Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780-1910 0826353762, 9780826353764

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Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910

Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910

edited by

Paul B. Niell and Stacie G. Widdifield

University of New Mexico Press Albuquerque

© 2013 by the University of New Mexico Press All rights reserved. Published 2013 Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13   1 2 3 4 5 6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buen gusto and classicism in the visual cultures of Latin America, 1780–1910 / edited by Paul B. Niell and Stacie G. Widdifield. — First [edition]. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8263-5376-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8263-5377-1 (electronic) 1. Art and society—Latin America. 2. Classicism in art—Latin America. 3. Classicism in architecture—Latin America. 4. Aesthetics. I. Niell, Paul B., 1976– editor of compilation. II. Widdifield, Stacie G., 1953– editor of compilation. N72.S6B84 2013 701’.03098—dc23 2013027323 book design: Catherine Leonardo Composed in 10.25/13.5 Minion Pro Regular Display type is Amigo Std Regular

Contents

Illustrations vii Acknowledgments xi Introduction by Paul B. Niell  xiii Part one 

Redefining Urban Space and the Promotion of Classicism Chapter One Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Statue of Charles IV and Buen Gusto in Late Colonial Mexico  3 Susan Deans-Smith Chapter Two Gothic Taste vs. Buen Gusto: Creolism, Urban Space, and Aesthetic Discourse in Late Colonial Peru  25 Isaac D. Sáenz Chapter Three El Templete: Classicism and the Dialectics of Colonial Urban Space in Early Nineteenth-Century Havana, Cuba  49 Paul B. Niell Chapter Four Neoclassical Pompai in Early Twentieth-Century Cartagena de Indias, Colombia  72 Carla Bocchetti

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contents Part two

Imprinting Classicism and Its Consumption Chapter Five A Taste for Art in Late Colonial New Spain  93 Kelly Donahue-Wallace Chapter Six The Plantation Landscape and Its Architecture: Classicism, Representation, and Slavery  114 Charles Burroughs Chapter Seven Buen Gusto and the Transition to Nation: 1830–1850  136 Magali Carrera Chapter Eight A Western Mirage on the Bolivian Altiplano  157 robert bradley Part three

Dividing Lines: Practices and Problems Chapter Nine The Language of Line in Late Eighteenth-Century New Spain: The Calligraphic Equestrian Portrait of Bernardo de Gálvez (1796)  179 Ray Hernández-Durán Chapter Ten Art and Viceregal Taste in Late Colonial Lima and Buenos Aires  206 Emily Engel Chapter Eleven From Baroque Triumphalism to Neoclassical Renunciation: Altarpieces of the Cathedral of Cuzco in the Era of Independence  232 Maya Stanfield-Mazzi Chapter Twelve Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Late Nineteenth Century: An Appraisal in the Context of the 1881 Centennial of Mexico’s Academy of San Carlos  255 Stacie G. Widdifield

Contributors 273 Index 277

Illustrations

Figure 0.1. Pedro Medina and others, façade of the Cathedral of Havana, Cuba, 1748–1771

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Figure 0.2. Estípite column, or pilaster, from Lorenzo Rodríguez, Sagrario Metropolitano, Mexico City, 1749–1768

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Figure 0.3. Manuel Tolsá, Palace of Mining, façade, 1797–1813

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Figure 0.4. Rafael Ximeno y Planes, The Miracle of the Well, 1809

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Figure 0.5. Virgin of Guadalupe, sixteenth century

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Figure 1.1. Manuel Tolsá, Equestrian Portrait of Charles IV, 1796–1803 6 Figure 1.2. José Joaquín Fabregat, View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico, 1796

6

Figure 1.3. Fernando Brambila, La Plaza Mayor of Mexico, 1791

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Figure 1.4. Jerónimo Antonio Gil, Charles IV and María Luisa, 1796 12 Figure 1.5. Jerónimo Antonio Gil, Equestrian Statue of Charles IV, 1796 12 Figure 1.6. Rafael Ximeno y Planes, Portrait of Tolsá with Model of Equestrian Statue, 1795–1803?

12

Figure 2.1. View and Perspective of the Molinos de Pólvora of Lima, late eighteenth century

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Figure 2.2. Cuartel de Santa Catalina, 1868

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Figure 2.3. Chapel of the General Cemetery of Lima, 1868

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Figure 2.4. Plan of the town of San Fernando de Bellavista

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Figure 2.5. Portada del Callao, 1863

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Figure 2.6. Anonymous, Portada de Maravillas, 1868

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Figure 2.7. Anonymous, Plan of the valle de la Magdelena, 1774

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illustr ations

Figure 3.1.  Antonio María de la Torre, El Templete, 1827–1828, Havana, Cuba

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Figure 3.2. Antonio Fernández de Trevejos and Pedro Medina, Palace of the Captain General, 1776–1791, Havana, Cuba

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Figure 3.3. Detail: portico, from de la Torre, El Templete

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Figure 3.4. Jean-Baptiste Vermay, The First Cabildo, 1827

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Figure 3.5. Detail: Captain General Francisco Dionisio Vives, from Jean-Baptiste Vermay, The Inauguration of El Templete, c. 1828

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Figure 3.6. Detail: ecclesiastical group, from Vermay, The Inauguration of El Templete 57 Figure 3.7. Jean-Baptiste Vermay, The First Mass, 1827

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Figure 3.8. Detail: Afro-Cuban woman, from Vermay, The Inauguration of El Templete 64 Figure 3.9. Detail: Afro-Cuban militiaman and Captain General Vives, from Vermay, The Inauguration of El Templete 65 Figure 4.1. Así es Cartagena de Indias, Cartagena, Colombia

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Figure 4.2. Centenary postcard, November 11, 1911, Cartagena, Colombia 78 Figure 4.3. Centenary postcard, 1910, Cartagena, Colombia

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Figure 4.4. “Monumento modelado por Tenerani, para colocar el corazón del libertador Simón Bolívar, en la catedral de Bogotá,” 1886

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Figure 4.5. Pepe Gómez, “Tome Nota,” February 21, 1919

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Figure 4.6. Anonymous, “Una graduanda y su amiga,” 1933

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Figure 5.1. José Joaquín Fabregat, View of the Plaza Mayor, 1796–1797

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Figure 5.2. Unknown engraver, Child with Birth Defect, 1789

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Figure 6.1. Nicolau Facchinetti, Fazenda Flores do Paraíso, 1785

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Figure 6.2. Eduard Laplante, Buena Vista Plantation, Valle de los Ingenios, 1857

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Figure 6.3. Eduard Laplante, Ingenio Intrépido, 1857

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Figure 6.4. Eduard Laplante, Ingenio Güinía de Soto, 1857

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Figure 6.5. Eduard Laplante, Ingenio Ácana, 1857

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Figure 6.6. Detail: the man with the whip, from Laplante, Ingenio Güinía de Soto 126 igure 6.7. Salvator Rosa, Ruins in a Rocky Landscape, c. 1640 F 127 Figure 6.8. Eduard Laplante, Ingenio Trinidad, 1857 128 Figure 6.9. Valle de la Magdalena, 1857 129 Figure 7.1. Frontispiece, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Decada terzera: Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del mar oceano, 1601 139 Figure 7.2. Hernando Cortés, 1843 145 Figure 7.3. Quetzalcoatl, Dios del Viento, 1844–1846 147 Figure 7.4. Un Emperador Mexicano en el Consejo de los Reyes, 1844–1846 149 Figure 7.5. Cortés Manda Prender á Moctezuma, 1844–1846 151 Figure 7.6. Batalla de Tepeyac, 1844–1846 152 Figure 7.7. Sacrificio de Guatimotzin, 1844–1846 153 Figure 8.1. The Gateway of the Sun in barbed wire enclosure 159 Figure 8.2. Alcide d’Orbigny, The Gateway of the Sun, 1839 163 Figure 8.3. Léonce Angrand, The Gateway of the Sun, 1849 164 Figure 8.4. Mariano Rivera and John James von Tschudi, The Gateway of the Sun, 1851 165 Figure 8.5. Ephraim George Squier, The Gateway of the Sun, 1877 167 Figure 8.6. Alphons Stübel and Max Uhle, The Gateway of the Sun, 1892 169 Figure 8.7. Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto), River Landscape with a Column, a Ruined Roman Arch and Reminiscences of England, 1754 171 Figure 9.1. Manuel Tolsá, Equestrian Monument to Charles IV, 1803 180 Figure 9.2. Fray Pablo de Jesús and padre Jerónimo, Portrait of Bernardo de Galves, 1796 182 Figure 9.3. Detail: horse’s left rear leg, from Fray Pablo de Jesús and padre Jerónimo, Portrait of Bernardo de Galves 183 Figure 9.4. Franco Sánchez, Don Juan José de Austria, 1678 185 Figure 9.5. Mariano Marco, Charles IV, King of Spain, c. 1790 187 Figure 9.6. Manoel de Andrade de Figueiredo, calligraphic equestrian figure, 1722 188

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Figure 9.7. Cristóbal Lozano, Don Manso de Velasco, Count of Superunda, 1746

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Figure 9.8. Anonymous, Don Pedro Fernández de Castro, Count of Lemos, late seventeenth century

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Figure 10.1. Pedro Díaz, José Fernando de Abascal, 1804

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Figure 10.2. Raphael Ximeno y Planes, Miguel Tolsá, after 1794

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Figure 10.3. Unidentified artist, Antonio de Olaguer Feliú, eighteenth century

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Figure 10.4. Unidentified artist, Joaquín del Pino, c. 1804

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Figure 10.5. Cristóbal Lozano, José Antonio Manso de Velasco, 1746

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Figure 10.6. José Joaquín Bermejo, José Antonio Manso de Velasco, eighteenth century

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Figure 10.7. Main altar, Iglesia de las Nazarenas

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Figure 10.8. Unidentified artist, Viceroy Manuel de Amat with the Iglesia de las Nazarenas, eighteenth century

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Figure 10.9. Paseo de Aguas

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Figure 11.1. Francisco Becerra and others, Cathedral of Cuzco, 1560–1654234 Figure 11.2. Martín de Torres, altarpiece of the Lord of Unu Punku, Cathedral of Cuzco, 1650

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Figure 11.3. Joseph Núñez de la Torre and others, altarpiece of “La Linda,” Cathedral of Cuzco, c. 1712

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Figure 11.4. Anonymous, altarpiece behind the main altar, Cathedral of Cuzco, late eighteenth century

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Figure 11.5. José Lucio y Villegas, main altarpiece, Cathedral of Cuzco, 1792–1803

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Figure 11.6. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Ciudad la villa rica e imperial de Potosí, c. 1615

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Figure 11.7. Anonymous, The Virgin of the Mountain, eighteenth century 245 Figure 11.8. Eusebio Soto, altarpiece of the Lord of the Earthquakes, Cathedral of Cuzco, 1830

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Figure 12.1. Santiago Hernández, Portrait of Román S. Lascuráin, 1888 265 Figure 12.2. Santiago Hernández, Portrait of Santiago Hernández, 1888 267

Acknowledgments

T his volume has been informed by new research directions arising

from individual and group initiatives and vigorous discussions of issues among colleagues in public and private. The conversations and critiques arising from these formal and informal scholarly gatherings led to a more nuanced appreciation of the complex relationship between buen gusto and classicism in Latin America, which has benefited this project immensely. We would, therefore, like to single out the Association for Latin American Art, the College Art Association, and the Meadows Museum in Dallas, Texas, for special recognition in this regard. Various institutions and foundations provided generous funding in support of our investigation of this topic, including the Meadows Museum, the University of North Texas, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Wells Fargo, Humanities Texas, the Charn Uswachoke International Development Fund at the University of North Texas, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation Between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States’ Universities. The editors would also like to thank John Byram of the University of New Mexico Press as well as the external readers whose critical suggestions have helped to shape and better cohere this book. Other individuals who have contributed insights and/or support to this project include Tom Cummins of Harvard University, Denise Baxter of the University of North Texas, and Eusebio Leal Spengler of Havana, Cuba.

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Introduction Paul B. Niell

in 1813 the professor of mathematics don Pedro Abad Villareal, of the

college and seminary of San Carlos in Havana, Cuba, wrote, “Architecture as a liberal art, and one of the fine arts, has deserved a very distinguished place among cultured nations . . . for which in modern times many academies of fine arts have been erected in order to revive good taste, which until now, has been buried among the ruins of the Roman Empire. To Your Excellency we owe the good results of these institutions in the domains of the Spanish monarchy, especially in the happy reign of Charles III, their patron and restorer.”1 This passage from the Cuban professor echoed late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourses in the Spanish world regarding the reform of artistic aesthetics, the propagation of scientific knowledge, the promotion of classicism in the visual arts, and the need to “revive” buen gusto (good taste). With the ascension of the French Bourbon dynasty to the Spanish throne in 1700, the visual landscape of Spain and its American colonies experienced a gradual and uneven transformation. The Bourbons aimed to expand the empire’s population, promote agriculture and industry, found new towns, and centralize the governance of the Spanish state. In eighteenth-century Spain numerous visual styles coexisted, including what has been considered baroque, rococo, and neoclassical. The founding of Spain’s Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid in 1752, followed by the Academy of San Carlos in Valencia in 1768 and the Academy of San Luis in Zaragoza in 1793 promoted drawing as the basis for training in las tres bellas artes (the three fine arts) of painting, sculpture, and architecture. The academy advanced the copying of antique models and the rule of “nature” as a principle underlying the fines arts yet possessed no univocal approach to a “modern” translation of GrecoRoman classicism. The courtly arts of King Charles III (r. 1758–1788) and his xiii

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son and successor, Charles IV (r. 1788–1808), rulers of Spain in the latter half of the eighteenth century, reveal much eighteenth-century rococo style with a gradual implementation of a more sober neoclassicism.2 In the Latin American colonies the visual scene was likewise complex, with baroque and rococo forms coexisting with the emergence of a late eighteenth-century neoclassicism promoted by reform-minded administrators and colonial elites in the Latin American viceroyalties. The present collection of essays examines different dimensions of neoclassical visual culture in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin America from divergent perspectives. The chapters consider how classicism was imposed, promoted, adapted, negotiated, and contested in myriad social, political, economic, cultural, and temporal situations. Through a set of case studies, visual classicisms in late colonial and early national Latin America appear as multivalent and multivocal phenomena driven by desires to impose imperial authority, to fashion the nationalist self, and to form and maintain new social and cultural ideologies. The adaptation of classicism in the Americas was further shaped by local factors, including the realities of place and the influence of established visual and material traditions. This volume thus provides new insights into the complexities of neoclassicism as a cultural, not just visual, phenomenon in the late colonial and early national periods and promotes new approaches to the study of a marginalized area of Latin American art history and visual culture.

Classicisms in the Spanish Colonial Landscape Spanish and Portuguese uses of Greco-Roman-inspired classicism in the Americas dates to the sixteenth-century conquest. The Iberian colonial powers imported and reconfigured classicizing forms from Italy to implement and authorize new colonial projects overseas. Spanish missionaries utilized European architectural treatises, such as Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1485), Vitruvius’s De architectura (first printed edition, 1486), and Sebastian Serlio’s Regole generali di architettura (1537) to design mendicant complexes.3 Such classical quotations as the Roman triumphal arch appeared on church façades, in nave crossings, and in ephemeral public viceregal arts. These expressions became metaphors for the victory of Christian civilization over the barbarism of indigenous America, not unlike militaristic associations of Catholicism seen in the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic polities in the late fifteenth century. In sixteenth-century New Spain

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mendicants taught Renaissance pictorial arts to native artists through prints, resulting in the appearance of spatial illusionism, linear perspective, naturalism, and figural representation in devotional sculpture and the frescoes in some monasteries. In 1573 Spain’s King Phillip II issued the Recopilación de las leyes de los reynos de Indias (Compilation of the laws of the kingdoms of the Indies) with ordinances for town planning based on the writings of the Roman architect Vitruvius, mandating that colonial towns adhere to gridlike, orthogonal configurations.4 In the viceregal baroque city of the seventeenth century, classicism continued to serve the representational needs of the Spanish church and state through architectural structure and adornment, religious painting and royal portraiture, prints, and myriad forms of ephemera. To cite a single example among many, the criollo intellectuals Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz designed ephemeral triumphal arches for the viceregal entrada (ritualized entrance) of 1680 for Mexico City.5 Upon the viceroy’s entrance into the city, he was compelled to regard a series of classical allegories designed by Sigüenza and Sor Juana and painted on their respective arches, affirming his intention to uphold the virtues represented. This imagery included references to Neptune, the Greco-Roman god of the sea, and Huitzilopochtli, the warrior god of the Aztecs. The arches thus reinforced the viceroy’s rule by conflating two antiquities, pre-Hispanic and Greco-Roman. The sea god’s mythic legacy in the Americas thus embodied the viceroy’s authority upon his entrance to Mexico City, a connection cemented through myth and classical allusions.6 Sixteenth-century classicism in the Americas gave way in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to baroque aesthetics that appealed to the viewer’s emotions through sensuous forms in both religious works and secular, courtly arts. Altarpieces, church façades, civic buildings, and private houses from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries exhibit curvilinear lines, broken pediments, ornamental conglomerations, and hierarchical surface compositions that communicated Catholic zeal, courtly magnificence, and resplendent luxury. This ornamental urban landscape became the stage for ritualized performances that reinforced colonial hierarchies and promoted the values of the Counter-Reformation church.7 The Cathedral of Havana, for example, possesses a concave and a convex surface, broken pediments, and undulating lines ornamenting the entrance to its main façade (figure 0.1). Lavish baroque altarpieces in churches throughout colonial Latin America challenged and obliterated indications of ordered, geometric divisions between parts with rich

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decorations that spill across linear boundaries and frameworks. Art historian Diego Angulo Iñíguez characterized the Ibero-American colonial baroque as formed by “curves and countercurves, angles and counter-angles, Borrominiesque baroque, exuberance, splendid doorways, vegetal ornamentation, churrigueresca, [and] mixtilinear estípites.”8 The author refers to the frequent use in Latin America of the design repertoire innovated by Roman baroque architect Francesco Borromini (1599–1667), as seen on the Havana cathedral. His reference to churrigueresca (churrigueresque) denotes a late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century style of elaborate sculptural/architectural ornament named for the Madrid architect and sculptor José Benito de Churriguera (1665–1725). This style, variably known as ultra-baroque, came to be associated with the estípite, a column and pilaster that served to ornament an architectural façade or altarpiece, providing little to no structural support. As seen in the façade of the Sagrario Chapel of the Mexico City cathedral, 1749–1768, by Lorenzo Rodríguez, the estípite was used extensively in the Americas, especially in Mexico, through the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, while the viceroyalty of Peru remained loyal to the Solomonic column almost until century’s end (figure 0.2).

Figure 0.1. Pedro Medina and others. Façade of the Cathedral

of Havana, Cuba. 1748–1771. Photograph © Paul Niell.

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Figure 0.2. Detail: estípite column, or pilaster. Lorenzo Rodríguez. Sagrario Metropol-

itano. 1749–1768. Mexico City, Mexico. Photograph © Kelly Donahue-Wallace.

Neoclassicism and Visual Culture In the eighteenth century neoclassical visual idioms began to enter the Americas via royal portraits on coins, architectural treatises, and imported artworks and through the art academy. The Royal Academy of San Carlos (RASC), founded in Mexico City in 1781 by the Spanish engraver Jerónimo Antonio Gil, began to introduce academic practice to late eighteenth-century New Spain and attempted to displace the colonial guilds.9 The monographs and survey texts of such authors as Manuel Toussaint, Jean Charlot, and George Kubler established an art historical narrative for the entrance of the academy in New Spain roughly half a century ago.10 These authors generally locate a rupture from baroque aesthetics with the influx of the academy’s classical principles of design. Yet, in actuality, this transition from baroque to neoclassical was far more complex than this normative narrative would suggest. While the academy in New Spain sought to reform tastes through

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the study of Renaissance and ancient art, Gil and other professors seem also to have been motivated by Spanish nationalism in their visual preferences. For example, they ensured that students studied works by the Spanish baroque master Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682) and read treatises by José de Ribera (1591–1652) and Antonio Palomino (1653–1726), all of which leaned heavily toward the Spanish baroque. The notion of an internally coherent style named “neoclassicism,” furthermore, existed in neither Spain nor Spanish America in this period. Rather, period terminology includes rather vague expressions to describe what academicians and reformers desired to see in visual art, such as antiguo (old), moderno (modern), and buen gusto. The objectionable visual landscape that a reformist style would eclipse or perfect was occasionally referred to as being of mal gusto (bad taste) or belonging to the gusto gótico (Gothic taste). David Irwin’s survey of European neoclassicism defines a style of subdued ornament, symmetry, a strict return to Greco-Roman geometries, formal order, a restrained color palette, and ancient Greco-Roman motifs of temple and triumphal arch with straight, unbroken lines.11 Yet neoclassicism was highly variable in form across time and space in Europe and the Americas. A more canonical definition of neoclassicism, as defined by Irwin, among others, does not seem to correspond to anything that existed in Spanish America. However, significant formal contrasts can be drawn between the freestanding column, championed by academicians in New Spain, and the estípite, which disappeared in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. Yet a clear rupture between baroque and neoclassical in Latin America cannot be definitively located. Furthermore, sources for classical revival did not necessarily come from Greece and Rome. Spain’s Charles III had financed excavations at the ancient Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the mid-eighteenth century; but excavations were likewise taking place in Spain at Visigothic and Islamic sites, producing material that was unearthed, studied, and published. Since the days of Kubler, Toussaint, and Charlot, few studies have emerged that challenge the narrative for neoclassicism in Latin America established by these foundational scholars.12 Two recent scholarly series published in Mexico begin to probe the complexities of the neoclassical phenomenon in the Spanish Americas. These include Los Pinceles de la Historia (1999–2003), which presents case studies on the visual culture of late colonial and early national Mexico.13 The series Hacia Otra Historia del Arte en México is a multivolume exploration of national Mexican art in which

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neoclassicism plays an important role.14 Both of these recent series include the work of such important Mexican art historians as Esther Acevedo, Fausto Ramírez, and Jaime Cuadriello. They draw needed attention to the interplay between local visual traditions and international stylistic currents. The authors examine the role of classicism in a complicated visual scene during the transition from colony to nation, in which important signifiers of American place in the colonial period were reworked in a national context for new representational purposes. In spite of the respective strengths of these works, however, recent scholarship reveals how Mexico-centric viceregal and national art history continues to be as well as underlining the need for Englishlanguage sources on this material. The case studies in the present volume draw needed attention to complexities of the neoclassical phenomenon across Latin American geographies and the temporal thresholds of viceregal and national periods. The problems of neoclassical art and visual culture in Latin America are multiple and include basic formal issues and their local understanding, such as expressions evincing formal characteristics that most European art historians would consider quite baroque. In the Palace of Mining in Mexico City, designed by Manuel Tolsá, a sculpture professor at San Carlos, a relatively subdued façade incorporates a prominent temple upon triumphal arch motif as a central projection accenting the main entrance (figure 0.3). Nevertheless, the façade possesses various characteristics of the viceregal baroque, including broken pediments and a busy surface. Tolsá’s building housed the new school of mining, intended to improve enterprise through systematic education, making mineral extraction more profitable for the Crown. The temple form, in particular, evoked the conformity of this building to the aesthetics of neoclassicism. However, the reality of local departures from a more doctrinaire European interpretation of academic style must have shaped design approaches and Americans’ views of neoclassical form and its relationship to American place. Late colonial expressions by academic artists in New Spain reveal an imperial-international-local dialectic with impacts on form, subject matter, and reception. In 1809 Rafael Ximeno y Planes, director of painting at the RASC in Mexico City, executed The Miracle of the Well for the chapel in Tolsá’s Palace of Mining, a historically veristic naturalistic rendering of the sixteenth-century apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe, including Bishop Juan de Zumárraga with a group of Amerindians on Tepeyac hill. The composition features an academic space of exacting proportion in a relatively

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Figure 0.3. Manuel Tolsá. Palace of Mining, façade. 1797–1813. Mexico City, Mexico.

Photograph © Kelly Donahue-Wallace.

nonsecular scene about a miraculous well (figure 0.4). Within the image, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the patron saint of mining, mystically appears, hovering in a celestial space at the top of the canvas. Mexican art historian Fausto Ramírez has noted the coexistence of baroque, rococo, and neoclassical elements in this work as “typical of the artistic eclecticism of Spanish America during the Enlightenment.”15 Juana Gutiérrez-Haces emphasizes the local significance of such stylistic conjunctions in late colonial Mexico as a deliberate gathering of the things of New Spain. She thus views the visual plurality of the late colonial period as the product of the Enlightenment, “when encyclopedic thought fostered revisionism and ordered a society’s entire past and accumulated knowledge.”16 Among artists in New Spain, evidence suggests that interest in neoclassicism existed in advance of the state-sponsored RASC. The work of colonial painters José de Ibarra (1685–1756), Juan Rodríguez Juárez (1675–1728), and Miguel Cabrera (1695–1768) exhibits an early eighteenth-century engagement with academic aesthetics. Ibarra and several Mexico City painters attempted to establish an academy of fine arts in 1753, a request denied by the

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Figure 0.4. Rafael Ximeno y Planes. The Miracle of the Well. 1809. Oil on canvas. Photograph © Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City, Mexico.

Novohispanic viceroy based on what had to have been their Creole status.17 This attempt by Mexico City painters to found an academy suggests a waning in the importance of guilds in New Spain for painters, arguments for painting as a liberal art, and attempts by painters to seek academic affiliation in order to raise the status of the painting profession.18 Eighteenth-century artists in Mexico City may have attempted to reconcile neoclassicism to the existing visual culture of New Spain. Colonial art historian Clara Bargellini asserts, “I suggest that the Virgin of Guadalupe as model is an element to be reckoned with as we try to understand eighteenth-century neoclassicism in New Spain.”19 Bargellini refers to the picture of the famous Marian devotion, the acheiropoietic image allegedly painted on the cloak of the Indian Juan Diego in 1523 by divine intervention. When Mexico City painters such as Cabrera inspected the work, the artists indeed confirmed that God himself authored the picture (figure 0.5). Due to the painting’s austerity of line, f latness of color, and relative lack of

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Figure 0.5. Virgin of Guadalupe. Sixteenth century. Oil and tempera (?) on maguey cactus cloth and cotton. Basilica of Guadalupe, Mexico City, Mexico.

ornamentation, Bargellini considers the painting to have been influential in shaping neoclassicism and/or its local reception in New Spain due to its divine provenance and local narrative. The eighteenth-century importance of the “original” painting of the Guadalupana may also reflect the will of eighteenth-century Mexico City painters to see a local antiquity in their own landscape, comparable to the search for antiquities in Spain and Europe. Scholars have increasingly emphasized the multivalence of neoclassicism in Latin America. Kelly Donahue-Wallace writes, “While crown administrators may have viewed the neoclassical style as evidence of American loyalty to Spain, many Latin Americans, particularly the elite criollo populations, may not have agreed. Independence-minded colonists may have associated neoclassicism with the art of France and the United States of America, whose late eighteenth-century revolutions soon inspired Latin Americans to pursue freedom.”20 The existence of formal and semantic ambiguity in colonial Latin American neoclassicism underscores the need to consider its reception by

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multiple audiences: Creoles, Spaniards, members of the castas (castes, or racially mixed populations), Indians, Africans, and Asians. Marginalized groups surely engaged such forms in certain situations in the colonial city, although much work is needed to recover their participation in the production and reception of this phenomenon. This multivalent and multivocal aspect of Latin American neoclassicism also points to the reflexivity of the style in the cultural transition from viceroyalty to nation, where classicism as a tool of imperial power could be reworked to envision and validate the nascent cultural modernities of emerging national republics. Furthermore, the impact of American reworkings of neoclassical visual culture on developments in Europe represents an important area for future research in the field. This volume considers neoclassicism in the visual cultures of Latin America in at least four interconnected ways.21 First, the essays examine a wider array of visual media than the academy-sanctioned “three noble arts” of painting, sculpture, and architecture, including urban spaces, prints, ephemera, and performances. Second, the chapters consider the ways in which classicizing objects, images, and spaces, often working together, can actively construct, demonstrate, and maintain colonial and national ideologies rather than existing as reflections of colonial power structures or indicators of transitional aesthetics. Neoclassicism in the service of viceregal representation could be retooled to construct national ideologies in ways that emphasized historical, cultural, and even technological authenticity. Third, late colonial and early national classicism became part of a process of constructing a new normative gaze or “scopic regime” under Bourbon colonial rule and the governments of national republics.22 Finally, attempting to understand more about the reception and use of neoclassicism in Latin America, some of the essays in this volume examine another aspect of its visual culture: the operation of “taste” in colonial and national societies.

