Such simultaneously transcendent and immanent foundation, as the core of Christian cosmovision, is valid not only for a religious conception of the Universe, but for every and all personal and historic experience of life. Neither philosophy, nor Morals, nor politics, nor economics, and much less aesthetics, with all its creative virtualities, escape such Christian universalization of the world before God or of God before the world. In all forms of human activities, therefore, and very particularly in the aesthetic vision of the total reality of the Universe, we cannot leave out this total view of the Universe, nor of any of its partial manifestations. And if I specifically emphasize the aesthetic aspect, it is because, through the artistic function, it is the creative fertility of the human being that is in action or in virtuality. Every man is a gog in action, or in potentiality, by virtue of his creative capacity.

Such distinction between time and eternity, which can either unite or conflict, is therefore one of the basic mysteries for very critical judgement in the face of an aesthetic work. Aesthetic vision is unique, albeit differentiated in particular kinds of art, which, on their turn, are subordinated to two general categories, the mechanical or technical arts, and the humanic or cultural arts. I make a distinction between humanic and human since all arts, mechanical or not, are human, for they originate from this creative capacity in human nature. But in humanic arts it is the efficient cause, that is to say, the creative genius of the human being that has command, whereas, in mechanical arts, the instrumental cause prevails. Although, in the criterion for diversification of cultural arts themselves, the tool used to create a work also serves as its most efficient criterion, so much so that literature is the art of words, such as music is the art of sound, dance the art of movement, painting the art of colour and line, such as sculpture is the art of volume and architecture the art of dwelling. Even the minor arts, such as clothing and cooking, are rendered different by the tools employed or the specialized and practical purposes for which they are intended.

Therefore we have that painting is the art of line and colour, and its technical and paramount instruments, with their respective subinstruments, are brush, palette knife, collage, paint, etc. Although taking into account all such sub-distinctions, in characterizing each kind of art, in each one of such divisions, we may or not find the reflection of said general conception of art as a vision of nature, of the supernatural, of the creature or the human creator himself in the face, or not, of the universality of creation. Everything is reflected in everything. The Creator himself, in all His creatures, including in the works created by the such creatures. In other words, creation, in its multiplicity of degrees. In this case, the lowermost may reflect the maximum, that is, human work may take into account the existence of a supreme Absolute, such as a major art of a human being may not take into account the hierarchy of values existing in the universe itself. Thence the complexity of any creative act or of any critical judgement of creators'works.

At all times and in all kinds of human communities, starting from troglodyte caves, man, this animal religious by nature, quoting Laplace, tries to direct his devotion to Divinity through nature's forms. Such polymorphism, from the formless through the superformalism of more sophisticated arts, shows that religious art is not an aesthetics specific of religious manifestations, but a typical facet of each and every art, whether pragmatic, or organic, instinctive, or intellective, from dance through music, painting, sculpture, architecture. Such coexistence, or such concourse of distinct aesthetic forms, of a religious kind, is an evidence of the consubstantiality of sacral feelings in human beings, such as the visible manifestations of such an infinite variety os artistic forms are variable aspects of a single uniformity or of a universality of spontaneously devotional inclination of the human being, even when exempt from spontaneous adherence to a positive and concrete form of this natural theocentrism. Either directly from man to God, or indirectly, through idolatrous or mystical modalities, of a congenital mysticism, but so frequently hidden, of human kind's naturally adoring and sacral vocation, such theocentric sacrality is instinctive in animals that merely follow the law of instinct, whereas it is conscious in human beings, through this polyvalent opening the difficult gift of freedom grants to man. Even the liberty to deny God. This is the reason why we may or not find, in major artists, this opening toward God, which constitutes the essence of religious art. An opening which may coincide or not with the author's personal feelings in the sense of an objective, transcendental directing of such inclination toward the mystery that exists in all things created, as an evidence of his own creation by a transcendental Creator, and not 'only due to an immanent evolution of natural forces. It is such possibility of an art objectively of a transcendental kind, without the artist personally participating in the awareness os such inevitable bond between man and God, between creature and Creator, that allows in actors the possibility of what Diderot called "le paradoxe du comédien", that is to say, of an incarnation of mystical or literary characters without the actor participating of the nature of the so depicted characters. I myself witnessed closely, at the beginning of the current century, the stage performance of two genius actresses - Sarah Bernhardt and Suzanne Desprès - of absolutely antiethical inclinations. Sarah Bernhardt was entirely foreign to the feelings of the characters she played on stage. It is told that Artur Azevedo, after raving with Margherite Gauthier's drama of having to part with her lover through a letter, climbed on the stage to see what Sarah had written. And discovered the most absolute antithesis between the passionality of the feeling transmitted and the coldness and indifference with which Sarah had acted it on stage. The opposite occured with Suzanne Desprès who had to remain days without acting after playing D'Annunzio's Gioconda, who had her hands crushed by the fall of a statute she had sculpted, and Suzanne reproduced on stage the scream of anguish she had once heard from someone smashed by a train. This twofold response in actors can also be found in authors. Therefore it is not necessary for a painter to be personally religious in order for his religious art to be authentic. And much less to have the touch of genius. Such polymorphism in religious art is both subjective and objective. There are all kinds of religious artists, as there are all kinds of artists who create or not religious works of art.

