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- The Observer,
- Sunday January 6 2002
Opulence and Devotion: Brazilian Baroque Art Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, to 3 February
Unknown Amazon: Culture in Nature in Ancient Brazil British Museum, to 1 April
Young, gifted and black - that's how St Elesbaan of Ethiopia is portrayed in what must be one of the most extraordinary shows of baroque sculpture ever seen in this country. Not much is known about this Ethiopian king who quit his throne to become a monk. Even less is known about the anonymous sculptor, although he may well have been black himself. But what a startling figure he made of Elesbaan, somewhere between a dancer and a champion athlete. There he stands, head held high, haloed only by his own tight curls, balancing a model church against one swaying hip. His left foot rests firmly on a crushed (white) infidel. His right hand is raised sky-high in triumph.
In Brazil, in the eighteenth century, when this statue was made, there was no iconography for St Elesbaan. News of his legend had arrived with the colonising Portuguese, but no images of black saints came with it. The artist had plenty of models - by 1800, more than a quarter of Brazil's huge population were African slaves - but everything else had to be invented. To the standard pose of St Michael trampling the devil, he added a stocky strength, a dancing energy and the spectacle of Elesbaan's cloak fanning out behind him like the wings of a giant Amazonian butterfly, half a world away from Western baroque.
Elesbaan is one of more than 40 saints in Brazilian Baroque Art, a fabulous display in which the figures, theatrically spotlit, loom out of the darkness much as they must have done in the sepulchral churches of Rio and Sao Paolo, illuminated by towering banks of candles. Anyone expecting the usual colonial version of baroque, florid and dilute, is bound to be surprised. These saints may be heading heavenwards but their strong feet are planted deep in the earth or the swirling waters of the Amazon. There is a zest and originality in this art not seen in any other South American country.
Take St Michael the Archangel. He has the customary set of outsize wings and twiddles the usual pair of scales, but he is wearing a spectacular suit of Brazilian gold armour, and his sultry features - long eyelashes, arching eyebrows - are those of a Caravaggio rentboy. Or the terracotta St Barbara, made to be carried by gold-rushers as a protection against sudden death. With her piquant smile and droll wink, she is anything but grave, definitely one in the eye for the Grim Reaper.
It has been suggested that there is a touch of the African god Yansan about this fearless St Barbara - and many of the portable altarpieces here, made for black confraternities, seem to evoke Yoruba traditions. Although it is impossible to say how many of these artists were black, since most remain anonymous, the most famous of them all, Antonio Francisco Lisboa, was the son of a Portuguese architect and an African slave.
Lisboa's polychrome wooden statues have enormous impact, even among such powerful competition. His saints are not so much types as vigorous portraits - St Joseph of the Boots, a rugged Brazilian fit to scale the Andes; St Joachim, mouth open, arm outstretched, ready to lead the faithful in full-throated anthem. Bold and exemplary figures, they have all the stage presence required to inspire and unite Brazil's congregations, the world's largest Catholic population.
Walking through Unknown Amazon: Culture in Nature in Ancient Brazil at the British Museum, you see hints of the baroque strangely prefigured. There is the radial crown of golden feathers that becomes a sunrise halo for a saint, or those swirling waters decorating an ancestral urn, or that shaman's stool, shaped like the very same bird that forms a silver censer many centuries later.
The invention of these long-dead tribes is stunning and extensive - crystal arrowheads made to soar invisibly towards their targets; heart-shaped paddles for canoeing into the heart of the Amazon; fantastical bird-necklaces made from the scarlet plumes of the macaw and the wings of the long-tailed tyrant. Art was incorporated into daily existence as in no Western culture - in eating, walking, fishing, mourning, above all, in the culture of drugs.
To be stoned was to be transcendent for the rainforest shaman, who smoked and snorted the pure products of hallucinogenic vines. The Amazonian drug paraphernalia is particularly beautiful - elegant spliff holders, powder trays in the form of serpents, a snuff inhaler made of hollow bird bones and turquoise feathers to lift you into flight. You sat on a stool shaped like a jaguar or a bird to speed your way through the universe. You wore a beetle-wing necklace, its shimmering iridescence evoking the psychedelic sensations happening in the mind's eye. The trip was implicit in every design.
A Colombian anthropologist who once got high with the shamans ecstatically described the eye-popping patterns he saw. But what he saw is visible everywhere in this show, in sculpture, pottery, jewellery and weaving - flickering stars, hexagons, zigzags, grids; vibrating, undulating, whirling lines. These 'luminous flashes and streaks' can look like electronic circuit-boards or op-art paintings, especially in the bowls collected by Claude Lévi-Strauss. But for hundreds of years, they remain the same: the principal elements of an entire visual culture.
Or cultures. No one knows quite how many tribes there were or even how old some of these objects might be. One of the biggest assumptions among experts has recently been completely revised - namely the date of the eerie burial urns found along the Amazon basin.
These are not so much urns as anthropomorphic pots: austere figures, generally seated, sometimes frowning, sometimes gesturing, always striking back at you with alarming eyes. They must have staggered the archaeologists who discovered them in subterranean caves, for their force of personality survives even in a contemporary museum. Surely they were modern, or at least eighteenth century, given their sophisticated markings and glass decorations?
In fact, these effigies are as old as the earliest tribes, dating back two or more millennia. Until the Portuguese brought disease in 1500, there were about three million tribesmen. These urns are thus the tombs, as well as the evidence, of a long-lost civilisation.