Buen Gusto The expression buen gusto appears frequently in period documents in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish world. As Spain came under the influence of the European Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, the notion of taste became ubiquitous in multiple realms of discourse. In eighteenth-century Europe, taste was discussed and debated by such intellectual figures as David Hume (1711–1776), Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Alexander Gerard (1728–1795), Archibald Alison (1757–1839), Immanuel Kant

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(1724–1804), and Edmond Burke (1729–1797). In general, these authors attempted to rationalize the human experience of beauty, offering such gradations as delicate, sublime, and picturesque.23 In An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue Francis Hutcheson seeks to identify the mechanism for perceiving taste by identifying a multistep process in which an “internal sense of beauty” producing “pleasure” was triggered when humans perceived “uniformity amidst variety” in nature.24 In the essay “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757) David Hume argues, “It is natural for us to seek a standard of taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.”25 For Immanuel Kant, in his third Critique, the perception of taste becomes a teleological realization of God’s grand purpose.26 While these eighteenth-century theorists of taste differed in their interpretations, they each suggested the ability of individuals to cultivate a strong “faculty of taste” in order to perceive various “objects of taste.” As eighteenth-century theory proposed to understand taste intellectually, individuals and groups in the social sphere appropriated taste in more immediate and tangible ways. The volume Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830, edited by Amanda Vickery and John Styles, sheds light on taste’s assimilation into the social life of eighteenth-century France, England, and North America. The authors suggest that the desire to possess aesthetic discernment created social anxiety, as wealthy and educated women and men actively sought to demonstrate their tastes within a discursive field. Taste seems to have belonged to normative notions of social appropriateness mediated by “decorum,” the belief in the correlation between different forms of conduct and various social stations, determined by age, sex, race, social rank, and/or occupation.27 The sociological scholar Pierre Bourdieu has drawn parallels between the aesthetic preferences of various people, communities, and nations and the corresponding social hierarchy and class distinctions.28 Subsequent studies have expanded views of how individuals and groups fashioned themselves in eighteenth-century consumer society through taste and material culture.29 Scholarship on the discussion of taste and its social practice is not as well developed for viceregal and early national Latin America. However, it appears that in Latin American contexts the verbal rhetoric of “good taste” maintained an ambivalent relationship to neoclassical visual arts. As Vernon Hyde Minor warned about the phenomenon in Europe, “Buon gusto is not a stable concept; rather, it is a marker in the game of discourse, a term used for persuasion and

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control. There is an inevitable and considerable slippage between signifier and signified in the word and in the cultural use of the concept of good taste.” 30 In the viceregal capitals of Mexico City, Lima, and Havana, royal administrators, high-level clergy, and the social elite sought to define themselves visually through such means as the consumption of objects of taste and activities that publicly affirmed their buen gusto. These individuals read about items of taste in the colonial press, discussed them at tertulias (social gatherings with literary or artistic overtones), read selected books, collected antiquities, and joined in associational life. Taste in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spanish America could refer to the neoclassical, but not necessarily. As a sociopolitical phenomenon propelled by the consumption of material culture and new forms of media, buen gusto encompassed much more than visual style and could claim an ambiguous relationship to it. Neoclassicism was often the referent of taste in Latin American contexts, but it coexisted with other styles and a wide domain of materials, objects, images, behaviors, and visual practices that could be willed into being tasteful. Taste can be said to have operated to cohere colonial subjects of the viceroyalty, and eventually citizens of the new nation, around a sense of collective selfhood and a will to know, redefine, and authenticate the cultural boundaries of the local territory. If baroque forms, miraculous observances, local craft traditions, and neoclassical style could all hypothetically become tasteful, a “taste community” in Latin America could embrace its diverse material landscape and discern its dignified place in a global system. While the elite of Latin America defined the discourse and practice of taste, the phenomenon may also have been assimilated into the socio-racial hierarchies of colonial and early national Latin America in day-to-day life.31 The meaning of classical forms and the practice of taste, furthermore, changed in national contexts, while retaining assumptions of exemplarity.32 However, if the relationship between buen gusto and classicism is studied across the colonial-national threshold, important continuities, inconsistencies, and reconfigurations emerge. Consequently, the following chapters are organized according to themes that consider the visual culture of classicism in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin America from three interrelated perspectives.

Redefining Urban Space and the Promotion of Classicism The redefinition of urban space through architecture, public art, and spatial reconstruction played a significant role in the promotion and implementation

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of classicism in Latin America. While royal officials sponsored and endorsed neoclassical projects of urban redesign, Creole communities became actively involved in patronage through civil societies and municipal organizations. In national contexts, neoclassical visual culture remained important for defining civic and national belonging. The tools for embodying and promoting neoclassicism comprised the three noble arts in conjunction with urban spaces and other forms of imagery. Additional methods included engraving, royal decrees, published academic discourses, colonial and national newspapers, books, nineteenth-century lithography, and performances. Considering the redefinition of urban space is an important way to ascertain the meanings that classicism was expected to construct and sustain in the Americas as well as its human agents and tools of promotion. Susan Deans-Smith examines the 1796–1803 commission of the equestrian portrait of Charles IV by Manuel Tolsá for Mexico City’s reconstructed Plaza Mayor and its promotion by Viceroy Branciforte (r. 1794–1798). In addition to viceregal patronage, local elites funded the monument by giving “donations” for the work. Through newspapers and visual media, such as the 1797 print of the Plaza Mayor by the director of engraving at the RASC, José Joaquín Fabregat, the letrados (literate classes) of Mexico City actively promoted the statue as an exemplar of buen gusto. Deans-Smith argues that buen gusto was “packaged and advertised” for late eighteenth-century consumers through the publicity for the statue, such as the Fabregat print and the colonial newspapers Gazeta de México and Diario de México. These newspapers promoted neoclassicism while baroque forms remained visible, in an effort to shape local tastes. Yet the colonial press presented readers with a diverse discussion about art and taste, reflecting local negotiations of the phenomenon of buen gusto and disparate opinions. In his essay Isaac Sáenz examines the promotion of classical urban space in late colonial Peru by both Bourbon administrators and the local Creole intelligentsia. Creoles employed theoretical works and art criticism and celebrated classical aesthetics in the publication El Mercurio Peruano. Associated through the merchants’ guild and the powerful Tribunal del Consulado, the Creole elite financed neoclassical civic works in Lima and Callao. Sáenz also explores how natural phenomena in late colonial Latin America shaped debates on aesthetics and the reception of buen gusto. Reactions to the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami of 1746 in colonial Peru led to the rebuilding of portions of the cities of Lima and Callao. Bourbon authorities leveled uncompromising building restrictions in light of the event, forbade second stories

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in houses, and mandated the use of quincha (indigenous thatch construction) and wood as materials instead of stone, as “enlightened” construction methods. Thus, when the situation demanded, buen gusto could mean what was favorable to public health and safety, regardless of the provenance and configuration of form or material. Creole appropriations of pre-Hispanic monuments in various discourses reveal an interest in “discovering” and thus constructing a local antiquity, thereby expanding our view of what composed buen gusto for the Peruvian colonial elite. My own chapter examines the reconfiguration of the Plaza de Armas of Havana, Cuba, in 1828 via the addition of a classicizing memorial, known as El Templete, to commemorate the city’s foundation. In the work’s patronage, royal officials collaborated with the Creole elite of the city who associated via the city’s Patriotic Society. The colonial press, guided by the society and Spanish authorities, promoted El Templete as a paradigm of buen gusto in an effort to reinscribe Havana’s central plaza with both Spanish authority and a dignity of Cuban place. However, the contentious sociopolitical environment of Havana in the 1820s suggests divergent conceptions of place on the city’s main plaza and differing expectations for the role of classicism, expressed through the memorial of 1828. Carla Bocchetti examines the use of classical architecture and sculpture for urban redefinition in the long nineteenth century, focusing on the early twentieth-century centennial of Colombia held in Cartagena de Indias. In an effort to bestow a sense of achievement and progress, civic leaders commissioned classical designs for parks, banks, government buildings, and train stations. The author focuses on Centenary Park, inaugurated November 11, 1911, and examines the persistent importance of the press as well as urban ritual in advancing classicism. The items announced for sale during the park’s inauguration, such as busts of revolutionary hero Simón Bolívar and other items that Bocchetti argues were part of a “neoclassical spectacle,” reveal the ongoing role of urban performance and neoclassicism in the construction of civic meaning and, in this case, the manufacture of national citizens.

Imprinting Classicism and Its Consumption Printed media played an important role in the framing, contextualization, and promotion of neoclassicism in colonial and national Latin America through text and image. Prints informed opinions, shaped aesthetic expectations, and served as sites of consumption by disparate audiences.33 With

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the increased prevalence of newspapers, society publications, and engravings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and with the emergence in Latin America of lithography in the 1830s, prints and printed texts came into wider circulation and were important vehicles for conveying classicizing ideals. The reproduction of objects and images via prints altered the visual culture of nineteenth-century Latin America, destabilizing subject-object relationships and leading to an increased commodification of the prints themselves and of the things that the prints reproduced.34 In her essay for this volume, Kelly Donahue-Wallace considers the contribution of newspapers to the promotion of classicism in New Spain, specifically the Gazeta de México from the 1770s to the 1810s. Her chapter exposes the importance of the press in promoting the things of buen gusto for colonial consumers in New Spain, echoed in the findings of Susan Deans-Smith’s essay. Newspapers notified subscribers about items for purchase, including the engraving by Fabregat, which depicted the tasteful transformations of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City. In the context of the Gazeta de México, DonahueWallace argues that possessing “good taste required purchases.” She thus argues that the Gazeta shaped consumer views on the identity of tasteful items and thus the role of tasteful things in the construction of colonial identity. Charles Burroughs examines the adaption of classicism in Cuban and Brazilian plantations through architectural treatises by such figures as the Renaissance architect and theorist Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) and the promotion of local translations of Palladio’s works through nineteenth-century lithography. First, Burroughs locates “attitudinal contrasts” in the use of Palladianism on plantations in the Americas among Anglo, French, and Iberian cultural landscapes. In the classicism deployed on plantations in both the Paraíba Valley of Brazil and the Valle de los Ingenios in Cuba, local elites reconfigured Palladianism to emphasize the productivity of plantations and their efficient management of slaves. Cuban planter Justo Cantero sponsored Los ingenios in 1857, an album of lithographs illustrated by French artist Eduardo Laplante. Through the prints, the rapid transformation of sugar mills then underway in Cuba was rendered synonymous with classicizing vocabularies and reconfigured types in architecture used to celebrate and manage the plantation complex. The images give prominence to classicized slave quarters on plantations, as service and served areas akin to what Palladio denominated as the “shameful” parts of a house. The role of printed media in promoting classicism continued in the national period of Mexico. Magali Carrera examines seventy-one plates

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arranged serially by the illustrator Isidro Rafael Gondora for Ignacio Cumplido’s Historia de la conquista de México (1844–1846), one of two translations of William Hickling Prescott’s 1843 Conquest of Mexico. Gondora’s plates for Cumplido’s translation revisualized Prescott’s Eurocentric history through scenes of preconquest Mexican material culture and historical episodes in three opposing styles. Carrera analyzes the operation of buen gusto as an “embedded dynamic” in Cumplido’s text and considers how taste was understood and how it operated in the promotion of Mexican national consciousness. She argues that buen gusto was considered not an innate ability but a process, susceptible to degradation, and a cultural force that could distinguish and help to define a patriotic community. Robert Bradley’s essay explores the use of prints and published illustrations to advance classicism in the case of the persistent misrepresentation of the pre-Columbian Gateway of the Sun at Tiwanaku, around the first millennium CE, in Bolivia, South America. The degree of departure from the original in these images is striking, including depictions of the gateway fully upright, reconstituted, monumentality grand and imposing, and, indeed, classicized. That this pre-Columbian artifact was corrected according to a classical template reveals the operation of classicism as part of an international scientific state of mind that continued to structure views of American antiquity after national independence. The essay also draws attention to the underinvestigated role of the traveler/scientist/reporter in the production of nineteenth-century imagery of and about Latin America.

Dividing Lines: Practices and Problems In practice, the assimilation and use of neoclassical visuality reveals a complex formal, practical, and semantic negotiation. Indeed, local individuals and groups could call into question the appropriateness of neoclassical forms for late colonial and early national contexts. Local translations reveal the importance of established visual traditions, used either to contest or contextualize neoclassicism. The ongoing production of alternative styles while the neoclassical phenomenon was burgeoning in Latin America reveals the negotiation of classicism as an officially sanctioned and therefore appropriate formal language among certain individuals and groups. Ray Hernández-Durán examines an equestrian image of the former Novohispanic viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez, made in Mexico City and completed in the same month in 1796 that Manuel Tolsá produced his preliminary design for the statue of Charles IV.

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However, the equestrian image of the viceroy Gálvez evinces patently different stylistic characteristics than that of Tolsá’s statue. In this painted image, the bodies of the man and horse are represented entirely by a continuous, white, ribbon-like line against a matte black field. In this enigmatic work, considerations of exemplarity as defined by the classicism of the academy give way to the particular, the exceptional, and the anomalous. The author considers the portrait in light of assumptions about the power of writing in late viceregal Mexico City as well as possible political leanings that caused the makers of this image to go against the grain of the official artistic style. Through the patronage of neoclassical aesthetics in civic works, portraiture, and other forms, Spanish colonial administrators and leaders of national republics suggested their international cultural standing as well as their immediate relevance. In the context of colonial South America, Emily Engel examines the relationship between the aesthetics of classicism, buen gusto, and the “intra-colonial” aspects of viceregal identity in South American portraiture in Lima and Buenos Aires. She asserts that Spanish viceroys used classicism and buen gusto to articulate American components to their evolving identities, thus acknowledging the concept of identity itself as fluid and reflexive. Engel draws needed attention to the complex uses of neoclassicism by Spanish royal officials, whose motivations were more complicated than merely the desire to impose royal authority. In the context of colonial Peru, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi investigates the construction and reconfiguration of altarpieces employing neoclassical formats and vocabularies in the Cathedral of Cuzco. Rather than resulting from the patronage of viceroys and/or academicians, these works were financed by the initiatives of a local confraternity and reformist prefect. Stanfield-Mazzi stresses that, with no art academy in South America, stylistic change exhibited a tremendous regional variation. In fact, artisans produced objects and images in the “Andean hybrid baroque” as late as the nineteenth century.35 Instead of large-scale urban renewal, as seen in Mexico City and Havana, local patrons commissioned new and renovated altarpieces with classicizing components in the Cuzco cathedral. Here the new main altarpiece of 1803 and the renovation of the Christ of the Earthquakes altarpiece of 1830 reveal local translations of neoclassicism based on such complex factors as indigenous Andean respect for material essences and independence-era alignments with neoclassical forms. By the end of the nineteenth century in national Mexico, discourses surrounding classicism and buen gusto still emanated on some levels from

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the bulwark of the art academy. In her concluding essay, Stacie Widdifield examines relationships among the volume chapters and provides late nineteenth-century perspective on classicism and buen gusto within the context of the 1881 centennial celebration of Mexico’s Academy of San Carlos. Archival documents suggest that the centennial provided a moment to look back on the academy’s one hundred years and reassess, to construct a meritorious history of the institution and its art, anchored, not surprisingly, in buen gusto and classicism. Yet it was also a moment at which the academy turned toward its future, a future that required an investment of buen gusto and classicism into the enterprise of progress. Widdifield poses important questions raised by this volume that point to areas for future research on buen gusto and classicism in late colonial and national Latin America.

_____ My sincere thanks to my coeditor, Stacie Widdifield, for staying with this project and providing invaluable support and guidance throughout its many stages of development. I also thank Susan Deans-Smith, Magali Carrera, and Kelly Donahue-Wallace for their steadfast support and for reading and commenting on various drafts of this introduction. My special thanks to all of the contributors for their efforts.

Notes

1. “La Arquitectura como arte liberal, y una de las Bellas Artes, ha merecido apré un lugar muy distinguido entre las naciones cultas . . . por lo qual en los tiempos modernos se han erigido muchas Academias de las bellas artes para hacer revivir el buen gusto que hacia sepultado entre las ruinas del imperio romano. A vuestra excellencia consta los Buenos resultados de estas instituciones en los dominios de la monarquia española, especiales en el feliz reinado de Carlos III, su protector y restaurado.” “Expediente sobre establecer una clase de arquitectura en esta ciudad promovido por Dn. Pedro Abad Villareal,” Archivo Nacional de Cuba, Havana, Gobierno Superior Civil, Legajo 861, Expediente 29158, May 17, 1813. 2. For the courtly arts of Spain’s Charles IV, see Royal Splendor in the Enlightenment: Charles IV of Spain, Patron and Collector, coord. Bridget Marx and Isabel Morán Suárez, trans. Wade A. Matthews (Dallas: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University; Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional, 2010), exhibition catalog. 3. See Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America (London: Phaidon Press, 2005), 122–23; and Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Art and Architecture of

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Viceregal Latin America, 1521–1821 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 10. 4. “The Ordinances for the Discovery, the Population, and the Pacification of the Indies,” as enacted by King Phillip II on July 13, 1573, appears transcribed and translated in Jean-François Lejeune, ed., Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), 18–23. 5. Criollo (Creole), was used in disparate ways across the Indo-Hispanic Americas but often referred to an individual of Spanish descent born in the Americas. Sor Juana and Sigüenza authored accompanying texts for the entrada arches of 1680. See Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Neptuno alegórico, oceano de colores, simulacro político, que erigio la muy esclarecida, sacra y augusta Iglesia Metropolitana de México en las lucidas alegóricas ideas de Arco triumphal . . . (Madrid: Cátedra, 2009); and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Teatro de virtudes políticas, que constituyen á un príncipe advertidas en los monarcas antiguos del mexicano imperio (Mexico City: UNAM, Coordinación de Humanidades, Miguel Angel Porrua, 1986). 6. The use of these arches in viceregal entradas as political performances is discussed in Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City: Performing Power and Identity (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004), 15–18, 23–27. For the early modern use of classicism in viceregal South America, see Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 7. For visual examples of colonial Latin American baroque, see Pál Kelemen, Baroque and Rococo in Latin America, 2 vols. (1951; repr., New York: Dover, 1967). 8. These quotations are taken from various passages in Diego Angulo Iñíguez, La arquitectura neoclásica en Méjico (Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1958), 8–9. 9. See Susan Deans-Smith, “‘A Natural and Voluntary Dependence’: The Royal Academy of San Carlos and the Cultural Politics of Art Education in Mexico City, 1786–1797,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29: 3 (2010): 278–95. For scholarship on artistic guilds in colonial Latin America, see Manuel Toussaint, Colonial Art in Mexico, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Wilder Weismann (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 132, 158–59, 162–63, 235, 277–78; Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America, 182–204; Donahue-Wallace, Art and Architecture, 103–5, 138–40. 10. George Kubler and Martin Soria, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500 to 1800 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959), 43–61, 79–82; Toussaint, Colonial Art, 401–56; Jean Charlot, Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 1785–1915 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962). 11. See David G. Irwin, Neoclassicism (London: Phaidon, 1997). 12. This scholarship includes Dawn Ades, “Academies and History Painting,” in Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1820–1980 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 27–39; Marcus Burke, “The Academy, Neoclassicism, and Independence,” in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (New York: Metropolitan

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Museum of Art, 1990), 487–96; Fausto Ramírez, “The Nineteenth Century,” in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, 499–510; Stacie G. Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996); Juana Gutiérrez-Haces, “The Eighteenth Century: A Changing Kingdom and Artistic Style,” in The Grandeur of Viceregal Mexico: Treasures from the Museo Franz Mayer (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts; Mexico City: Museo Franz Mayer, 2002), 45–67; Donna Pierce, “At the Crossroads: Cultural Confluence and Daily Life in Mexico, 1521–1821,” in Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521–1821 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 25–45, specifically 43–45; Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America, 204–6; and Donahue-Wallace, Art and Architecture, 224–41. 13. The series Los Pinceles de la Historia includes the works El origen del reino de la Nueva España, 1680–1750 (Mexico City: Patronato del Museo Nacional de Arte; Banamex; CONACULTA, INBA, 1999); De la patria Criolla a la nación mexicana, 1750–1860 (Mexico City: Banamex; Patronato del Museo Nacional de Arte, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas; CONACULTA, INBA, 2000); and La fabricación del estado, 1864–1910 (Mexico City: Banamex; Patronato del Museo Nacional de Arte, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas; CONACULTA, INBA, 2003). 14. The Hacia Otra Historia del Arte en México series includes Esther Acevedo, ed., De la estructuración colonial a la exigencia nacional (1780–1860) (Mexico City: CONACULTA, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2001); Esther Acevedo, ed., La fabricación del arte nacional a debate (1920–1950) (Mexico City: CONACULTA, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2002); Stacie G. Widdifield, ed., La amplitud del modernismo y la modernidad (1861–1920) (Mexico City: CONACULTA, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2004); and Issa Ma. Benítez Dueñas, ed., Disolvencias (1960–2000) (Mexico City: Banamex; Patronato del Museo Nacional de Arte, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas; CONACULTA, INBA, 2004). 15. Ramírez, “Nineteenth Century,” 501. 16. Gutiérrez-Haces, “Eighteenth Century,” 51. 17. For the politics of painting and artisanship involving issues of race, see Susan Deans-Smith, “‘Dishonor in the Hands of Indians, Spaniards, and Blacks’: The (Racial) Politics of Painting in Early Modern Mexico,” in Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America, ed. Ilona Katzew and Susan Deans-Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 43–72. 18. See Susan Deans-Smith, “‘This Noble and Illustrious Art’: Painters and the Politics of Guild Reform in Early Modern Mexico City, 1674–1768,” in Mexican Soundings: Essays in Honour of David A. Brading, ed. Susan Deans-Smith and Eric Van Young (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2007), 67–98.

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19. Clara Bargellini, “Originality and Invention in the Painting of New Spain,” in Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521–1821 (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2004), 78–91, quote on 89. 20. Donahue-Wallace, Art and Architecture, 240. 21. For recent literature on visual culture, see Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 1999), and The Visual Culture Reader (1998; repr., London: Routledge, 2002); Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, eds., The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004); Margarita Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture: The Study of the Visual After the Cultural Turn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). 22. See Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay View Press, 1988), 3–28. 23. George Dickie, The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 3. 24. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1725; repr., Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), 20–30, 41. 25. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste” (1757), in Aesthetic Theories: Studies in the Philosophy of Art, ed. Karl Aschenbrenner and Arnold Isenberg (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 107–19, quote on 109. 26. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment (New York: Hafner, 1951). 27. Amanda Vickery and John Styles, eds., Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 16–17. 28. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 29. See also Neil McKendrick, “The Consumer Revolution of Eighteenth-Century England,” in The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of EighteenthCentury England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (London: Europa, 1982); and Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995). 30. Vernon Hyde Minor, The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27. 31. For “taste communities,” see John Styles and Amanda Vickery, introduction to Gender, Taste and Material Culture, 19. Benedict Anderson emphasizes the role of newspapers in the construction of national consciousness in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; repr., London: Verso, 2006). 32. See Esther Acevedo, “Entre la tradición alegórica y la narrativa factual,” in De la patria criolla a la nación mexicana, 1750–1860 (Mexico City: Patronato del Museo Nacional de Arte; Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 2000), 114–31.

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33. For the significance of prints in colonial Latin America, see Kelly DonahueWallace, “Picturing Prints in Viceregal New Spain,” The Americas 64:3 (January 2008): 325–49. 34. For eighteenth-century consumerism, see Bermingham and Brewer, Consumption of Culture. For the impact of printed media on visual culture, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). For nineteenth-century visual culture in Latin America, see Magali Carrera, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 35. See Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010).

part one

Redefining Urban Space and the Promotion of Classicism

Chapter One

Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Statue of Charles IV and Buen Gusto in Late Colonial Mexico Susan Deans-Smith

During his two-month stay in Mexico in 1781, the soldier and future

Spanish minister of state Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis noted in his journal the prevalence of “bad taste.” Although he found Mexico City’s outskirts to be “extremely beautiful,” the fountains and decorations were “in bad taste.” As for the sanctuary of Guadalupe, “there is little taste in its decoration.” The Mexico City mint looked “more like the house of a rich man of bad taste rather than the sanctuary of the wealth of the world.” For Sangronis, however, the Royal Academy of San Carlos (RASC) provided the means to disseminate buen gusto, or good taste, among Mexico’s residents. He declared the RASC to be “an establishment indispensable in Mexico, whose natives are born with a decided inclination for the arts.” 1 His optimism appears to have been well founded. Some twenty years later Alexander von Humboldt observed that as a result of the academy’s work it was impossible not to perceive its influence “on the taste of the nation. . . . M. Tolsá, professor of sculpture at Mexico, was even able to cast an equestrian statue of King Charles IV; a work which, with the exception of the Marcus Aurelius at Rome, surpasses in beauty and purity of style every thing which remains in this way in Europe.” 2 Buen gusto as understood by Sangronis and Humboldt and promoted by the Spanish and Mexican arts academies connoted neoclassicism, with its 3

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emphasis on reason, restraint, clarity, proportion, symmetry, ideal beauty, and order.3 Although Sangronis does not elaborate on what he meant by mal gusto, or bad taste, in his journal entries, it can be assumed that he referred to that which was the opposite of the basic ideals of classicism—the chaotic exuberance of the baroque, with its artificiality, luxury, and excessive decoration.4 It can also be assumed that Sangronis did not understand buen gusto to be simply a definition of artistic style but, like so many of his contemporaries, to be a way of thinking and being, as demonstrated in the following journal entry: “That night we arrived at his house. . . . Dr. Condé is a man of good taste; he has excellent paintings and books, he thinks philosophically, and he has a winning personality. One who is a connoisseur and amateur of the arts must be apropos in Mexico now, as one thinks of plans for its reform and advancement.” 5 As John Styles and Amanda Vickery also observe, “‘taste’ was a heavily loaded word in most of its eighteenth-century uses.” 6 And, as it turns out, a heavily contested concept. Fausto Ramírez reminds us that “the assimilation of Neoclassical taste did not occur spontaneously among the enlightened criollos. . . . Some intellectuals expressed misgivings about the quality of the works produced in conformity with the new aesthetic.” 7 It is this process of the “shaping” of taste and its contestations, and what they reveal about the politics of taste in late colonial Mexico City, that I address in this essay. The relationship between place and aesthetics provides a productive lens through which to explore “taste cultures” refracted through a colonial relationship, in this particular case between Spain and Mexico, during a period in which the colonial status of Spain’s American possessions became more rigidly defined and in which normative judgments about the alleged “inferiority” of New World inhabitants and their societies, past and present, flourished.8 To explore this process I focus on Manuel Tolsá’s neoclassical equestrian statue of Charles IV from three discrete but interrelated perspectives. In the first section I discuss underexplored aspects of the cultural politics that shaped Viceroy Miguel de la Grúa Talamanca de Carini y Branciforte’s commission of the statue. Consideration of these cultural politics, I suggest, deepens our understanding of the statue’s importance not only for Branciforte but also for the academy and for perceptions of what constituted good taste in Mexico. The second section shifts focus to examine examples of the viceroy’s and the Mexico City literati’s efforts to promote the neoclassical equestrian statue as the embodiment of good taste. Such promotion also incorporated expressions of cultural patriotism focused on Tolsá’s aesthetic achievement and its significance for the dissemination of buen gusto

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in Mexico.9 Finally, in the third section I survey the contested nature of buen gusto. Commentaries and discussions related to aesthetics and taste that appeared in literary works and newspapers indicate a variety of responses to buen gusto and the Mexican public’s divergent understandings of the term.

(Re-)Contextualizing the Commissioning of the Equestrian Statue The basic history of the equestrian statue of Charles IV is well known but a brief summary is in order. Its commission occurred during a politically volatile period for the Spanish Empire and global politics in general, with the eruptions of the French and Haitian Revolutions. Viceroy Branciforte (brother-in-law of the Spanish prime minster Manuel Godoy) commissioned in 1795 from Manuel Tolsá, the RASC’s director of sculpture, a bronze equestrian statue of Charles IV. Tolsá produced a temporary version of the statue made of stuccoed and gilded wood to be displayed until the permanent, bronze version could be completed. As a result, the Mexican public witnessed two unveilings of the statue in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City, one in 1796 and the other in 1803. The king is dressed all’antica as a Roman emperor, crowned with a laurel wreath; in his extended right arm he holds a baton of command, signifying imperial power (figure 1.1). The superbly sinuous, muscular horse is restive but restrained by Charles’s firm grip on its reins.10 The monument stands inside an elliptical enclosure in a newly remodeled Plaza Mayor in front of the cathedral and sagrario, facing toward the viceregal palace (figure 1.2). Scholars have challenged traditional arguments that attribute Branciforte’s commission to his corruption and sycophancy. Clara Bargellini emphasizes the statue’s civic importance as an expression of the loyalty of the Spanish monarch’s subjects in Mexico as well as the kingdom’s grandeur.11 Kelly Donahue-Wallace has pointed to Branciforte’s recognition of the importance of reproductive engraving and his strategic use of this medium to publicize the statue and to shape his own public image.12 Fully persuaded by these arguments, I suggest that an understanding of the politically sensitive nature of royal statuary combined with anxiety about the status of the fine arts in Mexico also shaped Branciforte’s commission and the statue’s subsequent “packaging,” commodification, and patriotic descriptions. In addition to symbolizing Mexico’s loyalty to the king, the equestrian statue also signified Mexico’s accomplishments in the fine arts and the dissemination of neoclassicism nurtured by the academy.

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Figure 1.1. Manuel Tolsá. Equestrian Portrait

of Charles IV. 1796–1803. Bronze. Mexico City, Mexico. Photograph. © Susan Deans-Smith.

Figure 1.2. José Joaquín Fabregat. View of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico. 1796.

