Reading as if contemplating a picture: the persuasive image in Antônio Vieira’s sermons

Abstract

Recycled from the classical age, Rhetoric found in the Portuguese court of the 17th century the need to meet its counter-reformist urges, therefore integrating theological-political relations that aimed at the full functioning of the Portuguese mystical body (Pécora, 1994). For this purpose, the figurative appeal, an originally profane resource, served as a more efficient mediation strategy between the celestial and the earthly. This visualism conspicuous in Vieira’s sermonistics can be more remarkbly observed by reading his parenetic cycle dedicated to Saint Francis Xavier (1694), in which the Horatian concept of ut pictura poesis or, in this case, ut pictura rhetorica is mobilized as an abundant representational strategy throughout the sermons. By engineering a discourse of quickly recognized references by the society of his time, Vieira seems to transfer to his own work, through the application of discoursive topoi, the pictorical commonplaces of Xavierian representations of the age, exposing their Rhetorical strategies even from the preambular text of the aforementioned cycle. The pictorical tradition surrounding Saint Francis Xavier thereupon seems to enhance Vieira’s discoursive procedures, granting a sharper persuasive potential to his sermonistic works.