Igreja da Candelária

The Igreja da Candelária — the Church of Our Lady of Candelária — is one of the most imposing Baroque and Neoclassical buildings in Rio de Janeiro, its dome and towers landmarks on the city's waterfront. Visconti painted it in 1902, applying the observer's eye of a Post-Impressionist landscape painter to one of Brazil's most symbolically loaded architectural subjects. The church stood primarily as a monument to Brazil's colonial Catholic heritage, and its monumental form presented Visconti with a compositional challenge quite different from his looser landscape work. The painting is held at the Pernambuco Contemporary Art Museum.

The church's domed and towered mass presents Visconti with an architectural subject that required more structural definition than his looser landscape work. He balances the building's formal architectural character with his atmospheric treatment of surrounding light and sky, applying Post-Impressionist broken colour to surfaces that academic painting would have rendered with smooth precision.