“Parla, diavolo!”: Almeida Reis and Michelangelo's shadow

Renato Menezes Ramos [1]

RAMOS, Renato Menezes. “Parla, diavolo!”: Almeida Reis and Michelangelo's shadow. 19&20, Rio de Janeiro, v. X, n. 2, jul./dez. 2015. https://www.doi.org/10.52913/19e20.X2.10b [Português]

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1. "He didn't have the life he deserved".[2] The sentence with which Sartre begins his essay on Baudelaire, published in 1947 and dedicated to Jean Genet, deserves, first of all, a remark. To write about the one who is perhaps the biggest pessimist of the nineteenth century regarding the future of the world after Europe had been devastated by the Second World War, and to dedicate such writing to the biggest heir to the accursed literature of his time is an attitude that demands courage. Despite the strong impact of the sentence, it concentrated a generic content referring to those individuals of the nineteenth century for whom failure coincided with their success. This generation - Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valléry - considered itself the legitimate successor of the Baudelarian "névrose"[3] echoed in Genet, who was, at the same time, a familiar misfit and member of the social underground.

2. Between the lines, perhaps Sartre was referring to the race towards freedom of expression that Baudelaire praised so much in literature, but which, on the other hand, assured his untimely death (in 1867), deep in debt. Paradoxically, no periods of ostracism which could culminate in failure had been known to him. In 1850, Gustave Courbet, an exponent of freedom of art and of the artist in the nineteenth century, proclaimed his interest in the ferocity of his independence and individuality, and refused any affiliation to a master[4]. Nevertheless, only in 1863[5] would there be a decisive milestone in the artistic impulses, which then were able to combine the dark Baudelarian notion of failure with the rebellious Courbetian detachment.

3. However, there are two timely coincidences which should be noted. Firstly, in 1863 the young Brazilian Candido Caetano de Almeida Reis, considered a promising modern sculptor in the country, planned the plaster modeling of a statue of Michelangelo reading, even though it was given the title of Miguel Ângelo, poeta (Michelangelo, the poet) [Figure 1].[6] The work, initially made for the Youth Artistic Congress in 1864, as inscribed on its base, would be exhibited again in the following year, this time in the General Exhibition of Fine Arts, earning the artist an unquestioned prize to travel abroad. In Paris, he would make contact with Louis Rochet, who years before, in 1862, inaugurated in Rio de Janeiro the first Brazilian public monument [see Image]; and would admire the work of his contemporaries, especially the so-called "Neo-florentins," French artists who considered themselves heirs of the Italian sculptural tradition of the sixteenth century. Secondly, 1867 was marked by the sudden interruption of the artistic sponsorship which had been granted to the young sculptor, who, in charge of unavoidable duties, executes a work of allegorical theme, and not a historical or religious one, as demanded by the protocol. O Rio Paraíba do Sul (The Paraíba do Sul River, 1866-1867) would become his best known work. Despite his good fortune, he faded little by little out of the careless negligence of the future on which his modest endeavors rested.[7]

4. Almeida Reis embodied the idea that modern artists do not submit themselves to institutional rules, but act according to the will of art; he showed that the insubordination of the artist was a significant part of the expressive result of his work. Therefore, he seemed to incorporate the theory of art as per the master Frenhofer, a character of Balzac’s famous novel Chef d'Oeuvre Inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), for whom "the mission of art is not to copy nature, but to express it."[8] After the utter failure of his mysterious painting before his disciples, Frenhofer sets his studio on fire, destroying at the same time his life and his work.

