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Padre António Vieira was a Portuguese priest, preacher, and writer. He was a Jesuit — a member of Societas Iesu (eng: Society of Jesus; pt: Companhia de Jesus), a religious order founded in 1520 which was engaged in the evangelization of 112 nations. He was born in 1608 and went to Brazil (Portuguese colony since 1500) when he was 6 years old, where he ended up spending most of his life as a missionary. António Vieira could be considered a progressive figure for his time, given that he became known for fighting for the rights of the indigenous peoples, for the end of their enslavement and also for the end of the distinction between New Christians (Jews converted to Christianity) and Old Christians. ¹

He is considered one of the literary greats of the Portuguese-speaking world, much due to his many sermons which he preached throughout his life to various audiences, both in Brazil and in Portugal. In 1641, after Portugal reclaimed its independence from 60 years long Spanish rule, Padre António Vieira returned to Lisbon. There, he earned the trust of the king, D. João IV, who was impressed by the rhetoric of his sermons. He started working as his counsellor and was later sent to The Netherlands to resolve political upheaval between the two countries. In Amsterdam, his sympathy towards Portuguese New Cristian refugees led to tensions between him and the Holy Inquisition.

One of Padre António Vieira’s most known works, Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fish is mandatory reading in high school. This sermon uses Saint Anthony’s legend where he preached to the fish as an allegorical tool to establish parallels between the qualities and flaws of men and different species of fish. The sermon was first preached in São Luís do Maranhão, Brazil, on the 13th of June 1654, in the context of the conflict between the colony’s settlers and the Jesuits, who reiterated Pope Urban VIII’s prohibition against Indian slavery. Three days after preaching it, Vieira secretly embarked to Lisbon to appeal D. João IV for laws that would guarantee basic rights to Brazilian indians, preventing them from being exploited by white colonists.

However, his defence of the Brazilian indians among the Portuguese nobility was predicated in comparing the suffering of the Indian slaves to the suffering of Christ himself, as professor Adma Fadul Muhana explains when talking about his Sermon of the Epiphany, which he preached at the church of Saint Roch: “[Padre António Vieira] frames the indigenous people as if they were the very representation of Christ and of the true Christians — those who are humiliated, those who suffer and, thus, should receive blessings and gifts from the realm.”² This comparison is seldom problematized, even by established historians, who fail to understand how the equivalence of suffering to something divine in fact dehumanizes these brutal processes of enslavement and colonisation.

In addition to this, the evangelization of the indians and the erasure of their native religions is never recognized as an act of colonial violence towards these people. In this process of conversion, the Jesuits would often mention how the natives were fast to learn the new faith but equally fast in returning to their previous cultural and religious practices if left unattended. Padre António Vieira noted this in his Sermon of the Holy Spirit, where he compared the Brazilian indians to shrub statues, as they were easy to mould but quick to regrow into its natural shape after a while: It is necessary for the statues to always be overwatched by its master: once, to cut off what their eyes glisten, so that they believe what they do not see; again, to restrain their ears, so that they do not listen to the fables of their ancestors; and at last, trim what their feet thrive, so that they abstain from the barbaric actions and heathenish customs. And only in this way, always working against the nature of the trunk and the mood of the roots, can the unnatural shape and composition of the branches be preserved in these rough plants. ³ This “inconstancy” (after anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro), expressed by the indigenous people and recognized by the Jesuits, was weaponized as an excuse to import African slaves given that they were seen, at the time, as more keen to work and less eager to resist. “There was a price to pay to defend the little indians, as this price was the Africans. Vieira was not an abolitionist. He was a selective abolitionist”, as journalist Alexandra Lucas Coelho writes in her chronicle My last vote in Lisbon and Vieira’s cross.⁴

Lucas Coelho’s chronicle is a reaction to the inauguration, in 2017, of a statue of Padre António Vieira, in a central square in Lisbon. Upon the statue’s unveiling, Fernando Medina, the aldermen of the municipality of Lisbon, commented on how it represented a long due homage to “one of the greatest Portuguese thinkers, who, until now, didn’t have the recognition he deserves.” Priest António Vaz Pinto also spoke at the inauguration: “A great day in which we repair a great injustice and pay homage to a great man.” ⁵

The statue was sculpted by Portuguese artist Marco Fidalgo and depicts the priest with three indigenous children by his feet, one of them kneeling, while Vieira holds the cross upwards. Right after the inauguration, the statue was criticized by many for representing Padre António Vieira in a manner that, instead of paying homage to his humanist principles, actually reinforced Portugal’s colonial past.

By displaying the imagery of a condescending, paternalistic figure, the statue crystallizes the domination of the Christian faith over the indigenous children, who are depicted as accessories, looking at him as if he was some kind of saviour or messiah. In the words of Lucas Coelho:

The problem does not reside in raising him a statue now. It resides in the raised statue itself, in what was said in the inauguration, in who endorsed it. Meanwhile, this city, ex-world capital of slavery, has not paid a single tribute to the slaughtered indians nor to the six million Africans trafficked through the Atlantic by the Portuguese empire. The cross and the little indians at Vieira’s feet are, for all that, an insult to the present and the future. (Coelho, 2017) The inauguration happened on the 22nd of June 2017, and on the 5th of October, (a holiday which celebrates the proclamation of the Portuguese republic), the statue was subject to political action: the activist group Descolonizando was aiming to leave flowers and candles by the feet of the sculpted indigenous children, but were blocked by a far right nationalist group who wanted to “stop a subversive act that would be an attack to the legacy of Portugal.” ⁶ This small confrontation made it to the news but did not prompt a broader discussion on Portugal’s colonial past.

