The image of Soares dos Reis’ sculpture in art hitory, art criticism and literature: epochs, models and representations

• Autor(a) principal: Abreu, José Guilherme
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Carvalho, Salomé, Bordalo, Rui, Vieira, Eduarda
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/43947
• topic: Soares dos Reis; Sculpture; Fin-de-siècle; Art history; Art criticism

A hundred thirty years after his dramatic death, António Soares dos Reis (ASR) remains a huge challenge for art history understanding and art criticism interpretation, since he has been seen simultaneously as “a Greek, […] a realist, […] a classical, […] and a naturalist” (Arroyo, 1899: 78). His major sculpture – O Desterrado – being “an existential work” (França, 1966: 454) escapes from the classic orthodox aesthetic analysis, standing apart from the typical sculptural work of late 19th century. Our hypothesis is that ASR art works like a Rorschach test, for the narratives referred to it, instead of unveiling its character, reveal the concepts and beliefs upon which successive art studies have been produced. No visual images are displayed in this text, since the aim of our study is to detect the mental images associated to the insights and models that art historians and other authors traditionally used to assess ASR’s artistic work.