The Religious Art of Portinari

"It was said to be materialistic, but the saints, of course, did not believe. Who painted that wonderful Pampulha, who had the gift of transmitting the mystic in a San Francisco, who expressed, as only Candinho did, the torture and the vocation of sanctity, in his figures, much prayed through his brushes."

Dinah Silveira de Queiroz

“Portinari was also a great sacred painter. His series of works in the genre, above all, has significant meaning. It wraps up, so to speak, the golden cycle of sacred painting in the history of Brazilian baroque. … Portinari is the most complete artist of the style, considering our whole set of religious paintings.”

Antonio Bento

“If we compare, for instance, two genius representatives of modern or contemporary painting, Marc Chagall and Cândido Portinari, we will find in both the palpable, visible representation of two different but not opposite paths, of bringing heaven to earth, invisible to visible, eternal to modern, God to man or man ascending to God. … in a Cândido Portinari we will find a creator who is accidentally religious, but an art that is intentionally supernatural, where the painter’s genius starts with what is visible, with the tangible characters and then gets to the supernatural subject, the visible presence of God in things, facts and men that characterizes the religious art of the Renaissance. That was when spontaneous medieval theocentrism started to move to anthropocentrism or the worldliness of intentional religious art, whether modern or contemporary.”

Alceu Amoroso Lima

“The religious art of a Portinari seems to be indirectly derivative of the religious painting of the Renaissance, but put in a tragic environment, not formalistic, dazzled, and optimistic like that of painters or artists from the Renaissance, enchanted with discovering the world without negating God."

Alceu Amoroso Lima

"Portinari is one of the descendants of this anthropocentrism, but with a tragic, Brazilian accent that makes it absolutely singular. …”

Alceu Amoroso Lima

"I have always been impressed by the paradox of a painter like Portinari, personally deprived of a distinct or confessional religious faith, but aesthetically able to paint such diverse wonders, shown in this volume, as well as others of various types, but all equally genius in the object of their creation. …

.. Only in 1956, when I went to Ribeirão Preto and Brodowski looking to unearth the mystery of Portinari, the domestic environment of his childhood and adolescence, did I find the secret to this apparent paradox."

Alceu Amoroso Lima

"We know it is impossible to unveil the secret and sacred of geniality. Portinari was the greatest genius in our history of painting. I don’t intend to unearth a genius’s secret. But, in fact, the small thread I think I discovered in Portinari’s case is that of a deep, essentially authentic and universal art of objectively Christian vein, in an artist who apparently did not experience a personal, explicit religious feeling."

Alceu Amoroso Lima

"In Portinari’s case, I attribute a start to the paradox solution to that domestic atmosphere surrounding his childhood and especially his adolescence, a time in human life when we live not only from 12 to 18, but all ages, since it is in childhood and adolescence that human beings predict and create the marked traces of their personality forever. It is in the Portinari from Brodowski that we will find the universal Portinari who can and should be confronted with Marc Chagall, to speak only of the greatest Brazilian painter of all time."

Alceu Amoroso Lima

“This mystery, which has always intrigued me, was about understanding how a man with no conscious religious faith can paint so well, so wonderfully well, canvases of a religious subject. I know all too well that an artist’s qualities have nothing to do with the object of the creating genius. And the Parnassians and Naturalists even defended, though few practiced it, that those two things should be completely separate: the artist’s genius and the object or theme of his creation. In any case, however, this mystery has always intrigued me.”

Alceu Amoroso Lima

“And, now, I think I have deciphered the enigma by personally meeting Portinari’s friend, his old parents, and one of his sisters, as well as the house where he was born, the square in Brodowski where he played soccer with the other boys (and which he reproduced in some of his paintings), the Saint Anthony chapel in the middle, surrounded by thatch and with rough benches, like the small chapels in the backlands.

The city is located at the start of a hill, with very wide streets and low houses, all the color of clay and swept by the wind.”

Alceu Amoroso Lima

In a recent testimony, Brazilian art critic Israel Pedrosa commented: “The most important of Portinari’s murals is the one of Saint Francis of Pampulha...

... The one he did with Saint Francis of Pampulha is extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily strong, unparalleled in the world painting of the time...

... At a period when it was believed that sacred painting was finished, discarded, and even mural painting had fallen out of the artistic manifestation’s vocabulary, Saint Francis of Pampulha comes as a rebirth of every cultural heritage possibility, both pre-Renaissance and Renaissance. It is evidence of the possibilities of formal renovation of avant-garde movements of the 19th and 20th century.”

Israel Pedrosa

“Only a man close to the Gospels would have Portinari’s view of war and peace.”

José Lins do Rego