Uma selva entre o céu e o inferno: representações iconográficas e literárias dos índios do Brasil pelos portugueses nos séculos XVI e XVII

Abstract

In April 1500 the fleet of Pedro Álvares Cabral initiates the contact and registration through the pages of the letter of his scrivener, Pero Vaz de Caminha of a new world and a new humanity: the Indians who inhabited the territory that is currently known by Brazil. In the course of the sixteenth century, these different people and cultures were decoded and reinterpreted in various ways by letters, books and numerous handwritten documents. In the field of Portuguese visual arts, it was not different. This other plays a secondary role almost ever inserted in two main thematics, the religious art and the great voyages but no less interesting: the taste for the exotic, a hallmark during the period of the overseas expansions, not only in Portugal, but in different European regions, coupled with the ethnocentrism and the influence of Christianity, eventually characterized the Indians of Brazil, mutatis mutandis, as the new wild men . To some people, they are more like beasts, closer to hell; to others, potential Christians, closer to heaven