Engraving. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

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By the time Branciforte requested permission to erect a bronze equestrian statue of Charles IV in 1795 he was well aware of the controversial nature of royal statuary. As part of a lengthy complaint against Branciforte’s predecessor, Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, conde de Revillagigedo, the Creole polymath and scientist José Antonio Alzate accused him of having dared to remove a statue of Ferdinand VI. Alzate complained that the statue had been thrown out of the city as if the king were “a delinquent. . . . Many inhabitants [of Mexico] . . . saw the effigy of our Ferdinand VI placed on a column decorated with diverse inscriptions: the statue was adorned with the Royal mantle, crowned, and with the scepter, insignia of the sovereign power.” Alzate warned Branciforte that he could see with his own eyes the mutilated statue of Ferdinand VI, which “the birds would have already devoured if this were not made out of stone. . . . One sees not the bones, but the King’s effigy in pieces without royal robes, scepter or crown.” As compensation for such a heinous act Alzate suggested that Branciforte order his predecessor to pay for the reestablishment of “the image of the sovereign king” in a public place.13 Alzate also pointed out to Branciforte that in 1789, for the jura to Charles IV, an equestrian statue of the new king was placed in front of the sagrario of the cathedral but it too had disappeared.14 In response, Branciforte ordered an investigation into Alzate’s complaints about Ferdinand VI’s statue by the Mexico City Ayuntamiento. He also advised the Ayuntamiento that, given the “great veneration that the effigies of our sovereigns merit” the fragments of Ferdinand VI’s statue should be gathered up immediately and stored in one of the city’s warehouses “until new arrangements can be made.” 15 The investigation revealed that Revillagigedo had ordered Miguel Costansó, a military engineer and an advisor on the RASC’s governing board, to supervise the statue’s removal due to the “inappropriate” nature of the representation. Costansó’s report to the Ayuntamiento is particularly revealing for its insights into Revillagigedo’s views on public image, taste, and royal statuary: because the sovereign’s image was sculpted by some poor ignorant Indian, executed without art, intelligence, and without any resemblance to the original . . . his excellency [Revillagigedo] justly observed that similar monuments were a disgrace to the arts and to those who ordered them to be erected because they only inspire negative impressions of our Nation’s ability and culture among foreigners;

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that works of this type should never be carried out by anyone but the most eminent and skilled artists . . . and that the models they make should be assessed by professors and of knowledgeable men without whose approval the execution of the work cannot be carried out.16 Costansó noted the viceroy’s distaste for the inappropriate material chosen for the statue, cantería blanda (a soft-hewn stone).17 Despite the Ayuntamiento’s refutations of some of Revillagigedo’s arguments as reported by Costansó, Branciforte undoubtedly took note of his predecessor’s grasp of the importance of public representations of the monarchy and what they reflected about their patrons, artists, and their “tastes.” 18 Although Viceroy Revillagigedo also ordered the removal of a wooden equestrian statue of Charles IV I have yet to find evidence of an investigation comparable to that carried out for Ferdinand VI’s statue. Prior to the removal of the statue of Charles IV, in 1791 the painter and draftsman Fernando Brambila made an engraving of it during his stay in Mexico as part of the Malaspina Expedition (1789–1794) (figure 1.3). The statue appears to have been part of an ambitious project of the architects’ guild, spearheaded by the architect Ignacio Castera, that included the casting of two bronze life-size statues of Charles III and Charles IV. Until the bronze versions could be completed, temporary wooden versions were erected.19 By the time the statue was removed in 1792 Castera and the architects’ guild were embroiled in a conflict with masons, sculptors, and their journeymen over obligations to pay for the bronze statues. The conflict remained unresolved and Castera’s project was ultimately superseded by Tolsá’s commission from Branciforte.20 Revillagigedo bequeathed an important lesson to Branciforte on the sensitive question of royal statuary, especially his understanding of the importance of Mexico’s public image—and by extension, that of Spain—as reflected in its art. Not surprisingly, we see in Branciforte’s commission of the equestrian statue the insistence on the finest materials (bronze), the importance of securing the services of a reputable artist capable of producing a superlative work of buen gusto befitting a living monarch, and a fully documented record, textual and visual, of the statue for public consumption. At Branciforte’s disposal to implement his project for the equestrian statue and the Plaza Mayor’s renovation was the RASC and its artists. As viceroy, Branciforte held the position of vice protector, the RASC’s titular head, and therefore was responsible for monitoring its development and progress. Somewhat perversely, the second controversy that he inherited

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Figure 1.3. Fernando Brambila. La Plaza Mayor of Mexico. 1791. Pen and ink with sepia wash. Museo Naval, Madrid, Spain. Ms. 1726 (57).

from Revillagigedo focused on the academy’s development and its future as an arts institution in Mexico. Virulent internal disputes in the academy since its formal opening in 1785 had exposed it to increased external scrutiny from Madrid. Although efforts by the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid to formally subordinate the RASC to its authority failed, the Ministry of State approved the establishment of a satellite school in Madrid specifically for gifted students from Mexico to “complete” their training in the fine arts. The initiative confirmed prevailing assumptions among artists and officials in Spain about the backwardness of the arts and the lack of good taste in Mexico. As the minister of state queried in his deliberations about the Mexican academy, where “would the painters and sculptors find original models of antiquity? . . . Will they advance more in Mexico without these resources than in Madrid, where they exist in abundance?” 21 It would be difficult to find a clearer articulation of the equating of place and taste and assumptions about Mexico as peripheral

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to centers of cultural production. Such assumptions, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann reminds us, have been “ongoing since classical antiquity, [and produce] a discourse in which the geographical dimension has been regarded as an important constituent, even determinant, in the production of works of art.” 22 Six months prior to Branciforte’s request for permission to erect the equestrian statue, he received an order to send samples of students’ work to Spain to be evaluated by the Madrid academy’s faculty.23 Concerns about the implications of this order are reflected in the RASC president’s letter to the viceroy that accompanied the shipment of the students’ work. He requested that the viceroy convey to the king the academy’s continued advancement and point out its “usefulness.”24 As a follow-up to the president’s letter, the conde de Contramina, an advisor on the RASC’s governing board, also wrote to the viceroy to assure him that the development of “buen gusto” was plainly evident “in many things” in Mexico.25 Both letters suggest anxiety about the RASC’s institutional autonomy and its future. Whatever other personal and political reasons motivated Branciforte to commission the equestrian statue, I suggest that as a consequence of the particular cultural politics that converged around the issues of royal statuary and the academy’s status, they highlighted the importance not only of producing a superlative statue but also of providing incontrovertible evidence of the dissemination of buen gusto and the advancement of the arts in Mexico. Branciforte’s reputation and service may have been at stake but so were those of the academy, its artists, and indeed, the public image of Mexico City itself.

Packaging Buen Gusto, the Equestrian Statue, and Patriotic Taste Neoclassicism, so Albert Boime argues, was “the first art movement in history to be packaged, advertised, and sold on the market as a profitable investment.”26 While it is unlikely that neoclassicism in late colonial Mexico ever became a “profitable investment,” it certainly was packaged and promoted. Tolsá’s statue provided the perfect vehicle through which to disseminate official ideas about buen gusto in Mexico. The extent of the publicity and commentary that the statue generated is extraordinary. Its “life” was literally documented over the years in royal proclamations, sermons, literary works, pamphlets, and newspapers.27 Portable and possessable images of the statue appeared in the form of prints, commemorative medals, and small models.28 Both textual and visual representations served to circulate images of the

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statue not only internationally but also locally to present images of Mexico to itself as a space where buen gusto prevailed in the arts even as baroque forms remained firmly in evidence. At the statue’s first inauguration on December 9, 1796, the vicereine and her daughter threw three thousand silver medals off the balcony of the viceregal palace to the crowds assembled below.29 The commemorative medals, engraved by the RASC’s director-general, Jerónimo Antonio Gil, featured on the obverse side profiles of Charles IV and the queen, María Luisa de Parma, the former dressed in armor crowned with laurels (figure 1.4); on the reverse appears the equestrian statue of Charles IV with a Latin inscription that translates as, “Charles IV, generous benefactor, King of Spain and the Indies” (figure 1.5). Branciforte’s commission for an engraving of the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City proved to be a masterstroke of publicity for the statue, the RASC, and the new aesthetics (figure 1.2). The print’s inscription conveys the collaboration of the RASC’s director-artists.30 As Marcus Burke observes, “The sober taste of the academicians is evident in the underplaying of the elaborate Sagrario façade, while the ample uncluttered space shows Neoclassical inclinations.”31 Branciforte sent numerous copies of the print to Spain and distributed copies to the Mexico City Ayuntamiento with orders that they should be placed in their archive.32 Announcements advertising sales of the print to the Mexican public appeared in the Gazeta de México and the Diario de México. Initially, the print cost four pesos in 1797.33 In 1805, after the bronze version’s unveiling in 1803, the print could be purchased for one or two reales, according to the quality of paper.34 Aside from the circulation and sale of the prints in Mexico and Spain, Alexander von Humboldt provided international publicity for the statue. In addition to his description of the bronze statue—he personally observed its unveiling in 1803—he subsequently reproduced the print of the Plaza Mayor in his Vues des Cordillères et monumens des peuples indigènes de l’Amérique, which was published in Paris between 1810 and 1813. In addition to the prints and medals, several small models of the equestrian statue were made, including the one sent to the king (figure 1.6). It is not clear whether Tolsá distributed some as gifts to valued patrons. A report in the Gazeta in 1805 described a gala held in the viceregal palace and attended by “magistrates, counts, marquises, officials and other distinguished people with a splendid table on which was exhibited a silver equestrian statue of our beloved sovereign with other adornments of elegance and magnificence, all made at the expense of his excellency the viceroy.”35

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Figure 1.4. Jerónimo Antonio Gil. Charles IV and María Luisa. 1796. Medal (silver; obverse side). Colección del Museo Numismático Nacional; Casa de Moneda de México, Mexico City, Mexico.

Figure 1.5. Jerónimo Antonio Gil. Eques-

trian Statue of Charles IV. 1796. Medal (silver; reverse side). Colección del Museo Numismático Nacional; Casa de Moneda de México, Mexico City, Mexico.

Figure 1.6. Rafael Ximeno y Planes. Portrait of Tolsá with Model of Equestrian Statue. 1795–1803? Red chalk on paper. UNAM—Dirección General del Patrimonio Universitario and Museo Tolsá del Palacio de Mineria, Mexico City, Mexico.

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Tolsá’s equestrian statue inspired a variety of descriptions and literary works. Such works, while often conveying clear political messages about monarchy, empire, loyalty, and Charles IV’s beneficent rule, also convey important reflections on taste and classical antiquity as well as patriotic expressions. Singularly influential in impressing on the public the importance of classical antiquity in defining buen gusto and as epitomized by Tolsá’s equestrian statue was the Creole cleric and intellectual Dr. José Mariano Beristáin de Souza.36 Beristáin brought a cosmopolitan eye to his assessment of aesthetics and taste, shaped by a career that took him from Puebla to Spain and back to Mexico City.37 Beristáin and Branciforte became close friends when they traveled together on the same ship from Spain to Mexico in 1794.38 As a result of their friendship Branciforte chose Beristáin to deliver the sermón de gracias to commemorate the provisional statue’s inauguration in 1796. Beristáin also contributed commentaries on taste and aesthetics to the Diario and personally sponsored a literary competition to commemorate the bronze equestrian statue’s dedication in 1803. The contest generated over two hundred submissions that were published as Cantos de las Musas Mexicanas con motivo de la colocacion de la estatua equestre de bronce de nuestro augusto soberano Carlos IV (1804).39 The published collection could be purchased for one peso.40 Beristáin’s sermón de gracias for the statue’s inauguration in 1796 not surprisingly praises Charles IV and the glories of Spanish rule, but he also promotes neoclassicism and lauds the equestrian statue’s aesthetic significance. Beristáin presents neoclassicism as the official style favored by the king and assures his readers that “Charles possesses the most exact and scientific discernment in the three Noble Arts of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture.” 41 Incorporated into Beristáin’s printed sermon are observations about classical and contemporary European royal statuary as well as praise for Tolsá and other artists in Mexico. He refers to well-known royal statues in Europe, including the bronze pedestrian statue of Charles III erected in Burgos in 1784, that of Charlemagne at St. Peter’s Basilica, the bronze statue of Henry IV of France in the Basilica of St. John Lateran in Rome, and the equestrian statue of Phillip II in the portico of the Vatican basilica erected by Constantine.42 In citing such examples Beristáin asserts Mexico’s parity with its European counterparts, symbolized by the equestrian statue’s erection in the viceregal capital, and in so doing elides distinctions based on geographical place. Indeed, in a bold flourish Beristáin avers that Mexico is not only comparable to Rome but surpasses it,

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inasmuch as the city has been granted “this singular grace [erection of an equestrian statue] that Rome did not even concede to its colonies.” 43 In a contribution to the Diario, writing as “El Ex. D. P.,” he reiterates this trope of comparable achievement in a potted history of the arts in Spain and Mexico. In the three centuries of Spanish imperial rule, Beristáin argues, “The same taste has prevailed here [Mexico] with little difference from that in the metropolis, as much in the arts as in the sciences and literature.” 44 Clear associations are also made between buen gusto as represented by Tolsá’s neoclassical statue and expressions of cultural patriotism. Useful in thinking about this point is Thomas Nipperdey’s argument that points to the paradox whereby “a monument to a prince can also become a monument to the supra-individual context which he represents—in other words, it can become a monument to the state, the fatherland, and the nation.” 45 Published descriptions of the equestrian statue and its dedications not only provided readers with lessons on what defined buen gusto but also drew favorable comparisons between New Spain and ancient Rome. The account of the celebrations in 1796 emphasized the classical influences in the newly renovated Plaza Mayor, such as the Etruscan urns and the Doric pilasters.46 Readers were assured that they “would be seized with the same enthusiasm as that of an ancient citizen of Rome on seeing the image of Augustus placed at such a great distance from the Court” and that the statue and plaza were works worthy of “the best ages of magnificent Rome.” 47 Writers praised Tolsá’s artistic talents not only to demonstrate the prevalence of buen gusto in Mexico but also to assert the presence of artists comparable to those in Europe and in ancient Greece and Rome. Bruno Joseph de Larrañaga declared that “the celebrated name of Tolsá will bury in oblivion those of Phidias, Praxiteles and Myron. . . . This event [the bronze statue’s unveiling] presages the age of . . . glory in the rich, beautiful, and fertile imperial court of Mexico.” 48 Another writer assured his readers that the statue would perpetuate Tolsá’s name in both the Old and New Worlds as the artist “who knew how to give movement to bronze.” 49 Mexico as the geographical location of the equestrian statue’s creation is also emphasized by writers, a deliberate challenge to assertions about primacy of place in the determination of the quality (or lack thereof) of cultural production. Fermín de Reygadas described the statue as a “Mexican marvel” and a “miracle of modern sculpture” and declared that Mexico was “the theatre where all of the taste of Athens and Rhodes will be revived.” 50

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Contested Tastes Unlike the debates that swirled around many royal statues in Europe, there is little public critique of Tolsá’s equestrian statue. I have found only fragmentary evidence of attempts to desecrate the statue, a common occurrence with European statues.51 Presumably the statue’s height combined with the gates of the ellipse and proximity to the viceregal palace and its guards deterred delinquent acts.52 An unpublished anonymous letter and “Dialogue Between Mexico City and Reason” sent to Manuel Godoy shortly after the statue’s dedication on December 9, 1796, however, provide insights into critical responses to the statue, albeit the wooden version.53 Embedded in a litany of criticisms against Branciforte is a virulent critique of the statue and its excessive costs, financial and physical. On the statue’s aesthetic merits, “Reason” asks “Mexico City” to reflect on what he sees as a lack of proportion between the horse and its rider, as one could hardly see the king, as well as on the smallness of the horse’s head in proportion to the rest of its body. The materials (wood) and finish (gilded to imitate bronze but which looked “like a cheap yellow varnish”), Reason argues, “do no honor to Charles IV, unlike the bronze and marble used in Greece to celebrate the philosophers and the generals.” Finally, Reason queries what kind of comfort people would derive from seeing Charles IV dressed in the manner of “a pagan emperor.” 54 Far from an exemplary rendition of the new aesthetics, for the anonymous critic the equestrian statue of Charles IV represented Branciforte’s corrupt rule and moral deficiencies symbolized by a poorly executed and tasteless sculpture. Nothing comparable to such criticism of the equestrian statue ever appeared in published form, to my knowledge. I suggest, however, that descriptions and images of the statue contributed to broader commentaries and debates about questions of aesthetics and taste in Mexico. The Diario and Gazeta in particular provided an important public forum for information and discussions about art, buen gusto, and the classics. Extracts from influential works on classical antiquity, art, and art treatises were reprinted in the newspapers. Readers, the majority of whom never traveled to Rome, could avail themselves, for example, of excerpts from Sobre las antigüedades Romanas y los antiguos Templos del Cristianismo, Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Discurso . . . sobre el estilo sublime y del dibujo entre los Griegos, and Discurso sobe el estilo alegórico de la remota antigüedad, y sobre su influencia en la historia.55 Also recommended to readers were some of the most “important” works on the arts and sciences by English critics such as

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Archibald Alison and Daniel Webb.56 What emerges from these discussions is the contested nature of the definition of buen gusto. The terms gusto and buen gusto are ubiquitous in the pages of the Gazeta and the Diario, although they are rarely defined. Even in the 1796 description of the equestrian statue published in the Gazeta that emphasized its “buen gusto,” the term seems susceptible to multiple meanings. Indeed, differences in taste are acknowledged: “all of the streets of this beautiful city, its churches, convents, and colleges were illuminated and adorned with very fine hangings and other decorations that differed according to the taste and abilities of the residents.” 57 One anonymous author, however, provided an explicit definition of the term as he understood it: “Buen gusto is the . . . correct discernment of works and sentiments which consist in the best manner of seeing, knowing, and making, and is born of a delicate feeling and excellence of the soul.” 58 He subsequently observed, “It is generally claimed by western and northern Europe that it is there where [buen gusto] resides; but buen gusto is like the sun that cannot be hidden even though the clouds gather to eclipse its light. Well directed schools are the manner by which to acquire good taste and to perfect it. . . . Our customs, application and patriotism are the means of attaining buen gusto and public happiness.” 59 Implicit here is support for the RASC’s critical role in disseminating buen gusto in Mexico. Equally significant is the writer’s rejection of the idea that place and taste were geographically defined and bounded and of deterministic arguments that privileged Europe over Mexico in its arts and taste. Commentaries on classical antiquity ranged from adulation to vituperative criticism with explorations of its contradictions and obsolescence. A visitor to Rome praised the city’s ancient beauty: “Having seen Paris, and the best cities of France, and Milan, nothing seems to me to have so much grandeur [as Rome].60 “S.C.,” however, urged subscribers to read Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos’s oration given in honor of the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, in which he declared that the “obsession” with “ancient things” and Roman customs was “insufferable.” A simple example of how preoccupation with antiquity had exercised an “imperial despotism” on the Mexican public could be found in the use of Roman instead of Arabic numerals on clocks. It was the latter that “everyone could read, and which everyone used in their contracts and commercial dealings.” 61 On the relevance of the classics, “El tio Cruz” queried how knowledge about Diana, Arethusa, Cupid, Venus, Hercules, and Juno served his soul. Surely it made

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more sense to learn about the lives of the saints in order to serve God and emulate their virtues?62 In an anonymous “Dialogue” between “Cortés” and “Moctezuma,” Cortés attempts to persuade Moctezuma of the “Americans’” inferiority.63 Cortés asserts that the Greeks and Romans invented all of the arts and sciences, “of which you [the Mexica] did not have the slightest idea.” Moctezuma retorts that “one does not always have to follow the example of the Greeks” and reminds Cortés that the arts in America advanced without the Greeks and were “more admirable than even the arts in Europe.” 64 Another commentator, following Beristáin’s deliberate inclusion of Tolsá’s equestrian statue in the repertoire of famous European statuary, emphasized the custom among cultured nations to demonstrate their glory through “magnificent monuments that exemplify all the beauty of the arts.” He assured his readers that in this way “we are all witnesses to the ruins of Troy . . . the antiquities of Palmyra, the monuments of Herculaneum, the bas-reliefs and obelisks of Rome, the pyramids of Egypt, the enormous masas of Mexico.” 65 Numerous descriptions of architecture and artworks created in Mexico served as embryonic forms of art criticism, in which buen gusto (referring to neoclassicism) and academy artists received both kudos and criticism. A lengthy description of the new meeting rooms of the Sala del Crimen, for example, praised the work of Ximeno y Planes and Tolsá, which demonstrated “propriety and buen gusto” even though “the first [room] has more decorations than is usual. . . . All is of the ‘nuevo estilo.’” 66 In a discussion of the recently renovated parish church of Coyoacán, a writer praised Antonio Velázquez’s use of the Ionic order for the altars, which demonstrated “exquisite taste.” 67 Other commentators appeared less enthusiastic. “Arquitectófilo” emphasized the virtues of Mexico City’s varied architectural styles, especially as exhibited by the retablos in the Mexico City cathedral. The “abundant fantasies” represented in the designs demonstrated that their inventors were not inhibited by “the trifles of the rules of art.” The commentator, however, praised Tolsá’s use of proportion and symmetry in his designs for the completion of the cathedral.68 “P” in a discussion of the “Noble Arts” defended buen gusto and praised the foundation of the Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid and its influence on the dissemination of buen gusto in civic architecture. Based on the best models of antiquity, primarily those of the Greeks, new buildings possessed a “commodiousness and beauty that had been lacking for a long time.” 69 “Quidam” contemplated the RASC’s impact (or lack thereof) on painting and concluded that

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“Mexico, in the judgment of the learned, has not been able to emulate, even with the Academy, the glory of the celebrated Juárezes.” Quidam’s explanation for what he perceived to be a decline in the quality of painting focused on the moda (neoclassical style) and desnudez of most of the churches and houses.70 “Taste” as John Styles and Amanda Vickery have pointed out, is “undoubtedly about power,” an observation that readily applies to its dissemination and influence within a colonial context and to the fraught politics of taste.71 Following the logic of some of the Madrid mandarins who argued that students could never perfect their studies of the fine arts in Mexico because of the lack of original monuments of antiquity, geographical place could become an insurmountable obstacle to the florescence of both art and “taste,” dooming Mexico to a perpetual status of subordination and inferiority in the arts, a reflection of the broader asymmetries of power between an imperial power and its colonies. Such a proposition clearly exposed what was at stake in the demonstration of the dissemination of buen gusto in Mexico. Tolsá’s equestrian statue signified Mexico’s participation in a broader neoclassical movement that matched or exceeded European standards while simultaneously challenging deterministic arguments about the relationship between place and taste. The statue became emblematic of art produced in Mexico that would, as Stacie Widdifield has eloquently argued, “insert New Spain into the sphere of western European cultural modernity.” 72 At the same time, the range of opinions and topics represented in writings about the equestrian statue and broader discussions of taste and aesthetics exposed attentive readers not only to the promotion of neoclassicism as the very embodiment of buen gusto but also to the concept’s more capacious and contested interpretations. In so doing such discussions and commentaries opened up a discursive space for reflection on the history of aesthetics and taste in Mexico (and America more broadly) that lay beyond the academy’s classrooms and the reach of the reformist Bourbon state.

_____ I wish to acknowledge research support for this essay provided by the Institute for Historical Studies, History Department, UT-Austin, and the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at UT-Austin from funds granted to the institute by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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Notes 1. Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis, The Journal of Don Francisco Saavedra de Sangronis, trans. Aileen Moore Topping (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1989), 248, 247, 252, 253. 2. Alexander von Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (New York: I. Riley, 1811), 160–61. 3. The term neoclassicism did not come into use until the late nineteenth century. See David G. Irwin, Neoclassicism (London: Phaidon, 1997). On classicism in Mexico and Spain, see, respectively, Clasicismo en México, ed. Clara Bargellini and Elizabeth Fuentes (Mexico City: Centro Cultural/Arte Contemporáneo, 1990); and La visión del mundo clásico en el arte español (Madrid: Editorial Alpuerto, 1993). 4. A telling example of this inference is Sangronis’s observation that he noted in Puebla “that all the works built in the time of and at the orders of the Venerable Don Juan de Palafox have an air of magnificence and taste, although he exercised power at a time when bad taste was at its height, which proves that he was a man of superior cultural attainments.” Sangronis, Journal, December 3, 1781, 262. For astute discussions of the evolution of the concept of taste and the changing definitions of “good” and “bad” taste, see Helmut C. Jacobs, Belleza y buen gusto: Las teorías de las artes en la literatura española del siglo XVIII, trans. Beatriz Galán Echevarría (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2001); Ana Hontanilla, El gusto de la razón: Debates de arte y moral en el siglo XVIII español (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2010); and Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos, “El cambio de gusto en el siglo XVIII,” in Historia de la ciencia y de la técnica en la corona de Castilla, ed. Luis García Ballester, vol. 4 (Madrid: Junta de Castilla y León, Consejería de Educación y Cultura, 2002), 65–92. Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos understood mal gusto to be defined by prejudices, stupidity, and vulgarity. See Jacobs, Belleza y buen gusto, 231. 5. Sangronis, Journal, December 2, 1781, 261. Sangronis epitomized the ideal of the hombre del buen gusto. He graduated as a licenciado and doctor, read the classics and French, was an honorary academician of the Academy of Buenas Letras, enjoyed a friendship with Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar, and studied violin and drawing. See Francisco Morales Padrón, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Sangronis, Journal, ix–xxxvii. Sangronis’s observations about bad taste were not restricted to Mexico and the Caribbean. He observes that “the Palace of Versailles is immense, but it is made up of detached parts and so is wanting in plan and taste.” Sangronis, Journal, June 2, 1782, 333. 6. John Styles and Amanda Vickery, introduction to Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 19. Also influential in my thinking about taste/taste cultures are Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); George Dickie,

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The Century of Taste: The Philosophical Odyssey of Taste in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Jules Lubbock, The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 7. Fausto Ramírez, “The Nineteenth Century,” in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990), 499. 8. See David A. Brading, The First America: the Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 9. I draw on Holger Hoock’s use of “cultural patriotism” in Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London: Profile Books, 2010), 385. The patriotic expressions that the equestrian statue inspired capture forms of both Creole and Spanish patriotism and imperial pride. 10. For analyses of the statue, see Eloísa Uribe, “La estatua ecuestre de Carlos IV o la persistencia de la belleza,” in Escultura ecuestre de México (Mexico City: SEP, 2006): 76–125; Clara Bargellini, “La lealtad americana: El significado de la estatua ecuestre de Carlos IV,” in Iconología y sociedad: Arte colonial hispanoamericano (Mexico City: UNAM, 1987), 207–20; Stacie G. Widdifield, “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles IV: Art History, Patrimony, and the City,” Journal X 8:1 (2003): 61–83; Joaquín Bérchez, “Ornamentation Was No Crime: Tolsá in Mexico,” in Tolsá: Joaquín Bérchez Fotografías (Valencia, Spain: Generalitat Valenciana, 2008), 147. Much more research about Branciforte’s commission and Tolsá’s design of the statue is needed. See Susan Deans-Smith, “‘This Mexican Marvel’: The Equestrian Statue of Charles IV, Neoclassicism, and the Politics of Good Taste in Late Colonial Mexico” (paper presented at the Institute for Historical Studies, History Department, University of Texas–Austin, February 2011). 11. Bargellini, “La lealtad americana,” 208–20. 12. Kelly Donahue-Wallace, “Spinning the King” (paper presented at the College Art Association annual meeting, Los Angeles, 2008); cited with author’s permission. 13. Alzate to Branciforte, February 2, 1795, Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter cited as AGN), Indiferente Virreinal 2865, exp. 7. 14. Ibid. 15. Branciforte to Ayuntamiento, February 26, 1795, AGN, Indiferente Virreinal 2865, exp. 7. 16. Costansó to Ignacio de Iglesias Pablo, March 10, 1795, AGN, Indiferente Virreinal 2865, exp. 7. 17. Ibid.

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18. Sala Capitular del Ayuntamiento to Branciforte, May 29, 1795, and Branciforte, August 19, 1795, AGN, Indiferente Virreinal 2865, exp. 7. 19. For further discussion of the designs, see Manuel Tovar de Teresa, “Ephemeral Architecture and Royal Celebrations: The Oath of Charles IV, Mexico City, 1789,” Artes de Mexico, no. 1 (1993): 86. 20. On the conflict, see AGN, Indiferente Virreinal 1103, exp. 13, ff. 1–24v. 21. Expediente relativos a los Pensionados, ff. 97–99, Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain (hereafter cited as AGI), Mexico 2793. 22. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, introduction to Time and Place: The Geohistory of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Elizabeth Pilliod (Ashgate, UK: Aldershot, 2005), 2. 23. Viceroy to president of the RASC, April 25, 1795, AGN, Historia 160, exp. 18. Also see Susan Deans-Smith, “‘A Natural and Voluntary Dependence’: The Royal Academy of San Carlos and the Cultural Politics of Art Education in Mexico City, 1786–1797,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29:3 (2010): 278–95. 24. President of RASC to viceroy, February 1, 1796, AGN, Historia 160, exp. 18. 25. Conde de Contramina to viceroy, April 18, 1796, AGN, Historia 160, exp. 18. 26. Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Revolution, 1750–1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 60. 27. For the king’s permission to erect the statue, see the bando of June 17, 1796, AGI, Estado 25, no. 11; for a description of the laying of the first stone for the statue’s pedestal on July 18, 1796, and the projected timetable for its inauguration on December 9, 1796, to coincide with the queen’s birthday, see Gazeta de México (hereafter cited as GM), July 27, 1796; “Descripcion de las fiestas celebradas en la imperial corte de Mexico con motivo de la solemne colocacion de una estatua equestre de nuestro augusto soberano el Señor Don Carlos IV,” GM, vol. 8, December 7, 1796, supplement; “Breve noticia de la fundicion, altitud y altura de la Real Estatua Equestre de nuestro Augusto Soberano,” GM, September 17, 1802; “Descripción del modo con que se conduxo, elevó y colocó sobre su base la Real Estatua de nuestro Augusto Soberano el Señor Don Carlos IV,” GM, January 7, 1804. For an excellent collection of essays on the politics of royal monuments, see Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau, ed., Reading the Royal Monument in EighteenthCentury Europe (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011). 28. José Mariano Beristáin de Sousa, Sermon de gracias, que en la solemnisima colocacion de la estatua equestre de Carlos IV: En la Plaza Mayor de Megico el 9 de Diciembre de 1796. . . . (Mexico City, 1797); José Mariano Beristáin de Sousa, Cantos de las Musas Mexicanas . . . (Mexico City: Mariano de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1804); Bruno Joseph de Larrañaga, Poema heroyco en celebridad de la colocación de la estatua colosal de Bronce de nuestro Católico Monarca el Sr. Don Carlos Quarto Rey de España y Emperador de las Indias (Mexico City: Mariano de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1804). 29. “Descripcion de las fiestas,” GM, December 7, 1796, supplement.

