Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521–1821

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-063

1527-1900

Susan Deans‐Smith,

Latin American history and culture

Colonial art in Latin America has not traditionally generated the same intense interest that has been lavished on the pre-Columbian and contemporary art of Latin America, at least in the Anglophone literature and academy. Thankfully, this appears to be changing. The past decade has witnessed a surge of spectacular exhibitions in the United States on colonial Latin American art: The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530 – 1830 (2004); Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521 – 1821 (2004); Inventing Race: Casta Painting and Eighteenth-Century Mexico (2004); The Arts in Latin America, 1492 – 1820 (2006); and The Virgin, Saints, and Angels: South American Paintings 1600 – 1825 from the Thoma Collection (2006). All have produced sleek exhibition catalogues with essays by scholars from both Latin America and the United States on artistic production and its techniques, purposes, responses, and contexts. Consequently, it is becoming increasingly easier to introduce students (especially undergraduates who may not read Spanish and Portuguese) to sophisticated analyses of the visual and material culture of colonial Latin America. The fact that two new surveys dedicated to the colonial period have appeared within the last three years surely indicates not only the need to take stock of the cumulative significance of recent scholarship on colonial art but also the growth in university curricula of specialized courses in the art and visual culture of the colonial period. The work under review originated from the author’s frustration with the lack of adequate texts for courses on colonial Latin American art.Despite the title of the work, Kelly Donahue-Wallace focuses on the art and architecture of Spanish America, excluding Portugal and Brazil. She emphasizes the colonial capitals of Mexico City and Lima but gives considerable attention to different geographical regions. Her analysis ranges from the colonial capitals to Cuzco, Potosí, Santiago de Chile, Paraguay, Puebla, Tlaxcala, the mining communities of Zacatecas and Taxco, and frontier areas such as New Mexico. As an art historian, she is mindful of questions of style but questions how valuable it is to apply labels such as “Baroque” and “neoclassic,” echoing what Elizabeth Wilder Weisman described as the “chronological anarchy” of colonial Latin American art. However, her concerns extend well beyond confining contemplations on style labels. In eight chapters the author examines painting (religious themes and secular genres such as the casta paintings and monjas coronadas), sculpture, religious and civic architecture (altar screens, cathedrals, churches, miraculous cult images and their shrines), and urban planning, and their development over 300 years. The final chapter analyzes the foundation of the Royal Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City and the spread of the neoclassical style in South America in the late eighteenth century. The result is a deft exploration of the diversity of artistic production both within and between the viceroyalties, and its formal and iconographic variations.The chronological framework of this study enables the author to trace the differences in the various media between the early and late colonial periods, their changing cultural and aesthetic fortunes, and their broader political, social, and economic contexts. The main argument which threads its way throughout the book is that art and architecture played a significant role in the formation of Spanish American colonial societies and “participated in a constant and diverse cultural negotiation” (p. xxiii). While this argument is not exactly new, her careful attention to both the art and architecture and the people and policies that produced them demonstrates how those processes unfolded. Donahue-Wallace is particularly sensitive to teasing out the social interactions and exchanges embodied in artistic production, and she captures the energy of sheer inventiveness. Processes of acculturation, inculturation, and transculturation are illustrated in vivid ways, as are ruptures and repressions. Her discussions of the architecture of evangelization, mural paintings, and monastic decorative programs show the intellectual and artistic cooperation and negotiations of friars and native artists “even when the forms and iconography appear overwhelmingly European” (pp. 38 – 39). She analyzes the differing fortunes of several pre-Columbian media in postconquest society, such as Mesoamerican feather mosaics and Andean queros (ornamented cups); missionaries appropriated the former for use by the church but rejected the latter. The overall impression is of a cultural entente cordiale as much as it is of a “war of images.”This study is accessible to scholars, students (both undergraduates and graduates), and the general reader. It includes useful primary-source extracts and abundant illustrations. By way of comment more than criticism, the author could have profitably included a conclusion to reflect more generally on what she sees as the most important research directions for the future. And, one minor clarification is necessary. In the excerpt she chose of the painters’ guild ordinances of 1686, she includes the article that prohibited any master painter from accepting apprentices who were not Spanish (p. 139). The painters did indeed include this article in their revised ordinances. The viceroy, however, rejected it, along with one other ordinance, so it was not included in the final version of the ordinances that went into effect in 1686. Finally, as mentioned above, the author excludes Brazil and only makes brief reference to Spain’s Asian possessions. We are fortunate in this regard to have Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s Art of Colonial Latin America (London, 2005), which pays attention to Asian and African influences on colonial Latin American art. He also reflects on the enduring influence of colonial art on contemporary Latin American art. Both of these valuable studies should be read by anyone interested in the development of colonial Latin American art and of colonial cultures and societies.