5. When Almeida Reis decides to take Michelangelo as the theme of his sculpture, he seems to be already aware of the challenge he has in his hands. He is not seduced by the haughty and vivid image of the Florentine master; he is interested in the artist at the height of his reflexive pause, in the interruption of the reading which will soon be resumed. Michelangelo is henceforth the typical person whose ruined spirit is moved by nothing but his own anguish. Each artist who has ever been seduced by self-destruction, who has known the bitter taste of failure, can be found there, in the image of a melancholic, disillusioned and mournful man. On the other hand, it is curious that Almeida Reis did not think of the Italian artist as the painter of the dome of the Sistine Chapel, the unsurmountable master of architecture or the one who gave life to Moses from a rough block of marble. He is a poet, but does not write. He has a book in his hand, but  he is not reading it. At that moment the awareness of the hardship of his fate dawns on him, and maybe that is why he sits still. Perhaps this quietness is only the mood that precedes a frightening and destructive Promethean fury.

6. Almeida Reis’s artwork did not bear any fruits other than the aforementioned 1865 travel award, nor did it generate any critiques about him. However, in 1888, they year in which the slave regime was finally abolished in Brazil, Gonzaga Duque published his first book, entitled A arte brasileira (Brazilian Art), which intended to report the trajectory of the arts in the country, from the late eighteenth century to his own time. This book contained the first comments on the work of Almeida Reis, who died the following year,[9] before the Republic had been proclaimed. Gonzaga Duque quickly realized that the sculptor molded in plaster a series of discourses about himself, so that the resulting work corresponded to a proof of the accentuated identification between Almeida Reis and the Italian artist. The critic said, in opposition to what the phenomenology of art would later defend, that: "the conception of the artist is born out of the environment in which he lives, and of the struggles with his existence needs, the tenacious indifference of a society eager for useless wealth, saved with greed and stupidity, [...] led him to another stream of inspiration."[10] However, he seems especially touched by a poem written by Generino dos Santos, to whom he makes space in the book, fully reproducing the sonnet whose curious title was "Parla, diavolo": 

7. Buonarotti, thoughtful, had bent his forehead

8. Like a god creating a world in his thoughts.

9. Where could he find the expression of that deep look

10. Who had givens laws to the People and water to the Mount? 

11. Where to find the divine chisel? The innocent marble?

12. Where to find the line? The contour? The movement? The background?

13. The grove of a haunting pain? And the daring, fruitful plaster

14. That would open a borderless horizon to mankind! 

15. Buonarotti, thoughtful, had become helpless!

16. However, the sky darkens ... the lightning strikes... a huge

17. Block comes from Sinai and rolls at his feet ...

18. A sudden awakening ... a river flows ...

19. And, just like Jehovah created Adam after his own image,

20. He began carving in the rock the statue of Moses.

21. Generino dos Santos was a friend of Almeida Reis, for whom he would make several works, and had contact with the positivist group which Reis had joined upon his return to Brazil. His positivist faith increased the antipathy the Academy felt for him. Thus, he became a member of the more radical party in favor of a profound reform in the art education system of the institution[11]. It is true, however, that Generino dos Santos overestimated Almeida Reis in the work that was dedicated to him[12]. He spared no efforts to create the idea that the artist corresponded to an axis around which gravitated important figures, including Rodolfo Bernardelli. However, he obliterated the fact that Bernardelli, unlike Almeida Reis, would monopolize public sculptures in Brazil from the late nineteenth century to the beginning of the next, as well as his notorious role in the direction of the newly created National School of Fine Arts. In fact, he did not succeed in his intent.

22. Nevertheless, as a man of letters he gives in to classic Alexandrian verses, but bravely resisted the ancient tradition of ekphrasis in order to avoid looking at the sculpture of Almeida Reis as a mirror of Moses and at Moses as Michelangelos "persona". The restrained violence of the prophet turns into the demiurgic fury originated by the powerful contact between man and marble. He seems to reflect on the dual capacity of the will and the means: the hatred that destroys is the same one which builds[13]; the end coexists with the start. "Parla, diavolo!" is the interjection, the command which gives voice to the sleeping demon that lives both in Moses and in Michelangelo. There is in both of them an anguish that ruins and awakens love, and now it is its turn to speak.

