niches along the single nave. In these altars, mainly, was applied the decorative wealth that the conditions of each place could allow. According to Gustavo Schnoor, it is possible that this model was inspired by the Portuguese Gothic churches of a single nave. The facades were extremely simple by rule, derived from the model of the classical temple with a square or rectangle as the main body, pierced by a row of windows lintel straight at the top level, and crowned by a pediment triangular. The surface of the façades was little moved three-dimensional and had an ornamentation stripped, occasionally adorning the pediments with scrolls and pinnacles, and portals with columns and discrete reliefs in the frontispiece, emphasizing the sobriety, balance and order appreciated by the classicists. The steeples, one or two, were planted in the plan of the facade, following the austerity of the rest of the building, and covered by pyramids shaped like a pyramid or ribbed dome, but sometimes they resembled turrets integrated into the main body or placed apart from church. This model of church would be the most influential and lasting contribution of Mannerism to Brazilian art, being adopted on a large scale until the nineteenth century.

In 1577 the Jesuits sent Father Francisco Dias, renowned architect, to Brazil with the purpose of giving Brazilian temples the dignity they still lacked. He was a follower of Vignola and Giacomo della Porta, famous Italians whose style had pleased the court and who participated in the construction of the Church of Jesus in Rome, which became a model for a myriad of other Jesuit temples throughout the world. Shortly after another Italian, Filippo Terzi, built the important Church of St. Vincent de Fora and finished the first Jesuit church of Portugal, São Roque, in Lisbon, whose master of works had been the same Francisco Dias. Dias would leave work in various parts of Brazil, among them the reform of the Church of Our Lady of Grace, Olinda.

For John Bury, the Jesuits were then exposed to two major influences, the tradition inaugurated by the Church of Jesus in Rome, the matrix of all the Jesuit churches in the world, and the tradition of St. Vincent de Fora, the matrix of the Portuguese churches, and the Brazilian constructions would either reveal a predominance of one strand, or another, or make original syntheses of both, which exhibit quite different styles: the first derived from the model of the rectangle surmounted by a triangular pediment, and without towers, and the other with a rectangular block flanked by two towers, and without a pediment.

Meanwhile, the Franciscans also engaged in an intense constructive activity, and like the Jesuits, they had an outstanding exponent in the person of the Friar Francisco dos Santos. Its only surviving works are the Convent of San Francisco in Olinda, partially destroyed by the Dutch and whose church was restored in a Baroque style, and the Convent of St. Anthony in Rio de Janeiro, also with the church modified later. Other works of his have been lost entirely, but reports of the time refer that he and his collaborators were owners of an original style. These novelties are probably reflected in other Franciscan churches of the time, expressed in a lower pediment, in the presence of a porch or agalilee in front of the entrance, in more ornamental and dynamic facades, in the belfry recessed against the facade, in a narrow nave often lined with ambulatories with lateral altars installed in niches and in a sacristy placed at the back of the church, generally occupying the whole width of the church. building. They also distinguished themselves from the Jesuits for their love of decorative luxury and the greater variety of architectural solutions, and for the greater speed with which they adopted decorative formulas typical of the Baroque. Other important Franciscan buildings of the sixteenth century are the convents and churches of Igarassu and João Pessoa.

The Mother Church of São Cosme and São Damião in Igarassu, begun in 1535, is the oldest church in Brazil that still preserves its original recognizable features, although the tower is partly baroque. Other good examples of the first constructive phase are the Church of Our Lady of Grace, erected in Olinda between 1584 and 1592 on a chapel in 1551, and the Cathedral of Olinda, raised between 1584 and 1599, which after much modification was returned to a conformation rather close to the primitive in the 1970s.

Churches: Second phase
A second stage developed from the mid-seventeenth century, after the initial difficulties had been overcome, when the territory already had a significant life of its own, enriched and began to develop an autochthonous culture differentiated from the metropolis, already with many artisans and native artists in activity. However, the Portuguese State still had as its primary interest the economic exploitation of the colony, and little invested in improvements, social assistance, art and education, continuing to place on the Church the main responsibilities of educating the people, providing them with care of the orphans, the widows and the old, to register the born and to bury the deceased, continuing to dominate a large part of Brazilian life, and, in addition, as it was from the outset, the greatcultural patron, since the massive majority of artistic projects, large or small, remained in the sacred field. At this stage the distinctions between the Jesuit and the Franciscan styles, and those of the other orders, become more difficult to determine, with a great overlap of tendencies.

