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Ancestors and icons
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| Décio Villares, Tiradentes |
In Brazil, painters such as Décio Villares and Henrique Bernardelli were enlisted to fashion a new republican iconography centred around the cult of Tiradentes, executed for participating in a republican conspiracy in Minas Gerais in 1789. This image from the 1890s deliberately attempts to craft Tiradentes into a 'republican Christ', exploiting the religious connotations of his 'martyrdom'.