What the Angels says:

This work presents a philosophical and historical reflection on art and memory based on the material patrimony of the São João Batista Cemetery. Located in Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil, the nineteenth-century necropolis features monuments of angelic beings set in perpetual tombs of illustrious dead, such as Senator Pompeo, the Baron of Aquiraz, and the miracle worker Lúcia, named here to specify the direction of this funereal investigation. Through periodic visits, patrimonial surveys, bibliographic reviews, comparative studies, and creative writing, the methodology of this analysis and description aims to highlight the extent to which funerary art can rescue the social memory of other epochs for our times. To substantiate the research hypothesis, we created iconographies of necropolitan angels, described tomb architectures, and constructed biographies of public figures in order to find and demonstrate the correspondences between mortuary aesthetics and Brazilian society throughout the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. As a result of the field experiment, we found that the funeral heritage of Fortaleza safeguards a valuable part of the historical memories of Ceará and, by extension, Brazil. In conclusion, we sought to outline some of the connections between history and culture identified from a philosophical, artistic and social approach to the collection of angelic statues at the São João Batista Cemetery.