This text is an introduction to the iconography addressed in O Brasil dos Viajantes, a project that encompassed research and an exhibition of Brazilian images made by European travelers to that country from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The images included in the show, which had a variety of intentions, employed a wide range of media, and fluid forms of meaning. This text places emphasis on the importance of that iconography to memory of the colonial and imperial past, and primarily to a historical understanding of Brazil as seen and imagined by other cultures. According to the author of the text, Ana Maria Belluzzo, the images are organized around four basic approaches that in no way constitute the only ways of visualizing the topic addressed: imagination, the construction of meaning, sensibility in conjunction with reason, and the use of artifice to build an idea of “nature.” The basis for the exploration is recognition of the lack of stable visual forms in that iconography; at stake instead are multiple meanings and nexuses between images and their cultural contents. According to the author, the influence of what is called the “modernist” generation—figures such as Sérgio Buarque de Hollanda and Rubens Borba de Moraes—is at the core of this research.

This text is the introduction to the book O Brasil dos Viajantes, which comments on the critical conjecture of the exhibition of the same name that was organized in 1994. The show included a wide variety of works produced by artist-travelers engaged in the formation and transformation of Brazilian reality. The fruit of four years of research, this text constitutes an imaginary inventory of those artist-travelers as well as an intellectual reflection on and technical analysis of their work. The text addresses the fluid meaning of these images and their symbolic operations, as well as the cultural meanings that define the relationship between the Old World and the New World. Therefore, the exhibition attests to the contemporary need to analyze the long process by which the world became integrated as a whole, heeding the imperfections and dilemmas that that process entailed.

The show, which was held at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon in 1994 and 1995, became a point of reference. It made far-reaching and well documented research available to a large audience. The event illustrated the vitality of a certain strain of academic research on the visual arts from Brazil, and formulated a critical approach to the museum as an institution in the context of globalization.

For a related text, see Ana Maria de Moraes Belluzzo’s “A propósito d’O Brasil dos Viajantes” [doc. no. 1111299].