Belos panoramas, matizes imaginários: a cidade das províncias do norte na obra de Charles Landseer e William Burchell (1825-1830)

Abstract

The representation of the Brazilian landscape of the early nineteenth century set up as an important issue for the construction of imagery identity of the empire; inserted in this iconographic corpus, there is the production of European travelers who, under the most distinctive insignia, reported to pen and ink, watercolors and inks, changes in the colony just heave the seat condition of the Portuguese Empire. This pictorial production helped in the construction of what is as Brazilian urban landscape of the nineteenth century, permeated the studies and has been consolidated and legitimized by historiography during the first half of the twentieth century. This thesis aims to analyze the iconographic representations of the urban landscape of the provinces of Pernambuco, Bahia and the Gão-Para held in the first quarter of the nineteenth century by two English travelers: William John Burchell and Charles Landseer. It is intended to observe the perspectives that open from reading the handlings of these images offer the glimpse of a different approach for interpreting the complex picture of the urban landscape of Brazilian towns and cities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Members of the Diplomatic English Mission, headed by Sir Charles Stuart, whose goal was the negotiation of the recognition by Portugal of the recent Brazilian Empire, were designed to depict and document the path on Brazilian soil of the entourage. The analysis was based on the literature review, focusing on questioning the iconographic material produced by Burchell and Landseer as a historiographical source on the subject and analysis of iconography selected through formal and interpretative reading. The iconographic material reveals historical transformations experienced by the society to which it belongs; however, there is more in this speech: works of art are not mirror, give us aspects of reality from stratagems: either shifting or blurring elements, now resizing aspects of the real. documentary character of investees from its production, the work of two travelers on urban landscapes of the provinces proved to be permeated by figurative schemes whose job adds layers of meaning still little explored.