Project:

Landscapes, Melancholy, and Modernities: Vinet, Parreiras, and Castagneto

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Abstract:

This project aims to expose the critical debate surrounding the representation of Brazilian landscape and nature by visual artists from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The study aims to reflect on how, within the construction of Brazilian cultural identity, the exposure of nature through landscapes followed specific representational paths: 1) Scientific and magical mimesis, 2) Subjective distortions of the image of nature, 3) The construction of melancholic modernity through the representation of landscape. Such paths modify the very terminology of landscape and force researchers to reflect in multiple ways, giving mobility to the categories of critical analysis – investigating the relationship between visual arts and the geopolitics of spaces represented primarily, but not exclusively, by these three artists: Henri-Nicolas Vinet (1817-1876), Giovanni Castagneto (1851-1900) and Antonio Parreiras (1860-1937).