Oratórios em Salvador, Bahia: materialidade, visualidade e devoção

Abstract

This study presents the research entitled Oratories in Salvador, Bahia: materiality, visuality and devotion, which aims to investigate oratories that are or were used mainly in the private religious exercise of and are found in homes, nursing homes, chapels, antique shops and museums of the City of Salvador, Bahia. In order to specifically investigate the typology, stylistics, possible authorship, commercialization, the saints of devotion linked to them and iconographically and iconologically analyze their plasticity, we proceeded methodologically locating them, cataloging them and analyzing them. To this end, we have visited 20 residences, 12 antique shops, 5 museums, 4 nursing homes and 1 chapel so far. As a method, we also conducted interviews with the owners and/or owners to understand the path taken by the objects and their compositions (plasticity and saints); we researched in inventories, records of sharing and wills (saints), administrative documents of the City and State, advertisements in newspapers from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, individual files by scholars Marieta Alves and Carlos Ott, books, dissertations, theses, dictionaries of different types, museum and exhibition catalogues. We take the city of Salvador as a point of view, as it was the first and for a long time the main city in Brazil and in the State of Bahia; we defined the temporal record as a period in which the practice was still relevant until the 20th century, thus producing a significant amount of visual culture and also for having a large number of documentation, considering that the documentary memory of Bahian society does not exist. In good condition.