23. It is necessary to remember that, after a long period of historiographical limbo after the eloquent praises uttered by Giorgio Vasari, and echoed by Benedetto Varchi, the first decades of the nineteenth century would revive Michelangelo exactly because of the undoubted understanding of his affiliation with that which was evil, and his melancholic temper. If it were necessary to update the famous Vasarian "paragone", Rafael would receive grace, and Michelangelo, disgrace.[14] While the first one would fully incorporate the visual synthesis of the Italian Renaissance, the second would be entrusted with the opposite, "an impetuous mountain river, which at once fertilizes and devastates." After the divine seal, attributed to Michelangelo by Ludovico Ariosto in canto III of "Orlando Furioso" (1516), Roland Fréart de Chambray, spokesman of the French classicism and admirer of the Apollonian restraint guarded by Poussin, would call him the Mauvais Ange de la Peinture.[15] By radically condemning the unacceptable union between Christian eschatology and the ancient myth in the Last Judgment fresco, the work Idées de la perfection de la peinture (1662), by the French theorist, is responsible for establishing the analogy between Michelangelo and Lucifer, the cursed angel expelled from Paradise.

24. Centuries after Michelangelo's defamation by Fréart de Chambray, whose work would henceforth be among the prescribed texts for arts education in France and would be quickly translated into English and Italian,[16] the parallelism established by him would be revived. The sculptor Jean-Jacques Feuchère[17] would remember in silence that the word Lucifer in Hebrew is equivalent to "helel" (helel; heylel), a derivative from the verb to regret, which became the fundamental action evoked in his work dated 1833 [Figure 2]. Hunched over, the devil is human; he is uncapable of supporting his own weight and leans his head one hand. But he is also an animal, with bat wings which hint at closing, forming a dome around him. He regrets his fall and the loss of his light. O Paraíso Perdido (The Lost Paradise) from 1667, written by Milton, translated into French in 1805 by Chateaubriand and republished, greatly influenced the artist, although it does not take too much effort to understand this work as a sensuous metaphor for the artist's own image. It carried a strong sense of the challenge of fearless creation, and the desire to equate oneself with God "just like Jehovah created Adam after his own image", as Generino dos Santos declared, becomes an audacious eagerness to outperform the divine accomplishment. Once unacceptable, the condemnation, the expulsion from paradise and the curse are the result of a presumptive fate: "The grove of a haunting pain?".

25. More than a cursed artist, Michelangelo seems to have become the very curse that falls on those who lurk in his shadow. After sculpting the image of the Florentine master in bronze and sending it to the 1843 Salon, Feuchère had his work rejected [Figure 3a]. It would be reused, years later, as a mere ornament on a Napoleon III style clock, so it would not disappear [Figure 3b]. It is worth remembering Xavier Sigalon, the artist in charge of making a copy of the Final Judgement for the chapel of the École des Beaux-Arts. Although acclaimed by names such as Alexandre Lenoir and Théophile Gautier after four years of daily work in the Sistine Chapel, Sigalon could not enjoy his success, for he died of cholera shortly after. His sudden death prevented him from fulfilling his desire to keep on making copies of the Florentine master's paintings.

26. Generino dos Santos, therefore, seems to be driven by this intense flow, ensuring, on the other hand, the place of Brazilian art in the global agenda. He detects in the work of Almeida Reis a kind of cursed tone, identifying in the work of Michelangelo a glimmer of demonic possession, an element learnt by the Brazilian sculptor and applied in the ”poet-reader” Michelangelo. In this game of references, the idea prevails that the artist's body is subject to an enraged fulmination of an existential torment, and this quality can cost one's vital substance.

