Aleijadinho

Antônio Francisco Lisboa was the son of a Portuguese architect and an enslaved African woman, born into slavery and freed at the font by his father. Almost nothing about his life is certain — even his birth year is given as 1730 or, more probably, 1738, and the main source was written forty years after his death. He became the greatest sculptor and architect of colonial Brazil without ever leaving the mining province of Minas Gerais. He worked in soapstone and cedar, designing whole churches and then carving their doorways, pulpits and saints himself, in a style that took the European baroque he knew only from engravings and bent it into something restless and local.

In his forties he was struck by a degenerative disease — its nature is still argued over — that destroyed his fingers and toes and disfigured his face; the nickname Aleijadinho, the little cripple, dates from then. He kept working, carried to the scaffolding by assistants with hammer and chisel bound to the stumps of his hands, and in that condition produced the twelve stone prophets on the terrace at Congonhas and the sixty-six cedar figures of the Stations of the Cross below them. He died poor and nearly blind at seventy-six and was buried in the church of the brotherhood he had belonged to in Ouro Preto. His work is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.