At present we have, acting within our aesthetic millieu, different kinds of religious art, which reflect this fascinating and typical polymorphism. From the emaciated Christs of the essentially subjective religious art of Aloisio Vieira, from Sorocaba, to the theocentric and communicating objectivism of the excellent muralist Claudio Pastro, who decorated the church in the Monastery of Saint Gerald, in the Capital of São Paulo, and the walls of the Benedictine Monastery of Our Lady of Peace, in Itapecirica da Serra, with his religious paintings of high theological conception and inspired in Byzantine, medieval or even Coptic primitivists. And we also have the deliciously ludic and frail paintings of Nelson Cunha de Barros, of Barra do Piraí. All such variations in a way derive from the fundamental religious painting of Emeric Marcier and the modern masters of Ouro Preto, like Guignard or Scliar, who on their turn descend from Master Ataíde, of the XVIII Century.

All such polymorphism in religious art could well be atributed to the existence of two supreme kinds of religious art: that coming from God to man, from the supernatural to nature; and that which goes from man to God, from the natural to the supernatural. If we compare, for instance, two masterly representatives of modern or contemporary painting, the work of Marc Chagall and that of Candido Portinari, we will find in both the palpable and visible representation of these two different although not conflicting ways of bringing heaven down to earth, the invisible to the visible, the eternal to the modern, God to man, or man ascending to God. In Marc Chagall, the still living glorious nonagenarian, the natural form we could invoke as an expression of his essentially mystic painting is the cloud . All this characters and landscapes fluctuate between heaven and earth, all seem to be endowed with the gift of imponderability , all have forms but not weight. They are not, obviously, supernatural, as in certain mystic primitive paintings, or even in modern primitivists, but they glide in an intermediary atmosphere, between the natural and the supernatural, what medieval mystics used to call Aevum, that is, between Time and Eternity. It is here that lays, in my opinion, the supernaturalistic genius of the pictorial master Marc Chagall.

In Portinari, however, we find a creator , religious by mere accident, of an intentionally supernatural art, wherein the painter's genius emerge from visible things, from tangible characters, to arrive at his supernaturalistic theme, the visible presence of God in things, in facts and in men, a trait which characterizes religious art in the Renaissance, when medieval spontaneous theocentrism began to pass on to anthropocentrism or to the worldliness of intentional, modern or contemporary religious art. Portinari's religious art seems to me directly derived from Renaissance religious painting, but placed within a tragic environment, and not the formalistically dazzled and optimistic environment of Renaissance painters or artists in general, which were thrilled to discover the world without having to deny God. Portinari is one of the descendants of such anthropocentrism, although possessing a tragic and Brazilian accent, which renders him absolutely unique, in this confrontation between Chagall's spontaneous transcendentalism and Portinari's polymorphic universalism and rationalization. It suffices to compare Portinari's pictorial work with Chagall's for such two distinct panels to become comprehensible and tangible.

The paradox of a painter like Portinari, personally deprived of a distinct or confessional religious faith, although aesthetically capable of painting the wonders - so differentiated - shown in this book, and so many others ofdiverse kinds, but all equally the work of a genius as to the subject matter of his creation, has always puzzled me. In Portinari's case, as I tried to describe in my article "Amaranthyne Soil", published in newspaper Diário de Notícias in 1956, at the time I went to Ribeirão Preto and Brodosqui, in an attempt to unveil Portinari's mystery, it was in his childhood and in the home environment of his adolescent formation that I could find the secret of such an apparent paradox. We know too well that it is impossible to unveil the secret and the sacred that lays in masterliness. Portinari was the greatest genius of our painting. And far from me to dare to disclose the secret of a genius. However, in fact, the thin clue to the puzzle which I believe I discovered in Portinari's case is that of a profound and essentially authentic and universal art, in his objectively Christian and even Catholic springhead, in an artist apparently lacking in a personal and explicit religious feeling. In Portinari's case, I attribute the beginning of a solution to the paradox to that domestic atmosphere which surrounded his childhood and particularly his adolescence, an age in man when one does not live only that physical period between 12 and 18 years, but all ages , since it is in childhood and above all in adolescence that the human being forelives and casts the distinguishing traces of the personality he will have until his death. It is in the Portinari of Brodosqui that we find the universal Portinari whom we can and should compare with Marc Chagall, to limit our comments to the greatest religious painter of our century and the greatest Brazilian painter of all centuries.

