This life-sized bust of Manuel Faustino dos Santos Lira depicts him as a young man wearing a shirt and tie. The artist is Herbert Magalhaes and it is dated to 2004.
This website (
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"Manuel Faustino dos Santos Lira ( Santo Amaro , 1775 - Salvador , 1799 ) was a Bahian tailor , one of the leaders of the Bahian Conjuration , a revolt in Salvador, also known as the Revolta dos Alfaiates.
He was the son of a freed slave . His father is officially unknown, but throughout his life the young mulatto maintains close relations with the family of Pires de Carvalho and Albuquerque, his mother's former owner.
In the mid -1790s , he began to attend secret meetings, in which the ideals of the French Revolution and its possible application in Brazilian society are discussed. In 1798 , he is one of the first to be considered a suspect for the authorship of anonymous pamphlets that call on the population of Salvador to declare and defend the "República Baiense".
Wanted by the authorities responsible for the debauchery, he is found and detained on the property of Pires de Carvalho and Albuquerque. Tried and sentenced to death, he is hanged in Praça da Piedade, together with soldiers Lucas Dantas and Luís Gonzaga das Virgens and also a tailor João de Deus Nascimento ." The original source is at (
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Furthermore this Wikipedia site (
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"The Bahian Conspiracy, also known as Revolt of the Tailors (after the trade of many of the leaders) and recently also called Revolt of Buzios, was a late eighteenth century slave rebellion in the then Captaincy of Bahia, in the State of Brazil. Unlike the Inconfidência Mineira of 1789, it was a separatist movement with a popular base and extensive black participation.
The objectives of the rebelling baianos were, according to Clóvis Moura, "much more radical," and the proposal to liberate the slaves was one of the main goals. Its leaders and members included "freed blacks, black slaves, pardo slaves, freed pardos, artisans, tailors; those who were from the most oppressed or discriminated classes of Bahia colonial society". With many slaves living in Bahia, the probability of revolts and rebellions ran high. The elites of the area were frightened that if rebellion or revolts did happen, they would be similar to the Haitian Revolution. Because of the significant participation of Bahia's lower classes, the revolt has also been called “The First Brazilian Social Revolution”."