I have pushpinned two photocopied portraits of Dr Raimundo Nina Rodrigues (1862-1906) on the wall of my office in Amsterdam. They have been sitting there for months now, stuck somewhat unceremoniously between postcards from a summer's trip to the baroque churches of southern Spain, a printout with several how-to-avoid-RSI-exercises from my physiotherapist and teaching schedules for the next semester.

One of the portraits depicts Dr Nina as a young man. It seems to follow the conventions of portraiture in the Brazil of the second half of the 19th century, when – as Ana Maria Mauad tells us – Brazilians were in the grip of a genuine estatuamania (‘statue-mania’) and wanted their portraits to recall the statues of powerful great men on public squares (1997: 228). If that indeed is what the painter has tried to accomplish, the result is not entirely convincing. The portrait shows him to be a pale, skinny doutor, hiding behind an immense moustache and with a look in his eyes that expresses something midway between worry and desperation. The black coat over a spotless white shirt with starched collar, and the fur-trimmed cassock that indicates academic stature hardly produce the desired effect; other than a certain stiffness, there is little in this portrait that recalls the potency and might of a statue towering over a public square.

The other portrait, in an oval frame, was painted not too long before Dr Nina's death. Here he is portrayed full frontal, and made to look like the eminence grise of the Institute for Legal Medicine in Bahia where he was positioned as a professor of forensic medicine. The fur-trimmed cassock is still there, and the moustache – now pointing downwards – is even bigger. The frivolous, embroidered neck scarf of the earlier painting has been replaced by an austere-looking white one. His hair has gone almost as white. It is hard to believe that the man on this painting was only in his late thirties, early forties.

I had read the work of Dr Nina before I had even started my fieldwork in Bahia.