The short answer
Probably not, and no one knows what he looked like. No portrait of Tiradentes was made in his lifetime. The long beard and hair were invented in 1890, when artists modeled him on images of Christ. The records point the other way: shaving razors among his belongings, and a fellow plotter calling him “ugly, and wild-eyed.”
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A face nobody recorded
Every Brazilian knows the face: long hair parted in the middle, a full beard, a calm, suffering gaze. It is on the five-centavo coin, on statues and in school textbooks. It belongs to Tiradentes, the ensign hanged in 1792 for plotting a republic in Minas Gerais. But nobody drew or painted him while he was alive. He was an ensign with no fortune, and he left no portrait.
What survives are a few words. During the inquiry, the poet Alvarenga Peixoto, his fellow conspirator, described him as “ugly, and wild-eyed.” And when officials inventoried what the ensign owned, they wrote down shaving razors. Razors don’t prove a smooth chin, but they suggest a man who shaved.
Drawn in 1890
The face arrived when the Republic needed one. In January 1890, two months after the monarchy fell, a decree made April 21, the day of his hanging, a national day in his name. That same year the illustrator Angelo Agostini imagined him with a beard and long hair, working from a painting of Christ by Van Dyck. The positivist painter Décio Villares did the same, with the noose around his neck. In 1893 Aurélio de Figueiredo put him on the gallows in a white robe.
Also in 1893, Pedro Américo painted Tiradentes esquartejado, “Tiradentes Quartered.” At the top of the scaffold, the bearded, long-haired head lies beside a crucifix. The canvas hangs today in the Museu Mariano Procópio in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais.
Why he looks like Jesus
The resemblance was the point. The republicans wanted a martyr, and the most powerful image of martyrdom their public knew was Christ: a man betrayed by a companion, condemned by the authorities and killed in public. The story lent itself to the comparison, with an informer in the role of Judas and a condemned man who climbed the scaffold with his eyes on the crucifix. Pedro Américo’s painting makes the ensign a martyr in the religious sense of the word.
The part that is true
One detail the painters got right. The white robe was real: it was the alva, the garment of the condemned. Friar Raimundo de Penaforte, who stayed with him to the end, wrote that when the hangman came to dress him in it, Tiradentes took off his own shirt and put the robe on himself.
The other thing the paintings suggest, that he was the commanding figure of the plot, is shakier. In the records he is an ensign among colonels, priests and judges.
A face set in bronze
After the paintings came the statues. In 1894 Ouro Preto, the old Vila Rica, raised him on top of a column in its main square, facing the old jail. In 1926 Rio opened the Palácio Tiradentes, built where the jail of his last days had stood, with a bronze ensign on the steps, beard and robe included. Since 1998 the five-centavo coin has carried the same face beside the triangle of the conspiracy. It is the best-known face in Brazilian history, and it was drawn by people who never saw him. How the holiday helped spread it is a story of its own.
Sources
- Autos de Devassa da Inconfidência Mineira: Alvarenga Peixoto’s description of Tiradentes; inventory of Tiradentes’s belongings
- Pedro Américo, Tiradentes esquartejado (1893), Museu Mariano Procópio, Juiz de Fora
- Decree 155-B of the Provisional Government, January 14, 1890
- José Murilo de Carvalho, A formação das almas: o imaginário da República no Brasil (1990)