de Mello.
Gregório de Matos Guerra, a major baroque poet and a contemporary of Antonio Vieira, was born in Bahia into a wealthy family of sugar planters. As a member of the colonial elite, Gregório was sent to Portugal to pursue higher education. He studied at the University of Coimbra, and upon completing his education in 1661 he married a local woman and became a judge in Portugal. As a result of personal and political problems, Gregório lost his position as judge and returned to Brazil 1682. The cultural and material changes he experienced during his lifetime make him one of the best representatives of the Brazilian baroque poets. His models included the Spanish poets Quevedo, Calderón, and Góngora. In contrast to Vieira’s elegant sermons defending the interests of the Jesuit order, the satirical verses attributed to Gregório de Matos depict the economic and social upheavals that he experienced in Portugal and in Brazil.
Gregório de Matos wrote religious and lyrical poetry, but he is best known for his satirical poetry. These satirical verses describe the contradictions of colonial Brazilian society. Gregório focuses on what he saw in Bahia upon his return from Portugal and portrays the colony as an upside-down world. Like Quevedo, Gregório de Matos sought to correct the excess of liberty that he believed was the cause of the decadence of society through satire. Many of his aggressive and pornographic verses were directed towards the governor of Bahia, Luis Alves da Câmara Coutinho, and led to Gregório’s exile in Angola. Later on, he returned to Brazil on the conditions that he give up writing satirical verses and no longer live in Bahia. He died in Recife in 1696, a year before the death of Antonio Vieira in 1697. In the last four decades, particularly with the neo-baroque and tropicalist movement, Gregório’s poems have been recycled by poets like Harold de Campos, and also by the popular singer-songwriter Caetano Veloso. João Adolfo Hansen’s book, A sátira e o engenho, is one of the best critical studies of the satirical poetry attributed to Gregório de Matos. James Amado’s edition of Obras completas de Gregório de Matos (1969) is the most complete collection of the poetry attributed to the most important baroque satirist of Brazil.
Botelho de Oliveira was a contemporary of Gregório de Matos and Antonio Vieira. Although critics such as Varnhagen and Antonio Candido feel that Botelho’s baroque production does not compare in quality to the writings of Vieira and Matos, Botelho de Oliveira’s Música do Parnaso has the merit of being the first volume of poetry published in Portugal by a native-born Brazilian poet. One of the most celebrated poems found in the collection is entitled “Ilha da Maré.” The poem is a good example of the ufanista spirit that characterized writings such as the Carta by Caminha and the Prosopopéia by Bento Teixeira that glorified the Brazilian land and all its resources. Música do Parnaso praises the natural beauty and delicious foods found in Bahia, the poet’s homeland.
In the fields of history and historiography, some names stand out in colonial Brazil. Pero de Magalhães Gândavo, a Portuguese historian who lived in Brazil around 1570, is thought to be the author of História da privíncia de Santa Cruz a que vulgarmente chamamos Brasil and Tratado da terra do Brasil. Gabriel Soares de Sousa, a plantation owner who lived in Bahia at about the same time, is believed to have written Tratado descritivo do Brasil, published in Rio in 1851. The work of these early historians can also be considered exemplary of ufanismo. They portray Brazil as a land of beauty and wealth.
Not all historians were so positive in tone. Frei Vicente do Salvador’s (1564–1636) Historia do Brasil details the political and military crisis that he observed in Brazil during the period that Portugal and its possessions were part of the Spanish Empire. Rocha Pita’s baroque História da América Portuguesa, published in Portugal in 1730, comprises ten volumes. The first two volumes describe the geography and the inhabitants of Brazil. The remaining volumes describe the political and administrative aspects of Brazilian colonial society.
The Baroque style did not end with Gregório de Matos, Antonio Vieira, and the other writers of the period, but rather extended far beyond the chronological frontiers of the seventeenth century. The Baroque influence remained strong not only in literature but also in architecture and art. In the first part of the eighteenth century, the town of Vila Rica de Ouro Preto became the center of the baroque architecture, sculpture, and other forms of visual arts that characterized the Portuguese Empire at that time.
Neoclassicism, Arcadianism, and the Arcadias
In the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly under the patronage of the Marquis de Pombal, the literature that emerged in Brazil shows the predominance of neoclassicism, the style favored by the Marquis. In his recent book Mecenato Pombalino e Poesia Neoclássica, the Brazilian scholar Ivan Teixeira makes extensive use of archival sources to study Pombal’s relationship with the Portuguese and Brazilian writers and artists of his time. Following in the footsteps of their counterparts in Portugal, many Brazilian intellectuals who wanted the patronage of the powerful Marquis of Pombal wrote encomiastic poems praising his enlightened ideas and his neoclassic style. José Basílio da Gama (1741–95), educated by the Jesuits as a student, wrote laudatory verses to Pombal’s daughter and also produced the epic poem O Uraguai. Basílio’s epic, which was written a few years after Pombal expelled the Jesuits from the Portuguese territories in 1759, conformed to Pombal’s policies and saved the Brazilian neoclassic poet from being persecuted as a Jesuit.
José de Santa Rita Durão was an Augustinian priest who, although born in Brazil, lived in Portugal, where he had problems with the Portuguese elite. Perhaps to gain the sympathy of the members of the court, Durão wrote a wordy and pedestrian epic entitled Caramuru (1781). Durão epic poem praises the Portuguese people for bringing civilization to the Indians of Brazil. The hero of his epic was not a figure like Anchieta, who spent his life teaching the Indians, but a Portuguese sailor named Diogo Álvares Correia, who was saved by Indians after a shipwreck on the coast of Brazil around 1510. Diogo Alvares is transformed into a hero and portrayed as the one responsible for transforming the natives into civilized people.
Arcadianism appeared in Europe as a result of the Enlightenment and the formation of the first academies. The two movements arrived in Brazil almost simultaneously. Abandoning the baroque tradition, the followers of Arcadianism preached a return to the peaceful joys of nature and the purity and simplicity of thought and diction associated with Greek and Roman verse. Although marginalized in a colony such as Brazil, where printing presses were still prohibited, the first gatherings of intellectuals in Brazil occurred during the second decade of the eighteenth century. In 1724, the short-lived Brazilian Academy of the Neglected was founded in Bahia. Other groups of isolated intellectuals gathered sporadically to study and discuss such subjects as literature, history, botany, and zoology. Some of them re-created the Brazilian Academy of the Neglected and the Academy of the Happy Men.
The term Arcadias refers to the neoclassical cultural and philosophical groups that surfaced in colonial Brazil in the last half of the eighteenth century. The adverse intellectual environment in which these intellectuals lived without a press and dissociated from contemporary developments in Europe and from their homeland killed off the first Brazilian academies. It was not until the last decades of the eighteenth century that the Arcadian movement gained strength in Brazil. Following the model of the philosophers of the French enlightenment and the foundation of the Arcádia Lusitana in Lisbon in 1756 under the patronage of King José I (ruled 1750–77), a group of Brazilian intellectuals, including clergymen, lawyers, doctors, and scientists, frequently gathered to share ideas. These intellectuals were known as arcades mineiros owing to the fact that most of them lived in Minas Gerais.
The members of this movement included writers such as Tomás Antonio Gonzaga (1744–1810), Inácio José de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744–93), Cláudio Manuel da Costa (1729–89), and Manuel Inácio da Silva Alvarenga (1749–1814). Many of them had been supported by the Marquis of Pombal. They adopted Arcadian pseudonyms and wrote poetry that associated them with Greek and Roman idyllic poets. However, Pombal fell from power around 1777, as a result of King José’s
