The martyr of fanaticism

José de Brito intends to evoke, in this work, the terror of the Inquisition, provoking "a tremor in the whole body" as Rui Almedina, a critic from Oporto, said when he came across the painting. The composition is organized in two diagonals that intersect - three men in black and the vulnerability of a naked female body. Under a focus of light, his nakedness articulates metaphorically with that of Christ on the cross. Projected by the light from the window on the back wall, martyr’s hallucinations arise, in a clear allusion to the ancient Christians in Roman circuses devoured by lions, as if from a screen, in reference to the novelty of the magic lantern or the latest cinematic experiences.
Realized in Paris and reproduced in Ilustration Française, this historical composition is a pretext for an erotic-dramatic nude painting, unusual in Portugal and resulting of an eleven year stay in France. Organized in contrasts of shadows, reference to a tenebrist memory or to a columbanesque aesthetic, some aspects of the realistic description are diluted in the little sore face of the girl or in the imprecise faces of the inquisitors, revealing an anti-clerical spirit, proper to a culture of end of century and announcer of republican values.
Connections can also be made with Gustave Courbet (L'Atelier du peintre, 1855) or Edouard Manet (Déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1863), in the marking of contrasts naked / dressed, white / black, plastic expedients transmuted into a vast composition of academic conventionalism where some symbolic intent is diluted in prosaic solutions, omitting the aesthetic proposals of the two French artists.