This project provides a body of material for the study of graphic images used in religious prints, almanacs, school textbooks, commercial brands, and other advertising materials. These traditional and community-inspired graphic images are combined and produced according to new techniques for graphic arts reproduction.
Professor Gilmar de Carvalho (b. 1949) is a noted expert on literatura de cordel. He has written more than thirty books on the subject, and has been recognized for his prizewinning work. He has been a professor of social communications at the Universidade Federal do Ceará (Fortaleza) since 1984, and has taught a course on social history at the same school since 2000. The books by the professor describe how literatura de cordel has gradually evolved over the years; its heyday was in the 1940s, and it then significantly benefited from the works of Mestre Noza, Walderedo, Lino and José Caboclo, Stenio Diniz, and Abrahão Batista. La Nova Gravura [New Printmaking] was the name of the group of artists that contributed to a revival of this traditional artform of the woodcut in Juazeiro in the late 1980s and early 1990s, inspired by José Lourenço’s album about the life of Padim Ciço. Father Cícero (1844–1934) was a Silesian priest whose ministry in the state of Ceará was famous for its miracles. For political reasons, he has never been canonized by the Catholic Church, but he is nonetheless considered a saint in northern Brazil.
With regard to specific examples of literatura de cordel that were representative of this type of traditional design, see “Cordel: a novelistíca nordestina” in the ICAA digital archive, doc. no. 1110755.
On this subject, the author has also written, A nova gravura de Juazeiro do Norte (Fortaleza, 1999), and the essay “Desenho Gráfico Popular. Catálogo de matrices xilográficas de Juazeiro do Norte–Ceará” in the IEB-USP notebooks. See also de Carvalho’s article on this subject: “Engenho e arte: a fala dos gravadores” (doc. no. 1110758); and on “A nova gravura de Juazeiro do Norte” (doc. no. 1110756).