A materialização da melancolia no Cemitério Municipal de Cruz Alta-RS: um estudo sob o viés da arqueologia da imagem

Abstract

This work aims to recognize the social imagery related to the materialization of melancholy in human figures, with the goal of revealing the identity in the processes occurring in the image set selected at the Cruz Alta Municipal Cemetery, which was installed in 1863, in the wake of the cemeteries secularization process, and sanitation policies in Brazil. Also, this set was analyzed in the light of Archaeology of Image, a theoretical-methodological approach derived from Classical Archeology, characterized by developing researches with images objects. In the Archeology of Image approach, the image is not treated as a mere discourse illustration, or as a representation of the real, but rather, as a construction, a cultural composition formed by social factors, with various techniques applied to the most diverse supports and raw materials. In a nutshell, we identified sixteen tombstones with female anthropomorphic images marble made, with characteristics that refer to the classic concept of melancholy, associated with the humoral doctrine of Hippocratic medicine. Moreover, throughout its history, it has been associated with attributes such as slowness, stagnation, sadness, solitude, morbidity, indifference, but also to genius, to deep thought, and to divinatory gifts. This melancholic pathos influenced the arts and literature that characterized the Romanticism. The period in which the tombstones occurred more frequently, particularly the first three decades of the 20th century, was a time of substantial changes in the city, this being the reason why we associate the tombstones with an attempt of relating the buried with a spirit of modernity, that permeated the society in that period.