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Three years later, on the 11th of June of 2020 (the day after the 10th of June, Day of Camões, Portugal, and the Portuguese Communities, and on the day of Corpus Christ) in the aftermath of the worldwide Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd, the face of the priest was painted red, the word “decolonize” was written on the foot of the statue, and three red hearts were painted on the chests of the children. This action spurred a wave of heated criticism from the people, the parties (both from the right and the left wing) and even a declaration from the President, who considered it a “truly imbecile gesture against the memory of Portugal’s greatest preacher and a progressive man for his time.” ⁷

The main issue surrounding Padre António Vieira’s statue is not the questioning of the homage paid to his figure, but the visual means through which it was materialized. The iconographic model that the statue embodies is based upon Carlo Grandi’s 1742 engraving of the priest, displayed in André de Barros’ Vida do Apostolico Padre Antonio Vieyra, published in 1746.

This illustration would end up becoming one of the most common ways of visually representing the priest, serving as a model for another widely reproduced engraving of him by Charles Legrand in 1839. Both in these two images and in the statue inaugurated in 2017, the priest stands tall in the centre of the composition, rarely changing position throughout the various reissuings of this model.

As Ricardo Ventura notes in his volume which compiles texts written by Vieira about the indigenous peoples, Padre António Vieira: Escritos Sobre os Índios:

(...) what seems exemplary to us is that the figure of Vieira, like a monolith, remains practically unchanged, while the indians and the surrounding landscape change: that the “brazils”, anonymous figures, inhabitants of a vast and indefinite geographical area, dense jungle or river, dunes and sea, load weapons or lay them down, look at the preacher or at the sky, sail the rivers or be hidden by the dense vegetation. It could be said, therefore, that “brazils”, more or less like the background landscape, in their relative indeterminacy and anonymity, play a symbolic role, tending to be passive: they gravitate around the central axis, which is Vieira, and change according to the circumstance and the geographic space in which he worked. ⁸ What many failed to see was that the probable aim of the protesters was not to criticize solely the figure of Padre António Vieira but, first and foremost, the way he was publicly represented and how this representation is linked to a larger societal and cultural context — in Portugal, one of colonialism, exploitation of indigenous people and slavery. This visual trope of the indian as a passive figure decentralizes not only their bodies and stories from a colonial narrative but also centralizes Vieira as the archetypal hero, as the “good colonizer”.

Padre António Vieira’s anachronic statue is then a solidification of a story larger than himself: a narrative that glorifies Portuguese exploration and domination over other peoples. Having a statue based on a 400-years-old visual representation be erected in 2017 showcases how uncritical Portuguese society is towards its own past and towards the ways in which this past is still imbricated into present concepts of nationality, pride and unbound patriotism.

Mário Moura, once again writing (through a Facebook post) about the aftermath of the painting of Padre António Vieira’s statue, brought forward the relevance of architecture as a discipline that can give productive insight into dealing with monuments. He brings forth the two distinct stances of 19th-century critic John Ruskin and architect Violet Le Duc which still inform architectural practices nowadays: when facing a ruinous monument, architects either leave it as it is or reconstruct it according to the present aesthetic discourse. These reconstructions sometimes appear as shocking to the people, combining old styles with modern ones. The shock comes from a longing for authenticity, something that the architect usually understands as impossible, given that neither the techniques nor the context when that monument was first built longer exist. Moura then establishes a parallel between the action of acting upon a statue and this architectural understanding of the restoration of monuments: If a monument celebrates a ruin, a society which no longer exists, a feat that is no longer heroic, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be complemented or commented according to contemporary criteria. Those who paint or bring down statues which celebrate terrible things understand that. They refuse the kitsch of accepting monuments as inert facts. ¹² Portuguese architect Pedro Levi Bismarck, commented the following on that post: Everything that has been elevated to the status of a monument is destined to lose its proper historic condition: it is nothing more than a souvenir that integrates the long procession of the remains and ruins of the winners. That said, it is not the demolition of a monument that condemns us to forgetting the past, quite the contrary, it is precisely its demolition that returns the object to (its) history and that gives us back the past, the violence of the past. ¹³ Happenings like the painting of Vieira’s statue should be seen as a starting point for a deeper reflection on issues of representation — be it visual or verbal — and how these representations have a political impact in themselves, beyond what they represent. In breaking down the different layers that surround Padre António Vieira’s representation, we aimed to critically analyse not only his persona in itself but, most importantly, the way it was represented visually in the public realm. And all visual signs are political in themselves, be them images, sculptures, names of streets or wall graffities. Mapping out the relations between those signs, we hoped to showcase how institutions, governments and parties still hold major power in the way the common people experience the public sphere. In a country where silence and denial perpetuate century-long narratives of colonial violence, no representation is innocent: it can either reinforce or challenge it. When challenging these representations at the institutional level is not possible, and they end up being materialized into the public sphere (like in Vieira’s case), visual commentary can still prove itself as a legitimate way of questioning them. Recognizing the value that lies on these forms of graphic debate can help unblock larger public discussions on matters that have been long ignored.