From the Paulista Museum to the classroom: the visual representation of the Bandeirantes in educational publications in Brazil

Abstract

This study intends to analyze the uses, in educational publications throughout the 20th century, of models of visual representation established at the Paulista Museum and their focusing mainly on their symbolic content as related to the forging of a national identity whose essence is embodied in the Bandeirante. Popularly known as the Ipiranga Museum, the Paulista Museum was established in 1895 inside a building erected during the Empire to celebrate Brazilian Independence. In 1917, Afonso Taunay (1876-1958) took over as director of the institution, with an eye on the upcoming Independence Centennial commemorations, celebrated in 1922. Throughout his lengthy tenure as director (1917-1945), Taunay sought to convert the building-monument into a kind of pantheon honoring not only the nation's independence but also the history of São Paulo and those considered, in his view, its main protagonists, the Bandeirantes. As such, he commissioned a series of historical paintings and celebratory sculptures, reproduced exhaustively in Brazilian schoolbooks, the main instrument for the dissemination of the Paulista Museum throughout the 20th century, material that merits a thorough examination in terms of the discursive standards of this form of appropriation. Linked to the FAPESP's Thematic Project Collect, identify, process, circulate: The curatorial cycle and the production of knowledge, this study intends to form a corpus documental that will feed the Paulista Museum's databank and its actual archive of didactic material, contributing to the curatorial reformulation of this constitutional institution of the University of São Paulo and to the training of its educational service, tasks that appear ever more pressing with the approaching Bicentennial of Brazilian Independence, to be celebrated in 2022 and coinciding with the Paulista Museum's planned reopening to the public.