Percalços de um retrato majestático: história de uma gravura de D. Pedro I

Abstract

The article retraces the history of an engraved portrait of Emperor Pedro I, produced between 1824 and 1831, in Brazil’s first years as an independent nation. The analysis of the engraving has three parts: it starts relating its visual elements to the contradictions of Brazilian political emancipation; it mobilizes written sources to track its production and circulation as an artifact; and finally it describes the threshold of a new patrimonial cycle of this image in the late 1800s. The hypothesis is that the setbacks faced by the portrait followed the nation-state formation process.