O pintor Simão Rodrigues e a posse do Codex Casanatense em 1628: fortuna, atribulações e influências artísticas

Abstract

Using a drawing added to the Codex Casanatense with the figuration of a monstrous child born in Mouraria in 1628 as a starting point, we analyze the circumstances in which, after having been kept in Saint Paul College of Goa in the hands of father João da Costa, and being retrieved from pirates, the famous album circulated in circles of anti-Castilian resistance attracted by the nostalgia of the glories of the Portuguese. The drawing in question suggests that the Codex has been in possession of the painter Simão Rodrigues (who painted the monster-child) and of one of his iconographical mentors, the Jesuit father Diogo de Areda. We analyzed the exotic and orientalizing influences manifest in contemporary paintings (of artists like André Reinoso and Simão Rodrigues himself), in a time in which the cult of St. Francis Xavier, the apostle of the Indies, was developing strongly, even before his canonization in 1622. In the light of the socio-political situation of the time of Philip the Third of Portugal, the Mouraria prodigy (well described in the Memorial, by Pedro Rodrigues Soares, a Sebastianist author) was seen as a divine warning against the pro-Castillian regime. This fortuitous confluence of circumstances would explain the occurrence of the drawing of the baby along the colorful drawings of the Asian peoples. Together with the images of the peoples of that East, evocative of former glory, the child-prodigy could be seen as a providential sign of the future restoration of the Portuguese World Empire.