STONE PROPHETS

HIGH above the sleepy Brazilian town of Congonhas do Campo (pop. 6,000) stands the small, twin-towered, white Church of Senhor Bom Jesus do Matosinhos. Last week the church was the goal of the great annual pilgrimage of Brazilian backlanders, as it has been each September since 1786. The Church of the Good Jesus has all the religious trappings of a shrine: founded by the Portuguese hermit Feliciano Mendes, and today a Redemptorist mission, it boasts the original cross used by the hermit and a wooden effigy of the Good Jesus renowned for winder-working properties. But only in recent decades have Brazilians recognized that the church itself is a priceless part of the nation's heritage, largely because of the brooding presence of twelve soapstone prophets sculpted for the stairway (see opposite) by Brazil's first great sculptor, Antonio Francisco Lisboa.

Born the son of a Portuguese carpenter and a Negro slave, Antonio Francisco grew up in the 18th century gold-rush town of Ouro Preto. There, under the harsh rule of whiplashing, saber-swinging Portuguese dragoons, both blacks and whites labored to sluice and pan over $8,000,000 in gold and diamonds from the fabulous mines of Minas Gerais. Most of the gold went to the Portuguese Crown, but the little that the miners gleaned for themselves made them rich. To prove their piety, the miners embarked on a church-building spree that created some of the most handsomely rococo churches in South America. On these young Antonio Francisco worked, first as carpenter, later as architect and sculptor.

At the height of his career tragedy struck. Today most historians diagnose his disease as leprosy. As his toes and fingers began to wither, he is said to have struck several of them off in paroxysms of pain and rage. To hide his inflamed eyelids and grotesque face, he wore an engulfing hood and broad-brimmed hat. When he could no longer walk, he was carried about on the broad back of his slave Januario. To shut out the world's curious, derisive stare, he rigged a tent around him as he worked. Once the governor of Minas Gerais dared stick his head inside the tent and O Aleijadinho (The Little Cripple, as his townsmen called him) seized his mallet and chisel and showered His Excellency with stone chips.

The disease was well advanced when Aleijadinho was given the commission that became his crowning life's work, decorating the Church of Bom Jesus do Matosinhos. For the stairway he chose as his subject not the curved elegance of cherubim and seraphim that had made him famous, but stern Old Testament prophets. In them he found a wrath. compassion and inspiration that matched his own. He sculpted their squat figures in bizarre oriental costumes, twisted and tormented in soapstone (which is soft when quarried, grows hard with age). Before the last one was finished, in 1805, Aleijadinho was working with mallet and chisel strapped to the stumps of his crippled hands. He lived on miserably until 1814. When he died, his achievement marked the high point in exuberant Brazilian rococo.

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