Word: aleijadinho
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...longer walk, he was carried about on the broad back of his slave Januario. To shut out the world's curious, derisive stare, he rigged a tent around him as he worked. Once the governor of Minas Gerais dared stick his head inside the tent and O Aleijadinho (The Little Cripple, as his townsmen called him) seized his mallet and chisel and showered His Excellency with stone chips...
...disease was well advanced when Aleijadinho was given the commission that became his crowning life's work, decorating the Church of Bom Jesus do Matosinhos. For the stairway he chose as his subject not the curved elegance of cherubim and seraphim that had made him famous, but stern Old Testament prophets. In them he found a wrath. compassion and inspiration that matched his own. He sculpted their squat figures in bizarre oriental costumes, twisted and tormented in soapstone (which is soft when quarried, grows hard with age). Before the last one was finished, in 1805, Aleijadinho was working with...
Time has been unkind to the gold towns of Minas Geraes. Their old wealth is long since gone; the red dust of Minas cakes their half-deserted streets. But Aleijadinho's heroic monuments remain. Each year in mid-September, Mineiros rise from their huts and hamlets and journey by foot, by truck and by train over the scarred hills to the shrine-church of Congonhas do Campo. Last week, as they had for a century and a half, some 200,000 Brazilian peasants made the pilgrimage to kiss the sacred image of the Dead Christ in Aleijadinho...
Atop the hill, Aleijadinho's church stood in isolated splendor, its 16 soapstone prophets jutting above the buttresses. Here carnival melted away in the solemnity of the shrine. The pilgrims swarmed reverently past six little white buildings housing the sculptor's Stations of the Cross. They fell into two lines. Some shielded lit candles as they waited; most lit their candles as they entered the church...
...Kiss for Bom Jesús. Inside, they moved forward past the gold and white side altars, past the two ornamented Aleijadinho pulpits. The only sound was the soft scuffing of sandaled feet. Reaching the altar, the pilgrims handed their candles to a priest, kissed the recumbent image of Bom Jesús, dropped their offerings in a box beside the altar. Some paused to honor the old tradition of "measuring" the figure with a piece of white binding tape that would later hang in their huts as a souvenir. Then they went back to the dusty hill towns that...