Brazil races to restore art damaged in capital riot over election results
BRASÍLIA — Maria Cristina Monteiro was hosting a birthday party last month when she saw the images.
Thousands of supporters of farright former president Jair Bolsonaro had stormed Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court and presidential palace in what authorities say was a bid to topple President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
She watched as the mob rampaged through the institutions at the heart of the country’s young democracy, smashing glass, slashing paintings, urinating on tapestries, decapitating statues and splintering furniture. She cried.
“We got emotional because it was our home being invaded,” said Monteiro, who was settling into her new job as coordinator of the Senate museum before the Jan. 8. attack. “We saw it smashed, broken — and it’s not just our house. It is the house of all the Brazilian population.”
The next day, she went to work — but it was clear her job had changed. Ordinarily, she and her colleagues focus on preserving the roughly 3,000 pieces of art in the Senate museum, some of which have decomposed over the body’s 200-year history. Now, their focus was restoring what was damaged.
A month later, they’re making progress. Teams have restored dozens of damaged objects, including door handles in the shape of the coat of arms of the republic, bronze busts of key historical figures and the Alfredo Ceschiatti sculpture “A Justica” outside the Supreme Court.
But there are challenges. Some works were vandalized beyond repair. The entrance to the presidential office is still missing glass. The Supreme Court lost 31 pieces and a Brazilian flag. Restoring some items will require the construction of new contraptions to avoid wrecking them further.
Still, those who have been working long days to restore or rebuild the nation’s patrimony say they’re determined to restore as much as possible.
Asked if there’s anything that can’t be repaired, Gilcy Rodrigues de Azevedo, head of the preservation service for the Chamber of Deputies, smiled.
“Never ask a restorer if he or she won’t try,” she said.
The urgency of the effort mirrors that of Brazilian authorities investigating the attack, who have conducted several raids to round up those suspected of responsibility, including its financiers and the security and political officials whose alleged inaction abetted it.
More than 1,400 people have been arrested, including Bolsonaro’s former justice minister and the former commander of military police in the federal district. They also include the man authorities allege damaged a 17th-century clock by the French master Balthazar Martinot, leaving it “broken from top to bottom, with cracks, deformations and losses,” Brazil’s National Historic and Artistic Heritage Institute wrote.