27. Nevertheless, perhaps Generino dos Santos has turned into poetry what Vasari, in a word, called "terribilità", a michelangelian "topos" by which the artist would always be remembered. Among other characteristics, this would be associated with his saturnine and peevish temper, which led Michelangelo to dismiss any help, just to execute, alone and furious, the epopee in the fresco of the dome in the Sistine Chapel. Add to this the belief the fact that Michelangelo tortured the marble piece to force it to talk, as Sartre wrote,[18] regarding his ability to remove all the excess from the stone to make it potentially irresistible, not to mention his absolute ability to astonish those observing his work, a skill very well noted by Gonzaga Duque, who detected in the Almeida Reis plaster piece more than a representative reference, but the source of a visual problem:

28. Carved in an austere manner which is not too far from the great master’s both due to the violence and the width of the marks made by the spatula and the sentiment evoked by its shape, this body reminds us of that great Florentine who, in order to entertain Pedro de Médici, carved snow statues, and, in order to amaze Humankind, carved marble statues.[19]

29. In effect, "deaf storms of the human heart; the sparkling, dark and ruffled psychological struggles"[20] were detected by Gonzaga Duque as the driving force behind the work of Almeida Reis, who, in 1876, sent a plaster sculptural group entitled O gênio e a miséria (The genius and the misery) to the General Fine Arts Exhibition. It must be noted that the critic seems to already foresee a ruined future in the work of the Brazilian sculptor, whose pieces, although recent at that time, rested in fragments in his studio. Would not this be exactly the end of The genius and the misery, donated by the artist himself to an asylum for beggars in an apparently resigned attitude, suggesting he understood his work was somehow condemned? We can only imagine, as described by those who saw the piece, that it portrayed a Genius that succumbed to the voracious and ruthless force of Misery, which concentrated, at once, the void and the absolute evil.

30. The muscular effort, the pulsating strength of the material, the eloquent force that throbbed in the flesh made of plaster made a critic claim, hidden behind an alias, that the work was a comment about the "titanic, timeless and endless struggle between the same vulture that devoured the entrails of the chained Prometheus and all those who stole the sacred fire who, amidst tears and sighs, pass through the Earth".[21] The same critic ended his analysis with refined irony, recommending Almeida Reis to abandon the chisel, for the constant misunderstanding of the expressive value of his work would always result in his relentless sense of failure.

31. Almeida Reis was nevertheless an unpretentious artist in the intellectual world, unlike his friend Pedro Américo,[22] for example, who, portrayed him in 1888, the year before his death [Figure 4], curiously with the features of a mystical philosopher, in a black toga, with a goatee making a pointy chin, a serene and firm expression, an objective look and extending the hand with no hesitation: an invitation to follow him on a mission to establish a cosmic order according to his positivist faith. Almeida Reis, however, did not leave us many words, and the painting seems to lead us in the opposite direction to his silence, which remains until the present time. Michelangelo, on his part, wrote a book in the Sistine Chapel, and his poetry meditates on the plenitude of things and proposes theories. Maybe that's why the Brazilian artist submits himself to the dreary speechlessness of he who "had bent his forehead / Like a god creating a world in his thoughts.”

Bibliographic references

BALZAC, Honoré de. A obra-prima ignorada. In.: DIDI-HUBERMAN. A pintura encarnada. São Paulo: Escuta, 2012.

DUQUE ESTRADA, Luiz Gonzaga. A arte brasileira. Introduction and comments of Tadeu Chiarelli. Campinas: Mercado das Letras, 1995.

FRÉART DE CHAMBRAY, Roland. Idée de la perfection de la peinture. Paris: J. Ysambart, 1662.

MARTIN-FUGIER, Anne. La vie d’artiste au XIXe siècle. Paris: Éditions Louis Audibert, 2007.

MIRANDOLA. O gênio e a Miséria. Revista Musical e de Bellas Artes, May 31, 1879, year 1, p. 3.

OEHLER, Dolf. Art Névrose, análise sócio-psicológica do fracasso da Revolução em Flaubert e Baudelaire. Novos Estudos, n. 32, March 1992.

RAMOS, Renato Menezes. Almeida Reis, Michelangelo e o destino do artista. Revista Figura: studi sull’imagine nella tradizione clássica. 2014. Available at: <http://figura.art.br/2014_11_menezes.html>. Accessed on 09/23/2014

RÈPACI-COURTOIS, Gabriella. Michel-Ange et les écrivains français de la renaissance: grâce et disgrâce d’un itinéraire critique. Nouvelle Renue du Seizième Siècle, n. 8, 1990.