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30. “Tolsá, director of sculpture, made the pedestal and statue; Antonio Velázquez, director of architecture, decorated the plaza; Rafael Ximeno y Planes, director of painting, drew it; and José Joaquín Fabregat, director of engraving, executed the print in 1797.” 31. Marcus Burke, “The Academy, Neoclassicism, and Independence,” in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, 489. 32. Branciforte to Ayuntamiento, December 25, 1797, Archivo Histórico del Distrito Federal, Mexico City, vol. 2261, f.25. 33. GM, March 22, 1797. 34. Diario de México (hereafter cited as DM), October 21, 1805. 35. GM, November 6, 1805. 36. Beristáin is best known for his Biblioteca hispanoamericana septentrional, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Mexico City: UNAM—Instituto de Estudios y Documentos Históricos, 1980–1981). 37. Beristáin was an honorary academician and advisor of the Academy of Fine Arts of Valladolid and honorary academician of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia. 38. See Carlos Herrejón Peredo, Del sermón al discurso cívico: México, 1760–1834 (Mexico City: El Colegio de Michoacán/El Colegio de México, 2003). 39. Submissions came from colonial officials, clergy, lawyers, university professors, ecclesiastics, college students, the military, and a few female authors. Although submissions from Mexico City dominated, entries were received from Puebla, Michoacán, Veracruz, and Querétaro. 40. GM, February 18, 1804. 41. Beristáin, Sermon de gracias, 6. On Charles IV’s art education, patronage, and collections, see Royal Splendor in the Enlightenment: Charles IV of Spain, Patron and Collector, coord. Bridget Marx and Isabel Morán Suárez, trans. Wade A. Matthews (Dallas: Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University; Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional, 2010), exhibition catalog. 42. Beristáin, Sermon de gracias, 1, 19. 43. Ibid., xx. 44. DM, October 20, November 3, 1805. 45. Nipperdey’s argument is discussed by Eckhart Hellmuth in “A Monument to Frederick the Great: Architecture, Politics, and the State in Late EighteenthCentury Prussia,” in Rethinking Leviathan: The Eighteenth-Century State in Britain and Germany, ed. John Brewer and Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 318. 46. “Descripcion de las fiestas,” GM, December 7, 1796, supplement. 47. Ibid., 2, 4. 48. Larrañaga, Poema heroyco, 7, 9–10. 49. “Descripcion del modo,” GM, January 7, 1804, 20.

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50. Beristáin, Cantos, 111. On comparisons between Rome and Mexico as the “caput mundi,” see Bargellini, “La lealtad americana,” 220. 51. [Brigadier] Pedro Ruiz Davalos to Sr. Regente of the Real Audiencia, April 7, 1797, AGN, Indiferente Virreinal, 6174–019, related an incident in which an individual attempted to hurl a rock at the equestrian statue but when challenged he argued that the rock was meant to kill a dog that had attacked him. Ruiz Davalos also makes reference to the viceroy’s efforts to protect the statue. On defacing and desecration of royal statues in Europe, see Anne M. Wagner, “Outrages: Sculpture and Kingship in France After 1789,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. John Brewer and Ann Bermingham (London: Routledge, 1995): 294–318; Y. Whelan, “The Construction and Destruction of a Colonial Landscape: Monuments to British Monarchs in Dublin Before and After Independence,” Journal of Historical Geography 28:4 (2002): 508–33. 52. In 1799 wooden panels were placed around the provisional statue after the horse’s head splintered from its body, which would have made acts of vandalism a moot point. According to Tolsá’s report it would have been more difficult to repair the damaged statue than to make a new one and since the bronze version was in progress, it made sense to wait for its completion. Marquina to Mariano Luis de Urquijo, October 27, 1800, AGI, Estado 28, no. 101. 53. El Americano to Duke of Alcudia, December 27, 1796, and Dialogo entre la Ciudad de Mexico y la Razon sobre la solemne Dedicacion de la Estatua Equestre de Carlos IV exaltada el dia 9 de Diciembre de 1796 años, AGI, Estado 41, no. 67. It is unclear whether Godoy shared the contents of these documents with his brother-in-law, Branciforte. 54. Ibid. Here the anonymous author clearly takes the side of the Moderns in the longstanding querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. 55. DM, March 8, 1813, April 10, 1809, May 18, 1810. 56. DM, June 5, 1812. The references are to Alison, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790), and Webb, An Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting and into the Merits of the Most Celebrated Painters, Ancient and Modern (1760). 57. “Descripcion de las fiestas,” GM, December 7, 1796, supplement. 58. DM, August 6, 1813. 59. DM, August 7, 1813. 60. DM, December 27, 1807. 61. DM, July 8, September 25, 1807. 62. DM, March 11, 1811. 63. DM, May 24, 1808. 64. Ibid. Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to develop this theme more extensively, it is important to note that the “Dialogue” clearly references certain sensibilities that express an appreciation for Mexican antiquities not only with specific reference to taste and the fine arts but also for their originality. A good example of this is reflected in the writings of Guillermo Dupaix. See Guillermo

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Dupaix Papers, 1804–1820, Benson Latin American Collection, General Libraries, University of Texas at Austin. George Kubler notes that Dupaix conceived of preColumbian Mesoamerican architecture, sculpture, and painting “as original rather than derivative from any recent Old World tradition.” George Kubler, Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), 94. 65. DM, February 18, 1809. See also Pedro José Márquez’s discussion of the comparability of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican architecture with that of the Romans and Greeks in Due antichi monumenti di architettura messicana (Rome: Presso il Salomoni, 1804). 66. DM, April 22, 1806. 67. DM, December 11, 1804. 68. DM, September 29, 1811. 69. DM, February 11, 20, 21, 1816. 70. DM, January 11, 1814. 71. Styles and Vickery, introduction, 19. 72. Widdifield, “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Portrait,” 64.

Chapter Two

Gothic Taste vs. Buen Gusto Creolism, Urban Space, and Aesthetic Discourse in Late Colonial Peru

Isaac D. Sáenz

In Peru in the second half of the eighteenth century, viceregal author-

ities promoted an aesthetic discourse that differentiated two opposing scenes. On one hand, it was a discourse favorable to academicism and classicism, part of a modernizing project to impose order, control, buen gusto (good taste), and uniformity in colonial practices. Buen gusto came to be associated with intelligibility, homogeneity, formal clarity, rationality, and a scientific view of urban space and architecture. This aesthetic project was manifested in the work of Spanish architect Matías Maestro and painter José del Pozo y Cristóbal Lozano, who held the official monopoly on buen gusto until the end of the colonial period. The new aesthetic vision in the urban environment was expressed through a group of public works in neoclassical style, accompanied by new scientific views of the city and urban legislation based on “enlightened” principles. At the other extreme, officials ridiculed the cultural practices of baroque society, including manifestations such as ostentatious funeral rituals and devotional practices as well as plebian traditions and expressions, considering them degraded, exaggerated, sensual, obscure, and puerile. Proponents of buen gusto viewed such baroque forms as ornamental chaos and branded them with the pejorative of gusto gótico (Gothic taste). Yet the hegemonic discourse of buen gusto failed to extinguish baroque and popular tastes. On 25

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the contrary, a taste for the baroque persisted during the second half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. Inclusively, common people negotiated and interpreted buen gusto in their own ways, challenging its univocal character.1 Elite criollos (Creoles, or individuals of Hispanic descent born in America) played a key role in the implementation of classicism, from theoretical speculation and criticism to the financing of public works. Creole intellectuals such as José Ruiz Cano and Hipólito Unanue, among others, wrote from a local perspective. They promoted a vision of what the city’s art and architecture should be, inserting an “enlightened” perspective. These Creole writers thus appropriated the official buen gusto in an effort to differentiate their taste from that of commoners. Creoles organized through the guilds, such as the merchant-dominated Tribunal del Consulado, the most powerful corporation of late colonial Lima. Through such associations, Creoles actively participated in the construction of neoclassical works such as the Alameda del Callao, the Portada de Maravillas, and the renovation of the city walls. They also funded and supported the aesthetic and political projects of such viceroys as Bernardo O’Higgins (r. 1796– 1801) and Fernando de Abascal (r. 1806–1816) and their architects, such as Matías Maestro (1766–1835). Creoles promoted the buen gusto of such works, including the General Cemetery of Lima and the Anatomic Amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, through newspapers such as El Mercurio Peruano. While architecture customarily came under the purview of viceregal authorities, Creoles participated decisively in the promotion and execution of neoclassical architecture through local institutions such as the cabildo or the Tribunal del Consulado. This vigorous Creole participation evidenced the importance given to public works and urban monuments as elements in the construction of power and social identity. Creoles thus made the official classical taste their own, then propagated it widely. The traditional historiography on Peru has designated the period between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth as neoclassical. This period has been viewed as a moment of triumph for official aesthetic discourse under the banners of reason and buen gusto, which relegated and exiled the baroque. Neoclassicism came to be imposed in local space, where it was accepted by local society.2 This same historiography has understood the neoclassical phenomenon as a one-way process, a mere transfer of the metropolis to Peru, without considering local contingencies or the agency of local actors. A recent historiography has taken interest in the

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role of local agents, and of the colonial subject in particular, in the construction of aesthetics and modernity and of territory and urban space and in the appropriation of science and technology.3 This essay examines the process of appropriation, construction, and reception of classical rhetorics by colonial authorities and Creole agents in late colonial Peru and its impact on the urban landscape. Through the examination of discourses surrounding certain public works, such as the Alameda del Callao, the use of quincha (an indigenous construction method) after the quake of 1746, and the vindication of pre-Hispanic architecture, urbanism, and aesthetics, it becomes evident that both buen gusto and classicism assumed multiple meanings for Spanish authorities and Peruvian Creole elites in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Beyond considering the success or failure of the classicizing aesthetic proposal in Peru, I would like to underscore how authorities and elites sought to interpret, appropriate, and propose neoclassicism in a way that articulated local elements as well as expanded the concept of classicism beyond ornamental codes. This approach thus understands neoclassical manifestations in Peru as cultural hybrids, considering deeper aspects of the phenomenon’s political, social, and ideological dimensions.

Criollismo and the Aesthetics of Reason For its proponents in America, neoclassicism signified a break with the baroque past, with its values of exaggeration, grandiloquence, and profuse ornamentation. The revised classicism of straight lines and sober aesthetics was not immediately associated with reason in Latin America as much as it was with reformed administration. Neoclassicism negated the baroque and affirmed the new Spanish state, existing as an aesthetic tool for a new order. The Bourbon state adopted neoclassical aesthetics as an imperial style meant to aid in the unification of cultural practices, social control, and the reordering and recuperation of the fiscal state in the urban sphere and throughout the provinces.4 In urban projects, rationalism translated into the imposition of the Hippodamian grid, while in architecture, it assumed neoclassical stylistic dictates. Buildings, civil and military, secular and ecclesiastical, adopted classicism as an aesthetic solution, compatible with the objectives of instilling order, control, and civilization. This official posture and discourse came to be appropriated by “enlightened” Creoles who assimilated the principles of neoclassical architecture and used them to assess local architecture.

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In the description of the Cathedral of Lima after its reconstruction, the limeño Francisco Antonio Ruiz Cano argued that the cathedral possessed the noble elements that Vitruvius emphasizes in The Ten Books on Architecture: order, disposition, symmetry, eurythmy, decorum, and distribution.5 For Ruiz Cano, in the principle church of Lima, “Order, Disposition, and Symmetry had arrived there to the highest degree to which art can elevate them. Nothing was more agreeable than its Eurythmy, nothing more finished than its decorum, nothing more just than its distribution.” 6 This description of the cathedral is closely related to the valuation of classicist architecture promoted by the authorities, for example in the text published upon the opening of the General Cemetery in 1808, which also demonstrates an increasing appropriation of official aesthetic discourse by the Creole elite.7 Neoclassical style spread equally among the different public buildings that were erected in the colonial territory. However, they each had a particular scope and meaning according to their nature: military, religious, administrative, funeral, and so on. Thus, in contrast to religious buildings, much of the military infrastructure built in colonial Peru was typical of the eighteenth century. It comprised new building types such as barracks, the gunpowder factory, and even the citadel, known from Renaissance Europe and applied in Callao after the earthquake and tsunami in 1746 (figures 2.1 and 2.2). The classicist aesthetics of new military construction in Lima accord with the recommendations of the contemporary military architecture treatises, which included drawings and specifications related to each type. The novelty would reside, therefore, in the meaning that such aesthetics took on the local scene. Authorities took the classicizing aesthetic to these new projects, to the extent that military rhetoric coincided with that of Bourbon reformers: order, hygiene, discipline, and efficiency. In colonial Peru the term criollo, utilized to designate Spaniards born in America, was soon extended to any subject with Spanish ancestry born in America. Even mestizos (individuals of mixed Spanish and Indian descent) obtained this qualification, with the prerogatives it signified and the pejorative baggage it carried.8 Creole, as a social and historical construction, experienced transformations during the colonial period in terms of meaning and scope. The social phenomenon of criollismo (Creolism) can be traced to the sixteenth century and is found in literature, painting, jurisprudence, and the religious sphere. It resulted in many conflicts with Peninsulars (individuals born in Spain), while Creoles occupied high positions and different spaces in colonial society.

Isaac D. Sáenz

Figure 2.1. View and Perspective of the Molinos de Pólvora of Lima. Late eighteenth century. Biblioteca de Cataluña, Barcelona, Spain.

Figure 2.2. Cuartel de Santa Catalina. 1868. Photograph. Lima, Peru.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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During the second half of the eighteenth century, Creoles were threatened and in many cases displaced by the political reforms of the Bourbons, who were trying to streamline the administrative apparatus. Royal reformers aimed to make the government apparatus more efficient, even while privileges to local elites remained. These dynamics reveal the ups and downs that Bourbon officials experienced throughout the colonial period and their need to develop diverse strategies to appeal to various demands and achieve preeminence over other social segments of the viceroyalty. Creoles were willing to establish interracial alliances with Indians, mestizos, and blacks to achieve recognition and political and economic power, while they chose to ally with Spaniards, including Spanish immigrants, against the dangers of unrest in the lower social echelons.9 John Fisher has addressed the joint efforts of Spaniards and Creoles around the events of 1809 and 1810, after which both embraced loyalty, thereby demonstrating the fragility of their antagonisms and resentments toward each other. Stronger was the mistrust of castas (racially mixed individuals) and indigenous peoples in the eighteenth century, a fear that developed after the rebellions that plagued the viceroyalty. Víctor Peralta has emphasized the role of the Peruvian elite in the process of independence, as they monolithically supported the viceroy in the company of stifling government councils that emerged between 1809 and 1810.10 Far from believing in a separatist proposal, Creoles constituted a bastion that made decisions in response to fear of plebians and castas. Newspapers like El Mercurio Peruano were profoundly occupied by local issues, which could have promoted ideas of autonomy from Spain. However, Creoles eschewed independent thought, instead positioning themselves as members of a common body politic with the Spanish, united in their mutual interests and suspicions of the castas.11 Creole elites deployed various strategies to legitimate themselves in areas beyond the economic and political spheres, including, among others, science, aesthetics, literature, cartography, urban planning, and architecture. Pedro de Peralta placed Lima above Madrid in terms of literature, giving the Peruvian city universal prominence.12 The indigenous elite, who also raised claims through cultural and symbolic production, shared this type of strategy.13 Emmanuel Velayos notes, for example, that such elites presented reconfigured versions of the past, sometimes fictional, which reaffirmed the Spanish imperial order while simultaneously exposing the interests of the Andean nobility.14 In the realm of aesthetics, the works of the painter

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Cristóbal Lozano, under the patronage of another Creole, the oidor (judge) Pedro Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla, focused on the local environment. Lozano appropriated botany, including in his pictorial work elements of local flora such as roses, jasmine, and capulies. Like Lozano, the limeña painter of the second half of the eighteenth century preferred local subjects, including representations of local ethnicity and mestizaje (an ideology of racial mixing). Faces of Indians, blacks, and castas, including Indians of the mountains, appear in limeña pictorial work during the governorship of Viceroy Manuel de Amat y Junient (r. 1761–1776). These works also portray manifestations such as music, native clothing, and the urban surroundings where such expressions took place, articulating local physical and ethnic geography.15 Creoles appropriated science for legitimacy, providing them with a space of intellectual power to distinguish them from plebians, mestizos, and Indians. Scientific explorations, many financed by the Spanish state, passed into the hands of local elites in Ibero-American territories like Nueva Grenada, where the metropolis had less control and Creoles had greater persuasion. Creoles continued to affirm their acumen for science during the Republican period, taking control of scientific discourses and activities. Science thus appears as an instrument of political practice.16 Creole agency became most materially manifest in the privileged space of the city. The colonial urban sphere in eighteenth-century Peru was constructed, read, and imagined by the elite through scientific discourse. Urban discourse derived from science, from the perspective of specialties such as geometry, medicine, military engineering, cartography, and mathematics, among others. This view contributed to a new way of understanding the city as a space susceptible to being constructed, managed, and represented from the imperatives of reason. Much of the discussion surrounding the city pictured as its principle animators Creoles, who, along with Spaniards and other Europeans, wrote in El Mercurio Peruano. The ordinances and provisions of the cabildo seem closely related to eighteenth-century scientific discourses on the city. Creoles, for whom the city was the stage where one could materialize an “enlightened” vision of society, contributed strongly to the construction of an urban discourse. Some public works, such as alamedas (public walks), the road of the Callao, the new cemeteries, and the Amphitheatre of Medicine were the subject of discussion and dissemination on the pages of the city’s leading publications, venues that also contained historic references to pre-Hispanic buildings.

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One of the urban discourses outlined during the latter part of the viceroyalty, also addressed by the Creole elite and which caused profound debate in colonial society, concerned the modification of funerary practices. This discourse had its counterpart in the architectural and urban sphere with the emergence of a new building type: the cemetery. Burial would now take place outside the city limits and distanced from traditional sites around parish churches. For the Lima cemetery, the master Matías was commissioned and we find the colonial neoclassical aesthetic of Lima in the design of the cemetery chapel (figure 2.3). The construction of this new complex aimed to regulate religious and funerary practices together with the promotion of scientific treatment of the urban landscape. Its construction was at the center of a discussion that involved ecclesiastical authorities, Creoles interested in health reforms, royal officials, architects, and elite society as a whole. “Enlightened” Creoles participated actively in this debate through numerous writings, appropriating Bourbon diatribes against unsanitary practices and thus emerging as active reformers alongside their Peninsular counterparts. Discourses about the uses of space and the need for new public works became part of a normative narrative echoed by Creoles elsewhere in the

Figure 2.3. Chapel of the General Cemetery of Lima. 1868. Photograph.

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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Americas. Creoles sought to intervene in public works by financing and promoting them, efforts that represented attempts to construct a space of recognition, affirmation, and power. They built relationships, influence, and economic power in light of commercial success, a strategy located almost exclusively in an urban context in which all participated in commerce, although at various scales. The city was the ideal scene for their development, without diminishing their participation in rural areas where they aimed to control economic networks.17

After the Earthquake and Tsunami (1746): The Grid and a New Aesthetic of Mud and Cane Natural disasters often overturn not only buildings and infrastructure but also ideas and attitudes, destabilizing the existing social order.18 Aesthetic ideas are suddenly questioned and redefined, gaining particular importance in a context of crisis. In October 1746 the strongest earthquake ever recorded during the colonial period occurred in Lima. The quake destroyed much of the city, while the resulting tsunami left the nearby port uninhabitable.19 The reconstruction of Lima and its suburb Callao stimulated debate about issues of construction, architecture, urban space, territory, and aesthetics. The collapse of the port opened a window of opportunity for authorities, officials, and technicians near the viceroy and generated ideas on the location of the reconstructed port, with projects ranging from technical solutions to visionary proposals.20 The event of 1746 became an opportunity to adapt the physical configuration of Callao to the Indian legislation that proposed commercial and defense activities exclusively for the port. Viceroy José Antonio Manso de Velasco, conde de Superunda (r. 1745–1761), organized the reconstruction of Callao according to this principle. He proposed, first, the recovery of the private cellars of San Fernando de Bellavista, found a quarter of a league from the old plaza, and second, the rebuilding of the royal warehouses. In this way Bellavista joined the major Nuevas Poblaciones (New Towns) program, implemented as part of the reformist policies of the Bourbons and directed by the Creole limeño Pablo de Olavide in Andalucía. The program included the reorganization and revitalization of the area, limiting the participation of religious orders, the promotion and development of economic activities, and the exploitation of the comparative advantages of location and available resources, among other efforts.21

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Bellavista, as part of the assembly of New Towns established in Peru, sought to reproduce the physical arrangement of the first colonial cities. Its layout thus repeated some features of sixteenth-century urbanism, such as the adoption of a reticular pattern and spatial organization from a central square, where the parish church and other public buildings stood. This arrangement inscribed into a new discourse the social control of plebians, an “enlightened” strategy advocating geometric rationality to order both the streets and their inhabitants. Cities founded under the New Towns program followed the grid pattern, both in Spain at La Granja de San Idelfonso in Segovia, La Carolina in Jaén, and Ferrol in La Coruña and in Latin America at Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción in Guatemala. The use of the grid followed dispositions directed at the health of the city and the construction of urban spaces in the extramuros (outskirts, or literally “area outside the city walls”), such as paseos and alamedas.22 The aesthetics of the grid complemented neoclassical architecture in the command and expression of power. The pure lines, sobriety, and univocal language expressed in neoclassical architecture dovetailed with the grid’s values of uniformity, rationality, and abstraction. In both architecture and urbanism, neoclassical and gridded aesthetics involved the neutralization of place in context and time. The cartography of Bellavista upon which the grid was superimposed was never actually as regular or uniform as depicted on the map of Viceroy Amat, where even the perimeter of the city is represented by a square (figure 2.4). Views on the reconstruction of Callao ranged from recovery on the same site to moving the city to a safer place. Luis Godin, the official in charge of the reconstruction project, thought that both the port of Callao and the city itself were irrecoverable. However, if officials respected the original seat, plans called for the demolition of all buildings, secular and religious, that threatened to collapse. Godin thus advocated a rational and mathematical solution to the problem of construction and future seismic activity, including suppression of tall houses, the widening of streets, and the design of a circular section in the city of Palermo. He proposed regulating exact proportions between the height of walls and the width of streets; the maximum height of house walls, convents, and administrative buildings; the demolition of the second level of houses; and the use of quincha and wood in tall constructions, among other provisions, which Viceroy Manso elevated to the rank of ordinances. Peninsular officials were not the only ones with thoughts on rebuilding the city and on its significance. Creole limeños also had reflections on the recurring problem of earthquakes. Antonio Ruiz Cano used an organic

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Figure 2.4. Plan of the town of San Fernando de Bellavista.

Biblioteca de Cataluña, Barcelona, Spain.

metaphor to describe the city, addressing its physical, social, and political dimensions.23 There is a direct overlap between the political order that Creoles such as Ruiz proposed and compliance with the colonial order. For Ruiz, public buildings also acquired this living quality, occupying a central role in urban life: “Buildings have a kind of life, whose soul is proportion. The convenient disposition of their parts shows in each of them, members properly organized, to comprise when they join in population, a larger body.”24 Hence, Ruiz understands earthquakes as convulsions for the body that can lead to catastrophe, noting the importance of the reconstruction of public buildings such as the cathedral as a form of resuscitating the urban corpse. Beauty is another recurring concept in the work of Ruiz, for whom a declared enemy of beauty is the destruction caused by earthquakes in Lima.25 The rational view that prevailed in the reconstruction of Lima and its port included measures to rethink the prevailing building systems. These efforts forced a profound reflection on building traditions and aesthetics. Technical authorities such as Godin and Creole characters like Pedro Bravo de Lagunas, judge of Lima, thought that lightweight materials like wood

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should replace old constructions of stone, targeting the vulnerability of Lima. Bravo de Lagunas pondered the cathedral, for example, as an icon of the Peruvian capital that had “extremely strong wood” instead of “dangerous stonecutting.” The same judge also compared the reconstruction work undertaken by Viceroy Manso de Velasco with the Rome of Trajan, from the pen of Pliny. In the garrison of Callao, the restoration of the Casa de la Moneda (mint), hospitals, and sacred worship temples, and especially the progress of the rebuilding of the cathedral, “the whole city enveloped by dust and ruin, is now in safety, and beauty; the temples improved with strong fabric, proportionate to the injury suffered by the ground.” 26 According to Bravo de Lagunas, the reconstruction of public buildings had a central role not only in the recovery of the city but also in the construction of an orderly, “enlightened,” and civilized urban environment. Buen gusto in the sphere of construction meant not solely the adoption of neoclassicism for ornamental ends but specifically the adoption of quincha and the use of lighter materials like wood instead of stone. As a construction system, quincha has a long tradition on the Peruvian coast, dating back to pre-Hispanic times. It is a simple technique that involves the development of a light frame of cane and clay or mud. The insistence by authorities and experts on limiting building height forced the use of pre-Hispanic construction practices. Thus buen gusto could mean, from the eyes of reason, the adoption of an Indian construction system, which was imposed against the recurrence of disasters, displacing materials such as stone and brick.

The Tribunal del Consulado and the Alameda del Callao (1799–1803) The alameda, as an urban object, appears in Lima at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the viceroy, the marqués de Montesclaros (1603–1611), built what is referred to herein as the Alameda de los Descalzos and in period documents as La Alameda. Situated in the extramuros of the city, alamedas maintained dual ownership by urban and rural areas, constituting spaces of public recreation and sociability. In the late colonial period alamedas or public paseos were valued as expressions of modernization, progress, and enlightenment. Viceroys and local authorities initiated their remodeling and/or construction as gestures of concern for the public good. These works became key elements in the urban landscape of “enlightened” civilization, order, and control. Alamedas responded to concerns for the salubrity of air in urban areas and good ventilation.27

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Various royal proclamations extolled the virtues of alamedas for the city, including the Nuevo Reglamento de Barrios y Cuarteles (New Districts and Headquarters Regulation) of 1785 and the Reglamento de Policía (Police Regulations).28 In addition to local authorities such as viceroys and the cabildo, the Creole elite became particularly interested in funding these projects, along with watchtowers and gates, through such vehicles as the Tribunal del Consulado.29 The Consulado comprised the guild of merchants, being the most powerful corporation of colonial society. Their participation was crucial to the Peruvian political process in many instances and particularly in public works such as the building of the walls of Lima. After the earthquake and tsunami of 1746 that devastated Lima and Callao, the Consulado took on special importance as it assisted in the logistics of rebuilding the city and its surroundings, especially Callao. The Alameda of Callao, constructed between 1799 and 1803, represents one of the last chapters in the history of colonial Lima, before the beginning of the independence wars. Its construction involved collaboration between Viceroy O’Higgins and the Consulado, with its control of economic resources. The viceroy the marqués de Osorno understood very well the effective role of architecture as a tool for the implementation and dissemination of “enlightened” reform. Ricardo Kusunoki has argued that both painting and architecture served a propagandistic functions and that baroque elements from the colonial period were retained for their capacity to persuade.30 The Alameda of Callao was indeed not the first nor the most important road that the marqués de Osorno sponsored. Before this time, the principal road of the Andes, the Camino del Puerto, uniting Santiago and the port of Valparaíso, had been remodeled. The rationalism of the Alameda of Callao was evident in its rectilinear configuration, as opposed to the organic configuration of the roads surrounding the Valle de Lima. It stretched more than eleven kilometers, from the Peruvian wall to the fortress of Real Felipe, where it diverged at four specific points.31 The diversion of this path was done strictly for economic reasons. Hipólito Unanue (1755–1833), a Creole doctor, reports, “The road was diverted 15 or 20 degrees in four points based on the need to cause the least possible cost in the farms and buildings along its stretch.”32 Its elements, such as doorways, plazas, amphitheaters, and pedestrian walkways, were full of neoclassical aesthetics, reflected upon in the descriptions of Creoles such as Unanue in El Mercurio Peruano.33 Around the monumental front of Callao, which articulated the walled city as well as the alameda and rural perimeter,

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Unanue highlights three doors, a base of stonework and fine brick masonry, the body and ornamentation “fixed to a composite Ionic order,” and three pediments, carrying the shields of the king on the right and the consulate on the left. The portal thus highlighted the place of the court and the Creole elite in the political, social, and symbolic system of Lima. The new promenade and its symbolic features thus placed the Creole elite as leaders of the reformist urban project. In a nineteenth-century photograph of the portal, the pediments and shields have disappeared and the doorway stands dilapidated, due in part to the wars of independence, during which Creole patriots destroyed symbols of Spanish power (figure 2.5). The Mercurio was the main voice of the educated Peruvian elite at the end of the eighteenth century. On its pages, the new and reformed roads are associated with the rationality of the people, acquiring physical and political dimensions. Unanue affirms that the roads are “among the public establishments that best characterize the degree of civilization of the State and the governmental talent that rule it, they are the channels of politics like the arteries in the natural body . . . that animate and give life.” 34 Unanue prefaces his discussion of the

Figure 2.5. Portada del Callao. 1863. Photograph.

Biblioteca Nacional del Perú. Lima, Peru.

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alameda by speaking first of the roads.35 He then frames the alameda as a magnum opus that placed Lima firmly within the expectations of the capital of a rich and powerful viceroyalty.36 Cabildo members and local authorities also shared this vision. The celebration of this work by Creoles reveals their perception of themselves as prominent members of Peruvian colonial society, with identities based on economic power and intellectual influence. The elite Creole intellectual used such public works as a strategy of affirmation in the society of late colonial Lima. They appealed to classical aesthetics, appropriating the principles that colonial officials promoted as embedded in the classical idiom. They saw themselves as central agents in the “enlightened” project of urban planning, architecture, and aesthetics, fashioning themselves as champions of the modernization of “the city of the kings.” Creole intellectuals supported such public works through discussions, articles, manifestos, orations, and so on, appropriating the official rhetoric of buen gusto and fully accepting the neoclassical as the “enlightened” expression that would illuminate the city and its extramuros. The Portada de Maravillas became another project to promote urban commerce based the prevailing buen gusto. It was situated at the opposite extreme from the Puerta del Callao on a principal road heading east of Lima

Figure 2.6. Anonymous. Portada de Maravillas. 1868. Photograph. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

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(figure 2.6). Once again, the project involved collaboration between the Tribunal del Consulado and the Lima cabildo, which joined forces for its reconstruction. Through such projects, the Consulado contributed to the construction of an “enlightened” urban geography through the adaptation of classicism. Such projects directed by Creoles went hand-in-hand with the viceregal power that struggled to exile the “Gothic” taste and install a new aesthetic. Hence, Mauricio Nieto argues that Creoles contributed to the Eurocentric construction of the Americas in the aftermath of the colonial system.37 The urban vision of Creole intellectuals articulated through such means as El Mercurio Peruano was often more modern than that of the local authorities. The intervention of the Consulado in the project of the alameda, for example, suggests not that Creoles joined a project initiated by Spanish administrators but rather that it was the viceregal authorities who fell into line with a project promoted by the Creole elite.

