Reginaldo Leite
He is an adjunct professor at the Department of Theory and History of Art at UERJ. He carried out her postdoctoral research at the PPGHA/UERJ. PhD in Visual Arts from PPGAV / UFRJ. He has a Master in History of Arts from PPGAV / UFRJ, the same university from which he holds a degree in scenography. He is a member of the Brazilian Art History Committee (CBHA). He worked as a set designer in operas, theater, ballets, cinema and carnival, receiving some awards. Author of six published books, his area of interest comprises the history of Brazilian art of the 19th and 20th centuries, above all, the study of dramatic expression in visual arts.
Research project
Pedro Américo de Figueiredo e Melo. Joana D’Arc (detalhe), 1883. Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro.
Title
Opening image: pathos and dramatic expression in the visual production of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century
Area of Inquiry and Research
Art and Reception
Description
Based on the thoughts of Georges Didi-Huberman, who believes it is
possible to understand the history of art through three specific lines – aesthetics, semantics and pathos, this research project proposes to reflect on emotion, pathos and decadence in visual production of the 1800s and the first half of the 20th century. The study starts from the observation of how the compositional manuals, created by the Frenchman Charles Lebrun (1619-1690) – Epitome of Anatomy and Physiology of Passions –, and by the Spanish Modesto Brocos Y Gomez (1852-1936) – Rhetoric of
Painters –, adopted as teaching material during academic artistic training, they were used as prescriptions for “formulas for representing states of the soul” by artists of the selected period. Next, the project aims to verify how art criticism behaved in the face of visual works that excelled in emotion, as well as, due to their decadent profile, in Europe and Brazil.