Austrian Mission in Brazil, 1817
Lecture by Valéria Piccoli as part of the lecture series Transatlantic Modernities between Brazil and Austria.
The different itineraries followed through the interior of the country by members of the so-called Austrian Mission from 1817 on bequeathed to Brazilian culture an impressive corpus of scientific and topographical images of Brazil. This communication aims to analyze this legacy in a broader context that considers the presence of other missions (either scientific or not) and other traveler-artists crossing the Brazilian territory in the first decades of the 19th century. It also intends to reflect on the possible impacts of this legacy on the Brazilian artistic production at the time, considering its contribution to the country’s own imaginary of an exuberant tropical nature.
Art historian and curator, Valéria Piccoli has been Chief Curator at Pinacoteca de São Paulo since 2012. Her research work focuses on 19th century Brazilian art, especially the iconography of European traveler artists working in Brazil. She has collaborated in international projects such as Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic (Pinacoteca / Terra Foundation for American Art / Art Gallery of Ontario, 2015-2016), Terra Brasilis (Europalia Festival, Brussels, 2011), among others.