Pre-Hispanic Architecture and the Construction of a Creole Aesthetic In late eighteenth-century Peru, neoclassicism emerged as an official discourse that critiqued the exuberant expression and exaggeration of the baroque, proposing a new aesthetic based on the presumed universal discourse of reason. Such an aesthetic eschewed the past represented by the baroque, which was associated with the contradictions, crises, and ills of the colonial system, economic meltdown, corruption, and lack of social and physical control of colonial space. The new aesthetic of buen gusto associated with the Bourbon state assisted in the construction of an efficient, rational, prosperous, and “enlightened” state. This urban vision extended into the decades following Peruvian independence, reconfiguring late colonial discourses with new republican rhetoric. During the early republic, the colonial period became a pathogen fraught with vices and ills, and the new liberal generations evinced a visceral rejection of the Hispanic legacy. When the national states emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they bypassed the colonial to appropriate the remote past of ancient Europe and the Americas. Andrés Bello, for example, argues that the inspiration for a new order was not to be found in the Middle Ages nor in modern times but in Roman antiquity.38 Early national historicism could be seen in architecture in which neoclassical style was equated with the values and civic virtues of the new republics. Neoclassical buildings were

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erected as symbols of the new independent states in contexts from the United States to Argentina.39 Archaeological interest in the material culture and values of the European ancient world emerged in the eighteenth century, with the beginning of exploration of the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii as well as of Greek, Etruscan, and Asian buildings. Such investigations informed the new taste for archaeologically correct classicism.40 This trend was reflected not only through new, applied art but also in treatises, theoretical texts, and manuals that attempt to question hegemonic aesthetic values, proposing revised principles and arrangements derived more rigorously from the classical order. The rediscovery of the ancient world by Europeans during the eighteenth century brought several consequences in the production of EuroAmerican art and architecture: new codes, references, and patterns appeared, along with the construction of a discourse that called into question the free and spontaneous forms typical of European and American baroque. In America a simultaneous rediscovery of the pre-Hispanic world took place, from New Spain to Peru.41 In the case of New Spain, this vision conflated European and pre-Hispanic American antiquity as a source of knowledge and authentication, recovering both for local interests and political projects. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra argues that what occurred in New Spain was a discussion of European epistemologies and an attempt by Creoles to undermine Spanish power, constructing a patriotic epistemology. This epistemology was later used by “enlightened” Creoles as a reference to their emancipatory political project, appealing to the soundness of the glorious past that this epistemology provided them.42 In the context of late colonial Peru, “enlightened” Creoles considered Inca and pre-Inca monuments systematically in an effort to construct a new, “enlightened” geography that included monuments and spaces rendered invisible by the colonial system. The official cartography of the late colonial administration had likewise visualized this architectonic past, considering both Inca and pre-Inca landscapes (figure 2.7). The new republican state maintained this interest in the indigenous Andean past, considering its buildings and other objects of material culture as components of the new nation and of nascent republican discourse. Hipólito Unanue, a Creole doctor and official during the last years of the colonial period and minister of the hacienda in the new Peruvian state, was asked about the ruins of Santa and the evidence of canals and of intensive agricultural activity in the pre-Hispanic past. Where were the arms that opened those immense

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channels? Unanue laments the wilderness of the valley at the dawn of independent Peru. He highlights the practices of persuasion that the Inca employed to dominate the valley, in contrast to the use of arms employed by the Spanish. He thus attributes democratic virtues to the Inca, namely the capacity of forming opinions before using violence. Peruvians should reflect on this lesson, he suggests, meditating on these messages in relation to their own clashes with the nearby republic of Colombia.43 Another young Creole, José de la Fuente, idealized the Inca past: “And on the same ground the magnificent remains of the Inca, their famous agriculture, roads, and aqueducts, their arts and poetry record the magnificence of a stunned nation that now has almost disappeared from the earth, and was happy with its paternal and wise laws.” 44 In this case, members of the Creole elite of Lima appropriated the memory of the indigenous past as a foundation for their presence in America as established landowners, and that in turn made them different from Spanish immigrants. This pre-Hispanic past constructed a sense of place, a necessary component of Creole identity. The rediscovery of the classical world through the exploration and survey of the ruins of Pompeii, among other ancient sites, had its equivalent in

Figure 2.7. Anonymous. Plan of the valle de la Magdelena. 1774.

Biblioteca de Cataluña, Barcelona, Spain.

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the Peruvian Andes in the representation and description of numerous complexes, such as Pachacamac, near Lima, and the sites of Huánuco Viejo, Inga Pirca, Chan Chan, Huatca, and other Inca and pre-Inca complexes. Not only “enlightened” Creoles but also Spaniards worked these sites, including officials, clergy, and military. The Navarrese cleric Jaime Martínez de Compañón (1735–1797) was appointed bishop of Trujillo in 1778, which then comprised a considerable portion of the Peruvian territory, including the three primary geographic regions: coastal, mountain, and Amazon. He was a tireless traveler, zealous collector, and gatherer of historic, ethnographic, and naturalist information. References to buildings played an important role in his textual and graphic work, including some of the icons of pre-Hispanic architecture, such as that of the celebrated cuarto del rescate (fourth rescue) of the Inca Atahualpa in Cajamarca or the ancient pyramids around Trujillo, among others. The incorporation of pre-Hispanic buildings and indigenous material culture into the late colonial Creole imagination was not a singular strategy of Peru.45 New Spain/Mexico and Guatemala likewise had these practices. Nor was it new to build new partnerships in ethnic terms. Interracial alliances were woven into the colonial social fabric. Emmanuel Velayos, for example, has been identified as an indigenous elite hired by Creoles to write their claims into literary form, as with the loa (a short theatrical piece) and comedy La conquista del Peru (1748), a text written by a Creole of Lima, Fray Francisco del Castillo. Good taste in viceregal Peru expressed social, political, and cultural meanings and agendas, which widely transcended an aesthetic exclusively understood in terms of ornamentation. For the authorities, the tasteful was only to some extent represented by classical aesthetics. It was also expressed through elements such as the urban grid, as well as the visibility of indigenous monuments and the construction of an aesthetic of clay and cane in the city of Lima after the earthquake of 1746. The recovery of the indigenous past, in these cases, came under the flags of identity and pragmatism, respectively. For their part, the Creole elite followed some of these same paths in the construction of good taste, for example, pondering the indigenous past, appropriating its memory and material vestiges, and thereby building a local aesthetic constitutive of a sense of place. On the other hand, Creoles endorsed the aesthetics of the neoclassical, appropriating its principles and purposes and therefore the official aesthetic discourse. Thus they viewed

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themselves as central actors of the Enlightenment in key urban, architectural, and aesthetic matters, appearing as the spokesmen and drivers of the modernization of Lima. Creole intellectuals appropriated the official rhetoric of good taste and assumed neoclassicism, weighing and popularizing new construction that was extended in the city of Lima under this aesthetic. With this strategy, they were constructing a space of social recognition and power in colonial society, appropriating the official crusade of good taste. To seize metropolitan urban policies, the Creole elite reconfigured politicized aesthetics, making claims to the exercise of politics and power through architecture and urban space. Some of their representatives, such as the doctor Hipólito Unanue, obtained enormous prestige and, subsequently, significant levels of power in the colonial period and afterward in the Peruvian republic. Aesthetics, therefore, constituted a new language of legitimation for the authorities, but especially for the Peruvian Creole elite. Classicist aesthetics imposed on the construction of a reformed Lima, specifically, was a theater of conflict, forming part of an agenda of multiple actors, scenes, and auditoriums pointing in different directions.

Notes 1. Juan Carlos Estenssoro, “La plebe ilustrada: El pueblo en las fronteras de la razón,” in Entre la retórica y la insurgencia: Las ideas y los motivmientos sociales en los Andes, siglo XVIII, ed. Charles Walker (Cuzco: Centro Bartolomé de las Casas, 1995), 33–66. 2. José García Bryce, Del barroco al neoclásico en Lima: Matías Maestro (Lima, 1972), 48–68 (reprinted from El Mercurio Peruano 488); Ramón Gutiérrez, Arquitectura y urbanismo en Iberoamérica, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Editorial Cátedra, 1997); Jorge Bernales, Lima: La ciudad y sus monumentos (Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano Americanos, 1972). 3. On the construction of aesthetics and modernity, see Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, “Avatares del Bello Ideal: Modernismo classicista versus tradiciones barrocas en Lima, 1750–1825,” in Visión y símbolos: Del virreinato criollo a la República Peruana (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 2006), 113–59; Ricardo Kusunoki, “Matías Maestro, José del Pozo y el arte en Lima a inicios del siglo XIX,” Fronteras de la Historia (ICANH) 11 (2006): 183–209; Ramón Mujica, “Arte e identidad: Las raíces culturales del barroco peruano,” in El barroco peruano (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 2002), 1–57; and Estenssoro, “La plebe ilustrada.” On the construction of territory and urban space, see Heidi Scott, Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009); Charles F. Walker, Shaky Colonialism:

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The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Isaac Sáenz, “Imaginaciones urbanísticas y proceso reconstructivo en Lima y Callao (1746–1761),” in Imágenes (Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM, México) (2007), http://www.esteticas.unam. mx/revista_imagenes/rastros/ras_isaenz01.html; Gabriel Ramón, “Urbe y orden: Evidencias del reformismo borbónico en el tejido limeño,” in El Perú en el siglo XVIII, la era borbónico, ed. Scarlett O’Phelan (Lima: Instituto Riva Agüero, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, 1999), 295–324. On the appropriation of science and technology, see Marcos Cueto, Jorge Lossio, and Carol Pasco, eds., El rastro de la salud en el Perú (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2009); and Jorge Lossio, Acequias y gallinazos: Salud ambiental en Lima del siglo XIX (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2003). 4. For a vision of the late colonial city, see Walker, Shaky Colonialism; Manuel Lucena, A los cuatro vientos: Las ciudades de la América Hispánica (Madrid: Marcial Pons Ediciones, 2006); and Ramón, “Urbe y orden.” 5. Vitruvius, Los diez libros de arquitectura (Edición de José Ortiz y Sanz, 1787; repr., Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2008), 8–13. 6. “El Orden, la Disposición, la Symmetria, havían llegado allí al mas alto punto, á que puede elevarlas el arte. Nada era mas agradable, que su Eurithmia: nada mas acabado que su decoro: nada mas justo, que su distribución.” Francisco Antonio Ruiz Cano, Júbilos de Lima en la dedicación de sus Santa Iglesia Catedral . . . (Lima, 1755), folio 15v. 7. Descripción del Cementerio General mandado erigir en la ciudad de Lima, por el Excmo. Señor Don José Fernando de Abascal Sousa, Virrey y Capitán General del Perú (Lima: Casa Real de los Niños Expósitos, 1808), Biblioteca Nacional del Peru, X718 D44. 8. See in this respect Bernard Lavallée, Las promesas ambiguas: Criollismo colonial en los Andes (Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Instituto Riva Agüero, 1993). 9. John Fisher, El Perú borbónico, 1750–1824 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2000), 153, 158. 10. Víctor Peralta, La independencia y la cultura política peruana (1808–1821) (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos; Fundación M. J. Bustamante de la Fuente, 2010), 116. 11. Fisher, El Perú borbónico. 12. José Antonio Mazzoti, “La invención nacional criolla a partir del Inca Garcilaso: Las estrategias de Pedro de Peralta y Barnuevo,” in Perú en su cultura, ed. Daniel Castillo Durante and Borka Sattler (Ottawa: Université d’Ottawa and Legas, 2002), 55–72. See also Mark Thurner, El nombre del abismo: Meditaciones sobre la historia de la historia (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2012), chapter 3. 13. See, for example, Gustavo Buntinx and Luis E. Wuffarden, “Incas y reyes españoles en la pintura colonial peruana: La estela de Garcilaso,” Márgenes 4:8 (1991): 151–210.

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14. Emmanuel Velayos, “’Porque su derecho no perdieran’: La representación de la élite indígena (y la marca criolla) en la loa y la comedia de La conquista del Perú (1748) de Francisco del Castillo,” Ciber Letras, Journal of Literary Criticism and Culture, no. 24 (December 2010), http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v24/ velayos.html. 15. See in this respect Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, “Los lienzos del virrey Amat y la pintura limeña del siglo XVIII,” in Los cuadros de mestizaje del Virrey Amat: La representación etnográfica en el Perú colonial (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2000), 48–65. 16. Mauricio Nieto, “Historia natural y la apropiación del nuevo mundo en la ilustración española,” Bulletin de l’Institut Français d’Etudes Andines 32:3 (2003): 425. 17. See Jay Kinbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 18. See Virginia García, ed., Historia y desastres en América Latina, 2 vols. (Bogotá: La Red/Ciesas, 1996). 19. For literature on the earthquake and its physical, demographic, social, political, and urban implications for Lima, see Walker, Shaky Colonialism; and Sáenz, “Imaginaciones urbanísticas.” 20. Sáenz, “Imaginaciones urbanísticas.” 21. For an examination of the New Towns policy undertaken by Pablo de Olavide in Spain and implemented in America from California to Chile, see Jordi Oliveras, Nuevas Poblaciones en la España de la ilustración (Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, 1998); and Alberto de Paula, Las Nuevas Poblaciones en Andalucía, California y el Río de la Plata, 1767–1810 (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2000). 22. For a discussion of the physical structure of Bourbon Mexico City, see Federico Fernández Christlieb, Europa y el urbanismo neoclásico en México: Antecedentes y esplendores (Mexico City: UNAM; IG, Plaza y Valdés, 2000). 23. For an exploration of the city as physical and cultural object, see Richard Kagan, “Cartography and Community in the Hispanic World,” in Visions of Community in the Pre-modern World, ed. Nicholas Howe (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2002), 149–50. 24. “Tiene una especie de vida los edificios, de quien es alma la proporción. La conveniente disposición de sus partes, deja ver en cada uno de ellos, miembros debidamente organizados, para componer cuando se unen en población, un cuerpo más grande.” Ruiz Cano, Júbilos de Lima, folio 5v. 25. Ibid. 26. “La ciudad toda envuelta antes en polvo y en estrago, se halla hoy en seguridad, y en hermosura; mejorados los edificios con fábricas firmes, y proporcionadas a los accidentes que padece su terreno.” Joseph Pedro Bravo de Lagunas, Voto

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consultivo que ofrece al Excelentísimo Señor D. Joseph Antonio Manso de Velasco . . . (Lima, July 14, 1755), folio C. 27. The eighteenth century witnessed the widespread construction of alamedas in diverse parts of viceregal Latin America. In Peru there was the Alameda de Huamanga and the one at Arequipa. See Marcela Dávalos, Basura e ilustración (Mexico City: UNAM, 2009). 28. Jorge Escobedo, “División de cuarteles, y barrios, e instrucción para el establecimiento de alcaldes de barrio en la Capital de Lima, año de 1785,” Archivo Histórico de la Municipalidad de Lima, Gobiernos Distritales, caja 1, documento 1, 15 ff.; Nuevo reglamento de policía: Agregado a la instrucción de alcaldes de barrio (Lima, 1787), instrucción 66 (text dated December 30, 1786), available in Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.law/llesp.0005_0065. 29. The Lima City Council was interested in the proper functioning of malls and public walks and efficient circulation of the city, to the extent that facilitated commercial activity, as well as the control of smuggling. See, for example, “Vista de ojos practicada en Piedra Lisa y Paseo de Lurigancho, jurisdicción de la ciudad de Lima, en 7 de enero de 1782, atendiendo a la información del guarda de la Alameda Ignacio Meléndez, quien ha notad serios desperfectos,” Archivo General de la Nación, Lima, Peru, GN, CA-GC 4, caja 29, documento 8, 1782. 30. Kusunoki, “Matías Maestro.” 31. Hipólito Unanue, “Discurso histórico sobre el Nuevo Camino del Callao, año de 1801,” Colección documental de la Independencia del Perú, tomo I, vol. 8, (1974), doc. 443, p. 417. 32. “El camino se desviaba 15 ó 20º en cuatro puntos por la necesidad de causar el menos gasto posible en las chácaras y edificios que se hallan al paso.” Ibid. 33. The neoclassical aesthetic was discussed extensively in the late decades of the colonial period, particularly in the discourse surrounding public events following the death of the Peruvian Creole Vicente Morales Duárez, who was president of the Cortes Generales de Cádiz; his death was commemorated on November 7, 1812. See Honores, patrios consagrados a la tierna memoria del Señor Don Vicente Morales y Duárez (Lima: Imprenta de los Huérfanos, 1812), XX–XXII. 34. “Entre los establecimientos públicos, los que mejor caracterizan el grado de civilización de un Estado, el talento y gobierno que lo rigen; porque a manera de las arterias en el cuerpo natural . . . que los animan y vivifican.” Unanue, “Discurso histórico,” 419. 35. For the ports and roads in colonial Peru, see Dirk Bühler, “La construcción de puentes en las ciudades latinoamericanas,” in Historia social urbana:. Espacios y flujos, ed. Eduardo Kingman Garcés (Quito: FLACSO, 2009), 101–22.

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36. Archivo Historio Nacional de Madrid, 8AH, Consejos, 21285, Expediente 1 /1/ f. 76r.–81v. 37. Nieto, “Historia natural.” 38. Rafael Rojas, Las repúblicas de aire: Utopía y desencanto en la revolución de Hispanoamérica (Mexico City: Taurus, 2009), 190. For the use of the Roman Republic as a model in the founding of the American nation, see Richard Sennett, Carne y Piedra: El cuerpo y la ciudad en la civilización occidental (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1997), 284–86. 39. See, for example, Fernando Aliata, “Gestión urbana y arquitectura en el Buenos Aires posrevolucionario (1821–1835),” in Perspectivas Urbanas (Barcelona), no. 5 (2004): 33–46. 40. For a contextualization of classical revival in the early modern period, see Leonardo Benevolo, Historia de la arquitectura moderna (Barcelona: Gustavo Gili, 2005). 41. For El Mercurio Peruano, see Hipólito Unanue, “Idea general de los monumentos del antiguo Perú” (1791), Colección documental de la Independencia del Perú, tomo 1, vol. 8 (1974), doc. 434, pp. 332–36. 42. Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, ¿Cómo escribir la historia del Nuevo Mundo? Historiografías, epistemologías e identidades en el mundo del Atlántico del siglo XVIII (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2007), 447–50. 43. Hipólito Unanue, “Apuntes sobre las ruinas de Santa” (1791), Colección documental de la Independencia del Perú, tomo 1, vol. 8 (1974), doc. 444, pp. 431–36. 44. “Y en este mismo suelo los magníficos restos de los incas, su famosa agricultura, caminos y acueductos, sus artes y poesía recuerdan la magnificencia de una nación que anonadada ahora, ha desaparecido quasi del orbe, y fue feliz con sus leyes paternales y sabias.” José María de la Fuente y Mesia, Prelusión que al examen de matemáticas dedicado a los señores diputados de ambas Américas en las Cortes Generales (Lima: Imprenta de los Huérfanos, 1812). 45. See Jesús Cosamalón, Indios detrás de las murallas (Lima: Fondo Editorial PUCP, 1999).

Chapter Three

El Templete Classicism and the Dialectics of Colonial Urban Space in Early Nineteenth-Century Havana, Cuba

Paul B. Niell

On March 19, 1828, Havana, Cuba, inaugurated a civic memorial for

the east side of the city’s Plaza de Armas. The event climaxed a three-day festival officially designated to honor the founding of the city and the name day of Spain’s Queen Maria Josepha, wife of his majesty Ferdinand VII (r. 1813–1829, 1833). The work commemorated the site of a symbolic ceiba tree, under which the Spanish conquistadors, according to eighteenth-century sources, established Havana in the sixteenth century. The colonial press corroborated this narrative and hailed the memorial as “the ultimate proof of [the city’s] refined loyalty and of its never-contradicted patriotism.”1 Cuban military engineer José María de la Torre designed a classicizing building known as El Templete to house three history paintings visually narrating the foundational story of the site (figure 3.1). French expatriate artist JeanBaptiste Vermay (c. 1786–1833), a former student in Paris of Jacques-Louis David, painted the three works for the building’s small interior space. The press affirmed that this exquisite work of fine art indicated Havana’s ascendancy as a modern city, of its elevation to “the rank of the most cultured towns of Europe.”2 Scholars on Cuban art and cultural history have viewed El Templete primarily in terms of style, as the inaugural work of neoclassicism on the island.3 Yet what remains to be explored is the symbolic and narrative complexity of 49

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Figure 3.1. Antonio María de la Torre. El Templete. 1827–1828.

Havana, Cuba. Photograph © Paul Niell.

this work in late colonial context. El Templete brought together diverse international and local forms, creating an expression that constructed multiple narratives about the Spanish Empire, the island’s population, and Cuba’s colonial situation in the early nineteenth century.4 To deal with such imperial-local tensions and multiple meanings, El Templete can be considered as a time- and place-specific construction informed by local mythology and as such related to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism.5 Multiple voices coalesced in a work intended to narrate the historiography and social order of the late colonial city on its main public plaza. El Templete underscores the persistent importance of the plaza in defining the colonial body politic in the nineteenth century as well as a dialectics of colonial urban space, the existence of opposing sociopolitical forces that seem to have taken concrete form in the work.6

Classicism, Buen Gusto, and the Public In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Havana launched a variety of regular publications informing an elite group of subscribers on

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economic, political, social, and cultural developments on the island, within the Spanish Empire, and abroad. Captain General Luis de la Casas inaugurated a biweekly in the 1790s, the Papel Periódico de la Habana, Havana’s first colonial newspaper.7 By the late 1820s the city incorporated the daily known as the Diario de la Habana.8 The Havana elite, composed of Creoles (island-born individuals of Hispanic descent) as well as Peninsulars (individuals born in Spain), exerted influence over these publications through local associations. In 1792 twenty-seven Cuban hacendados (landowners) chartered the Economic Society of the Friends of the Country of Havana, also known as the Patriotic Society. The organization allowed a certain degree of Creole agency in Spanish policy making and used the colonial press to educate subscribers on “useful” improvements and to propagate the organization’s annual activities and achievements through occasional memorias, or society reports.9 In memorias, papeles, and diarios, frequent discourses appear, instructing readers about the criteria for fine art and for living with buen gusto (good taste).10 The early nineteenth-century elite of Havana considered buen gusto a form of aesthetic discernment tied to both knowledge and perception, similar to that demonstrated by Magali Carrera’s essay in this volume in the context of Mexico. The Papel Periódico must have shaped aesthetic expectations by publishing poetry read and discussed at tertulianos, or literary gatherings, designed to elevate attendees to the “rank of good taste.”11 Articles appear on refined social behavior and revised habits, instructing readers on “the modern taste.”12 When El Templete was inaugurated, the Diario de la Habana praised the work for its tastefulness and for its distance from el género gótico (the Gothic sort), a vague reference to baroque and Hispano-Mudejar styles.13 In the Diario, El Templete emulated los templos antiguos (the old temples) in its beauty, decency, solidity, exactitude, and perfection.14 The Diario assured its readers that the paintings within the monument would educate future generations on the city’s foundational moments with “taste, propriety, and erudition.”15 This appraisal of classicism within the framework of 1820s tastefulness in Havana seems to have evolved from early discourses informed by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century transformations. Bishop Juan José Díaz de Espada y Landa, an important patron of reformed aesthetics in Havana, was born in Spain’s Basque country in 1756 and educated at the progressive University of Salamanca.16 He arrived on the island in 1802 and funded various projects, including the 1806 General Cemetery of the city, a work incorporating severe classical vocabularies and rigorously conceived geometric space.17 Espada also mandated that baroque altarpieces in

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the city’s cathedral be replaced by classicizing substitutes with freestanding classical revival columns, gilded urns, and unbroken pediments.18 The promotion of classicism came also from the Patriotic Society of Havana, which petitioned for an academy of drawing as early as the 1790s.19 In 1818 Spanish intendente and Patriotic Society director Alejandro Ramírez founded the Academy of Drawing and Painting of San Alejandro in Havana and appointed French expatriate artist Jean-Baptiste Vermay to serve as the school’s director.20 Ten years later Vermay executed the history paintings for El Templete, a work paid for largely by Bishop Espada. Thus the commission of the work in 1828 fulfilled the representational desires and artistic ambitions of an associated group of Spanish and Creole individuals that made connections between classicism and buen gusto.21

Reinventing a Civic Tradition Designers positioned El Templete on the east side of Havana’s Plaza de Armas, an urban space reconstructed by Bourbon administrators in the late eighteenth century in response to the British occupation of the island in 1762.22 The captain general the marqués de la Torre had ordered the plaza’s transformation in 1771, according to the two-to-three (width-to-length) ratio in the Spanish “Compilation of the Laws of the Kingdoms of the Indies” of 1573.23 The Bourbons reasserted imperial order with the addition of the Palace of the Second in Command, 1771–1776 and the Palace of the Captain General, 1776–1791, which met at right angles along the north and west sides, respectively (figure 3.2). Fifty years later El Templete joined the Bourbon palaces on the plaza, erected on the eastern side on the alleged site of the city’s foundation. Eighteenth-century Cuban historians situated this town-founding event under a tropical ceiba tree, allegedly in situ when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the early sixteenth century. Historian José Martín Félix de Arrate (1701–1765) wrote, “Until the year 1753, a robust and leafy ceiba was conserved [in the Plaza de Armas] which, according to tradition, at the time of the colonization of Havana the first mass and cabildo were celebrated under its shadow, news that the . . . governor of this plaza tried to preserve for posterity, by arranging to erect on the same site a memorial stone to preserve this memory.”24 When the tree compromised the fortification wall in 1753, the captain general ordered it removed and replaced by a memorial in 1754. This work, a stone pillar with curvilinear volutes emulating the tree’s buttressed

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Figure 3.2. Antonio Fernández de Trevejos and Pedro Medina. Palace of the Captain General. 1776–1791. Havana, Cuba. Photograph © Paul Niell.

trunk, accompanied three ceibas planted to flank the pillar on three sides.25 This attempt to monumentalize the tree suggests that the ceiba was, by this time, a public symbol associated with place and history. The addition of another tree monument in 1828 reveals concerns for civic reform. A municipal act of 1819 documents the concerns of Havana’s cabildo that the ceiba-tree pillar suffered from neglect.26 Members of the cabildo envisioned a new memorial to enclose the vertical monument with a palisade fence. Upon completion, this second memorial incorporated the older baroque pillar and modified its historical associations. Mixtilinear moldings in the cornice of the 1828 monument paralleled the baroque aesthetics of the earlier work and thus reveal a local translation of international neoclassicism. Hence, as the colonial press positioned El Templete within a framework of tastefulness, readers were encouraged to regard the multiple stylistic tendencies in the monument as equally tasteful. For the monument’s architectural form, designers appropriated the model of the freestanding Greco-Roman temple (figure 3.3). In the portico, de la Torre appropriated a mixture of elements taken from the Tuscan and

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Roman Doric orders, which could have been found in the treatises of Roman architect Vitruvius and Italian Renaissance architect and theorist Andrea Palladio. Vitruvius’s and Palladio’s writings had been translated into Spanish editions in the late eighteenth century and were used at Madrid’s Royal Academy of San Fernando, which opened in 1752.27 In Havana, members of the Patriotic Society owned such treatises and to some extent made them quasi-public through the society’s library, which opened in the 1790s.28 Spanish regidor Francisco Rodríguez Cabrera provides a lucid account of El Templete in the Diario of March 16, 1828, informing us of the original positioning of the Vermay paintings. Inside the memorial, on the northern wall, The First Cabildo, completed c. 1827, depicts the Spanish conquistadors

Figure 3.3. Detail: portico. Antonio María de la Torre. El Templete. 1827–1828.

Havana, Cuba. Photograph © Paul Niell.

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holding the first town council meeting of Havana under the ceiba tree (figure 3.4). Vermay positions a figure of the Spaniard Diego Velázquez, who led the conquest of Cuba, in a central location beneath the tree. Standing before the trunk of the ceiba, Velázquez motions to a group of Spanish men to his left who converse over town plans, royal orders, and/or maps. Life-sized, naturalistic figures and realistic spatial illusion engaged nineteenth-century audiences in a growing rational vision and an attempt to involve the colonial community in public education. To the right of The First Cabildo, against the eastern interior wall, the viewer encounters the much-larger Inauguration of El Templete, completed c. 1828–1829 (figures 3.5–3.6). Vermay based this massive scene compositionally

Figure 3.4. Jean-Baptiste Vermay. The First Cabildo. 1827. Oil on canvas.

Photograph © Paul Niell. Reproduced with permission of the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana.

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on Jacques-Louis David’s monumental canvas for Napoleon, The Coronation of the Emperor and Empress (1805–1807, oil on canvas), which Vermay exhibited alongside in the Parisian Salon of 1808.29 The inauguration scene contains portraits of Spanish officialdom, senior clergy, members of the Bourbon public, and other civic elites. The image moves the observer from a contemplation of sixteenth-century events depicted in a relatively low light to a much brighter scene of the nineteenth-century plaza, thus juxtaposing past and present. The Cagigal pillar, one of the Bourbon palaces, and the sixteenth-century Castillo are clearly visible in the background, as communocentric references to local architectural icons.30 In the center of the painting and the represented crowd stands the figure of Captain General Francisco Dionisio Vives (r. 1824–1832) among members of his family, including his young daughters.

Figure 3.5. Detail: Captain General Francisco Dionisio Vives. Jean-Baptiste Vermay.

The Inauguration of El Templete. C. 1828. Oil on canvas. Photograph © Paul Niell. Reproduced with permission of the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana.

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Figure 3.6. Detail: ecclesiastical group. Jean-Baptiste Vermay. The Inauguration of

El Templete. C. 1828. Oil on canvas. Photograph © Paul Niell. Reproduced with permission of the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana.

Further to the right, Bishop Espada stands on an elevated platform, close to El Templete, among the city’s ecclesiastical authorities. Having removed his miter and dressed in pontifical vestments, the bishop smites the monument with incense and thus narrates the importance of both religious and secular authorities in their contributions to public works. Espada’s actions create a directional line that guides the viewer’s eye to the right, toward Vermay’s scene The First Mass, c. 1827 (figure 3.7). Situated on the southern interior wall, this work mirrors The First Cabildo, on the wall opposite, in form, iconography, and composition. An image of the ceiba tree again provides a setting for a group scene, echoing the trabeated architecture of El Templete in its post and lintel configuration. A priest, identified by the colonial press as Dominican

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friar Bartolomé de las Casas, stands on axis with the ceiba’s trunk and parallels the clerical presence of Bishop Espada in the previous scene of the inauguration, providing him with a civic ancestor.31 In response to the actions of the priest, the Spanish figures kneel and venerate the altar in foreshortened positions. The conquistador Diego Velázquez reappears and this time shepherds a group of Amerindians into the Christian faith. The indigenous figures in this painting mirror the Native woman and child in the bottom left of The First Cabildo on the opposite wall. Taken together, the three paintings form an allegory of civilization over barbarism, positing the Amerindians on the flank of this almost-continuous line of Spanish and Creole figures between the three works.

