Moema

Meirelles painted this in 1866, when Brazil was busy building a national mythology under its emperor, and artists were encouraged to find heroes in the country's own past. Moema comes from an old epic poem about the first Portuguese to settle Bahia. She was an indigenous woman who swam after the ship carrying her lover back to Europe and drowned when he sailed on without her. Meirelles does not show the chase. He shows her afterward, washed up on the sand, and paints her in the pose of a European Venus, a native woman given the body of a classical goddess. It was the fashion of the time to honor Brazil's original peoples this way while quietly leaving out what colonization had done to them.