ANTÔNIO FRANCISCO LISBOA, called ALEIJADINHO
(Ouro Prêto, Brazil, ca. 1738 – 1814)
Christ Crucified
Polychrome cedar wood and plaster
38 ½ x 31 ⅞ x 7 ⅛ inches (98 x 81 x 18 cm)
Provenance:
Orlando Gallego de Bardeci, Marquis of Bardeci, Spain.
The Brazilian sculptor known as Aleijadinho is generally considered to be the greatest sculptor of the Colonial Americas. His work is also the rarest, as nearly all his carvings in stone and wood remain in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil, where he lived and worked. Only one sculpture confidently attributed to him has appeared on the art market in recent times, that over 25 years ago.[i] Aleijadinho’s style is both figurative and expressionistic, at times painful to view and experience, his art reflective of his extraordinary life. The present Christ Crucified, intricately carved and powerful in its emotive content, is a recently discovered work by the artist that has emerged from a Spanish private collection.
The artist’s life and career were marked by his mixed-race and his eventual disability. Antônio Francisco Lisboa was born into slavery—the son of the Portuguese architect Manuel Francisco Lisboa and his African slave, Isabel—and was manumitted by his father at baptism. The details of his artistic education are few, but it is assumed that he was trained by his father in drawing, architecture, and sculpture. Initially he worked as a collaborator and day laborer before establishing an independent workshop in 1770. At the height of his career, around 1777, the artist’s body started to be ravaged by the onset of an unknown degenerative condition, which led to his disfigurement and continuous pain for the rest of his life. This earned him the sobriquet by which he is now known—Aleijadinho, meaning “the little cripple.” The artist’s face became disfigured, and he also lost many fingers and both of his feet, which caused him to walk on his knees. He often had to be carried around for longer trips (several surviving receipts for payments for transport attest to this). Despite this, Aleijadinho continued to be active as a sculptor and oversaw projects undertaken by his pupils, only stopping his activity towards the end of his life when his condition caused his blindness.
This expressive and imposing Christ is a prime example of Aleijadinho’s highly personal sculptural idiom, marked by its dynamic movement, theatricality, and emotional intensity. Carved in polychromed wood and constructed from multiple joined elements, the sculpture’s anatomical realism and expressive pathos are conveyed through a sinuous contrapposto. Christ’s knees are bent and his torso gently twisted under the weight of crucifixion, and his arms are outstretched with evident muscular tension. The sculpture is conceived with remarkable attention to anatomical detail—veins protrude visibly along the arms and legs, the fingers are splayed with nail holes puncturing the half-open palms, and blood trickles from his wounds in stylized rivulets.
Christ’s head is inclined in sorrow and his face masterfully carved with his brow furrowed in agony, framed by the crown of thorns and deeply grooved strands of hair. The figure’s facial features—particularly the arched eyebrows forming a pronounced “V,” aquiline nose, parted lips, and bifurcated beard—correspond closely to Aleijadinho’s best known works, including his Flagellation of Christ in the Museu da Inconfidência in Ouro Preto (Fig. 1). The perizoma—Christ’s loincloth—is executed with particular elegance, its folds cascading in baroque pleats that echo similar draperies in Aleijadinho’s oeuvre. It was undoubtedly influenced by Indo-Portuguese ivory sculpture from Goa, whose aesthetic influence was widely felt in the visual culture of colonial Minas Gerais in this period.
Fig. 1. Aleijadinho, Flagellation of Christ, Museu da Inconfidência,
Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Aleijadinho’s authorship of the present sculpture has been confirmed by Dr. Rafael Schunk (written communication, January 2024).[ii] Schunk has written of this work:
“During the Baroque and Rococo era in Portuguese America, especially in its golden age, there was a significant aesthetic change in the elaboration of sacred image carvings. The hieratic imagery practiced in the convents located on the coast starts to be reformulated in the secular workshops of the interior, and the planning of the sculptures in the Serras Gerais, once financed by the abundance of gold mining provided a sophistication and improvement in the carving, moving through the body, showing the balance and movement of the canons: pleats, draperies and punched, rich golden estofado and silver accessories promoted the illusion of sculptural mobility; drama and emotion in the compositions of collective worship, an invitation to liturgical celebrations.
In the Colonial period in Brazil, religious art reaches the apex of ornamentation, in line with the sacraments implanted by the Church and the State, according to the regime of the Portuguese Patronage, in which the Holy See, through papal bulls, delegated to the monarchs the administration and organization of the Catholic religion in the domains beyond the sea. For this, administrators and clerics resorted to striking, attractive rituals, within a theatrical, allegorical and persuasive spirit: altars with gleaming implements and richly gilt images were intended for conversion, the baptism of catechumens, communion, mysteries and funerals.
This Christ Crucified in Agony, produced in Minas Gerais during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, is a piece of erudite labor, with details carved separately—simulating body movement of tension and suffering, expressed by the flexion of the knees and deformation of the fingers with carnations on the half-open palms.
Christ’s expression is accentuated by the visible veins and the face imbued in pain, the back wounded by whipping, the knees skinned, the polychromy simulating blood dripping on the forehead and throughout the body, the rib pierced by a spear, arched head and a winding strand of hair falling on the right shoulder; baroque-rococo theatricality of extreme erudition; dramatic and allegorical features that are found in other works carved by Aleijadinho that are admired in collections in museums and churches throughout Brazil.”
[i] Nossa Senhora das Dores, The Virgin of the Sorrows, polychromed wood sculpture, height 26 ¾ inches (68 cm). Sold, Christie’s, New York, 28 May 1998, lot 77.
[ii] A catalogue entry on this painting by Dr. Schunk is available upon request.