The Aleijadinho Prophets and the Sculptor's Curse

The Crippled Master of Minas Gerais

Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known by the epithet Aleijadinho — “the little cripple” — is the most celebrated artist of Portuguese colonial Brazil and one of the strangest biographies in the history of South American art. Born in Vila Rica, now Ouro Preto, around 1738, the illegitimate son of a Portuguese architect and an enslaved African woman, he carved cherubim, saints, and scenes of the Passion across the gold-rich cities of Minas Gerais while his body was destroyed by a disease his contemporaries could not name. By the time he completed his masterpiece — the twelve Old Testament prophets that stand on the terrace of the Sanctuary of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos at Congonhas — he had reportedly lost most of his fingers, his toes, and the use of his lower legs. His apprentices strapped his chisels to what remained of his hands. He worked at night, when the heat was bearable and observers fewer. He died in 1814, blind and largely abandoned.

The disease has been variously identified as leprosy, syphilis, scurvy, porphyria, or some combination, with no diagnosis fully accounting for the symptoms recorded by his nineteenth-century biographer Rodrigo Bretas. What is not in dispute is that the twelve prophets at Congonhas, completed between 1796 and 1805, were carved by a man in extraordinary pain. Pilgrims visiting the sanctuary across two centuries have reported that this pain is somehow legible in the soapstone, and that the figures themselves do not feel entirely inert.

The Prophets as Witnesses

Each of the twelve prophets — Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Habakkuk, and Nahum — is rendered with an expressiveness unusual for colonial religious sculpture. Their gestures point, accuse, lament, and prophesy across the broad terrace overlooking the valley. Visitors have long remarked that the figures seem to follow viewers with their gaze, an effect attributable in part to the subtle asymmetry of the carved eyes but reported with a consistency that some pilgrims interpret as more than optical.

A persistent strand of regional folklore holds that the prophets stir during the Holy Week processions held each year at Congonhas, when the carved figures from the Passos da Paixão chapels — over sixty wooden statues, also attributed to Aleijadinho’s workshop — are paraded through the town. Older townspeople have described nights during which the soapstone of the terrace seems “warm to the touch,” and others have reported hearing low Latin chanting from the direction of the prophets when the sanctuary is locked. None of these accounts has been verified beyond local testimony, but they are recorded in the parish archives and have been studied by the folklorist Saul Martins.

The Curse and the Death of Manuel da Costa Athayde

The “curse” of Aleijadinho — the term is loose, and the master himself was a devout Catholic — refers most often to the ill fortune said to follow those who damaged or removed his work. The most cited example is the painter Manuel da Costa Athayde, Aleijadinho’s principal collaborator, whose family was struck by a series of deaths and financial ruin in the years after the master’s funeral. Two of the original soapstone prophets were damaged during nineteenth-century restoration work, and the workmen involved are said to have suffered accidents or sudden illness, though the documentary trail for these claims is thin and largely retrospective.

A more concrete tradition concerns the small chapels of the Passos da Paixão. In 1957, a thief broke into the Crucifixion chapel and removed several of the wooden figures, intending to sell them on the antiquities market in Rio de Janeiro. He was found dead three weeks later in a São João del-Rei hotel room, the figures stacked beside him and the cause of death officially recorded as a heart attack. The Brazilian art historian Germain Bazin, who had recently completed his study of the Aleijadinho corpus, was asked about the case by a journalist and replied — with the careful neutrality of a scholar — that “the prophets do not forget.”

Pilgrims, Visitations, and Recent Reports

Bom Jesus de Matosinhos draws roughly half a million pilgrims a year, many of whom visit specifically to leave ex-votos — small wooden or wax representations of healed body parts — in gratitude for cures attributed to the sanctuary. The Sala dos Milagres, where these offerings are displayed, contains tens of thousands of items dating to the eighteenth century. Pilgrims occasionally report dreams of the prophets, of a small dark figure working at night with his back turned, or of being addressed by name from the terrace at dusk. Whether these experiences belong to the category of visionary pilgrimage common across Catholic Iberian-American sanctuaries or to something more specifically local is a question the local clergy generally decline to adjudicate.

A small number of contemporary sensitives, including practitioners associated with the Brazilian spiritist tradition, have visited the sanctuary and reported a presence they identify as the sculptor himself. Spiritism, codified by Allan Kardec and culturally established in Brazil since the late nineteenth century, treats such encounters as communication with disincarnate spirits rather than as hauntings in the gothic sense. Reports from these visits, when written up, often describe a figure of “small stature, much pain, and great patience,” matching the historical Aleijadinho with a fidelity that skeptics attribute to suggestion and that proponents take as evidential.

Heritage and Mystery

The sanctuary and the twelve prophets were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985. The Brazilian Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage has restored the soapstone figures repeatedly, addressing the granular erosion that affects the local stone. Each restoration has produced its own minor folklore — a worker who refused to return, an instrument that cracked inexplicably, a sudden storm that delayed a critical phase. None of these incidents alone constitutes evidence of the supernatural; collectively, they form a thread of unease that has accompanied the prophets for two centuries.

The mystery of Aleijadinho himself — his disease, his discipline, the spiritual content of work made in such pain — remains the deepest layer of the case. The carvings outlast the carver. They look down on a valley that has changed beyond recognition since 1814, and pilgrims continue to feel watched.

Sources

• Bazin, G. L’Aleijadinho et la sculpture baroque au Brésil. Paris: Le Temps, 1963.
• Bretas, R. J. F. Traços biográficos do Antônio Francisco Lisboa. 1858.
• Martins, S. Folclore em Minas Gerais. Belo Horizonte: UFMG, 1991.
• IPHAN. “Restauração dos Profetas de Congonhas: Relatórios 1957–2019.”