Views on African art in Brazil: lightings in the track of the hidden’s authorship of the Afro-Brazilian objects in museums

Abstract

In examining objects preserved in collections related of ancients Candomble’s Terreiros, Marianno Carneiro da Cunha finded out and profiled a Nago-Yoruba aesthetic tradition created in Brazil that have been considered as one of the first form of Afro-Brazilian Art, or a continuation of African Art in Brazil. We expanded the schollar’s established sampling rooted in this tradition in gathering a new corpus presented in this article, in trying to set potentialities of the stylistic analysis that he used and introduced in Brazil as a methodological procedure employed in the study of material culture of African origin. The obtained data reveal that these objects, far beyond from what they originally represent, can constitute merely an emblematic visual repertoire of the hybrid approaches adopted in the Brazilian academic production on the Black in the country, just as on African cultures, if these objects are not retaked under of self-expressions of materiality.