The fact is that only in the language of each art and each artist may the critic have the pretension of objectively unveiling the mystery of each creation. It is by painting that one may speak well of the art of painting. It is by dancing that one may speak of the dance. It is by listening that one may speak well of music, except in extraordinary cases such as Beethoven's who couldn't hear but inside himself the musical sublimities he created.

As I stated in the above mentioned article:

"A lot is said, particularly in France, about the distinction between an official country and a real country. I do not see such distinction as being really a division of people into two separate groups, and much less into two categories of values. The 'real countries' would, in this case, be the good. And the 'official', the bad. I rather see such distinction existing in all inhabitants of a country, who either belong to one category or to another, according to how they appear in their really productive and generally anonymous work, or in their roles as conventional representatives at highly eminent positions.

"The pessimism with which, in general, we face the destiny of our land derives nearly always from an attitude of the official-Brazil and of those responsible for the none too constructive conditions of our faulty political education and our disastrous economic situation. Since all or a large majority of us participate in this Brazil, the mea culpa should be collective, and not reserved only to the 'escape goats'. Likewise, the remedy against such maladies lays not in political coups or counter-coups, with which for such a long time they have been with impunity poisoning public opinion and vitiating the honest exercise of democracy, but rather in resorting to the anonymous-Brazil, that works in the shade and in silence.

"The fruit of such continuous and discrete work is what we see in a visit to the interior of the State of São Paulo, as I have just made. I had not gone to that region since 1927. Exactly as it was then, I could only find nature. And in nature, the amaranthyne soil, the incomparable soil, which by the way is not, or rarely is, amaranthyne, but is instead red or brick-colour, and which invades everything, your eyes, under your skin, even after the heavy rains which make green greener and red redder, giving to the fields a life so strong that restores in the worried ones the taste of living. I am well aware that there are no idyllic cities in this earth. Nor should we look in the middle of agricultural and industrial wealth, such as Ribeirão Preto, for the charm of old Minas Gerais towns, not the ideal solution for human toil conditions. In this respect, one cannot dissociate a visit to Ribeirão Preto from a trip to two neighbouring towns which in fact form with it one single unit of civilization in the São Paulo hinterland. It is that both, the tiny - may it never grow - and the medium-size town, which is already another center in accelerated pace, evoke the name of the most universal of our painters - Portinari.

"Portinari was born in Brodosqui and was christened in Batatais. These two towns, the small and the medium-sized, already constitute today points of obligatory pilgrimage for both admirers and adversaries of his art, still so controversial, except for one point: abroad, no other Brazilian name is as known as the name of this son of immigrants, whose mystery I now tried to decipher at his birth place. This mystery, that has always intrigued me, was to understand how a man with no conscious religious faith could paint so well, so wonderfully well, religious themes. I am fully aware that the qualities of an artist have nothing to do with the subject matter of the creative genius. And both Parnasians and Naturalists even sustained, although few did in fact practice it, that these were two completely separate things; the genius of an artist and the subject matter or theme of his creation.

"In any case, I was always intrigued by this mystery. And I now believe I have deciphered the enigma, having become acquainted with Portinari's family, his aging parents and one of his sisters. As well as the house where he was born, the Brodosqui square where he played soccer with the other kids (and which he reproduced in some of his paintings), and also the little Saint Anthony chapel, in the middle of the square, surrounded by a sape grass porch, with its badly finished benches, like all back-country little chapels.

"The tiny town lays at the start of a hill, with its very wide streets and its low houses, all clay-colour, and swept by the winds.

"Fifty-two years ago they were married there and today they still live there, the Portinaris. There the couple's seven children were born, and there they were brought up, between the humble walls of a low house, to which one or two of the same kind were added, having in the back a yard, which descends by the slope of the hill, until it meets the lands of the future seminary. On those inner walls the great painter began to leave, every time he went there, signs of this passage. There are still two medallions with feminine figures, which he painted as a boy. Likewise there is the first mural-fresco made in Brazil, when he still exercised his hand, and a Saint Francis os Assisi preaching to the birds. And above all yhe extraordinary 'Nona 's Shire'. Nona was one of Portinari's grandmothers, his father's mother. Of his other grandmother, a forceful woman who came from Italy with her children, leaving everything she had there after she had a quarrel with her brothers, the painter left, in the larger room, a portrait showing an impressive look. But his nona lived until she was 99, and only died 'because she got tired of living', as I was told by the painter's father, a charming man in his simplicity, acute spirit, naturalness, as a matter of fact like the whole family, the whole domestic environment, that to me now is the key to Portinarian art. The nona however was very old, and cried because she was maimed and could no longer go to the church, across the square. One day her grandson told her: 'Nona , don't cry. I'll paint a shrine for you'. And he took his brushes and painted, on the four walls of a small room, natural size figures around a rude altar: a Saint John the Baptist holding a distich: 'Ecce Agnus Dei'; a Visitation Scene in which the Virgin Mary and Saint Elizabeth are two young girls in long dresses with their hair held back, one a blonde with eyes looking up, the other a brunette with downcast eyes; Saint Lucy, with two eyes on a plate; Saint Peter with the thick key to heaven; and a Sacred Family. Everything deliciously pure, simple, natural. With the naturalness of supernatural things. The old nona was taken in her chair to the door, and there she used to spend forgotten hours, with the thick rosary in her hands, praying for her grandson, who painted such lovely girls, saints so full of innocence. Some people told her that now he was already a famous man, already known, even abroad, called by some a 'genius' and by others, how was it?, a mystifier.

"The old nona , however, wanted to hear nothing about it and only saw, in the author of her beautiful colourful saints, the restless boy she had helped to bring up and that one day had hurt his leg and, poor thing, was left cripple for the rest of his life. She probably would say, of her grandson, what the father told me of his son: 'I don't know if he is a good painter, for I know nothing about this. Now, what I know is that he is a good son'. The same way he told me, when I pointed at a Saint John the Baptist painted on one of the walls, asking whether that was also by Candinho*: 'No sir, it is by Mrs. Juanita Blank. It happened like this: she came here to visit Candinho. And I told her that we slept in this room, and next to it, in the other room, all the boys crowded together as we were poor. And that I woke up often at nights thinking about the future of those kids; and one night I woke up thinking: 'Who is my guardian angel?' And at that very moment one of the boys, in the other room, probably dreaming, cried 'John the Baptist'. And this was why she painted the Saint John the Baptist here.'

"It was in this atmosphere then of inscriptions in gold, of an incomparably simple painting, which is kept until today unchanged and which one breathes with enchantment, like the air from the highest summits, with no dust and fully impregnated already with heaven, it was in such atmosphere that this genius of universal painting inhaled air since his birth. And it is there that he goes, from time to time, to purify himself, to get new strength to continue to be a boy throughout his life. And to gain the inspiration to paint the marvels of the Batatais See, like the 'Way of the Cross', wherein the forms of Christ, in the XI Station, begin to dilute until they confuse with the cross itself, and where the light tones dominate until they reach a nearly pure white and darken in the terrible shadows of the Descent and the Sepulchre scenes. But it is in his panels at the back of the altar or on the walls of that church that Portinari has performed one of his major miracles of colour. And right next to it, a harmonious and suprising combination with the sculpture on the faces of the ochre colour figures, tone over tone, in a contrast with the very vivid colours in the robes, and everything fitting naturally into the See's Latin cross, classic and soberb. So much so that the panels seem to combine the three arts: painting, sculpture and architecture, in one single admirable harmony, which has turned Batatais into a small Mecca of modern Brazilian painting.

"But it is in tiny Brodosqui, between the Saint Anthony of the humble little chapel in the square and the Saints of the old nona , and in the chat with this good and simple people just like warm fresh bread that seems to come directly from God's hands, with no contamination with this world, that I have found, I am convinced, the secret of the most glorious and controversial of our painters.

"This was enough to make me understand also that this amaranthyne soil, that at every step brought to me the memory of other days of my own youth, the 'Amaranthyne Soil and... other soils' of the gone days of the modernistic battle, would not merely be the fertile soil of the material wealth of our people, but also the natural and growing source of other more elevated and more perennial riches, such as the masterful work of Candido Portinari".

To understand the fight that Portinari's work at Pampulha and Batatais, and so many other masterly works from his hands, had to undertake to conquer the prejudices of a non-authentic conception as to what is religious art, it suffices to compare the extraordinary masterful freedom of Portinari 'genius' pictorial composition with the cheap conventionalism of a religious and moral art purporting to be constructive, but that fails to construct objectively anything, either the eyes or the spirit of their viewers. A work is the creator of its author, in the case of really genius artists. And it is but a servant of the author when the accents os masterliness are missing. Portinari's creative genius was able to translate into his work such a creative independence that today, through his work, even detached from the passional and literal participation that its author may have had in it, we see that his religious painting was converted into a kind of aesthetic and perhaps mystic conversion of is author. There are sorceries that turn against the sorcerer, as folks say. So there are forms of religious art, like Portinari's, that convert their authors, that transform their disbelief into mysterious forms of belief, perchance mystic and supernaturalistic. This is what happened, as I see it, with Candido Portinari, a Christian painter. The reader will be able to tell, after resting his eyes, undoubtedly dazzled and illuminated by the admirable reproductions of his objectively mystic pictorial creation contained in this volume of the finest printing art.

ALCEU AMOROSO LIMA