Images of Celestial Bodies and the Art of Emblems in the Decoration of Jesuit Spaces from the Amazon to Argentina

Abstract

The representation of astral bodies had good fortune in the iconography of Latin American art. In the Jesuit missions of Portuguese America, the sun, the moon and the stars, in different iconographic programs are represented, for example, by the pictorial decoration of emblems on the ceilings of the sacristies of the school churches of Belém and Vigia in Pará (eighteenth century), as well as in the painted altarpieces in the São Miguel Chapel in São Paulo (seventeenth century). In São Luís, the sun, the moon and the stars, along with other Marian emblems also adorn the arches of the seventeenth-century altarpiece of the Jesuit church of Nossa Senhora da Luz. In Argentina, emblems carved in polychrome wood, taken from L’Imago Primi Saeculis, a book published in Antwerp in celebration of the first centenary of the Society of Jesus (1640), decorate the walls of the nave and the private chapel of the Jesuit church of Córdoba (seventeenth century). Thus, migrations of symbols and images took place, crossing oceans, through illustrated books and the culture of emblematic tradition. It is important, then, to analyze how these elements, painted and sculpted by other hands, with other techniques and materials were reinterpreted and reworked so that in the Portuguese Amazon or in Cordoba in Argentina, the churches of the Company can be decorated with moonlit, starry and sunny skies.