Escrava Anastacia: the Iconographic history of a Brazilian popular Saint

This article describes the transformation of an image depicting an unnamed, enslaved African man wearing a metal facemask, a common form of punishments in colonial Brazil, into the iconic representation of the martyred slave Anastacia/Anastasia, the focus of a growing religious and political movement in Brazil. The authors trace the image to an early 19th century engraving based on a drawing by the Frenchman Jacques Arago. Well over a century later, Arago's image increasingly became associated with a corpus of myths describing the virtuous suffering and painful death of a female slave named Anastacia. By the 1990s, Arago's image (and variations of it), now identified as the martyred Anastacia/Anastasia, had proliferated throughout Brazil, an object of devotion for Catholics and practitioners of Umbanda, as well as a symbol of black pride.