John Bury highlights two churches as the most representative of this second phase: the Cathedral of Salvador and the Church of Santo Alexandre de Belém do Pará. This Cathedral is the fourth to be erected in the same place, and was completed in 1672. Formerly the church of the college Jesuit, after the demolition of the Old Cathedral of Bahiacame to have status of Cathedral. “An exceptionally vast and imposing building, which undoubtedly exerted considerable influence in churches built afterwards, not only by the Jesuits, in Bahia and elsewhere in the colony.” Its facade has a great severity, with small towers integrated to the main body. The interior is also austere in its basic design, with a single nave, main chapel flanked by two subsidiary chapels, and others arranged along the nave. On the other hand, the decoration of the altars is luxurious and refined, some of them still preserving Mannerist traces, and others already in Baroque style. Already the Church of Santo Alexandre, inaugurated in 1719, is more arcaizante, has affinities with the Style Ground, in spite of its voluptuous pediment. The interior is similar to the example of Salvador, though less sumptuous.

Churches: Third phase
The last phase of Architectural Mannerism developed mainly in Minas Gerais in the first half of the 18th century, when the gold cycle occurs and the region becomes a great economic, political and cultural center. More recent town area, its first monuments built still follow the model of Chã Architecture in its austerity and adherence to the straight lines, although the interiors are already decorated in a baroque style. Good representatives are the Cathedral of Mariana and the Matrix of Sabará.

Architectural Mannerism would still experience a long survival in Brazil, although its influence passed through a certain decline from the second half of the eighteenth century, giving way to the Baroque and the Rococo. Several important authors already recognize their long history. According to Sandra Alvim, “Mannerist architecture has great penetration, roots and becomes a formal prototype. As for plants and facades, it guides the rigid character of works until the nineteenth century,” Gustavo Schnoor says that ” the long duration of Mannerism […] would put him in touch, almost in continuity, with the advent of neoclassical taste, who turned to the models of his own classical tradition, that is, to Mannerism, before becoming interested in Ancient Rome,

Other typologies
Military buildings, where fortifications stand out, were another field in which the Baroque was largely ignored, with the principles of the Chã Architecture dominating simplicity, ornamental detachment and adaptability. Its specific characteristics favored this, since in respect of such buildings the main concerns were about functionality and efficiency, without major aesthetic considerations.

The fortifications also underwent a recognizable typological evolution. Between the end of the fourteenth century and the first half of the sixteenth century, Portugal built in the so-called “Transitional Style”, adapting to the recent introduction of firearms, producing an architecture that merged elements of the old medieval castles and the first modern fortresses. According to Edison Cruxen, among the elements most modified in this transition were the old Gothic turrets, which diminish their height and lose their polygonal party, taking on a circular or semicircular party, more resistant to artillery, being called so-called cubelles, bulky and prominent to the wall, and constituting “the beginnings of the rampartswhich would come to gain definition and establish itself in a period of full use of the pyrobalistic artillery. “The battlements are reinforced and the harness is introduced, an extra protection at the base of the wall in the forts located at the seaside.At the same time, the barrier, an evolution of the barbican, at the base of the ground walls, gains increasing importance and began to receive openings for installation of artillery to defend against the brim fire that destroyed the base of the walls.

However, these changes were not adopted in all the strong ones at the same time, observing a long period of experimentation and adaptation to the evolution of the artillery, appearing a variety of constructive solutions. Furthermore, the first defenses Brazilian due to deficiencies in material and builders technicians were raised in clay or in the form of wooden palisades, necessitating frequent repairs but then the concern over the strength and resistance imposed, being replaced by masonry. The first major fort to be erected in the colony was the Fort of St. John in Bertioga, built in 1553 on an old palisade, following a Mannerist aesthetic.

The period between the Spanish Domination and the Restoration in the seventeenth century represents a new phase in the military construction, there was a large scale restructuring of the old fortifications, which became lower and more compact, to be better confused with the line of the horizon and cease to be easy targets, and some of the main features of the Transitional Style, such as towers and battlements, disappear. Reflecting the art modifications of war, there were new treated, especially the Draw method Lusitano fortifications (1680) of Serrão Pimentel and the Portuguese Engineering (1728) de Azevedo Strong. At the same time, the Portuguese conquest advanced through the interior of the continent over Spanish areas, and many other new fortifications were built, especially on the land border to the west of the territory, in order to secure conquest. The eighteenth century still witnessed an important activity, and from this time most surviving examples date. In the nineteenth century fortifications found less and less useful, few were built, and in 1829 there were almost 180 strong in operation, in 1837 there were only 57. Many were abandoned and degraded, and others have been adapted to new uses.

