Brazil

Portuguese America kept accounts in réis, written with a cifrão, alongside the cruzado of 400 réis, which survived as a habit of speech in contracts long after it ceased to be struck; gold coin came from the mints of Bahia, Rio de Janeiro and Vila Rica, the 6$400 réis peça of 14.34 grams at 22 karat being the workhorse piece from 1727 onward, and crown policy deliberately tariffed gold higher in the colony than in Lisbon to keep it from leaving. In the mining captaincy of Minas Gerais gold was not merely the measure but the medium: until well past mid-century debts were settled in weighed gold dust reckoned in oitavas of about 3.59 grams, and church receipts routinely record payment as thirty-two oitavas of gold rather than any coin. What survives in unusual density are the account books of the lay brotherhoods, together with notarial contracts and the delivery acts in which sworn assessors itemised and priced every departure from an agreement, because these bodies were run by elected laymen who had to account to their fellows and to the bishop. In Minas the artists were paid out of the same gold their patrons dug, and the documents let one watch a price being argued: a moulding at five oitavas, a faked stone bay at ten, a mis-painted pedestal docked to three.

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João de Carvalhais’ Contract to Paint and Gild the Nave of the Pilar Mother Church, Vila Rica 1768

On 1 February 1768 the Irmandade do Santíssimo Sacramento of the Pilar mother church in Vila Rica put its coffered nave ceiling out to contract, bare of paint for thirty years since the carpenter Antônio Francisco Pombal built it, and the painter João de Carvalhais took the work for five thousand cruzados plus 385$000 réis, payable in four instalments. When the work was handed over in May 1770, two master painters were brought in as assessors, one for each side, and they walked the scaffold pricing every addition beyond the written conditions in eighths of gold: five oitavas for each moulding, ten for each bay faked as veined stone with gilded lips, three apiece for sixteen pedestals painted in oil, indigo and vermilion instead of the burnished white the contract specified. Carvalhais, called merely a painter in 1768, is titled Mestre Pintor in the delivery act. The sum is converted at the standard of the 6$400 réis gold peça current in Brazil in 1768; because Minas also settled debts in weighed gold dust tariffed below coin, the metal actually handed over may have been a third greater, so this is the conservative end.

~4,898.6g

Arquivo Eclesiástico da Paróquia de Nossa Senhora do Pilar de Ouro Preto, Volume 218, Livro de Receita e Despesa da Irmandade do Santíssimo Sacramento, 1749–1810, fls. 119v–132v; Campos, Adalgisa Arantes. “Contribuição ao estudo da Igreja Matriz do Pilar de Ouro Preto e sua ornamentação pictórica no XVIII mineiro.” Revista Barroco Digital 1 (2021); Martins, Judith. Dicionário de artistas e artífices dos séculos XVIII e XIX em Minas Gerais. (IPHAN, 1974).