In Brazilian historiography and national culture, ban-deirantes occupy a very important and highly ambigu-ous position—praised for their endurance and discov-eries, and condemned for th
Trang 1In Brazilian historiography and national culture,
ban-deirantes occupy a very important and highly
ambigu-ous position—praised for their endurance and
discov-eries, and condemned for their brutalities and cruelties
that were integral to Indian slaving in the backcountry
By 1600, most residents of São Paulo (which at the
time was a small settlement of only about 120 houses
and 2,000 people) were Portuguese, Indian, and
racial-ly mixed mamelucos (the Portuguese equivalent of the
Spanish term mestizo) The predominant language was
Tupí Their city and homesteads vulnerable to attack,
Paulistas initially launched bandeiras as a defensive
measure against hostile natives By around 1600,
ban-deiras had transformed into offensive slave-raiding
expeditions The indigenous inhabitants around São
Paulo having all but disappeared by this time, victims
to enslavement and diseases, the Paulistas found
them-selves chronically short of servile labor The bandeiras
were their effort to remedy this chronic labor shortage
Most bandeiras left no written record, though many
others did, thanks in large part to Jesuit missionaries or
for-eigners who accompanied them through the backcountry
and reported on their experiences As one Jesuit priest
marveled, “One is astounded by the boldness and
impertinence with which, at such great cost, men allow
themselves to enter that great sertão for two, three, four
or more years They go without God, without food,
naked as the savages, and subject to all the persecutions
and miseries in the world Men venture for two or three
hundred leagues into the sertão, serving the devil with
such amazing martyrdom, in order to trade or steal
slaves.” A classic account is by the Jesuit priest Pedro
Domingues of 1613, which described a journey of
sev-eral thousand kilometers lasting 19 months
Occasion-ally clashing with Spanish settlements emanating out
from the Río de la Plata, the bandeirantes helped to
define colonial Brazil’s southern boundaries As time
went on, they also clashed repeatedly with the Jesuits,
who saw their slave raiding as antithetical to their own
goal of converting the natives to Christianity and saving
souls This conflict between bandeirantes and Jesuits in
colonial Brazil can be aptly compared to similar
con-flicts between encomenderos and religious missions in
colonial Spanish America during this same period
By around 1650, there occurred a broad shift among
bandeiras from slave raiding to the search for precious
metals By this time, African slaves were fulfilling the
colony’s servile labor requirements, while the Jesuit
mis-sions had fortified their defenses, making Indian slaving
more difficult Greatly extending geographic knowledge
of the vast Brazilian interior, the bandeirantes have come
to occupy a position within Brazilian national culture akin to the cowboys of the United States or the gauchos
of Argentina, symbolizing the spirit of adventure, inde-pendence, and, ironically, freedom It is estimated that
bandeirantes enslaved and caused the premature deaths
of hundreds of thousands of Indians during the decades
of their greatest activity
See also encomienda in Spanish America; Jesuits in Asia; slave trade, Africa and the
Further reading: Hemming, John Red Gold: The Conquest
of the Brazilian Indians London: Papermac, 1978; Morse, Richard M., ed The Bandeirantes: The Historical Role of the Brazilian Pathfinders New York: Knopf, 1965.
Michael J Schroeder
baroque tradition in Europe
“Baroque” describes both a period and the artistic style that dominated the 17th century The baroque style orig-inated in Rome, Italy, c 1600, largely as an expression of Catholicism and the royal courts, and spread throughout Europe, lasting into the early 18th century Following the Counter Reformation in the 16th century, the Roman Catholic Church, the main patron of the arts in Europe, required new forms of art in ecclesiastical contexts to educate the masses and to strengthen the church’s spiri-tual and political positions
Baroque painting not only includes portraits of saints and the Virgin, but also encompasses numer-ous styles and diverse themes—large-scale religinumer-ous works with monumental figures that clearly convey a narrative, which were intended to convince worship-ers to adhere to the church’s doctrines; heroic mytho-logical and allegorical cycles, designed to engage the intellect of the viewer and glorify royalty; portraiture; and still life Seventeenth-century painting comprises five stylistic categories Caravaggio (1571–1610), who stressed painting from the model and the use of chiar-oscuro, the strong contrast of shade and light, helped
to spread naturalism from Rome into Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands
Classicism, represented by Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) and his school, drew from Renaissance and Venetian sources to create works of great drama, vitality, and grandeur that appealed to the senses Aca-demic classicism, or the Louis XIV style, developed in France through the Royal Academy Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) popularized the later high baroque style,
baroque tradition in Europe