Brazil's flag

Why green and yellow?

by Ruth Salles

We saw the BRAZILIAN FLAG so much at the Olympics that I wonder: Who knows to whom we owe the design of our flag and what the colors mean? They used to say that the person who designed it was José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, and a poet even explained that the green represented the forests, and the yellow, gold. But it was not like that. 

José Bonifácio helped in the elaboration of the project, but the drawing was created by the French painter and draftsman Jean Baptiste Debret, who wasa teacher in Brazil and linked to the court.

The green of the flag is the color of the family, or as they used to say, the color of Dom Pedro I's house in Bragança; as for yellow, it is the color of the house in Austria, where Empress Leopoldina was born, and with yellow in diamond, it means the female figure. In the center there was a symbol of the Empire, which later, in the Republic, was changed to blue with stars representing the states of Brazil. And the motto of the republic is a positivist motto, in vogue at the time, and this motto, complete would be Amor, Ordem e Progresso, but the word Love was removed. Here is the authorship and meaning of the “auriverde pendão of our land / that the Brazilian breeze kisses and sways” as the verses of the great Castro Alves say.

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