São Carlos and São João, royal public theaters. Theatrical architecture and artistic culture in Portugal in the reigns of Maria I and João VI (1777-1826)

Abstract

The purpose of this investigative proposition is the formation of systemic knowledge about the architecture of public and private theaters built in Portugal, between the reigns of Maria I and João VI, 1777-1826. The great theaters built in Portugal as the Royal Theater of São Carlos (1793), in Lisbon, and the Royal Theater of São João (1798), in Porto, considered fully, are the genesis of the first great Brazilian theaters of the nineteenth century. The history of construction of these theaters is intrinsic to the cultural movement that was processed in the Court of Bragança, lovers of music and celebratory pomp, responsible for the dissemination of the opera by the Portuguese territories and for promoting the building of theaters that during the second half of the century XVIII spread throughout the interior of Brazil. However, there remains a cloud over the understanding of theater architecture and its representations grouped into cultural, social and political of the time, and their formal, typological and compositional content as characterization of an urban artifact of immense value in the social constitution of the liberal monarchy, is what the research seeks to deepen. The priority of the research are the primary sources: iconography, cartography, hemerography, epistolography and the literature of the time. The general mapping databases and analytical direction will be established in the related history and the methodological procedures will be organized on a survey of sources, systematic and comparative and associative analysis on two levels: on the infield of the theory of theater architecture and general context of artistic culture and societies, Portuguese and European, coeval, jointly with scientific centers of excellence.