Le baroque colonisateur : principales orientations théoriques dans la production historiographique

The present article aims to present a general panorama of historiographical and artistic literature on colonial, or baroque, art in Brazil. Thematic, chronological, or geographical subdivisions are no longer sufficient for writing a “total history” embracing this production in its entirety. The authors have therefore chosen to focus on the principal orientations of scholarly output. Critical analyses and research on baroque in Brazil are vast and vibrant fields of investigation. A topic of interest to art historians beginning in the nineteenth century, the baroque, a symbol of national art and the origins of a specific Brazilian aesthetic, became in the twentieth century an extensive field of study. Such an operation was unusual for the artistic production of Latin America. The equation of baroque with a national art and the numerous debates on the extent of exchanges with international sources, as well as syncretism with local, European, African, and Asian formal elements, caused the debate to expand and traditional approaches to be revised. These approaches, in turn, were transformed and perfected by the increasing accessibility and systematization of data on arts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.