A Trip through History: Itaú Cultural Institute

A few days ago I had the opportunity to go through a trip through Brazilian History: I visited the Itaú Cultural Institute. First, some context: Itaú Bank is the largest bank in Latin America, headquartered in São Paulo. For many years it had a banker by the name of Olavo Setúbal as its chairman, and, in addition to administering the bank, he painstakingly collected a number of rare artifacts from the beginnings of Brazilian History (as in, when Europeans first arrived in the country, all the way back to the XVI century) and once he passed away a museum was built to show to the public all those artifacts.

It's quite an extraordinary collection: it contains original drawings made by the first artists who visited Brazil, throughout the XVI, XVII, XVIII and XIX centuries. To Europeans, Brazil was a big unknown land, full of strange creatures and unimaginable places. For the sake of comparison, the Europeans that looked at those drawings felt kinda like us when we see pictures of Mars. To the artists, it was a challenge to capture on paper the images of plants, animals and places they had never seen before.

As a bonus, there was a temporary exposition about Oswald de Andrade (1890 - 1954), one of the greatest Brazilian writers and (like myself) from the city of São Paulo. He was one of the exponents of the Brazilian modernist movement, which in the first half of the XX century brought in new artistic trends from abroad and fused them with Brazilian culture. Furthermore, he was a really funny guy, being the author of some rather amusing witticisms, as you can see below.

All in all, it was a wonderful afternoon, and I can wholeheartedly recommend this museum to anybody passing by São Paulo.

(at the entrance, a stair is flanked by a series of ancient drawings of animals and plants from Brazil)




(one of the very first drawings of Native Brazilians: not exactly knowing what he was seeing, the artist took some creative liberties and drew them like Europeans)

(one of the very first maps of Brazil - the interior of the country was a vast unknown, and the artist just put some drawings to fill the void. Eventually legends about gold, gemstones and mythical creatures would fill up that empty space)


(a couple of pieces of the very first gold taken from Brazil by the Portuguese - it is incredibly rare to find those ingots as the Portuguese originally made them)

(my apologies for the reflections - it was next to impossible to get rid of them. This is the first drawing of the Brazilian jungle by an European)





(Rio de Janeiro, with the sugarloaf in the background)

(and some more Rio de Janeiro)

(a painting of my hometown, São Paulo)

(an original Brazilian flag from 1850)

(a painting of a Brazilian Navy ship rescuing an American ship in flames, in the XIX century) 

(some context on this collection of documents: in 1889 Brazil went from being a monarchy to be a republic. So, each original document you see above has the signature of each Brazilian president, from 1889 to 1985)

(at the entrance of the temporary exposition, a picture of the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade)

(his original thesis, "The Crisis of the Messianic Philosophy", when he became a Philosophy professor at the University of São Paulo)

("Tupi" is the name of one of the largest Native Brazilian tribes. This was part of his "anthropophagist manifest", in which Brazilian artists would "eat" foreign culture and make it Brazilian, like in some of the first contacts with Native Brazilians in which they ate some Europeans)

(one of his poems, that I particularly like. Translation of the last stanza: "Please God don't allow that I die / Without coming back to São Paulo / Without seeing 15th street / And the progress of São Paulo")


Location: São Paulo, State of São Paulo, Brazil

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