Figure 3.7. Jean-Baptiste Vermay. The First Mass. 1827. Oil on canvas. Havana, Cuba.

Photograph © Paul Niell. Reproduced with permission of the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana.

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A Spectacle of Cuban Loyalty and the Commemoration of Local Ancestry According to the press, El Templete served to teach the history of the city in the interest of reforming colonial subjects. Designed, built, and decorated during some of the most politically turbulent years for imperial Spain, El Templete reinforced a sense of place, but one with ambiguous and debatable geocultural boundaries. The Spanish Empire’s loss of political control in the hemisphere due to the independence wars of the mainland in the 1820s made Cuba one of Spain’s last remaining colonial possessions in the Americas by 1828. Indeed, El Templete’s inauguration came at roughly the same moment when Peninsulars were being expelled from Mexico. To construct an image of imperial power, stability, and solidarity, the Spanish captain general Vives utilized the plaza, the monument, and various visual tools to stage the inauguration of El Templete as a testament to Cuban loyalty.32 From March 18 to 20, 1828, the governor order the plaza cleared of carriages for the ceremony. Authorities compelled private residents with houses on the plaza to adorn their balconies and windows with decorative curtains. Stages and platforms were constructed, along with triumphal arches, paintings, and plaques bearing texts and images. The imperial rhetoric surrounding the inauguration conditioned public readings of the monument’s imagery. Seeing Vives, for example, at the center of the inauguration painting as the island’s governor recalls the image of the island’s first governor, Velázquez, in the painting The First Cabildo. The seemingly identical wooden staff held by each figure further encourages this connection. The providential overtones of the sixteenth-century scenes made this Spanish rulership of the island seem divinely ordained. Articles in the colonial press situated El Templete within a contemporary narrative of independence war. The press vehemently disowned the rebellious colonials of the mainland as “those denaturalized children of our country, that instead of offering worthy monuments as this of virtue and enlightenment, launch themselves into the arena, insulting those to whom they owe their civilization and their glory.”33 The antirevolutionary rhetoric in the Diario cast imperial solidarity as the product of reason and a political disposition worthy of classicism, while Spain counted only Cuba and Puerto Rico among its American possessions by 1828. El Templete’s inauguration not only sensationalized Cuban loyalty but also fictionalized Spain’s ability to rule in the hemisphere.

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Amid the pro-Spanish signifiers and performances surrounding the memorial, however, imperial references coexisted, if tensely, with symbols of things Cuban. A sense of Cuban place and identity grew among the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century elite, as a connection to the land and local history. In 1820 English traveler Robert Jameson described the situation: “In Cuba . . . the Hacendados, or great proprietors, are, almost generally, natives of the island; their ancestors were born there; it is their country, in the full sense of the word, in which they live and in which they hope to die. The circumstance of there being twenty-nine resident nobility, many of whom never saw Spain, will show how much more domiciliated the proprietary is here than in our islands.”34 Historian Dolores González-Ripoll Navarro has argued that as sugar production was expanded in Cuba in the early nineteenth century, the Creole and Peninsular elite created a colonial public sphere generated by a shared interest in education, readership of the colonial press, membership in civic associations, and the patronage and consumption of fine and decorative arts.35 These developments generated not only a sense of Cuban place but also a will to inscribe place into the narrative of classicism and Spanish national antiquity. Jameson’s observation about the link between Cuban hacendados and their ancestors by virtue of birthplace recalls the Spanish conquistadors. While Creole elites claimed direct descent from the early Spanish conquerors to acquire prestigious titles, the Bourbons had in 1729 stripped Havana’s cabildo, dominated by Creoles since early colonial times, of the right to distribute public lands among local residents.36 If read in a different way, perhaps by the same audience, El Templete’s suggestion of the conquistadors’ natural right to rule validated not Spanish imperial authority but Creole entitlement to land and independent self-action. Such slippages in late colonial signification complicate imperial and local readings of this monument and were embedded in the negotiations of late colonial identities in Havana.

Inventing a Cuban Antiquity While El Templete carried a mix of imperial-local significations, some writers have claimed that political subversion guided the work. Fernando Ortiz, a scholar of Afro-Cuban culture, argued that Bishop Espada used the monument as a subversive statement.37 Ortiz posits that in his advocacy of Spanish constitutionalism, Espada resented Spanish king Ferdinand VII’s

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abolition of the Constitution of 1812 in 1823 and reinstatement of absolutist rule. Thus the bishop, in his patronage of El Templete, sought to reference the Tree of Guernica in Spain’s Basque region and a similar classicizing structure that had been erected in its honor in 1826. The Basque tree became a site where Castilian royalty in medieval and early modern times met to swear an oath to respect Basque fueros (regional liberties). Ortiz saw this gesture as an effort on the part of the bishop to send a message to the Spanish state to likewise respect Cuban regional liberties. This interpretive possibility adds yet another layer to El Templete’s complexity as well as the need to consider the impact of revolutionary-era “Tree of Liberty” imagery, symbolic of natural rights in North American, French, and Haitian contexts.38 While the Diario de la Habana suggested that El Templete evoked an antiquity comparable to that of the Aztecs and the Incas, the indigenous population of Cuba left no stone architecture as a reminder of a heroic past.39 Thus monumentalizing the foundational ceiba tree could have served as a substitute for an antiquity that Cuba did not seem to have in comparison to New Spain or Peru. The combination of tree and temple in Havana, a trope of human inventive capacity in the work of French theorist Marc-Antoine Laugier, lent a deeper sense of cultural authenticity to the theme of town founding and Cuban agency, elevating Havana to the rank of European cities.40 If Cuba’s history could be located in the island’s pre-Hispanic past, then Vermay’s inclusion of Indian figures in the paintings of the first mass and cabildo merit evaluation in connection with the construction of Cuban antiquity. Eighteenth-century Cuban historians José Martín Félix de Arrate (1701–1765) and Ignacio de Urrutia y Montoya (1735–1795) examined the Indian figure in Cuba’s history. In Arrate’s Llave del Nuevo Mundo, the author recounts the indigenous origins of the island’s name, Cubanacán, along with the nature of Cuba’s pre-Hispanic inhabitants. On the character of the Indians of Cuba, Arrate writes, “They were of peaceful, docile, and bashful nature, very reverent with the superiors, [and] of great ability and aptitude in the instructions of the faith.” 41 Arrate co-opted discourses about the Indian from New Spain, drawing on such Spanish chroniclers and eighteenth-century writers as Antonio Solís, Antonio de Herrera, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo. He uses Juan de Torquemada’s Monarquía Indiana (1615) to give account of the first state of the world and barbaric peoples who conducted blood sacrifices. Arrate assures readers, nevertheless, that the Indians of Cuba did not practice such diabolical rituals, instead living in “beautiful indolence.” 42

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Cuban historian Ignacio de Urrutia y Montoya’s Teatro histórico, published in 1789, also gave account of the Indians of Cuba.43 Urrutia was educated in both New Spain and Havana and cites some of the same authors as Arrate, including Herrera and Torquemada, along with Gil González and José de Acosta. Urrutia likewise writes of Cuba’s peaceful Indians but focuses considerable attention on their origins, citing Gregorio García’s Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo of 1607. He writes that the Indians of Cuba knew of a universal flood, that they possessed “principles of the true religion.” 44 Historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has argued that such eighteenth-century histories by Creole patriots can be viewed as a deliberate attempt to humanize the Indians of the Americas by suggesting that they were part of the biblical story of Genesis and thus easily converted to Christianity.45 If Indians were human, that is, descended from Adam and Eve, it validated Cuban history in the face of European spite for the idea of American civilization.

The Afro-Cuban Sacred Ceiba While evocations of the Tree of Guernica may have spoken to members of the “enlightened” public in Havana, people of African descent could have made quite different meanings of the tree. The ceiba functioned ritually and symbolically in alternate cultural landscapes for African American populations in Cuba, a reality documented in both colonial and modern times. Scottish botanist James Macfadyen (1800–1850), a member of the Linnaean Society of London, recorded the reception of ceiba trees by individuals of African descent on the neighboring island of Jamaica in the early nineteenth century: “Perhaps no tree in the world has a more lofty and imposing appearance. . . . Even the untutored children of Africa are so struck with the majesty of its appearance that they designate it the God-tree, and account it sacrilege to injure it with the axe; so that, not infrequently, not even fear of punishment will induce them to cut it down. Even in a state of decay, it is an object of their superstitious fears: they regard it as consecrated to evil spirits, whose favour they seek to conciliate by offerings placed at its base.” 46 This colonial-era observation from a European scientist mirrors twentieth-century findings in Cuba. The ethnographic work of Cuban-born Lydia Cabrera (1899–1991) suggests that twentieth-century practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions revered the ceiba tree as the “iroko,” a West African tree god.47 Santeros and santeras, Santería priests and priestesses, reported to Cabrera that they considered the planting of a ceiba to be a potent religious act. They

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always asked permission from the gods before crossing its shadow, refused to cut the tree down for fear of offending spirits, and frequently conducted rituals at the tree’s base by leaving offerings. These twentieth-century observations form a continuum with the nineteenth-century reports of Macfadyen in neighboring Jamaica. The connective thread of these beliefs is the notion of what Afro-Cubans call aché (known to the West African Yoruba as asé), a spiritual matrix that binds all matter on earth. The ceiba tree is believed to be a powerful source of aché in Cuba and to sometimes be inhabited by intermediary deities known as orichas. Patterns of African American tree veneration in Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, and Brazil (all former sites of plantation slavery) suggest a pan-diasporic transcultural process by which American landscapes, particularly certain trees, were filtered through West African memory and recast to meet the spiritual needs of incoming slaves and their Creole descendants.48 It is quite possible that the significance of the ceiba tree to the population of Havana owes something to these beliefs of African origin.49 In the early nineteenth century Bishop Espada recorded various aspects of African religious practice in detail during his pastoral visit of Cuba in 1804.50 Local authorities could have known of the tree’s significance for populations of African descent, especially given increased surveillance under Bourbon administrators. Viewed in this light, El Templete potentially becomes an even more complex multivocal sign, recasting the plaza tree in visual terms of religious orthodoxy and official high culture.

Sugar, Slavery, and Public Representation If the presence of the ceiba tree in the monument, real and represented, served to integrate populations of African descent, the paintings inside worked to identify ideal social niches for whites and blacks. Jean-Baptiste Vermay renders only two members of Cuba’s extensive African and AfroCuban populations in the fictive space of the inauguration painting. These include a morena (African female), who kneels with a group of white women in the bottom left corner of the great canvas, and a pardo (mixed-race, African and European male), a member of the local militia, standing next to Captain General Vives. One of the white women is turned, giving the morena a harsh glance and motioning with her right hand, as though to demonstrate appropriate behavior at the event (figure 3.8).51 The monument thus legitimates master-slave relationships by framing this paternalistic vignette by

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classicism and within history painting, providing a nineteenth-century link to the civilizing theme established in the scenes of Amerindian conversion. In the center of the painting, the figure of the pardo militiaman stands in military uniform near Captain General Vives (figure 3.9). The upright posture of the pardo echoes that of the colonial governor and thus embodies the discipline of the colored militias and the subservient nature of Cuba’s militarized black population.52 Thus the Vermay paintings visually interceded in what whites perceived as the Africanization of the island. The demand for slave labor for sugar production, combined with the Spanish system of coartación (slave self-purchase), dramatically increased the number of people of African descent in Cuba in the early nineteenth century.53 This demographic change was confirmed by the census figures of 1827, which

Figure 3.8. Detail: Afro-Cuban woman. Jean-Baptiste Vermay. The Inauguration of El Templete. C. 1828. Oil on canvas. Havana, Cuba. Photograph © Paul Niell. Reproduced with permission of the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana.

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revealed, to the deep concern of elite whites, an African/Afro-Cuban population majority on the island.54 The growth of the African population triggered white concerns about racial mixing in a multiracial society. The dependency of the Cuban elite on a family’s limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) to maintain social standing likewise became a serious concern of church and state on the island.55 While church officials allowed mixed marriages among the races out of aversion to “concubinage,” the Spanish state sought to prevent such unions, as they tended to enrage the nobility and destabilize social order. There were also

Figure 3.9. Detail: Afro-Cuban militiaman and Captain General Vives. Jean-Baptiste Vermay. The Inauguration of El Templete. C. 1828. Oil on canvas. Havana, Cuba. Photograph © Paul Niell. Reproduced with permission of the Oficina del Historiador de la Ciudad de La Habana.

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fears of slave insurrection. The Aponte conspiracy of 1812 revealed that both slaves and “free people of color,” including former militia, were involved in plots against the state and the Creole oligarchy.56 The location of Vermay’s figures of African descent in the inauguration painting combined with the overarching and interconnected themes of Divine Providence and “enlightened” natural order visualized and naturalized social boundaries in an increasingly heterogeneous and contentious colonial society. Social ordering had been the primary theme of the eighteenth-century casta painting genre in colonial New Spain.57 Yet, while the site of display is relatively unknown for much of the casta series, El Templete provides us with a concrete urban setting in which viewers regarded images of race within an allegory of civilization over barbarism in the context of a town-founding myth. Locating the significance of El Templete as either a Spanish imperial or a Cuban subversive statement sets up a reductionist, binary understanding of the monument and its use of late colonial classicism. Rather, local and extralocal forms and significations functioned together, co-opting the past to serve multiple representational needs in a complex colonial present. The use of the plaza to visualize public history through the monument deliberately democratized multiple messages and thus calls for considering a wide spectrum of viewers and their interpretations. However, the competing claims to Cuba’s history visualized through El Templete indicate the instability and multivalence of Cuban place in late colonial Havana, casting classicism’s symbolic role in a provisional light.

Notes

1. “La última pruebe de su lealtad asendrada y de su patriotism nunca desmentido.” Diario de la Habana, March 16, 1828, 1. 2. “Al rango de los pueblos mas cultos de Europe”; see “Alguna cosa mas sobre el nuevo monumento erigido en la plaza de Armas,” Diario de la Habana, March 27, 1828, 1. 3. El Templete appears in numerous works of Cuban art, architectural, and urban history, including Guy Pérez Cisneros, Características de la evolución de la pintura en Cuba (1959; repr., Havana: Editorial Pueblo y Educación, 2000), 49–50; Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, La Habana: Apuntes históricos, (Havana: Editora del Consejo Nacional de Cultura, 1964), 3:7–14; Adelaide de Juan, Pintura y grabado coloniales cubanos (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1974), 18; Jorge Rigol, Apuntes sobre la pintura y el grabado en Cuba: De los orígenes a 1927 (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982), 101–2; Roberto Segre, La Plaza de

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Armas de la Habana: Sinfonía urbana inconclusa (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1995), 20–22; Joaquín E. Weiss, La arquitectura colonial cubana: Siglos XVI al XIX (Havana: Instituto Cubano del Libro; Seville: Agencia Española de Cooperacion Internacional, Junta de Andalucia, 1996), 387; Sabine Faivre D’Arcier, Vermay: Mensajero de las Luces (Havana: Imagen Contemporanea, 2004), 133–61. 4. The historiography of El Templete and suggested new approaches based on the reality of the multivalence of late colonial visual culture are discussed in Paul Niell, “El Templete and Cuban Neoclassicism: A Multivalent Signifier as Site of Memory,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 30:3 (2011): 344–65. 5. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981). 6. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (1974; repr., Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). 7. As an administrative unit, Cuba was a captaincy general, governed by a senior Spanish official known as a captain general. 8. For details on the development of the colonial press during this period, see Larry R. Jensen, Children of Colonial Despotism: Press, Politics, and Culture in Cuba, 1790–1840 (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1988). 9. For economic societies in the Iberian world, see Robert Jones Shafer, The Economic Societies in the Spanish World (1763–1821) (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958), esp. 178–99 for the Havana society. For the impact of the economic society of Havana on the intellectual culture of city, see Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 66–69. 10. The Royal Economic (or Patriotic) Society of the Friends of the Country of Havana published Memorias de la Real Sociedad Económica de la Habana intermittently, including in the years 1817 and 1827–1828. For a close account of the society’s activities and publications, see Izaskun Álvarez Cuartero, Memorias de la ilustración: Las Sociedades Económicas de Amigos del País en Cuba (1783–1832) (Madrid: Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País, 2000). 11. “El rango del buen gusto”; see Papel Periódico de la Habana, September 28, 1800. 12. “El gusto modern”; Papel Periódico de la Habana, February 15, 1801. 13. Diario de la Habana, March 16, 1828. 14. Ibid. 15. “Con gusto, propiedad, y la erudición”; see Diario de la Habana, March 27, 1828. Habitual readership of the press created a public space for the production of public opinion on the visual arts. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; repr., London: Verso, 2006). For the notion of a “community of taste,” see John Styles and Amanda

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Vickery, eds., Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 16. For biographical information on Bishop Juan José Díaz de Espada y Landa, see García Pons, El Obispo Espada y su influencia en la cultura cubana (Havana: Publicaciones del Ministerio de Educación, 1951); Miguel Figueroa y Miranda, Religión y política en la Cuba del siglo XIX: El Obispo Espada visto a la luz de los archivos romanos, 1802–1832 (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1975); and Eduardo Torres-Cuevas, Obispo Espada: Ilustración, reforma y antiesclavismo (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1990). 17. Sources on the General Cemetery of Havana include Roig de Leuchsenring, La Habana, 245; Felicia Chateloin, La Habana de Tacón (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1989), 50–54; Narciso G. Menocal, “Etienne-Sulpice Hallet and the Espada Cemetery: A Note,” in “Cuba,” special issue, Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts 22 (1996): 56–61; and Paul Niell, “Classical Architecture and the Cultural Politics of Cemetery Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Havana, Cuba,” Latin Americanist 55:2 (June 2011): 57–90. 18. For Espada’s architectural transformations of the cathedral, see Weiss, La arquitectura colonial cubana, 345. 19. Álvarez Cuartero, Memorias de la ilustración, 128. 20. For sources on the Academy of San Alejandro in Havana, see Corporación Nacional del Turismo, La pintura colonial en Cuba: Exposición en el capitolio nacional, marzo 4 a abril 4 de 1950 (Havana, 1950); Pérez Cisneros, Características de la evolución de la pintura; Rigol, Apuntes sobre la pintura; de Juan, Pintura y grabado coloniales cubanos. 21. For discussion of the development of civil society in Latin America under the Bourbon monarchy, see Pamela Voekel, “Scent and Sensibility: Pungency and Piety in the Making of the Gente Sensata, Mexico, 1640–1850” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 1997); and Gabriel B. Paquette, ed., Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830 (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009). 22. For the Bourbon Reforms in Cuba, see Allan J. Kuethe, Cuba, 1753–1815: Crown, Military, and Society (Knoxville: University Tennessee Press, 1986); Pérez, Cuba; Dolores González-Ripoll Navarro, Cuba, la isla de los ensayos: Cultura y sociedad (1790–1815) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2000); and Sherry Johnson, The Social Transformation of Eighteenth-Century Cuba (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001). 23. See Jean-François Lejeune, ed., Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), 21. See also Dora P. Crouch, Daniel J. Garr, and Axel I. Mundigo, Spanish City Planning in North America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982). 24. “Hasta el año de 1753 se conservaba en ella robusto y frondosa la ceiba en que, según tradición, al tiempo de poblarse la Habana se celebró bajo su sombra la

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primera misa y cabildo, noticia que pretendió perpetuar a la posteridad el Mariscal de Campo D. Francisco Cagigal de la Vega, gobernador de esta plaza, que dispuso levanter en el mismo sitio un pardon de piedra que conserve esta memoria.” José Martín Félix de Arrate, Llave del Nuevo Mundo: Antemural de las Indias Occidentales (Havana: Cubana de la UNESCO, 1964), 77–78. 25. Segre, La Plaza de Armas, 20–23. 26. “February 5, 1819, se dío cuenta de un informe del Sr. Francisco Filomeno sobre la Petición hecha por el Sr. Bonifacio García, cuyos originales estan unidos al acta y copiado dicho informe dice así”; in the notes of Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring, La Biblioteca del Museo de la Ciudad de la Habana, Havana, Cuba. 27. See Renovación, crisis, continuismo: La Real Academia de San Fernando en 1792 (Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1992). 28. See Fermín Peraza Sarausa, Historia de la Biblioteca de la Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País (Havana: Anuario Bibliográfico Cubano, 1939). 29. H. W. Janson, comp., Catalogues of the Paris Salon, 1673 to 1881 (New York: Garland, 1977), catalogue for 1808, 91; 1810, 103; 1812, 102; 1815, 95–96. 30. For the notion of the communocentric view, see Richard L. Kagan, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 107–50. 31. Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566) was the sixteenth-century Spanish Dominican priest known for his advocacy on behalf of Native Americans to King Charles V. See Bartolomé de las Casas, Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (London: Penguin, 1999). Las Casas was included as an indispensable actor in eighteenth-century Cuban historiography. See, among others, Arrate, Llave del Nuevo Mundo, 22; Pedro Agustín Morell de Santa Cruz, Historia de la isla y catedral de Cuba (Havana: Imprenta “Cuba intelectua,” 1929); and Antonio José Valdés, Historia de la isla de Cuba, y en especial de la Habana (Havana: Comisión Nacional Cubana de la UNESCO, 1964). 32. Descriptions of the festivities are given in the Diario de la Habana, March 16, 1828; and in Mariano Gómez, El Primer Centenario del Templete (Havana: Sindicato de Artes Graficas de la Habana, 1928), 14–21. 33. Diario de la Habana, March 16, 1828. 34. Robert Francis Jameson, Letters from Havana During the Year 1820 Containing an Account of the Present State of the Island of Cuba, and Observations on the Slave Trade (London: Printed for John Miller, 1821), 8. 35. González-Ripoll Navarro, Cuba. 36. Pérez, Cuba, 52. 37. See Fernando Ortiz, “Bibliografía,” in Archivos del Folklore Cubano (Havana) (July–September 1928); and Fernando Ortiz, La hija cubana del iluminismo (Havana: Molina y Compañía, 1943). This theory has been sustained in Segre, La Plaza de Armas; and Eduardo Torres-Cuevas, El Obispo Espada: Papeles (Havana: Imagen Contemporánea, 2002).

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38. For the liberty tree in transatlantic context, see Alfred F. Young, Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution (New York: New York University Press, 2006). 39. Diario de la Habana, March 27, 1828, 1. 40. Laugier identified a “primitive hut,” a primordial structure composed of trees first encountered by the Greeks, who imitated the example to produce the first architecture. The idea of the “primitive hut” thus reinforced Laugier’s argument and that of other eighteenth-century theorists that architecture should derive directly from the principles of natures. See Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essai sur l’architecture (1755; repr., Farnborough, UK: Gregg Press, 1966). For the Indian figure in late nineteenth-century Mexican painting in relationship to notions of cultural authenticity and nationhood, see Stacie G. Widdifield, “Resurrecting the Past: The Embodiment of the Authentic and the Figure of the Indian,” in The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 78–121. 41. Arrate, Llave del Nuevo Mundo, 18. 42. Ibid., 19. 43. Ignacio de Urrutia y Montoya, Teatro histórico, juridico y politico military de la isla Fernandina de Cuba y principalmente de su capital la Habana (Havana: Publicación de la Comisión Nacional Cubana de la Unesco, 1963), 90. 44. Ibid. 45. See Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 11–59, 60–129. For the visualization of the Indian in art, see Ilona Katzew, “‘That This Should Be Published and Again in the Age of Enlightenment?’ Eighteenth-Century Debates About the Indian Body in Colonial Mexico,” in Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America, ed. Ilona Katzew and Susan Deans-Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 73–118. 46. James Macfadyen, The Flora of Jamaica: A Description of the Plants of That Island, Arranged According to the Natural Orders (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longman, 1837), 92. 47. See Lydia Cabrera, El monte: Igbo-finda, ewe orisha-vititi nfinda; Notas sobre las religions, la mágia, las supersticiones, y el folklore de los negros criollos y el pueblo de Cuba (1954; repr., Miami: Colección del Chicherekú en el Exilo, 1983). See also Migene González-Wippler, Santería, the Religion: A Legacy of Faith, Rites, and Magic (New York: Harmony Books, 1989); and Michele Reid, “The Yoruba in Cuba: Origins, Identities, and Transformations,” in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World, ed. Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 111–29. 48. Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 111; Robert A.

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Voeks, Sacred Leaves of Candomblé: African Magic, Medicine, and Religion in Brazil (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 20, 32, 161, 163; and Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara, Manipulating the Sacred: Yorùbá Art, Ritual, and Resistance in Brazilian Candomblé (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 93, 107. 49. A ceiba was replanted on the El Templete site shortly after its completion. 50. Juan José Díaz de Espada, “Visita pastoral del obispo Díaz de Espada en 1804, según el relato de fray Hipólito Sánchez Rangel,” in Torres-Cuevas, El Obispo Espada: Papeles, 161–91. 51. These images also allude to social issues of race and marriage, shaped by the Real Pragmática de Matrimonios of 1776 and the enforcement of marriage policy in Cuba by the church and state. Verena Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study of Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society, 2nd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989). 52. See Philip A. Howard, Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of Color in the Nineteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998), 73–99; and Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle Against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 53. From 1790 to 1820, figures show 225,574 Africans imported into Havana alone. See Alexander von Humboldt, The Island of Cuba: A Political Essay, trans. J. S. Thrasher (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener; Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2001), 139. 54. For “western” Cuba, the area including Havana, the Cuban census of 1827 gave the following figures: whites (male: 89,526; female: 75,532), free colored (male: 21,235; female: 24,829), slaves (male: 125,888; female: 72,027), total: 409,037. See Ibid, 133. 55. Martinez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour. 56. Childs, 1812 Aponte Rebellion. 57. For casta painting, see Magali M. Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); and Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

Chapter Four

Neoclassical Pompai in Early Twentieth-Century Cartagena de Indias, Colombia Carla Bocchetti

This chapter addresses the use of antiquity in the shaping of identities

in new Latin American republics in the early twentieth century. Specifically, it investigates the aesthetics of public neoclassical monuments within the politics of self-representation in Colombia. This study considers neoclassicism as a cosmopolitan element that allowed Latin American nations to imagine their participation in the Western project of modernity. The use of Greek and Roman classical references, however, could generate multiple meanings. Was neoclassicism only an elite import, an element of exclusion and imperialism, impervious to local Latin American identities? Or, on the contrary, was neoclassicism an alternative discourse to colonial identity in which different local identities could be expressed? I argue that the use of neoclassicism in early national Colombia became an attempt to give order to several local pasts, such as Indian, Creole, mestizo, and mulatto. It nevertheless did not erase the pre-Hispanic and/or colonial pasts or other forms of identity but instead was a global product that offered a legitimizing language to construct identity based on ideas of progress and cosmopolitanism. In this sense, neoclassicism supplied the support necessary to construct a new sense of the self, based on public performances and within the social dynamics of buen gusto (good taste).

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Neoclassicism came to express a new sense of the self in the centenary of independence celebration in Colombia by serving as a medium in which many different ways of belonging could took shape. This essay takes as its primary examples various neoclassical monuments built between 1909 and 1911 in Centenary Park in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, to celebrate the first one hundred years of independence. I argue that architecture and public performances, as integral parts of the urban expression of neoclassicism, became signs around which a sense of belonging to the nation could be built. The appropriation of antiquity in early twentieth-century Colombia did not serve so much to define a particular ethnic group as to create a new sense of identity based on progress. It was a consistent language designed to generate shared values, in the shape of white marble statues, columns, obelisks, and other architectural motifs selected from an antique repertoire. Neoclassical monuments were placed in public locations to represent both the achievements of the local past, mainly wars of independence, and future prospects for progress and social prosperity. The visions of neoclassical perfection that such monuments constructed are thrown into relief when considered against the realities of the failure of modernization, the lack of progress, and the limitations in using and producing technology and communications systems that characterized many emerging nations in Latin America at the time. In that sense, they became the material ruins portraying the failure of political and social accomplishments in modernity. In terms of buen gusto, neoclassical monuments in early twentieth-century Latin America exemplified the material forms in which cultural anxieties were expressed: the desire to belong to the international scene and the limits of cosmopolitanism.

Architecture and Civic Identity In Latin America neoclassicism came to represent the rise of democracy, the formation of nation-states, and the promotion of capitalism. To celebrate the first hundred years of independence, most Latin American capital cities began major architectural works in order to give new shape to urban areas, stimulating urban revival. Optimism had accompanied the rise of democracy and communication systems. Religious identity, which so strongly characterized the colonial period, was overcome by a civic identity based on political freedom.

