Iconografía de la migración: el caso de la acogida brasileña al cuadro Os emigrantes (1910) de Antonio Rocco

Resumen

The human migration is one of the most important social and political issues in the international agenda nowadays, and itsrepercussion in the fields of art and image constitutes sucessivelly an interference on the matter. The purpose of this paper is to present a small panorama of visual representations on the subject to understand their creation and difusion circumstances, the uses by different agents and eventually aesthetical and artistic qualities. The methods of art history and cultural history are basis to the analysis as well as the comparative procedures on image and text. To exemplify and detail we took a case of the Italian emigration from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing in the large painting Os emigrantes (1910), by Antonio Rocco. We will consider illustration, photographs, the novel Sull’Oceano (1889), by Edmondo De Amicis, the acquisition of Os emigrantes by the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil, in 1918, and the international changes in migration policy and commerce relationships between Brazil and Italy. The exceptionality of Rocco’s painting is defended in contrast to the migration iconography of the time, considering the incorporation by a Brazilian public collection.