Between the city of São Paulo of the past and the present in the urban landscape representation of Benedito Calixto de Jesus

Abstract

Benedito Calixto de Jesus (1853-1927) has a large pictorial production that comprehends the representation of the city of Sao Paulo consisting of long demolished churches, as well as still existing ones, such as Luz Convent. Starting from some of the paintings of Calixto’s urban series, the article aims at analyzing the transformations reached by the artist’s work, in order to understand them facing the architectonic and urbanistic transformations occurred between the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth, in Sao Paulo. This research still demonstrates that the collection of paintings here analyzed, in fact, starts from a set of photographs made by Militão Augusto de Azevedo (1837-1905) in the nineteenth century and, transformed into paintings, contribute both to the comprehension of the architectonic patrimony and to the artistic one.