Notwithstanding the prioritization of functionality in the fortifications, military engineers were well prepared and were often informed of the art and erudite architecture of their time, as evidenced by their knowledge of Vitrúvio, Vignola and Spanocchi treaties, among others, their frequent collaboration in the religious constructions and the many projects that they left for churches and chapels. In addition, many of the most important fortifications had some ornamental detail in the portals, in the barracks and in the chapels they had inside.

Some examples are enough to show the enormous importance of military engineers. The Church of Santa Cruz do Rio, was the work of Brigadier José Custódio de Sá e Faria. The Church of the Monastery of São Bento in the same city, was designed by renowned Francisco Frias de Mesquita, chief engineer of Brazil, designer of the plant in the city of São Luis and author of some of the most important fortifications of the century XVII, as the Fortress of the Magi and the Fort of São Marcelo. In São Paulo, the military engineerJoão da Costa Ferreira was praised by the governor-general Bernardo José de Lorena, who mentioned that he had been loved by the people because of his performance teaching everyone how to build well with local availability. Brigadier José Fernandes Pinto Alpoim is considered to be the diffuser of shot-down gates in the windows and doors in the mid-eighteenth century from his project of the Palace of the Governors of Ouro Preto, which became an almost omnipresent pattern in civil construction, strongly associated in the Baroque style. In addition to the Governors’ Palace, Alpoim projected the reform of the Carioca Aqueduct and the Santa Teresa Convent, the Convent of Help, the Viceroys’ Palace, the Church of Our Lady of the Conception and Good Death, the cloister of the Monastery of São Bento and several fortifications, designed the plan of the city of Mariana, in the course of artillery and fortifications and wrote two important treatises, the Examination of Gunners (1744) and the Examination of Firemen (1748).

In fact, military engineers played a fundamental role in the Brazilian architectural evolution, not only in the military and religious fields, but also in the popular and civil fields, designing, constructing, supervising works, organizing production systems, opening roads, planning cities, politics and also teaching.

Houses, colleges and monasteries are other noteworthy typologies that were erected with the plain features of simplicity and regularity of lines and decorative austerity on the facades, with windows of straight poles and occasionally some portal discreetly ornamented, looking for functionality rather than luxury. The great majority of the original buildings were overturned or disfigured in later reforms. may be cited as examples more or less intact the old Town Hall and Chain Salvador, the Casa Torre de Garcia d’Avila in Mata de Sao Joao, the Convent of St. Anthony in Rio de Janeiro (his church is baroque), the Misericórdia Convent in Salvador, the old Jesuit college of Belém do Pará, the Solar de São Cristóvão on the outskirts of Salvador, the Palace of the Eleven Windows in Belém, and the Solar Ferrão in Salvador.

Among the houses a separate category is formed by the so-called bandeirista architecture, usually farmhouses, developed more intensely in the old Province of São Paulo and typified by a classic matrix plant, where the great centralized room of multiple use stands out and the porch tucked between two rooms of social function, which usually served as a chapel and another as a guest room. Its roof was of four waters and its lines very stripped. Typology very common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, today there are few examples, among them the House of Butantã, the House of the Tatuapé Site and the House of Regent Feijó.

It was in the architecture that the Mannerism left in Brazil its more extensive, lasting and influential legacy, and little of its expression remains in the other artistic categories.

Music
Virtually nothing was saved from the music practiced in the first two centuries of colonization, except literary references. Through them it is known that music, especially vocal, was an integral part of religious worship and was cultivated with intensity. In the profane sphere it was also present at all times, both in public ceremonies and in the recess of the home, but even less is known about this aspect than about sacred music. There seems to have been nothing comparable to the sophisticated and hermetic music of the Italian mannerist courts, with their extravagant harmonies, irregular melodies and broken rhythms. On the other hand, there are records citing the practice of polyphonic musicin the main churches, which already had choirs and instrumental sets stable from the seventeenth century. However, sacred music was closely tied to the conventions established by the Contra Reforma, when it partially reverted to polyphony practices in the so-called “Old Style” or Prima Prattica, but characterized by solemnity, simplicity of writing and accessibility, avoiding the complex contrapuntal techniques of the end of the Gothic and the Renaissance that often obscured the texts in a mass of voices singing different words at the same time, as opposed to the “Modern Style” or Seconda Pratticawhich described the most advanced music. Notwithstanding the canonical impediments, in Portugal a parallel style exuberant and artificial style developed, that possibly had reflexes also in the Brazilian practices.

