Atlantic Masters: Three Early Modern Afro-Brazilian Artists

Brazil received the largest number of Africans enslaved into the Americas: nearly five million by some estimates. Thus, Brazil became the world’s largest slavocracy. But slavery was not the only experience available to Africans and Brazilians of African descent in slavery-era Brazil. Numerically, Afro-Brazilians dominated the arts in colonial Brazil. However, very few of those artists and artisans, many of whom were enslaved, are known by name today. Free Afro-Brazilian artists, such as Aleijadinho, Mestre Valentim, and Teófilo de Jesus, on the other hand, fared far better. In this article, I turn to these three mixed-race artists’ works and what little is known of their lives, not only as exemplary Afro-Brazilian artists but also as some of the most important artists of Brazil’s late colonial period, where they had the greatest impact on the artistic developments in their home regions. These artists’ careers thus illustrate how artists of African descent contributed to and defined urban and sacred spaces in the early modern Atlantic. This is therefore an invitation to look at Afrodescendants’ role in early modern art beyond the anonymity of slavery and static representation.