Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuriesHitchcock, Henry-Russell
History
Architecture : $b nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell
Architecture, Modern -- 19th century; Architecture, Modern -- 20th century
Just as the Iberian peninsula was in general devoid of significant
architectural activity in the first half of the nineteenth century, so
in the Spanish and Portuguese lands beyond the seas there came no early
wave of autochthonous Romantic Classicism to submerge and succeed the
Baroque that had flourished there to the end of the colonial period and
beyond. In Brazil Dom Pedro, later the first Brazilian Emperor, under
whose rule the centre of gravity of Portuguese civilization moved from
Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, imported in 1816 a group of French artists.
They were expected to found a new post-Baroque Brazilian culture much as
Alexander I’s architects had done a little earlier in Russia. One was
the French architect Grandjean de Montigny, author with Famin of that
most influential work _L’Architecture toscane_ to which all Europe
turned for _quattrocento_ models, who had been employed by Jerome
Bonaparte in Westphalia as long as Napoleon’s Empire lasted. He erected
in Rio in 1826 the first home for the new Imperial Academy of Fine Arts,
founded of course on the model of the Parisian École des Beaux-Arts, the
Market, and the extant Custom House. He also trained a group of
Brazilians who gave local architectural production an Empire flavour
that lasted until it was superseded well after the mid century by a wave
of Second Empire influence.
In vernacular building traditional treatments were often maintained in
Brazil, notably the use of _azulejos_ (glazed tiles) for wall surfaces
and of rich painted colour for the ubiquitous stucco. But more
sophisticated work can be very French indeed. For example, the Itamaratí
Palace in Rio of 1851-4 by J. M. J. Rebelo, a pupil of Grandjean de
Montigny, might well be taken for a _hôtel particulier_ erected in the
new quarters of Paris in the earlier decades of the century (Plate 47B).
Beautifully restored, this now houses the Brazilian Foreign Office—one
says ‘Itamaratí’ as one says ‘Quai d’Orsay’. Rebelo also built the
Summer Palace at Petrópolis. The Santa Isabel Theatre at Recife,
Pernambuco, built about 1845, which is so like a French provincial
theatre of this period, is by another French architect who had settled
in Brazil in 1840, L.-L. Vauthier.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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