20th C. Brazilian Carved Wood Relief Panel - Man, Donkey, Serpents

South America, Brazil, Northeast region (Pernambuco or Paraiba). A carved hardwood narrative panel, worked in deep relief with a crowded cast of men and beasts. At the base rises the long muzzle and flared ears of a donkey; above it emerges the head, neck, and shoulders of a bearded man, his hair cut in a heavy fringe, his eyes wide and lids sharply undercut. A serpent coils along the left edge with head raised, while two crocodilians or lizards cross the upper register, jaws agape and bodies rendered in dense crosshatched scales. The carver has filled nearly every surface with chiseled texture, so that scale, hair, and beard read as one continuous woven skin. Such panels belong to the popular art of the Brazilian Northeast, where woodcarvers translated the printed imagery and rhyming tales of literatura de cordel into sculptural form. Literatura de cordel, the chapbook poetry sold on strings in the markets of Pernambuco, Paraiba, and Ceara, supplied the Northeast with a shared visual language: bandits and saints, talking animals, devils and drought, the sertanejo on his donkey. The woodcut covers of these booklets, cut in blunt, high-contrast blacks, shaped generations of regional carvers and printmakers, and their vocabulary migrated readily into sculpture, ceramics, and relief panels made for local devotion, decoration, and, from the 1950s onward, for visitors. The composition here follows that logic rather than a single fixed story: the man and his mount are anchored by creatures of the caatinga backlands, the serpent and the lizard, animals that carry both practical menace and proverbial weight in cordel verse. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 203976

Estimate:$225

View all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorEthnographic