At the airport in Salvador—the capital of Brazil’s northeast state of Bahia—José Bezerra’s carved wood statues of Catholic sacred personages stand ready for sale to national and international travelers. Bezerra usually does not sign his unpainted and occasionally multihued figures. As folklorists Henry Glassie and Pravina Shukla put it in Sacred Art: Catholic Saints and Candomblé Gods in Modern Brazil, these works are “anonymous commodities in the urban market” (147) of interest to religious devotees, folk art collectors, and souvenir buyers. Itself an antidote to such commercial anonymity, this encyclopedic and richly illustrated publication allows Glassie and Shukla to reunite Bezerra and his artwork, as it does for other vernacular creators of Catholic and Candomblé visual arts, by providing an ethnographic account of the creative process in contemporary northeast Brazil. The authors illuminate the aesthetic, religious, and philosophical underpinnings of these artists of sacred art through their detailed documentation and accessible prose. As Glassie and Shukla make clear, they are not concerned with holy texts or clerical exegesis but instead with the thoughts, feelings, life experiences, processes, and finished products of living artists crafting religious material culture.
The manifestation of the sacred in the mundane world is a puissant moment of charged encounter. Revelation occurs during the heightened ecstasy of dance, with the artfully performed word, in moments of contemplative quietude, or instances of murmured prayer. At other times, as the authors eloquently demonstrate throughout the fifteen chapters of the book, the divine also emerges gradually through the shaping of clay, carving of wood, forging of metal, and painting on canvas. Sculpture and paintings bring our focused attention to the holy and are vehicles for channeling divine presence in the everyday. The authors locate those moments and sites where the artistic and sacred emerge and join.
Sacred Art is a pilgrimage of sorts, taking the reader on an extensive journey to churches (not to the terreiros, Candomblé temples, however, because of religious proscriptions), markets, and streets, but most significantly to the workshops, ateliers, and olarias (potteries) of the numerous artists documented. The reader discovers the artisans’ biographies, philosophies, skills and practices, relationships to learning and mentoring, and their interpretations of works of art that precede them. The book is organized as a series of journeys to towns and cities in three Brazilian regions. Glassie and Shukla stress the imperative of traveling to where artists reside and work, writing that “there is no alternative to fieldwork. It’s hot, sure, the food is bad, you get sick, but unless you find fuzzy speculation and faddish rhetoric sufficient, you will head for the field” (99). This collaborative account moves at a flaneur’s easy pace but also with the targeted purpose and intellectual rigor of folklife scholars. A decade of fieldwork has resulted in a critical study concerning the making of sacred art in the contemporary world.
The authors are attentive to the ways artists working on Catholic-themed sculpture engage human anatomy through neoclassical verticality, frontal posturing, and symmetry, or the baroque’s curves, twists, and simulated motion, or at times through a combination of the two. The reader learns of the influence of African, and in particular Yoruba, artistic tradition (e.g., small bodies and large heads) in the clay figures of Catholic saints and the Virgin produced in Tracunhaém in the Pernambuco region. Glassie and Shukla astutely explore the crossroads of Candomblé and Catholicism by Brazilian artists of sacred art, including Celestino Gama da Silva from Cachoeira in Bahia, who carves figures from both religions. In Salvador, woodblock prints, recycled metal sculpture, and painted canvases are media well represented in rendering the orixás, members of Candomblé’s sacred pantheon.
A significant number of the featured artists are self-taught or were not born into artist families, and they turned to the craft out of economic necessity as well as their artistic proclivities. As José Edivaldo Batista says: “So, Trancunhaém is a city in which every day new artists emerge, every day new people emerge. It does not come from someone taking your hand and teaching you how to work the clay. It is you discovering yourself” (235). But those individuals who continue and excel are blessed—some say by God—with dom, that is the “gift” that helps them learn quickly and inculcates them with a desire for sedulousness and mastery.
Glassie and Shukla’s intimate focus on the artists results in little or no ethnographic attention to believers and their actual engagement with the handmade sacred art objects they purchase. The contributions of art historians studying popular religious imagery, such as David Freedberg and David Morgan, would have been useful in suggesting approaches to reception and response by religious practitioners. This observation is also applicable for the economics of clerical patronage, folk art collectors, and local markets and sellers. While the authors consistently acknowledge the commercial aspects of these sacred works (as mentioned above), the reader is left wondering how monetary value is negotiated with individual buyers and how the commercial exchange influences cultural production. (This publication will no doubt provide a handy source for future buyers of sacred art.) Concerning matters of consumption and circulation of material culture, Sacred Art’s personalized attention to individual artistry and production can be read in conjunction with sociologist Howard S. Becker’s Art Worlds (1982) and philosopher Néstor García Canclini’s Transforming Modernity: Popular Culture in Mexico (1993).
It is not until the penultimate chapter that Glassie and Shukla explore theoretical concerns of what they refer to as the “essences of spirituality” (457) in sacred art. Citing anthropologists Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roberto DaMatta (but surprisingly not religious studies scholars), referencing Western artists like Picasso and Duchamp, and discussing Hindu artists in Bangladesh and Muslim craftspeople in Turkey from Glassie’s previous studies, the book strives to establish a cross-cultural understanding of sacred arts by suggesting the symbiotic distilling of the power of the divine and the beauty of the mundane. Delving into the twinned concepts of power and beauty, the authors’ attempt at a deeper, philosophical understanding of the vernacular production of sacred arts (that is, “the centrality of this combination in spiritual art” [460]) offers a fruitful guide for further inquiry and development.
One cannot review Sacred Art without discussing the beauty of this coffee-table-style publication. From the handsome portraits of formally posed artists to the full-page images of art works to the numerous landscapes, location shots, and ethnographic details, the color photographs printed on heavy coated paper are a delight and a valuable feature in a book about vernacular arts. In addition, the book is written in a friendly tone that is easy to understand by a non-academic reader and is also free of footnotes, although citations and references are found at the end of the book. Artists’ quotations are written in cleanly rendered transcriptions in short one-to-four-sentence paragraphs, unencumbered by the verbatim spoken word, with its hesitations and asides—this is no ethnography of speaking—which adds to the text’s flow and legibility. In keeping with Glassie and Shukla’s thesis on sacred arts, the textual and visual beauty enhances and contributes to the book’s intellectual power.
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[Review length: 1172 words • Review posted on September 5, 2019]