Notes on the painting A Pátria (1919), by Pedro Bruno

Abstract

This article will focus on an unequivocal national symbol, namely the republican Brazilian flag, which was designed by Décio Villares and reproduced by an academic painter along the first half of the twentieth century. The departing point of our reflection is a work entitled A Pátria, an oil on canvas, painted in 1919 by Pedro Bruno and exposed at the permanent exhibition of Museu da República, in Rio de Janeiro. We will begin by reporting the socio- historical circumstances at the first Brazilian republican times that have witnessed the symbolic battles over the adoption of a markedly positivist national flag. The painting A Pátria will be approached in its double aspect of both an iconic sign, related to the mimetic representation of the world, and also a museological one, headed to mnemonic consecration. A formal analysis of the painting will essay to respond our major point which writes: to what extent representations of the nation, built by a few Brazil interpreters, are explicited or forgotten in this very iconographic discourse? Or, in other words, are there agreements or disagreements between traditional word narrators and this particular image narrator?