Like Discovery of Brazil, on April 22, 1500, a succession of new experiences opened up for both the Europeans and the natives (indigenous) who lived here. The encounter between these two cultures was permeated by a mixture of curiosity, strangeness, interaction and violence. In the first days when the shipment of Pedro Alvares Cabral was in Brazil after docking, one of the first gestures of exposing European culture to the peoples who lived here was the celebration of a mass.
THE firstmass held in Brazil took place on April 26, 1500 and was celebrated by the Friar Henrique of Coimbra, who had sailed with Cabral's entourage in Santa Cruz da Cabrália, in Praia da Coroa Vermelha, in the south of Bahia. Mass, as is well known, is the most important ritual for Christians, and its performance in the “new world” had a symbolic importance without equal. The main source that historians have on how this mass was held is the Letter from Pero Vaz de Caminha. This letter shows the behavior of the natives before the Christian rite:
While we attended mass and preaching, a group of people were taking a day off on the beach […] with their bows and arrows. And looking at us, they sat down. After Mass was over, when we were sitting and listening to the preaching, many of them got up and started blowing the horn or the horn, jumping and dancing for a long time. Some of them got into rafts – two or three they had there – which are not made like the ones I've seen: they're just three beams, tied together. And four or five climbed in them, or whatever they wanted, leaving almost no ground, going only where they could."
In addition, the event of the first mass in Brazil also prompted, in the 19th century, an intense historical investigation of the details of that occasion, which was undertaken by the painter Victor Meirelles (1832-1903). His painting “First Mass in Brazil” – see photo at the top of the text – was inspired by another painter's painting called by Pharamond Blanchard (1805-1873), whose title was “First Mass in the Americas”. The purpose of Meirelles' painting was not merely to portray the historical event of the mass described by Caminha, but to build part of the Brazilian historical memory through painting.
GRADES
[1] TUFANO, Douglas. Pero Vaz de Caminha's letter. São Paulo: Modern, 1999.
By Me. Cláudio Fernandes
