LENDO E AGENCIANDO IMAGENS: O REI, A NATUREZA E SEUS BELOS NATURAIS

The main goal of this article is a methodological one. Why we, human scientists in general, are so careful about written documents, but so conservative dealing with iconographic sources? How to understand the importance of images as an historical document? How to deal with visual documents not as mere "illustrations", which are only meant to give luster and adorn what is a priori known, or "products" of their context, but as a main source of "production" of costumes, representations, and depictions of a particular moment? Having this kind of questions in mind, the article analyses a set of documents produced during the Second Reign, when Pedro II and his governors tried to create a kind of official project of nationality on a tripod basis formed by official images of the State: the king, nature, and his natives (slaves and indigenous people). The challenge then is to analyze how images not only reproduce (are products of ) but also produce the context in which they are inscribed.