Brazil received the largest number of Africans enslaved into the Americas: nearly five million by some estimates. Thus, Brazil became the world’s largest slavocracy. But slavery was not the only experience available to Africans and Brazilians of African descent in slavery-era Brazil. Numerically, Afro-Brazilians dominated the arts in colonial Brazil. However, very few of those artists and artisans, many of whom were enslaved, are known by name today. Free Afro-Brazilian artists, such as Aleijadinho, Mestre Valentim, and Teófilo de Jesus, on the other hand, fared far better. In this article, I turn to these three mixed-race artists’ works and what little is known of their lives, not only as exemplary Afro-Brazilian artists but also as some of the most important artists of Brazil’s late colonial period, where they had the greatest impact on the artistic developments in their home regions. These artists’ careers thus illustrate how artists of African descent contributed to and defined urban and sacred spaces in the early modern Atlantic. This is therefore an invitation to look at Afrodescendants’ role in early modern art beyond the anonymity of slavery and static representation.

中文翻译：

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大西洋大师：三位早期现代非裔巴西艺术家

巴西接收了数量最多的被奴役到美洲的非洲人：据估计将近 500 万。于是，巴西成为了世界上最大的奴隶制国家。但在奴隶制时代的巴西，奴隶制并不是非洲人和非洲裔巴西人的唯一经历。从数量上看，非洲裔巴西人在殖民地巴西主导着艺术。然而，这些艺术家和工匠中很少有人知道今天的名字，其中许多人曾被奴役。另一方面，Aleijadinho、Mestre Valentim 和 Teófilo de Jesus 等自由巴西裔艺术家的表现要好得多。在这篇文章中，我将探讨这三位混血艺术家的作品以及他们鲜为人知的生活，他们不仅是非裔巴西艺术家的典范，而且还是巴西殖民后期最重要的艺术家之一，他们对家乡地区的艺术发展影响最大。因此，这些艺术家的职业生涯说明了非洲裔艺术家如何为早期现代大西洋的城市和神圣空间做出贡献并定义它们。因此，这是一个邀请来审视非裔在早期现代艺术中超越奴隶制和静态表现的匿名性的角色。