Abstract
The Campaign for Traditional Art in Brazil, run by Ricardo Severo da Fonseca e Costa between the 1910s and 1930s, consisted of architectural projects, articles, and interviews published in periodicals such as O Estado de S. Paulo, Revista do Brasil and A Cigarra, as well as lectures held at institutions such as Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo, Sociedade de Cultura Artística and Grêmio Politécnico de São Paulo. Through this campaign, the Portuguese engineer constructed a narrative of the history of Brazilian architecture that was based on and fostered recurrent representations of the nation, reverberating in the writings and preservation policies of intellectuals committed to the creation of a genuine modern art, such as Jose Marianno Filho, Mário de Andrade, Paulo Santos, Lucio Costa and Rodrigo Melo Franco de Andrade. Attentive to the specificities of Severo’s discourse, this article seeks to uncover the political and disciplinary motivations of his campaign; its connection with his previous experience in Portugal, especially in the field of Archaeology; its theoretical matrices; research sources and means of dissemination, building bridges of dialogue between Severo and his contemporaries.
Keywords:
Ricardo Severo; Campaign for Traditional Art in Brazil; historiography