Congonhas

The twelve stand on the adro in front of the church, life-size in soapstone, dressed in the oriental fashion, each holding a cartouche with his own prophecy on it in Latin. Aleijadinho and his assistants cut them between 1800 and 1805, when he was already gravely ill. They have names: Jeremias, Isaías, Baruc, Ezequiel, Daniel, Oséias, Joel, Amós, Abdias, Jonas, Naum and Habacuc.

The church behind them began as a sick man's promise. Feliciano Mendes, a miner travelling with Bartolomeu Bueno's bandeira, fell gravely ill, swore to work only in the service of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos if he recovered, and once cured spent his life collecting alms for a temple he never saw finished. It went up across the whole eighteenth century and was only completed late in the nineteenth, and the municipality is clear about what earned it UNESCO's list, which is the roll of people who worked on it: the painters João Nepomuceno Correia e Castro, Manuel da Costa Ataíde and Bernardo Pires, the carver Jerônimo Félix, the builder Francisco de Lima Cerqueira, the gilder João de Carvalhais, and Aleijadinho among them. Before the prophets came the Passion, 66 cedar figures across six chapels, from the Last Supper to the Crucifixion, cut between 1796 and 1799. The sanctuary entered IPHAN's Livro de Tombo de Belas Artes in 1939 and the UNESCO list in 1985.