10 - Ivory Good Shepherds as Visualizations of the Portuguese Restoration

Summary

Abstract: The chapter examines a group of objects that has enjoyed great popularity in art historical research on global artifacts in recent years: ivory sculptures of the childlike Christ as a good shepherd on a mountain, richly detailed with animals and biblical scenes. These were produced in Goa and found numerous buyers and collectors in Europe and in Brazil. This chapter links these figures to the idea of the Fifth Empire, which enjoyed widespread popularity above all in Brazil, popularized by the Jesuit António Vieira. According to this hypothesis, John IV of Braganza's ascent to the throne announced the last, peaceful age before the end of the world. The iconographies of the objects, but also their materiality and stylistic characteristics, are examined in detail in conjunction with Viera's theory.

Keywords: ivory, Good Shepherd, universal conversion, Fifth Empire, António Vieira

The Ivory Figures of the Good Shepherd

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries in Goa and presumably other places in the Portuguese Estado da Índia there was a group of objects aside from Madonnas and crucifixes manufactured in especially high numbers and probably in series. These were ivory sculptures of a shepherd boy sitting on a steep, nearly tower-like mountainous formation—an image now designated as the Good Shepherd (figs. 173–177). These figures have a very specific yet not easily decipherable iconography. As a rule, the boy is clothed in a wool cloak and more often than not sits on a heart that grows out of a stone or mountain; he holds a lamb on his lap or shoulder, and sometimes a shepherd's crook in his hand. Often, one of his arms rests on a gourd. Usually, the boy's legs are crossed and his head leans a bit to the side against his open right hand. The mountain on which he poses is full of sheep and other, wild, animals that comingle peacefully. Often we see Saint Mary Magdalene lying and reading in a cave at the sculpture's bottom. Water also generally pours out from a spring and flows from the top of the rocky outcropping onto the work's lower levels