Nery & Castro also point out that Mannerism persisted in Portuguese music long after the Baroque was already the dominant musical style in Italy, a process that occurred between 1630 and 1640, with a main culture of the genres of Mass, motet and villainy in the sacred land, and the tento and the fantasy for profane music, all inherited from the sixteenth century, still missing some of the fundamental genres of the seventeenth century Italian Baroque, such as the opera, the cantata, the oratory, the sonata and the concert. A consistent upgrade to the Baroque would only begin in Portugal during the reign of Dom João V (1706-1750). In Brazil, from the scarce evidence available – a small handful of anonymous works, some other literary references and the treatise School of Song of Organ (1759-1760) by Caetano de Melo de Jesus, which makes references to older practices – after timid beginnings in the early eighteenth centurythe new style only seems to have been established from the 1760s, nonetheless, still cultivating archaisms and stylistic ambiguities. However, the baroque presence seems to have been as brief as it was fragile, and by the end of the century a transition to Neoclassicism was beginning, when Brazilian music began to be better documented and understood.

Sculpture and gilding
Contrasting with the austere façades of Chã Architecture, the interiors of the most important churches and convents could be decorated with great luxury, including statuary, paintings and gilded carving. However, there is little left of the primitive Mannerist decoration in these places, in its vast majority distorted by later reforms or entirely lost. In the sculpture traces of a classicism almost only appear in the initial production of sacred statuary, characterized by its solemnity and staticity, by faces with impassive expression, and by the clothes that fall smooth to the ground, which contrast with the bustling and dramatic patterns of the Baroque of the seventeenth century onwards. The surviving collection is small and almost always made of clay, and the pieces are small. His characterization as part of Mannerism is controversial, and in general this production is analyzed as a proto-Baroque. In any case, the images created byJoão Gonçalves Viana and by the religious Friar Domingos da Conceição da Silva, Friar Agostinho da Piedade and his disciple Friar Agostinho de Jesus, who were active between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Also included in the category of sculpture are the architectural reliefs that still remain in portals of plots, churches and convents, of which a good illustration is the front page of the Covenant of St. Peter of the Clergy in Recife, but the most significant example is in the Church of the Third Order of San Francisco de Salvador, an absolutely unique case in Brazil for the extraordinary ornamental richness of its façade, showing affinities with the Plateresque style, a strand of Spanish Mannerism, which some critics identify as a proto-Baroque. Its only stylistic similar, much less rich and exuberant, is the Church of Our Lady of the Guide in Lucena, in Paraíba.

Painting and Graphics
Other categories in which scarce testimonies survive are painting and the graphic arts. The first travelers and explorers often had designers and engravers on their expeditions, charged with making the visual record of the fauna, flora, geography, and native peoples. Among them may be cited Jean Gardien, illustrator of the book Histoire d’un Voyage faict en terre du Brésil, autrement dite Amerique, published in 1578 by Jean de Léry, Theodor de Bry, illustrator of the book Two Travels to Brazil by Hans Staden, and Father André Thevet, probable illustrator of its three scientific books published in 1557, 1575, and 1584. The engravings of these artists show Mannerist traces in their representation of the human bodies, with an anatomical description and a system of standard proportions, heirs of the idealistic naturalism of the Renaissance, but already impregnated with a more precious approach and contorted michelangelesque dynamism, in compositions that often detract from the perspective of a central point so dear to the Renaissance, creating a new spatiality, and escape the clarity and order typically classic.

In the painting the first known record is the Jesuit priest Manuel Sanches (or Manuel Alves), who passed through Salvador in 1560 on his way to the East Indies and left at least one panel painted in the Jesuit college. Shortly afterwards the Jesuit Belchior Paul appeared, who arrived in 1587 along with other priests and left decorative works scattered in many of the greater schools of the Society of Jesus until the beginning of century XVII, but only few works are known to him attributed, among them one Adoration of the Magi, today in the Church of the Magi in Nova Almeida, which shows Flemish influence.

