A study based on visual semiotics of the painting A Primeira Missa no Brasil from Victor Meirelles

Abstract

The work that we intend to analyze in this article is named A Primeira Missa no Brasil, from Victor Meirelles. Since its expressive dimension, it is considered one of the canvas of major proportion of Brazilian art produced in XIX century. As it is well-known, the history of the discovery of Brazil is full of contradictions, among them questions about the chance and the intention of the Portuguese that docked in Brazil in 1500. Meirelles'painting is also wrapped in divergences if we consider the narrative by Pero Vaz de Caminha in his letter to the king of Portugal. The reading of this art work is done with the objective of learning the categories of the expression plane homologable to the categories of content, based on the theoretical-methodological assumptions of the discursive semiotics of A. J. Greimas and his contributors, more specifically the visual semiotics perspective. Such categories of the expressions were related to oppositions found in the contents plane, whose results approximated to what, in semiotics, are called semisymbolic relations. As the analysis presented were focused on only on the text-painting A Primeira Missa no Brasil, there was no intention of approaching the ideological discourse of this painting in opposition to other discourses.