The Painting's Scripture: Power and Portrait in A menina morta (1954), by Cornélio Penna

The article proceeds to a reading of Corn & eacute;lio Penna's novel A menina morta (1954), starting from the hypothesis of the centrality of the portrait of the dead girl in the narrative and the impact of the images in its novelistic configuration, tangent to the relations between painting and literature that, moreover, they cross the writer's own biography. The portrait is analyzed as a mechanism for legitimizing manorial power due to the effect of subjectivation that it perpetuates, using, for this purpose, Burke and Kantorowicz's analysis of the uses of the king's image in european monarchies. Finally, the description of the enigma of the dead girl by her sister, Carlota, is presented, which suspends its effect to reveal the violence on which the manorial power of the Grot & atilde;o farm is based, in a movement specified to that of the cornelian writing itself by placing in perspective the picture of the original catastrophe of Brazilian history.