In a separate environment there was a remarkable artistic flourishing around the court of the Dutch invader Maurício de Nassau, established in Pernambuco between 1630 and 1654, bringing together illustrators, painters, philosophers, geographers, humanists and other specialized intellectuals and technicians. In the painting, the figures of Frans Post and Albert Eckhout stand out, leaving works of high quality and within a calm and organized classicist spirit that has little affinity with the nervous and irregular pictorial Mannerism more typical, and that until today are one of the primary sources more important for the study of the landscape, nature and life of the Indians and slaves of that region. On the other hand, the allegorical characterand decorativeism of Eckhout’s compositions and his tendency to the artificial “whitening” of blacks and Indians, and the doses of fantasy and the incongruities in the assembly of scenes that could not have existed in reality in Post, creating both images that had a programmatic content cultural and political context recognized and explained at that time, and were more the materialization of the desires and idealizations of the nobility and the enlightened bourgeoisie of the Netherlands – who bought their works and mythologized the tropical world – than scientific descriptions of the earth, are elements that of a certain mannerists approach them. Most of this production has returned to Europe, but a small group is still found in Brazilian museums.

Also surviving in various churches and convents is a number of panels and ceilings of decorative painting, including some on tiles, which reveal a transition to the Baroque style, spilling into profuse vegetable motifs in intricate interlacings, reminiscent of Plateresque decorations, interspersed with religious symbols, images of saints and other figures, as exemplified by the important sacristy ceiling of the Church of Santo Alexandre in Belém do Pará. Another great example, a very pure Mannerism, is the sacristy ceiling of the Cathedral of Salvador, derived from the slope grottesque of Roman inspiration, with a series of medallions inserted in the carving, with floral frames and portraits of Jesuit saints and martyrs in the center. [ 64] Schnoor identifies as Mannerists a large full-length portrait of Gonçalo Gonçalves, the Moço, and his wife Maria, in the gallery of benefactors of theSanta Casa of Rio de Janeiro, the celebratedChrist of the Martyrsof FriarRicardo do Pilar, although others identify as a Baroque work, and a painting depictingSanta Rita de Cassiainhis Carioca church.

In the case of painting on tiles, it is almost invariably ornamental, without figurative scenes, or at most with tiny figures scattered among rich patterns of vegetable or geometrical motifs, in the so-called “Carpet Style”, made with a palette of colors limited to a few shades. This tile was generally applied as a bar at the bottom of corridor walls and around convent courtyard cloisters, in church interiors, and more rarely in private dwellings and public buildings.

Literature
The paupérrimos context of the early colonial times conditioned and limited the Brazilian literary production still with greater intensity than in the other arts. There were no schools other than priests’ schools, and the study was practically limited to basic literacy and religious catechesis, illiteracy was widely disseminated, the press was banned for a long time, book circulation was very small and invariably passed through the scrutiny of government censorship, being in general romances of cavalry, catechisms, almanacs and lunarios and some dictionaries and treaties of Law, Legislation and Latin, there was no paper production, and even the Portuguese language was established on a large scale until the middle of the eighteenth century. Rather, they were mainly spoken in hybrid languages of Portuguese and indigenous languages, which combined to make the local literary scene almost non-existent. After the great active precursors in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Jesuits José de Anchieta, author of historical chronicles, grammars, sacred autos and poems, and Manuel da Nóbrega, author of the Dialogue on the Conversion of the Gentile and a rich epistolary, in century XVII begin to appear other writers, among them Bento Teixeira, author of Prosopopeia, the first Brazilian epic, the poet Manuel Botelho de Oliveira, the Jesuit António Vieira, exponent of the sacred prose, and Gregorio de Matos, great author of sacred poetry, lyric and satirical. Despite addressing local themes, his work is still a direct extension of Portuguese literature.

Except Anchieta and Nobrega, when the others flourished the literary Baroque was already beginning to become the dominant style in Portugal. But Mannerist traits are clearly perceptible at many points, particularly because of Camões’ overwhelming influence on metropolitan literary production, a source in which all the latter have drank, and which shows his mannerism through the intense political and spiritual crisis of his writings, in the absence of any certainty, in his famous sense of disenchantment and melancholy in relation to the lost ‘classic paradise’, in the opposition between the high ethics of humanismRenaissance and the perception of the inadequacies and evil of the real man, in the strangeness and the desire to escape from the world, in religious propaganda, in the use of complex language figures and artificially precious figures, and in the taste for contrast, emotional rapture, by the paradox, by the atmospheres of dream and by the fantastic, and even by the grotesque and the monstrous. According to Walkyria Mello, “the Mannerist poet became obsessed by the tragic feeling of life, by the misery of man, heir to a legacy of pains…. Melancholy and anguish are also constant themes in Mannerist poetry, and this because their worldliness is dark and permeated with suffering. ” These features would accentuate later Baroque production and become their most distinctive features, also found in the production of the writers cited above, and which are therefore often understood mainly as baroque and non-Mannerist.

Source from Wikipedia