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Ex-votos

10 de out.
3 min de leitura

Atualizado: há 2 horas

Ex-votos are objects offered to a divinity in thanks for a grace received. Their name comes from the Latin ex-voto suscepto (for the vow fulfilled). They appear in various places, from Egypt and Mesopotamia, and are made in various forms (painting, sculpture, written plaque), but their most popular form is the sculpture of a part of the body that was healed.


The term “votive art” is used to define any object used as a religious offering, in order to request agreements with the divinity: it can be to ask for protection, ask for a sign or message, or ask that something specific happen. But all of them speak of the future, of a promise (vow) to be made in exchange for an object offered. Except the ex-voto: it speaks of the past, because it is a work created to thank a grace already received.


Because it describes a past event, it can be read as a narrative object. And for telling a story of a miracle or transformation, it can also be read as a form of self-mythology. This is how French anthropologist Marc Augé defines ex-votos: small individual mythologies. And who can make a statue of themselves? Those usually considered worthy of a historical record are powerful figures, social and political leaders, eternalized in stone in an important place. Stories worthy of a monument. The ex-voto is a counter-monument: it gives ordinary people an extraordinary record, of a story about survival brought by faith, therefore it escapes logic, it is magical and mythical.


Today, the ex-voto is considered a traditional Christian practice. However, its adoption by Christianity is curious. The great boom of archaeological records of ex-votos occurs in Ancient Greece, where the practice was part of offerings to the pantheon of Greek mythology. But when the Roman Empire, which followed the ways of Greek culture, adopted Christianity as its official religion, mythology was put at risk. And the strategy to defend the power of the one God was to condemn idolatry and offerings to polytheistic gods, who came to be called “pagans,” the false gods. But to facilitate conversions, the pope allowed some practices to be maintained, as long as the recipient changed: “You can make your offering, but only the Christian God will answer it.”


But while the practice was absorbed, the language was criminalized. In classical Greek, “ex-voto” was linked to the idea of “anáthema,” which meant “something raised to the heavens” or “placed upward,” an object dedicated to a divinity. However, in Christianity, “anathema” came to mean “excommunication,” frequently cited in the Bible as the most serious form of punishment: expulsion from the church and from the right to paradise and salvation. This contradiction, which is common in the expansion of Christianity, even has its own name among scholars: interpretatio christiana, the practice of reinterpreting pre-existing cultural elements within the Christian vision. Basically a form of cultural appropriation.


But in Latin America it was different. Despite the colonial stereotype that it was a great empty land with dispersed cultures, there were already solid cultural soils, and Christian expansionism met resistance. Indigenous and African peoples did not passively receive cultural imposition, and interpretatio gave way to religious syncretism, a practice that walks between mixture and disguise, so that the culture of colonized peoples could survive. Brazil’s title of “country of mixture” owes much to religious syncretism. Many orishas are associated with Catholic saints: Saint George is linked to Ogum, Iemanjá to Our Lady of Navigators, the twin saints Cosmas and Damian are the Yoruba twins Ibejis, and the foods and dances of June festivals come from Indigenous traditions. The ex-voto is one of these crossings.


The Museu Afro Brasil Emanoel Araujo records the production of ex-votos, with sculptures that move between popular Catholicism and elements linked to Afro-Brazilian religiosities. The synthesis (pejoratively called simplicity) and the geometry of the forms are not “lack of technique”; they simply do not follow the European artistic ideal. Instead, they use cultural references that pass through the crossroads of syncretism.

Interpretatio has similarities in modern art. Picasso reinterpreted the geometric synthesis of African masks, which, according to him, had a “wild, primitive force” that caused in him a spiritual awakening. But while Picasso is read as a revolutionary of visual language, the syncretic ex-voto is still read within the big basket of “popular religious practices,” a more downgraded place in the hierarchy of the technical gaze of art. Brazilian anthropologist Lilia Schwarcz defines Brazilian ex-votos as heirs of popular, Indigenous, and African traditions, a channel that to this day is used in Brazilian art for the construction of counter-narratives.





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