SANTOS, Generino dos. Humanidades: livro undécimo: o estatuário brasileiro C. C. Almeida Reis. Rio de Janeiro: Jornal do Commercio, 1939. v. 7.

SARTRE, Jean Paul. Baudelaire. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada S. A., 1968. Tercera edición.

SARTRE, Jean Paul. O sequestrado de Veneza. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005.

WÖFFLIN, Heinrich. A arte clássica. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1990.

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[1] Master in Art History - Unicamp, fellow teacher Fapesp. Graduated in Art History - UERJ

[2] SARTRE, Jean Paul. Baudelaire. Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada S. A., 1968, p 15. Tercera edición.

[3] OEHLER, Dolf. Art Névrose, análise sócio-psicológica do fracasso da Revolução em Flaubert e Baudelaire. Novos Estudos, n. 32, march 1992.

[4] Mentioned in: MARTIN-FUGIER, Anne. La vie d’artiste au XIXe siècle. Paris: Éditions Louis Audibert, 2007, p.  427.

[5] 1863 was deeply marked by the first Salon des Refusés, authorized by Napoleon III to exhibit the hundreds of pieces which were refused by the official event. This paradoxal event would be a definitive milestone in the history of the modern artistic institutions.

[6] Thanks to Alberto Martín, who introduced me to this work some time ago.

[7] Regarding the sponsorship of Almeida Reis, I could develop the matter in detail in: RAMOS, Renato Menezes. Almeida Reis, Michelangelo e o destino do artista. Revista Figura: studi sull’imagine nella tradizione clássica. 2014. Available at: <http://figura.art.br/2014_11_menezes.html>. Accessed on 09/23/2014

[8] BALZAC, Honoré de. A obra-prima ignorada. In.: DIDI-HUBERMAN. A pintura encarnada. São Paulo: Escuta, 2012, p. 156

[9] Almeida Reis dies on April 14, 1889.

[10] DUQUE ESTRADA, Luiz Gonzaga. A arte brasileira. Introduction and notes by Tadeu Chiarelli. Campinas: Mercado das Letras, 1995, p. 247.

[11] Back to Rio de Janeiro, Almeida Reis, together with the painter Antônio de Souza Lobo and the architect Rodrigues Moreira, creates O Acropólio, an association to oppose the official education, mainly regarding the European models. 

[12] SANTOS, Generino dos. Humanidades: livro undécimo: o estatuário brasileiro C. C. Almeida Reis. Rio de Janeiro: Jornal do Commercio, 1939. v. 7.

[13] RÈPACI-COURTOIS, Gabriella. Michel-Ange et les écrivains français de la renaissance: grâce et disgrâce d’un itinéraire critique. Nouvelle Renue du Seizième Siècle, n. 8, 1990, p. 65.

[14] WÖFFLIN, Heinrich. A arte clássica. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1990, p. 55.

[15] FRÉART DE CHAMBRAY, Roland. Idée de la perfection de la peinture. Paris: J. Ysambart, 1662, p. 65-66.

[16] The English version was created in 1668, by Evelyn, and the Italian one, although made by Anton Maria Salvini in 1685, would not be largely printed until 1809.

[17] Member of the group called Neo-florentins with which Almeida Reis had contact, as mentioned.

[18]SARTRE, Jean Paul. O sequestrado de Veneza. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005, p. 48.

[19] DUQUE ESTRADA, op. cit., p. 246. Gonzaga Duque mentions an excerpt from the Vasarian text of the 1568 edition, inexistent in the first edition of 1550, related to the life of Michelangelo published by Ascanio Condivi in 1553.

[20]Ibidem, p. 247

[21] MIRANDOLA. O gênio e a Miséria. Revista Musical e de Bellas Artes, May 31, 1879, year 1, p. 3.

[22] Pedro Américo advocated in 1868, in the Brussels Sciences University, the thesis Ciência e os Sistemas: questões de história e filosofia natural, and he received the title of Doctor of Sciences.