Cleaning Up the Insurrection
The art restorers putting the Brazilian Senate building back together.
APRIL 11, 2023
“Can I take a look?” Urbano Villela Neto asked. Moving slowly, his arms folded, he approached the paintings on the wall of the Brazilian Senate Museum. “Wow. … That’s really sad.” In front of him was a vast gallery of 69 oil portraits of presidents of the Federal Senate. Each one had been painted by his father, the artist Urbano Villela.
The bottom row, with the most recent paintings, had been destroyed. Four paintings were slashed: two of Renan Calheiros (who presided over the Senate twice), one of José Sarney and one of Ramez Tebet. The cuts slashed the faces of the senators. Another painting of Sarney, who held the position of president of the Senate three times, had been destroyed.
Villela Neto had already seen images of the damage in the press. But he wanted to witness it with his own eyes. In 2005, his father was commissioned to make portraits of all the presidents of the Senate since the establishment of the National Congress of Brazil, an ongoing task. On January 8, a Bolsonarist mob invaded the Praça dos Três Poderes (Three Powers Plaza), which houses the Palácio do Planalto (the offices of the president), Congress and the Supreme Federal Court. The museum where the paintings were displayed is across from the ramp leading to the congressional building. During the invasion of the congressional building, a few Bolsonarists broke off from the mob and entered the museum. “My father was devastated that day,” said Villela Neto, who manages his 80-year-old father’s studio. “He started to cry. An artist’s perception is different from ours.”
Three days after the attempted coup, Villela Neto confirmed what he had already imagined: No restoration could possibly repair those slashes. The only thing that could be saved was the stained painting of Sarney. Since it wasn’t punctured, the portrait can be restored by museum specialists. Sarney himself commissioned the paintings, 20 years ago, when he assumed the presidency of the Senate for the second time. Sarney, who fancied himself a champion of the arts, wanted to become patron of the museum’s heritage. In a productive flurry, Villela made portraits ranging from José Egídio Álvares de Almeida (1767-1832), Marquis of Santo Amaro and first president of the Senate, through to Sarney himself. The artist has brought the gallery up to date every time a new president of the Senate is elected.
“To destroy a work of art is something that has no justification. What does that have to do with political ideology?”
Villela will now have to redo the paintings. Despite his advanced age, the painter remains very active. The paintings require at least two months of work and cost the government around 9,000 reais ($1,700) each. “To destroy a work of art is something that has no justification,” Villela Neto said. “What does that have to do with political ideology?” As he walked by the museum, a few workers from a company hired to clean up the damage were knocking down what remained of the broken windowpanes. Others painted the damaged roof of the congressional building.
A parliamentary adviser came in through the door of the museum, looked at the floor and gave a pained expression, as if he’d felt a pang in his heart: “Ay … the Burle Marx.” Spread across the marble floor, surrounded by poles, was a colorful tapestry made by the Brazilian landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx in 1973. The piece, almost 5 meters wide, had hung on one of the walls of the museum’s Black Hall, well clear of the entrance to the building. The day after the invasion, it was found far away from there, in front of the Senate chamber, torn and soaked — and not just with water: the fabric smelled of urine.
“How do you clean pee?” the coordinator of the museum, Maria Cristina Monteiro, asked aloud. “I have no idea,” she answered herself. The problem is one the restorers of the Senate have never faced before. That afternoon, after conversing with Villela Neto, Monteiro received two consultants from the National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage to analyze the tapestry and help think of solutions.
“They invaded and are destroying my house. That was the feeling.”
On January 8, Monteiro was at home supervising a play date with her daughter and a friend. She received the news of the invasion by cellphone. When she turned on the television and witnessed the destruction, she was inconsolable. “I thought: That was the museum. That was the glass panel by [French Brazilian artist] Marianne Peretti.” She started to cry. “They invaded and are destroying my house. That was the feeling.” The panel by Peretti, whose stained glass features in several buildings in Brasília, survived the day of destruction intact.
Monteiro arrived early the next day to assess the damage. The museum was filled with splinters of glass and marbles fired from a slingshot by some Bolsonarists. A greenish dust produced by the fire extinguishers covered the floor, which had been hosed by the invading crowd. Here and there were pieces of wood, torn out of a table from the 19th century. The museum staff suspects the vandals used those fragments to rip Villela’s paintings.
“The guys came up to this painting and kept shaking it to try and make it fall,” said Monteiro, in front of a 132-year-old painting by Gustavo Hastoy showing President Deodoro da Fonseca, surrounded by ministers, signing the constitution. At 10 by 14 feet, the painting is enormous, and the frame made of dense jacaranda plated with gold. The Bolsonarists did not achieve their objective. “Imagine if that fell on top of them,” Monteiro said. “It would kill them.”
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Wearing a white lab coat, Raimundo Nonato, a painting restorer, and Priscila Rocha, who restores works on paper, placed artworks that had been removed from the walls on a table. By Friday, January 13, five days after the attack, pieces that had been withdrawn from the museum awaited treatment in the restoration laboratory, which is located in a warehouse in a Senate parking lot. The little room looked like an office but with hammers and screwdrivers on the wall. Wearing blue gloves, the pair evaluated the damage to a dented bronze inkwell used by Senators of the Empire of Brazil in the 19th century, and a painting by 20th-century artist Guido Mondin, wet and scratched by glass shards. They also had the torn portrait of Sarney.
“The idea is that in the future, people can show the damage done on January 8. We hold on to them to tell the story.”
“Here we’re going to dot it with ink,” said Nonato, examining the painting by Mondin. “It’s going to be imperceptible.” Repairs to the shredded face of Sarney, on the other hand, could only do so much: “Up close, you’ll still be able to see the tearing,” Nonato explained. The paintings by Villela underwent an autopsy. The size of the cuts was measured with a ruler and noted on a slip. Although they are irreversibly damaged, neither of the two portraits will be discarded. For the time being, they will remain stored in the laboratory. “The idea is that in the future, people can show the damage done on January 8,” Rocha said. “We hold on to them to tell the story.”
This is an edited translation of an article originally published in the February issue of the Brazilian magazine Revista Piauí.
✺ Published in “Issue 3: Reparation” of The Dial
PHOTO: “Estrago patrimonial no prédio do Congresso Nacional, invadido na tarde de ontem (8), por manifestantes bolsonaristas. No Salão Nobre, a galeria de retratos oficiais de ex-presidentes do Senado Federal também foi depredada, como pode ser visto na tela rasgada do retrato de Renan Calheiros” by Pedro França/Agência Senado (via Wikimedia, licensed under CC BY 2.0)