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Staging the leader's divinity

Keywords: Anachronism, Fragmented body, Pietà, Portuguese-Brazilian culture, Warburguian phantasmal model.

To promote a historical-cultural crossing, I highlight the use of a figural fragment and its correspondences in historical aesthetic models: the pendant arm. From these relationships, a genealogy of the figuration of the body is consolidated, especially from the studies of Georges Didi-Huberman on the survival of the images, notably according to the ghostly model of Aby Warburg. In admitting the figure of the heroic body as a derivation of the figure of the holy body in previous work, I now propose an anachronistic and remissive path, starting with a short contemporary cinematographic scene, in About Schmidt (2002), to arrive at the medieval Portuguese Pietàs in the singular typology of Manueline bifaceted crucifix. My attention, therefore, falls on a significant deviation in relation to the axial paths of Art History, in order to regain a contact between Brazilian art and Portuguese culture, whose connections I suppose are considerably attenuated.