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Neoclassicism gave material form to democratic and capitalistic ideologies: columns, pediments, and elements of classical architecture were used in building banks, train stations, academies of art, public buildings for ministries, and governmental offices, with the purpose of bestowing legitimacy and authority on the new republican institutions. In this section, I address the monuments of Centenary Park, their relevance for studying the reception of the classical past, and their use in the expression of civic identities based on the notion of progress. Centenary Park is located immediately outside the city walls of Cartagena in the area of Gethsemane. In a public competition, the park commission was awarded to Felipe Jaspe and Pedro Malabet. The park was inaugurated on November 11, 1911, the day of Cartagena’s centenary, and was built to commemorate the patriots who signed the act of independence. The square is based on models of English urban and garden planning, with walking avenues eight, ten, and fifteen meters wide. It has a trapezoidal shape with fountains, a lake with wooden bridges, a pavilion, and gardens.1 It was built around a central obelisk in marble with a bronze condor at the top, decorated at its base with four standing figures of angels in marble. It has eight entrances, with triumphal arches possessing four Ionic columns each. At the top of three of them are statues in white marble allegorically representing the republic, labor, and youth. Centenary Park was never finished, and its other five entrances have single arches with no decoration. The statues were brought from Italy and were made at the expense of local economic and labor associations.2 From the group of statues, the one that represents the republic has special significance (figure 4.1). Images of women representing the nation were used to symbolized freedom and justice; such images also were associated with economic growth and expansion. Women representing liberty can be seen in most of the paper money (pesos) that circulated in Colombia, which was printed in North America in the early nineteenth century. The wellknown source for this imagery comes from French iconography, particularly such paintings as Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris), which depicts a half-naked woman holding a flag in her hand, representing revolution. However, the trope of woman as the embodiment of the city is an old one. In ancient Athens the goddess Athena symbolized the city in a standing statue dressed as a warrior with a shield, dressed in a chiton.3 In ancient Roman art, statues of women wear crowns representing cities. In Roman maps, or itineraria picta, such as the Tabula Peutingeriana, Rome and Jerusalem are represented as seated women. In the

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Elizabethan era the English nation was depicted in a similar manner. All of these images reveal seated women, and feminist theory has shown us the difference in meaning between seated and standing women in art. Statues of women standing, in movement as running, half-naked figures, or wearing a dress that renders visible the shape of the body signify the coming of a new age, a rupture from the past, and freedom. This symbol works against the seated figure, which signifies tradition and continuity. In scholarship on the iconography of Latin American nationalism in art and visual culture, references to antiquity figure prominently. Rebecca Earle has studied the image of the Indian woman as an emblem of national independence.4 She argues that the female Indian figure became an image employed by Creoles, or individuals of Hispanic descent born in the Americas, to construct a past perceived as different from that under Spanish rule. Other scholars, such as Sabine MacCormack, argue that Greece and Rome were used to refer to life in America before colonization, that is, to the antiquity of the Inca and Aztec Empires. I argue that within neoclassicism the female figure as a sign of the nation took an important position in the spectacles of

Figure 4.1. Así es Cartagena de Indias, statue of the republic at Centenary Park. Cartagena, Colombia. Photograph © Andres Lejona.

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public performances. The figure embodying the republic in Centenary Park wears a tunic and holds a torch in one hand, raised to the horizon, and in the other, a quiver and a figure that resembles the goddess Artemis. The figure stands over a globe, representing mappa mundi (world maps), and next to it are four lion heads. Statues placed in the open air, where they can be easily seen, emphasize optimism, freedom, and equality. The fact that these statues are placed atop arches, in windy places, gives the sensation of the progress of time. The figure’s tunic seems thus to move with the winds of prosperity. The symbolism of the other statues refers to additional elements necessary to build a nation: labor and youth. Labor is represented by a standing figure of a man working, with one hand lifting a hammer in the air while the other hand holds a stone. The monument dedicated to youth has two figures. One is a young, half-naked boy in the act of unsheathing a sword. Behind him, in a gesture of protection, a female statue representing the nation wears a tunic, with one hand indicating the way to follow and the other holding a flag. At the base of the statue is an inscription reading, “La Juventud se apresta a defender la patria” (Youth preparing to defend the homeland). Adjacent to the neoclassical scenery of the park and its statues there used to be a train station, post office building, and harbor immediately in front of the square complex. On one of the sides of the park, facing the bay, are busts of the martyrs killed by the Spaniard Pablo Morillo in 1815, to whom the centenary celebrations were also devoted. A fountain once stood next to them. Within this monumental display is another statue of a woman, a gift from the women of Cartagena for its centenary, with an inscription that reads, “Noli me tangere” (Do not touch me).5 Earle states that in Latin America the centenary was an opportunity to commemorate Spain and to use the Indian past to reshape Creole identities.6 However, I argue that the presence of neoclassicism in centenary celebrations became a cultural performance of searching for a new civic identity. Neoclassical statues of women provided ideological support to argue for the modernization of the new republics, that is, to situate them within the use of technology and communication systems, which were burgeoning in the late nineteenth century. Neoclassicism even expressed feelings of anti-hispanidad.7 It coexisted with other discourses of identity, including Catholicism and conservatism in Caro, as I demonstrate below. Yet in most cases it represented the formulation of a new sense of self, the “astusia neoclásica,” as José Lezama Lima refers to it.8

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Centenary Park established a sense of social well-being, serving as a place to gather multiple groups of people. It therefore gave unity to a community of diverse social backgrounds and ethnic descent. The park symbolized the construction of the nation. In the words of Denis Cosgrove, “Landscape is not merely the world we see, it is a construction, a composition of that world. Landscape is a way of seeing the world.” 9 Together with monuments, the use of flora and fauna to decorate national parks was also an attempt to include nature in the national agenda. In Centenary Park there were plantations of palm trees and a pool with crocodiles. Since the 1840s the glasshouses in Kew Gardens in England had displayed tropical plants and trees as an expression of control over colonial trade, especially rubber trees. In that sense, Centenary Park was conceived to be a landscape garden in which elements of civic identity were actualized. Neoclassicism was not conceived as an alternative national heritage but was a ready-made product or commodity through which new civic identities were expressed. This project of identity construction was related to cosmopolitanism and to the desire to join the Western project of modernity. It was a way of expressing the self, in opposition to colonial darkness and hispanidad, for it purported to create free individuals who belonged to the nation and the world.

Neoclassical Pompai: The Political Aesthetics of Buen Gusto Aesthetics and good taste can also be read as political manifestations of the new civic body. Foundational myths are a human construct that can be represented through monumentalization: the creation of places and artistic monuments that serve to symbolize a cultural unification activated by an event, which is created as a national discourse of self-definition. The past is used to construct present identities. Centenary Park attempted to unify a collective identity and thus can be regarded as a place of memory to fulfill political purposes. It represents the cultural appropriation of space. Neoclassical trends served to construct a Latin American identity that could face the international arena, thus becoming a mirror of social and cultural performances of good taste. Reminiscences of antiquity filtered into America from multiple European sources, especially France. French style offered a cosmopolitan flavor to local identities. The events chosen to commemorate centenary celebrations were based on the French tradition of the

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battle of flowers.10 This event was a grand floral parade in which there was a procession of carnival floats, some pulled by horses, all decorated with flowers. People dressed elaborately for the occasion, and the crowds on the pavement and the people on the floats threw flowers to one another. The declamation of poetry was the central act of this event.11 Three heralds with arms and the colors of the flag of Cartagena were at the head of the centenary battle of flowers. Behind them was a float allegorically representing fame (figure 4.2). This neoclassical pompai reflected popular and elite attitudes toward both the present and the past. There were fashion advertisements in newspapers for the occasion: clothes, shoes, hats, jewelry, rum, and a lottery, all examples of neoclassical spectacle. Cartagena’s newspaper, La Época, announced that pins in the shape and color of the flag of Cartagena and others with the bust of Bolívar were available at certain shops.12 There was also a centenary raffle: two gold watches, one for a man and another for a woman; nine rings with precious stones; and twenty-five silver pins.13 A restaurant named Centenario was opened, serving turkey with champagne.14 The agenda of the celebration also included acrobatics, donations of toys to poor children, processions of schoolchildren and soldiers, declamation of poetry, political speeches, popular bullfights (corralejas), horse competitions with prizes, public cinematographic exhibitions, fireworks, masked balls, and processions of the association of workers and craftsmen.15 There was also

Figure 4.2. Centenary postcard. November 11, 1911. Cartagena, Colombia.

Luis Ángel Arango Library, Bogotá, Colombia.

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a concert where Concepción Micolao de Alandete and her sister performed Aida. It is said that their voices transported the audience to La Scala in Milan.16 During the ten days of celebrations the city walls of Cartagena were illuminated, using barrels of coal.17 All of these celebrations display a conscious historical approach. Centenary celebrations grew out of neoclassical cultures that appropriated antique precedents. Horace was requested to compose an ancient Roman festival hymn by Augustus in 17 AD, the “Carmen Saeculare,” an ode addressed to Apollo and Diana that celebrated the deeds of Augustus. The secular games were held on later occasions organized by Tacitus; they were celebrated for the last time in 248 AD to commemorate the one thousandth anniversary of the foundation of Rome. Centenary celebrations were held to create a cult for secular heroes, a memorial for those who had been killed in battle, and a sacred spot for the liberties of the people. The past and the present were at the center of the famous quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in France (1678–1715). The Battle of the Books, as it is also called, was based on the idea that while the Ancients could confer authority, in reality, modern humanity, in the age of science and reason, could surpass the Ancients in knowledge. Progress was expressed in cultural terms, for progress was seen to conceive of time in connection to the possibility of social improvement (figure 4.3).18 In fact, in North America and France centenary celebrations were held in conjunction with the Philadelphia Exhibition (1876) and the Exposition Universelle in Paris (1889). Latin American countries such as Chile and Argentina had centenaries with exhibition halls dedicated to displaying national art together with electric machines and other technological innovations, with the aim of situating their national pasts within the scenario of progress.19 The academies of art in Mexico and Cuba had vast collections of GrecoRoman art. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) mentioned seeing the Laocoön Group during his visit to Mexico in the early nineteenth century.20 Havana held the famous Lagunillas collection of original pieces of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian art.21 The neoclassical revival was much more vital in Havana than in other places in Latin America or the Caribbean, and many buildings of neoclassical style in Cartagena used Havana as a model. For instance, Teatro Heredia (1911), one of the monuments built to celebrate the centenary, was made following the model of the Tacón Theater (1838) in Havana.22 Neoclassicism symbolized union and progress, and it aimed to transmit to posterity the remembrance of great events.23 However, more than longing

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for the classical past, neoclassicism reflected contemporary preoccupations. In that sense, it was an example of the use of the past to enact new identities (figure 4.4). Neoclassicism was the performance of public attitudes towards the past in order to re-interpret the present. The construction of public monuments was also an example of a community giving physical shape to its rebirth. Centenary Park was a political gesture that pretended to be embedded in civic identity and was not particularly successful. A similar statement can be made about many other neoclassical monuments in many other cities of Latin America. They express grandeur, expansion, and optimism about economic and social progress, but they also stand in relief against the failures of modernization. They become ruins of the past, for they represent the impossibility of Latin American countries to belong to the Hellenization of the world, that is, to feel civilized and cosmopolitan. Thus the statues of Centenary Park—the republic, youth, and labor—can be regarded as ruins of the nation.

To Repudiate Antiquity Neoclassicism has not been studied in its full cultural and historical dimensions in Colombia because the classical past there has always been associated

Figure 4.3. Centenary postcard. 1910. Cartagena, Colombia.

Collection of Thimotée Saint-Albin.

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Figure 4.4. “Monumento modelado por Tenerani, para colocar el corazón del libertador

Simón Bolívar, en la catedral de Bogotá” (Monument modeled by Tenerani, in order to place the heart of the liberator Simón Bolívar, in the cathedral of Bogota). From Papel Periódico Ilustrado de Bogotá, October 28, 1886. Archivo Histórico Universidad del Rosario. Bogotá, Colombia. This monument was lost in a shipwreck near Venezuela in 1867.

with Miguel Antonio Caro and his conservative and Catholic program for the nation. Historians of the nineteenth century have argued that the association of antiquity with Caro’s political ideas has denied the nation’s progress. There is, therefore, a common consensus that repudiates antiquity as an elite foreign element that does not describe or apply to Latin American nations. However, elements of the past cannot be easily simplified by rejecting the work of Caro. The presence of the classical past in America goes beyond an individual and his political project.

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Exclusions and pressures regarding gender, race, and class have frequently been at the center of the efforts of individuals and minority groups to challenge national culture. Presence and absence refer to aspects of civic identity that have as a model a classical past that never took place in America. The reference to such a civic identity is an attempt to build dialogues about the absence of the classical past and our sense of self. In the words of Joseph Brodsky, “we for antiquity do not exist.”24 The use of antiquity in the service of empire and colonial mythmaking has been the subject of postcolonial writings, such as the work of Emily Greenwood and Derek Walcott.25 Several authors, Alejo Carpentier among them, have argued that classical monuments better suit the landscape and climate of the tropics than those of England and France.26 These authors wished to legitimate the American landscape by suggesting its natural affinity with the landscape of European classicism. Palm trees of the Caribbean have been thought to provide an ideal setting for columns and arches. In Latin American countries neoclassicism represents an urban rhetoric that speaks simultaneously of concerns for belonging, periphery, and exclusion. The age of ideas was the age of rhetoric. The poetic potentiality of ruins was a motif used to express political and philosophical ideas. C. F. Volney, in The Ruins, presents a fictional encounter with a genius who explains to him the rise and fall of empires due to their laws and types of government.27 For Volney, ruins represent absence. They are involved in a sepulchral and melancholic scenario of night and darkness. That absence tells also about discontinuities and gaps and suggests how modernity established a distinction between the laws that ruled the Ancients and the liberty of Moderns. Ruins have the prestige of antiquity and the appeal of contemporary popularity. The excavations at Herculaneum and Paestum sparked a lively curiosity in Europe. Literature was inspired by the contemplation of ancient ruins and the tradition of the dramatic genius. The rhetorical vision is an old literary device, attested to even before Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis. Miguel Antonio Caro translated from Spanish into Latin the poem La canción de las ruinas de Itálica, written by the Spaniard Rodrigo Caro (1573–1647).28 This poem talks about the fall of Itálica (Sevilla la Vieja), one of the earliest Roman colonies in Spain: Estos, Fabio, Ay dolor! Que ves ahora campos de soledad, mustio collado fueron un tiempo Itálica famosa.

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In the introduction, Caro attempts to define the poem as a special literary type concerned with ancient ruins and gives a brief analysis of some poets who have written on the same subject. In this poem there is a literary genius similar to that of Volney’s work. However, here Caro expresses his unconformity with Volney, considering him as someone who uses knowledge about archeological sites in order to disrupt and support an immoral philosophy of history.29 Benjamin Constant, in his speech “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns,” claims that Athens represents the closest model of freedom that Moderns should follow: “We shall see why, of all the ancient states, Athens was the one which most resembles the modern ones.” 30 In North America classical antiquity had an ideological significance, served as a model for emergent values associated with democracy, and provided a repertoire of themes and political images for public speech.31 Europe, North America, and South America used neoclassical references to express political purposes. Although in Colombia neoclassicism has been associated with elitism, the North America example shows neoclassicism representing social inclusion. Therefore, there still is much to study in broader terms on neoclassicism in Latin America. What is the role for neoclassicism in a culture that cannot take into account its multiple forces and groups that generated the nationalist self? Classical references were used also to illustrate parodies and mimicries of incorrect political behavior and corruption in the new republics. Political cartoons in newspapers illustrate how different groups could use Greece or Rome in order to promote national identification and to subvert dominant authorities. For example, references to antiquity recur in the service of criticizing the establishment, which exemplifies the fact that classical themes were circulating in the collective imagery of public life, a sphere shared by both the popular classes and the elite (figure 4.5). Images depicting statues of muses and classical references such as harps, tunics, and crowns of bay leaves were also used as vignettes to decorate printing flyers and political articles. Such classical references became especially common in Latin America after the French Revolution, when they became a source for political performance.

Uses of the Past and Cosmopolitanism Copying models from the past in order to create modern political identities recurs throughout history. In Latin American, Greece and Rome occupied an important place in defining modern political identities. Georges Lomné argues that, instead of giving a privileged position to the neoscholastic mentality of

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Figure 4.5. Pepe Gómez. “Tome Nota.” February 21, 1919.

Cartoon published in Semanario Bogotá Cómico. Collection of Thimotée Saint-Albin.

Creole patriots, it is more useful and accurate to study the uses of antiquity to fully understand the ideology of Latin American revolutions.32 The classical past was a useful construct even for the Ancients. The Ancients possessed “antiquities” and made reference to remote pasts.33 However, classical antiquity as we conceive it today was the invention of the early modern period. It was invented in the nineteenth century by such figures as German art historian and archaeologist Johann Winckelmann (1717– 1768) and the German poets Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Victorian England was heavily re-created in the classical image of Greece, and the youth of England were educated in the fashion of the Grand Tour, having romantic figures such as George Byron (1788–1824) as a model. The code of behavior associated with the Greek spirit was vital to the British constitution. It created the administrators of the

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British Empire, and the elitism of the Greek language served to bolster the superiority of the ruling class. The assimilation of Greek language and its role in defining European modernity in the sixteenth century, in opposition to the scholastic tradition, was led by Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536). He put Greek learning at the base of humanities, and Hellenism became the fundamental principle of the construction of the West.34 Some scholars argue that the encounters of Odysseus with creatures such as the Cyclops and the Phaeacians represent the contacts of the Greek world with barbarians in a period in which the Greeks were establishing colonies in the Mediterranean.35 And it has been stated that those “colonial encounters” speak of the superiority of Greek views and attitudes as part of center-periphery dialectic. However, there is no clear evidence in The Odyssey to support that interpretation. Actually, the Greeks did not consider themselves as a separate unity or collective entity, nor were they isolated from others. On the one hand, the Greeks existed on their own far before the Victorians made use of them to build their empires. On the other hand, the classical past was used as a force toward the globalization of the West. However, classical references took root and worked with different logics in different places, becoming a way to legitimize self-expression for all sorts of groups of people, not only Europeans. For instance, Spaniards and Creoles compared the ancient Inca Empire to Rome, and in Mexico the iconography of the period of Independence employs Hellenic features to depict Indians with epic dimensions.36 Historian Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra also refers to the ways in which Mexican intellectuals used the Aztec past as a substitute for European antiquity.37 The claim for the past as a bastion of Western culture is a fiction operative in Latin America as much as it is in European countries. In modern Greek studies, scholars such as Gregory Jusdanis and Yannis Hamilakis, among others, argue for the reevaluation of the use of the classical past to construct modern Greek identities.38 This argument is made in favor of a more elaborate discourse that includes other periods of Greek history as being equally important to the classical past. These scholars state that the privilege of the classical past in giving shape to the modern Greek state was associated with the colonial domination of European countries after Greek independence from the Ottomans. It has been a way to erase the complexities that define modern Greek identities today. Neoclassicism can be seen as a way to incorporate a classical past into places where classics are absent. To claim a classical past is something that

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modern nations such as Italy, for example, have been doing, but ancient cities themselves made similar claims, as with Corinth in the eighth century BC, which did not have a Mycenaean past and thus was not involved originally in the Trojan War.39 Since the classical past could offer a sense of belonging to the world scene, it also became one of the features of Latin American neoclassicism. Instead of being deployed to construct an identity as an alternative to Hellenism, it was actually used to the contrary, to situate collective self within the mainstream of Western culture. In Las Tres Tazas José María Vergara y Vergara portrays aspects of local cultural behavior interwoven with political aesthetics of good taste.40 The essay describes how social prestige arises from pretending to be a foreigner

Figure 4.6. Anonymous. “Una graduanda y su amiga” (A graduate and her friend).

1933. Cartagena, Colombia. From Banco de la República, ed., Memoria visual y vida social en Cartagena, 1880–1930 (Bogotá: 1998), 31.

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in one’s own country. Frédéric Martínez explains that in Vergara’s essay the Marquis of Garnachá is a man from a village near Bogotá who went to Paris and lived there for two years, returning to Los Andes as a gentleman, showing others the glamor of people in France.41 Martínez does not mention antiquity as a reference, but one can argue that those in Latin America who made the trip to Europe in the nineteenth century thought that they were participating in the major events of the world, living in the Americas as if they were true Greeks and Romans in another geographical location. In Latin American countries people of all social groups displayed their cosmopolitanism through neoclassicism, just as they searched for their roots in an indigenous past (figure 4.6). Neoclassicism often lent a positivistic perception of the modern self without asking about the question of ethnic roots. Aspects of buen gusto became integral to public discourse as well as to the moral nature and purpose of the nation. Buen gusto was a social practice that went beyond aesthetics. It was also a political mode of expression and of cosmopolitanism where Greek and Roman culture were represented as a universal good. However, neither neoclassicism nor the indigenous past was able to serve as a true cultural structure to unify and give order to Latin American nations. Neoclassicism expresses for Latin American nations the ambiguity of accomplishing modernity.

Notes 1. El Porvenir (Cartagena), March 13, 1909. 2. The newspaper La Época reported that the statue of the republic was brought from Europe as a gift from the Junta de Empleados to decorate one of the arches. “Estatua de la libertad,” La Época (Cartagena), September 8, 1911, 3. 3. Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.24.5–7. 4. Rebecca Earle, “‘Padres de la Patria’ and the Ancestral Past: Commemorations of Independence in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America,” Journal of Latin American Studies 34:4 (November 2002): 775–805. 5. “Noli me tangere” (Do not touch me) comes from the Gospels, John 20:17. See “Discurso pronunciado por el General Adriano Tribin,” La Época, November 22, 1922, 3. I want to thank Salim Osta and the Groupo Conservar of San Pedro for allowing me to consult their unpublished document, “Inventario de monumentos en espacio público en el centro histórico y zonas de influencia de Cartagena de Indias.” 6. Earle, “Padres de la Patria,” 802. 7. José Fernández Madrid, “Atala,” in Atala Guatimoc (Bogotá: Arango Editores, 1988), 1–50.

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8. José Lezama Lima, La expresión americana (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993). 9. Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 13. 10. “Battle of the Flowers: Nice 1950,” British Pathé, http://www.britishpathe.com/ video/battle-of-the-flowers-nice. 11. Moisés Álvarez, “Los juegos florales de Cartagena,” Revista Travesía (Cartagena), no. 6 (May 1994): 76–94. 12. “Centenario de Cartagena.” La Época, October 5, 1911, 4. 13. “Rifa la elegancia,” La Época, October 19, 1911, 3. 14. “Centenario restaurante y cantina,” La Época, November 6, 1911, 4. 15. “Más fiestas para el centenario,” La Época, October 15, 1911, 4; “Aplaudimos el cambio,” La Época, October 17, 1911, 4; “Festividades del centenario,” La Época, October 3, 1911, 3. 16. “Juegos florales,” La Época, December 5, 1911, 2; Juan Dager Nieto, Diccionario artístico y arquitectónico de Cartagena de Indias, 2001, p. 6, http://www.delagracia.de/Diccionario.pdf. Also, Enrique Santos Molano mentions the opera singer Conchita Micolao in El Corazón del Poeta (Bogotá: Presidencia de la República, 1997), 179–314. 17. “Iluminaciones para el centenario,” La Época, October 18, 1911, 4. Charlotte Cameron, an English traveler to Cartagena in 1917, fails to describe the new monuments that were built for the centenary celebrations in her account of the neoclassical revival of the city, A Woman’s Winter in South America (London: S. Paul, 1911), 234–39. 18. Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 104. 19. Beatriz González Stephan, “Invenciones tecnológicas, mirada poscolonial y nuevas pedagogías: José Martí en las exposiciones universales,” in Galerías del progreso: Museo, exposiciones y cultura visual en América Latina, ed. Beatriz González Stephan and Jens Andermann (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo Editora, 2006), 221–60. 20. Georges Lomné, “Invención estética y revolución política: La fascinación por la libertad de los antiguos en el Virreinato de la Nueva Granada (1779–1815),” in Las revoluciones en el Mundo Atlántico, ed. María Teresa Calderón and Clément Thibaud (Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia, Taurus y Fundación Carolina, 2006), 100–120. 21. Arte de la Antigüedad: Catálogo de las salas del Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana (La Habana: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2006). 22. Moisés Álvarez, “El teatro Heredia de Cartagena de Indias: Itinerario y cronología” (thesis, Becas Colcultura, Bogotá, 1993). 23. Ronald Quinault, “The Cult of Centenary, c. 1784–1914,” Historical Research 71 (October 1998): 303–23.

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24. Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998). 25. Emily Greenwood, “Postcolonialism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies, ed. Barbara Graziosi, George Boys-Stones, and Phiroze Vasunia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 653–64; Derek Walcott, The Odyssey: A Stage Version (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1993). 26. Alejo Carpentier, Entrevistas (La Habana: Letras Cubanas, 1985–1987). 27. C. F. Volney, The Ruins; or, Meditations on the Revolution of Empires and the Law of Nature (New York: Twentieth Century Publications, 1890), 7–8. 28. Miguel Antonio Caro, trans., La canción a las ruinas de Itálica, del Licenciado Rodrigo Caro (Bogotá: Editorial Voluntad, 1947), 101–2. 29. Enrique Aguilar, review of La canción a las ruinas de Itálica, del Licenciado Rodrigo Caro, trans. Miguel Antonio Caro, ed. José Manuel Rivas Sacconi, The Americas 4:2 (October 1947): 273–75; Clifton Cherpack, “Volney´s Les Ruins and the Age of Rhetoric,” Studies in Philology 54:1 (January 1957): 65–75. 30. Benjamin Constant, “The Liberty of Ancients Compared with That of Moderns,” February 1816, Online Library of Liberty, Liberty Fund, http://files.libertyfund. org/files/2251/Constant_Liberty1521_EBk_v6.0.pdf. 31. Joy Connolly, “Classical Education and the Early American Democratic Style,” in Classics and National Cultures, ed. Susan A. Stephens and Phiroze Vasunia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 78–99. 32. Lomné, “Invención estética,” 118. 33. See Timaeus in Plato, Timaeus; Critias; Cleitophon; Menexenus; Epistles, trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library 234 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929). 34. Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14–59. 35. Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition Through Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); John Boardman, The Greeks Overseas: The Early Colonies and Trade (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999). 36. Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007); Andrew Laird, “Soltar las cadenas de las cosas: Las tradiciones clásicas en Latinoamérica,” in La influencia clásica en América Latina, ed. Carla Bocchetti (Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 2010), 11–31; Elina Miranda Cancela, “Mitos y cánones trágicos en el teatro actual del Caribe Insular hispánico,” in Bocchetti, La influencia clásica, 33–52. 37. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). For classics in the Caribbean, see Cancela, “Mitos y cánones.” For the period of conquest in America, see David Lupher,

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Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006). 38. Gregory Jusdanis, “Adiós a los clásicos: Excavaciones en el modernismo,” in Bocchetti, La influencia clásica, 113–40; Yannis Hamilakis, The Nation and Its Ruins (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 39. Giovanna Ceserani, “Classical Culture for a Classical Country: Scholarship and the Past in Vincenzo Cuoco’s Plato in Italy,” in Stephens and Vasunia, Classics and National Cultures, 59–77; Carla Bocchetti, La Geografía de La Ilíada: Una propuesta cultural (México: Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2011). 40. José María Vergara y Vergara, Las tres tazas, 3rd ed. (Bogotá: Editorial Minerva, 1933), 161. 41. Frédéric Martínez, El nacionalismo cosmopolita: La referencia europea en la construcción nacional en Colombia, 1845–1900 (Bogotá: Banco de la República e Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2001), 348–49.

part two

Imprinting Classicism and Its Consumption

Chapter Five

A Taste for Art in Late Colonial New Spain Kelly Donahue-Wallace

The description of the festivities surrounding the December 1796

installation of a new equestrian portrait of Charles IV, as chronicled in the Gazeta de México, Mexico City’s biweekly newspaper, concluded with the following notice: “At the order of the Most Excellent Viceroy, Joseph Joaquín Fabregat, Director of Engraving at the Royal Academy of San Carlos, Professor of recognized merit, is engraving a grand copper plate that will represent the Plaza Mayor with all of its new adornment.” 1 The March 22, 1797, issue of the Gazeta added more information, explaining that the viceroy decided “to have engraved at his own expense a copperplate of the beautiful view of the . . . Plaza and Statue, which he has dedicated to the Royal couple, our Sovereigns. [H]e has also determined that in order that the People do not lack the satisfaction of having examples of the print, which will be very appreciable for both the esteemed object they represent as for the delicacy and perfection of the engraving, they will be available at the moderate price of four pesos each, and the profits will be distributed as dowries for poor girls.” 2 The first advertisement offering the print for sale to the public (figure 5.1) appeared in the Gazeta on February 2, 1798: “The Royal Academy of San Carlos now offers for sale the beautiful Prints that represent the view of the principal Plaza of this capital in which has been placed the Royal Equestrian Statue of the King our Lord.” 3 Fabregat’s large engraving, 93

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designed by academy painting director Rafael Ximeno y Planes, was now available for purchase by print collectors, patriots, and those wishing to help poor girls afford to enter a convent. What interests me about these notices is not the object itself, the print, but how it was characterized in the newspaper: beautiful, appreciable, perfect, desirable, and although not stated explicitly, tasteful. Analysis of this and other stories and advertisements in the Gazeta de México reveals a persistent appeal to readers’ good taste and the desirability of beautiful objects to embody it. The following essay presents examples of these newspaper notices and draws preliminary conclusions regarding what they reveal about their authors and readers. I argue that the newspaper, more than a listing of current events and items for sale, was a uniquely efficacious site to which colonists turned to shape their taste. It likewise reified the important social and political differences between those with good taste and those without. The Gazeta’s use of the rhetoric of taste furthermore crafted a notion of tastefulness unique to the viceregal context. It is essential, therefore, before entering into the discussion of the newspaper stories and advertisements to define what is meant here by good taste and why it was important to the newspaper’s readers. As employed in the present essay, taste is the notion of aesthetic judgment as articulated with increasing

Figure 5.1. José Joaquín Fabregat. View of the Plaza Mayor. 1796–1797. Engraving.

Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

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specificity by the mid-eighteenth century and summarized most effectively in the writings of the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke as “that faculty, or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of the works of imagination and the elegant arts.” 4 In other words, good taste was discrimination of good from bad, beautiful from ugly, and current from outdated. It resided in the person, not the object—in the case examined here, the viewer possessed good taste, not the print—although the object revealed qualities that appealed to those viewers possessing good taste. As Vernon Hyde Minor has demonstrated, this good taste was a slippery thing; its definition shifted constantly and those able to define the term exercised it for “persuasion and control.” 5 Retooling the parameters of good taste, and doing so convincingly, caused others to follow suit or risk social ridicule. It is clear from this definition that good taste was intimately bound up with social distinction. The connection between good taste and class distinction has been amply studied by Pierre Bourdieu, of course, who determined that taste functions as a marker of class.6 As John Brewer has argued for the European, and specifically French and English, contexts, the central figure in the literature on taste during this era was the man of taste. But this character, a well-to-do lover of the arts, wise, philosophical, and reflective, displays the disinterested rational and aesthetic judgment born of his upbringing and cultivated through exposure to objects and ideas. In the eighteenth century, the ideal man of taste leveled a pure gaze on works of art to render his dispassionate judgment, unaffected by any value other than its aesthetic qualities. “The man of taste does not taste, he has taste.” 7 Economic gain, social jockeying, or other self-serving motives were supposed to play no part in his aesthetic appreciation. His distinction from those without taste was found in his dispassion and denial of impulse and temptation. Did this man of taste exist in colonial New Spain and, if he did, how was he addressed in the paper? With the exception of the oft-repeated statement that the Royal Academy of San Carlos was founded in the 1780s to impose modern, neoclassical taste on the Mexican people, taste has received limited attention in colonial art historiography; the scholarship offers even less on the Mexican man of taste. The most sustained examination of colonial New Spanish taste, as opposed to art history, is the work of Justino Fernández, who analyzed the criticism of New Spain’s art from 1554 through the end of the colonial era. Of particular usefulness for the present study is Fernández’s distillation of the language of artistic opinions during three phases roughly corresponding to the sixteenth, the seventeenth to mid-eighteenth, and the late eighteenth centuries. For the period

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considered here, Fernández sees beauty and tastefulness attributed to objects displaying neoclassical characteristics.8 The other quality of colonial art criticism Fernández identifies, although he believes it disappeared by the 1780s, is what he calls the grandeza mexicana or mexicanidad, as authors in Mexico distinguished Mexican artistic production as equal to, or better than, works from Europe. Father Pedro Márquez, one of the few colonial authors to address taste, likewise exalted the classical tradition yet allowed the relativity of taste. Following the ideas of Winckelmann, Márquez argued that “national ideas influenced the taste of each nation.” 9 This would eventually allow tasteful Mexicans to appreciate pre-Columbian objects, but this was not yet the case during the period studied here. So while Fernández’s study is useful for helping to define what was tasteful—although I disagree with him on the exclusivity of neoclassicism within the rubric of good taste in Mexico in the late eighteenth century—it does not engage the tasteful viewers or the question of how residents of New Spain cultivated their good taste. The stories and advertisements in the Gazeta de México are, I argue, an excellent place to find the Mexican man or person of taste constructed. An advertisement in the classified section of the December 4, 1787, issue is a good place to start. The ad, placed in the newspaper by a Mexico City merchant, reads, Offered for sale are 25 copperplate paintings measuring more than a vara tall and three-quarters wide: of very appreciable and delicate Mexican Work, by their artist the famous Nicolás Enríquez; [the lot for sale] is composed of 13 paintings of the Apostles with the type and year of their martyrdom in small letters; four of the four Evangelists and the Four Patriarchs; one of the Trinity; one of the Savior; one of the Immaculate Conception; one of the Pietá; one of Saint Joseph; one of Saint Nicholas of Bari; one of Saint Francis Xavier; and the other of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. The person of good taste who wishes to buy them should visit the bridge of La Leña, a house without number in front of Farrier’s Bank.10 The advertisement referred to the work of Mexican painter Nicolás Enríquez (c. 1722–1790). His paintings exhibit the typical characteristics of Mexico City’s late baroque period: emotionally expressive religious images filled with idealized figures in dramatic poses and agitated draperies. His color palette consists of the pastel tones employed by his peers José de Ibarra

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(1688–1756), Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz (1713–1772), and José de Alcíbar (active 1751–1801) when he does not represent the gruesome bloodshed of martyrdoms. The advertisement clearly calls upon the rhetoric of tastefulness by describing the images as appreciable and delicate and by referencing their desirability for persons possessing good taste. It furthermore plays upon this quality of mexicanidad by identifying the specifically Mexican appreciableness of Enríquez’s work. Whether this refers to their reflection of typical stylistic characteristics of Mexican painting (“delicacy,” as the ad mentions), their content, or merely the Mexican nationality of their maker is not made clear in the ad.11 An advertisement in a 1794 issue of the Gazeta similarly offered goods for sale. The ad notified readers that a newly opened shop located in Mexico City sold “Mirrors, Chandeliers, Painted Screens, Footstools, Chairs, Armoires, Tables, Rodastrados, Biombos and the other necessary adornments, which join taste, comfort, durability and economy respective of all states. They have been offered for sale at various prices for the outfitting of the home; made according to drawings of the best European taste; and a collection of prints of Saints by the best Professors from the same [Europe].”12 For those familiar with the contents of elite Mexican homes in this era, the advertisement was a virtual catalog of fashionable items. In addition to the mirrors, chandeliers, armoires, and painted fireplace screens common to all wealthy homes in the west, it included rodastrados, or paintings created to surround low estrados, or platforms. Inherited from Arab traditions, the estrado was usually found in the parlor and female members of the household and guests sat on it on pillows or low stools when dresses were too wide to allow them to gracefully sit in armed chairs. Many of these were biombos, painted freestanding screens inspired by works that first came from Japan in the early seventeenth century and soon became essential decoration in wellto-do Mexican homes.13 The ad’s reference to furniture based on European drawings likely refers to the Mexican fashion for Chippendale-like furnishings, made locally but sharing the Chippendale curved leg and claw-and-ball foot. All of these items were promoted in the notice as available for those possessing sufficiently good taste to acquire them. Although many more advertisements referenced and solicited persons of good taste, aficionados of fine engraving, lovers of the noble arts, and the like, in order to not belabor the point, a single additional example suffices. This one is slightly different from the others already mentioned but nevertheless furthers the argument about the rhetoric of taste in the newspaper.

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The lead item in the November 12, 1795, issue of the Gazeta de México came from Oaxaca: The Most Illustrious Doctor Don Gregorio Omaña y Sotomayor, the worthy Bishop of this Diocese, on October 27 this year made the following Decree: “So that the people of these Catholic and tranquil territories do not abandon the admirable and pious custom they inherited from their elders of having Images of Our Lord Jesus Christ, his Most Holy Mother, and the other Saints in Heaven in the most important rooms in their homes, and giving them the cult they deserve, despite the ridiculous fashion of putting profane pictures in Dining Rooms, Corridors, etc., we concede eighty days of indulgence to all Persons of both sexes who place Holy Images in the most decent rooms of their homes, giving them appropriate veneration, and greeting them and praying to the sacred Originals they represent.” With the same laudable objective another of the most Illustrious Diocesan Fathers of our America has conceded another forty days to the Persons who help to reestablish this most Catholic practice.14 In other words, by 1795 residents of the viceroyalty were decorating their homes not with holy images intended for pious reflection and personal devotion but with landscapes, genre scenes, and other secular themes created for aesthetic enjoyment and entertainment. The fashion may have been ridiculous, but it was prevalent enough for the bishop to take action. Though the bishop would not have said so, the implication behind the indulgence is clear: the Mexican elite considered landscapes and genre scenes as appropriate reflections of their good taste. Unfortunately, the efficacy of Omaña’s indulgence may been undermined by an advertisement later in the same issue that offered precisely these secular images for sale, promoted as appropriate for the decoration of private offices.15 Let us pause here to consider some preliminary conclusions about the rhetoric of good taste articulated in the newspaper. That is, the advertisements and other notices in the paper reveal that not only were the objects commodities, but good taste required purchases. Even if the language suggested disinterestedness, that is, purchasing art for its beauty and exemplarity rather than economic or other social value, it seems clear that the calls to the person of taste and the references to beautiful things available for sale or used in Mexican homes were intended as an appeal to social competition or

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the desire to reaffirm social distinction. The advertisements cited here furthermore operated doubly: flattering readers by referring to them as persons of taste and offering them the opportunity to reaffirm their membership in this elite group by purchasing the latest objects described in the advertisements as appropriate to and desirable for the person of taste. Today’s scholars may have yet to identify the drive to be seen as a person of taste among eighteenth-century Mexicans, but the Gazeta’s advertisements communicate what can only be described as a persistent and powerful anxiety, a need to be and to be seen as a person of good taste.16 While this may have been a concern manufactured by vendors, it stands to reason that if such an anxiety to be a person of taste did not exist, these advertisers would not have so frequently mentioned him. Seen in this light, then, the concession of indulgence printed in the paper likely had an effect the bishop did not intend. It informed readers, if they were not already aware, that their peers with homes large enough for dining rooms and corridors displayed secular images on their walls. Regardless of their religious sentiments and fervor, readers likely faced a dilemma, however fleeting, upon reading the notice: should they emulate their peers (if they did not already) and fill their homes with genre scenes and landscapes, or help to revive the practice of exhibiting religious images in the principal rooms of well-to-do homes, as the bishop asked? This way of reading the indulgence statement and the advertisements makes a key assumption about the Gazeta de México that must be acknowledged. That is, it seems clear that the newspaper was for its readers not a passive listing of news and goods for sale. I argue instead that the newspaper was an efficacious device for its readers, a site where they could see what was tasteful and purchase it to maintain their status among New Spain’s elite persons of taste, with all of the benefits and associations attached to this status. The paper was not, of course, the only means of staying current. A host of social opportunities, from literary tertulias held in private homes to discussions among members of elite confraternities and organizations such as the Real Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del País, allowed anxious men and women of taste to gauge their own judgement against that of their peers. More concrete evidence of the concern for tastefulness and of local residents’ opportunities for informing their tastes include the many books on the topic found in colonial libraries, by authors such as Antonio Ponz, Juan Sampere, Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Charles Rollin, and others.17 The Gazeta was one more means—a biweekly primer, as it were—of understanding and asserting this slippery thing known

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as good taste, but one that was uniquely effective thanks in part to its provenience and to the fact that it was a paper. To understand this claim, let us consider the newspaper itself. In his dedicatory statement in the 1784 inaugural issue of the Gazeta de México, editor Manuel Antonio Valdés noted how useful newspapers were in the “most cultured courts of Europe.” On the other hand, “the curious Literati . . . [of New Spain], the precious jewel of the Imperial Crown of our Sovereign CHARLES . . . lack[ed] . . . a review of passing news, which would be greatly advantageous for them.”18 To remedy the problem, Valdés founded the Gazeta, the third periodical to use this title.19 Printed in Mexico City on the presses of Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontíveros, the periodical survived for the next twenty-five years, although its zenith—in terms of both circulation and general newsworthiness—corresponded to the period from 1793 to 1797.20 In 1805 the Gazeta changed editors and Spaniard Juan López Cancelada led the journal until 1809, when it became the Gazeta del Gobierno. When the newspaper became an official government organ that year, it made formal what had been for the previous quarter century a tacit relationship. Since its founding, the Gazeta de México had operated under the protection of the viceregal government, licensed and privileged by the viceroy yet not a state publication.21 As Valdés prepared to print his first issue, Viceroy Matías de Gálvez declared, “In imitation of the Court in Madrid and others in Europe, a Gazette of news worthy of knowing is born in this territory” and ordered Mexicans to send Valdés news for printing every fifteen days.22 Each volume of the paper was dedicated to the viceroy, and his escutcheon graced its pages. In turn, the government used the paper to publish decrees, announce bureaucratic appointments, and more generally, to promote its activities and good government. Viceregal support for the paper was repeated in 1791 when Viceroy Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo, second Count of Revillagigedo, stated, “All of the cultured nations of Europe have adopted weekly Gazettes as a true medium for universal and public instruction from discoveries useful to humanity and the sciences, to rare and surprising events that serve either as warning or as good example, and to news of other things that allow one to know about the Viceroyalty, satisfying the taste of the curious at any distance.”23 As Revillagigedo’s statement suggests, the paper published more than governmental missives and Valdés used the 1786 prologue to encourage the submission of what he called “gazette-able facts,” suggesting notices on topics including agriculture, elections, inventions, construction of religious and

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public buildings, natural disasters, and deaths.24 The newspaper’s readership, described by historian Patricia Adank as consisting primarily of locally born and peninsular ecclesiastical and secular bureaucrats, merchants, mine owners, scholars, and other members of the viceregal upper social echelons, responded to Valdés’s call, offering the editor information about droughts, epidemics, shipping records, religious and secular festivals, trade, discoveries, and clerical appointments; they also placed advertisements for items of every kind.25 This fact is important, as it reveals the broad array of contributors to the newspaper, even if their submissions were filtered by the editor. With the exception of special issues reprinting stories of European conflicts, the Gazeta followed a consistent organization. Submissions appeared in a single, page-wide column under rubrics corresponding to their geographic provenance, beginning in regional towns and cities and ending with the capital. The city of Veracruz on the gulf coast, for example, appeared in almost every issue, offering the commercial cargo inventories of ships entering and leaving the port. Other towns and cities appeared more sporadically and most often for the plagues, droughts, festivals, and other sensational events that altered domestic tranquility. Mexico City, as seat of the viceregal government, the Archdiocese of Mexico, the Holy Office of the Inquisition, and the religious orders that populated the viceroyalty, added a host of official and unofficial missives to stories of notable happenings. Each issue ended with the encargos, or classified section, offering a diverse array of advertisements and notices, from requests for information about lost children and jewelry and runaway slaves to ads offering books, townhomes, and rural haciendas for sale. A very small number of stories were illustrated with scientific engravings made by local printmakers, which were tipped in, as engravings could not be printed on the same press as the type.26 Hence, the paper made good on its title’s claim to be the gazette of Mexico.27 That is, with contributions by private individuals and authorities throughout the viceroyalty, both civic and ecclesiastic, on virtually every theme that affected daily life and being published in the viceregal capital under the protection and license of the viceroy, the Gazeta de México justifiably claimed to represent Mexico, and, more broadly, the viceroyalty of New Spain. The significance of the paper’s claim to be the gazette of New Spain, and its importance for the articulation of tastefulness as well as for how elite Mexicans knew art and what sense they made of it from its pages, is best understood in light of Benedict Anderson’s writings on the nation as “an imagined political community” of residents rather than a manifestation of

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dynastic or religious authority.28 This imagined community emerged in the eighteenth century and the newspaper was one of the “technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation.”29 Stories composed in a nationally standardized language and placed together thanks to more-or-less chronological coincidence created boundaries of national identity—of “us,” even when the stories spoke of other places. In other words, it was this imagined community articulated through the newspaper by its contributors and readers that created the sense of nation and national identity in the eighteenth-century world, especially in colonial contexts. Speaking specifically of Latin America, Anderson states that “what brought together, on the same page, this marriage with that ship, this price with that bishop, was the very structure of the colonial administration and market-system itself. In this way, the newspaper of Caracas [or Mexico City] quite naturally, and even apolitically, created an imagined community among a specific assemblage of fellow-readers, to whom these ships, brides, bishops and prices belonged.”30 The juxtaposed stories, notices, and advertisements that appeared on the Gazeta’s pages consequently created the idea of New Spain for its readers, both at home and abroad; they defined the nation, at least the nation of the elite, literate reader. The readers themselves routinely appeared in the paper to affirm their position within this nation as participants in religious and secular events, advertisers of goods, recipients of bureaucratic appointments, or donors responding to the frequent calls for pious or patriotic offerings, for which they were listed by name on the Gazeta’s pages. Seen in this light, the Gazeta, through its collective contributions and claims to represent the nation and everything one needed to know about it, represented for readers a primer on being Mexican. More specifically for the present study, the stories, notices, and advertisements discussing works of fine and decorative arts, by both their language and their mere presence in the newspaper, operated, to paraphrase Anderson, as an imagined aesthetic community that defined a specifically Mexican persona de buen gusto. My reading of the advertisements and indulgence notice at the beginning of this essay therefore needs expansion. While it remains true that the advertisers exploited readers’ anxiety to be seen as persons of taste, their actions were bolstered by the particular efficacy of the newspaper. The statements by Valdés and the viceroys clearly identified the function of the paper to instruct, to inform, and to emulate cultured Europe but also to shape New Spanish culture. It stands to reason, therefore, that Mexican elite readers looked to the newspaper also to know what constituted good taste and made

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their purchases from its pages to distinguish themselves, to affirm and reify their membership in the ranks of tasteful persons, efforts that, I believe, took on a unique potency in the colonial context, a point to which I will return at the end of this essay. The efficacy of the newspaper in shaping persons of taste, not just constructing an image of tastefulness or exploiting readers’ desire to be seen as tasteful, is best demonstrated by the subscriptions for illustrated books and prints offered through the paper. With some regularity, printed texts and images made either in Spain or in New Spain were offered in advance of their production through the Gazeta. The notices briefly explained the forthcoming item, identified its worthiness using the rhetoric of tastefulness I have already discussed, and informed readers where to purchase their subscription tickets. “Literate aficionados” could subscribe to the newest Spanish edition of Antonio Palomino’s art treatise, “fans of the noble arts” could buy prints of the Málaga cathedral, and “curious persons of good taste” were encouraged to subscribe to an immense engraved map of Mexico City.31 A reminder message frequently followed in a subsequent issue. When the item was ready for pickup, subscribers were again notified through the Gazeta, as they were when subscriptions were canceled due to poor sales. In this way, Mexican colonists subscribed to, in addition to the items already mentioned, a luxury edition of Don Quixote printed in Spain, engravings of pre-Columbian antiquities, and an illustrated encyclopedia.32 We can gauge the efficacy of these subscriptions in shaping taste and tasteful collections through wills and inventories compiled as estates were settled following their owners’ deaths. While the cursory manner in which probate inventories listed printed images precludes linking subscription prints to specific private art collections—most inventories unfortunately just list the number of prints the deceased owned and whether these were framed—books are more easily traced. Comparison of books advertised in the Gazeta and surviving library inventories reveals that texts sold via newspaper subscriptions entered the collections of the viceroyalty’s literate elite. A Mexican edition of Tomás de Iriarte’s Poema de la música offered by subscription in 1784 is a good example, as the Mexican edition of this text was available only via subscription. The full notice explained that the Gazeta editor viewed the newspaper as the best medium to reach “the aficionados and lovers of good taste” and offer them “works of singular poetry and elegance.” These literary exemplars were chosen to celebrate the achievements of “our Nation,” meaning the collective intellectual elite of Spain and New

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Spain. To sweeten the deal, the editor promised to add the list of subscribers to the book, “so that for all time the names of these zealous Patriots are known.”33 This message clearly worked and the book immediately found its way into the libraries of four important Mexicans whose inventories have survived to the present: academy founder Jerónimo Antonio Gil, Bishop Antonio Bergosa y Jordán, Bishop Manuel Ignacio González y Campillo, and intellectual Antonio de León y Gama.34 The significance of the subscription cannot be underestimated for our purposes. The advertisement baldly employed the rhetoric of good taste that merged aesthetic judgment and social distinction. Readers, anxious to demonstrate both their good taste and their membership within the socially distinct class of persons of taste, acted and purchased the book to add to their collections. It consequently seems clear from this and other, similar examples that literate colonists viewed the newspaper as the location for taste cultivation. Authored by their peers, the Gazeta de México stories and advertisements operated as primers of tastefulness for Mexicans anxious to continuously be and be seen as persons of taste. The Iriarte subscription notice is also significant for referencing another issue that has appeared throughout this essay but has yet to be addressed. That is, it referenced the politics of the Mexican person of taste and the unique issues of tastefulness in a colonial context. In this example, the person of taste was described as a patriot as he promoted the glories of Spanish literature. The other subscriptions mentioned briefly offered a Spanish art treatise, engravings of the Málaga cathedral created specifically for émigrés from that Spanish city, an edition of the most significant example of Spanish literature—Don Quixote—commissioned by the prince, and a monumental map of Mexico City. In the advertisement discussed earlier, persons of taste were encouraged to purchase the “appreciable Mexican work” of Nicolás Enríquez. And the notice described at the opening of the essay encouraged colonists to purchase an engraving of the zócalo, which the viceroy commissioned and dedicated to the Spanish monarchs, according to its inscription.35 In the rhetoric of taste employed in the Gazeta de México, politics (in the form of national identity) and tastefulness were inseparable. The political identity of the person of taste referenced in the newspaper defies the easy paradigm of Creole patriots versus Peninsulars, or Spanish royalists, that we have come to expect in the late colonial era. It instead reflects the social class of the newspaper’s readership: the merchants and bureaucrats of New Spain’s urban centers—some locally born, some from the

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Spanish peninsula. Regardless of the differences that would soon divide them over Mexico’s independence from Spain, they were both, at least in the newspaper, españoles of Mexico: lovers of the Spanish nation on both sides of the Atlantic; heirs to the literary and artistic traditions of the peninsula and, increasingly, indigenous antiquity; and admirers of European culture (to a point policed by the Inquisition) yet victims of the anti-Spanish biases of other European nations.36 Perhaps in making their purchases, they sorted themselves into Creoles and Peninsulars—the former attracted more to the appreciable Mexican paintings by Enríquez, the latter more to engravings of the Málaga cathedral—but as it appeared in the newspaper, the culture of Mexico’s españoles was unified. Such was their imagined community that was defined in the newspaper: “this ship with that bride,” or in our case, this map with that book, this Mexican painting with that print from Spain. Their good taste was patriotic and their purchases reified their identity as españoles of good taste. This vision of tastefulness consequently agrees with the writings of contemporary theorist Father Pedro Márquez, who argued that good taste is relative and is shaped by national identity. Here we see the final argument I wish to make about the rhetoric of good taste deployed in the Gazeta. That is, good taste operated as one more index, along with light skin, ancestry, dress, speech, and other characteristics, to distinguish Mexico’s elite españoles from the masses who, in the Spanish colonial context, were non-noble Indians and members of the socalled society of castes, New Spain’s complicated system of racial classifications based on intermarriage. This was important not just for racist motives, which abounded, but also because classification as español carried with it a host of legal, professional, and social privileges, from relief from certain taxes, to the right to wear silk and bear arms, to access to certain professions and admission to convents or advanced study at the university or seminary.37 As Magali Carrera has amply demonstrated, elite colonists in the era studied here zealously defended their status as españoles. They did so through appeals to their genealogy, of course, but also through evidence of their moral behavior and good judgment. Being español was not just a biological imperative; it was, as Carrera demonstrates, about the calidad, or quality, of Spaniard, which she defines as encompassing “occupation, wealth, purity of blood, honor, integrity, and place of origin.” 38 Being español took the whole body, performing appropriately in its proper context. And since artistic taste is, after all, a function of the eye within that body, possessing good taste is another defining feature of calidad.

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These were the persons with good taste and other qualities of español who distinguished themselves from those of non-Spanish calidad, which would include poor taste. In fact, good taste was perhaps the best way to distinguish charlatans “passing” for elite españoles, since good taste is not easy to fake. As mentioned earlier in this essay, good taste was the product of breeding, upbringing, and lifelong cultivation. Whereas the advertisements linking specific objects to good taste might seem to give these charlatans precisely the information they needed to purchase their way toward elite status, their attempts would immediately be seen as hollow mimicry. In previous work I have argued that the landscape and genre prints hanging on the walls of homes in casta paintings stand in for the attempt to “pass” into polite society (or at least for elite fears about passing), but their tattered edges reveal the impossibility of truly altering the owner’s status.39 The same may perhaps be said of the landscape paintings and prints massed on the walls of the anonymous casta painting De español y morisca nace albina: the display of the recently designated tasteful landscape paintings—especially when hung above the gruesome bloodletting below—may have signified poor taste to an elite, tasteful viewer. The pictured mimicry by these plebes flatters the elite through the imitation of their polite art-buying activities but is rendered neuter by the awkwardness of its frayed edge. Surely no tasteful art collector would place a gallery of paintings and prints in a bloody barber/phlebotomy shop; such objects were reserved for gabinetes and salones de estrados. Items reflecting the tastefulness of the elite could be purchased, but good taste itself was not for sale. The Gazeta notices seemed to suggest that españoles needed to purchase tasteful items to reify and maintain their status, but they needed to possess that status in the first place to truly be the persons of taste called out in the newspaper advertisements. To return to the Gazeta, nonelite native, black, and mixed-race persons appeared in the paper only rarely: when they reached a remarkable age, ran away from their slave owners, or gave birth to a baby born with profound deformities (figure 5.2), such as the “child monster” born to Otomí Indian parents in 1789 (figure 5.2). The contributors to the newspaper treated them like scientific specimens to be studied in their curiosity, misery, and misfortune; children born with birth defects were, along with inventions, one of the few topics illustrated in the paper. And while indigenous antiquity and its monuments began to enter the newspaper as examples of great achievement and the product of native intelligence comparable to the architecture of ancient Rome, the Gazeta stories identified them only as objects of scholarly

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and curious, not tasteful, interest.40 They would not be described as beautiful or worthy of aesthetic appreciation until closer to Mexico’s independence from Spain.41 And it was furthermore only the indigenous products of antiquity made at the behest of native nobility that appealed to the “curious literate,” not questions regarding the welfare of living, common Indians. The Gazeta advertisements and stories deploying the rhetoric of good taste may consequently be seen as referencing more than aesthetic judgment. It was one more way to distinguish oneself in a time and place when distinction was more than an academic question; it was, to New Spain’s españoles, crucially important. Unlike the European definitions of good taste, the Gazeta reveals the centrality of interestedness disguised in the language of disinterest. To borrow from Bourdieu, “taste classifies and it classifies the classifier.” 42 The repeated reference to persons of taste in the advertisements and stories in the newspaper served time and time again to reaffirm readers’ classification as españoles, to distinguish them from the masses. Far from appealing to disinterestedness, the rhetoric of tastefulness and the

Figure 5.2. Unknown engraver after José María de la Vega.

Child with Birth Defect. 1789. Engraving. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin.

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construction of the tasteful person in the Gazeta de México, this primer on being the Mexican person of taste, are wholly interested—in status, in national identity, in class distinction, in race.

Notes 1. “Se está grabando, de orden del Exmo. Señor Virrey, por D. Joseph Joachín Fabregat, Director de este ramo en la Real Academia de San Carlos, Profesor de conocido mérito, una grandiosa lámina que representará la vista de la Plaza mayor con todo su nuevo adorno.” Gazeta de México 8:27, December 28, 1796, 16. All translations mine unless otherwise noted. Spanish passages provided in the footnotes of this essay maintain the spelling, grammar, and punctuation of the original texts. 2. “[Y] habiendo dispuesto S. E. se abriese a sus expensas una lámina de la hermosa vista de la misma Plaza y Estatua, que ha dedicado a los Reyes nuestros Señores, ha determinado igualmente que para que no carezca el Público de la satisfacción de tener de ella algunos exemplares, que serán muy apreciables tanto por el alto objeto que en ellos presenta, como por la delicadeza y perfección del gravado, se expendan al moderado precio de quatro pesos cada uno, y su producto se distribuirá tambien en dotes para pobres de a trescientos pesos.” Gazeta de México 8:33, March 22, 1797, 274–75. 3. “Se han puesto ya para su venta en la Real Academia de S. Carlos las hermosas Estampas que representan la vista de la Plaza principal de esta Capital en que se ha colocado la Real Estatua Equestre del Rey nuestro Señor.” Gazeta de México 9:2, February 2, 1798, 16. 4. Burke as cited in John Brewer, “‘The most polite age and the most vicious’: Attitudes Towards Culture as a Commodity, 1660–1800,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), 350. 5. Vernon Hyde Minor, The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 27. 6. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984). 7. See Brewer, “The most polite age,” 352. 8. Justino Fernández, Estética del arte mexicano: Coatlicue, el Retablo de los Reyes, el hombre (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1972), 212. 9. Pedro Márquez, Dos opúsculos: Discurso sobre lo bello y dos monumentos de arquitectura mexicana, trans. and intro. Justino Fernández (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1972), 41.

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10. “Se venden 25 láminas de a mas de vara de largo y tres cuartas de ancho: muy apreciable y delicada Obra Mexicana, por su Autor el famoso Nicolás Enríquez; se componen de 13 Láminas del Apostolado con la clase y año de su Martirio en pequeño; quatro con los quatro Evangelistas y Quatro Patriarcas; una de la Trinidad, una del Salvador, una de la Concepción, una de la Piedad, una de Señor San Joseph, una de San Nicolas de Bari, una de San Francisco Xavier y otra de San Ignacio de Loyola. La persona de buen gusto que quisiere comprarlas ocurra al puente de la Leña, casa sin número, frente del Banco del Herrador.” Gazeta de México 2:46, December 4, 1787, 460. 11. Although outside the scope of the present essay, these advertisements offer a fascinating comparison with the history of art sales in contemporary England and France. On these, see Andrew McClellan, “Watteau’s Dealer: Gersaint and the Marketing of Art in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” Art Bulletin 78:3 (1996): 439–53; I. Pears, The Discovery of Painting: The Growth of Interest in the Arts in England, 1680–1768 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); and L. Lippincott, Selling Art in Georgian London: The Rise of Arthur Pond (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983). Unfortunately, the commerce of art sales in colonial New Spain has yet to be studied. 12. “Cristales, Candiles, Pantallas, Camapés, Sillas, Cómodas, Mesas, Rodastrados, Biombos y demás adornos necesarios, que reuniendo el gusto, la comodidad, duración y economía respectivas a todos estados, se han dispuesto, de varios precios para el mueblaje de una casa; hecho todo sobre dibujos del mejor gusto de Europa: y una colección de estampas de Santos de los mejores Profesores de la misma.” Gazeta de México 6:77, November 13, 1794, 644. 13. The ad likely used the label “rodastrado” to distinguish the screens used for the salon from the screen employed in the bedroom, which it called merely the “biombo.” On the painted screens known in New Spain as biombos, see Viento detenido: Mitologías e historias en el arte del biombo; Colección de biombos de los siglos XVII y XVIII de Museo Soumaya (Mexico City: Museo Soumaya, 1999); Marita Martínez del Río de Redo, “Los biombos en el ámbito doméstico: Sus programas moralizadores y didácticos,” in Juegos de ingenio y agudeza: La pintura emblemática de la Nueva España (Mexico City: Patronato del Museo Nacional de Arte, 1994); and Teresa Castelló and Marita Martínez del Río de Redo, Biombos novohispanos (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1970). 14. “El Illmo. Señor Dr. D. Gregorio Omaña y Sotomayor, dignísimo Obispo de esta Diócesi, con fecha de 27 de Octubre anterior, ha expresado el siguiente Decreto: ‘Para que las gentes de estos felices y católicos paises no abandonen la loable y piadosa costumbre que heredaron de sus mayores, de tener en las piezas mas principales y decentes de sus casas las santas Imágenes de nuestro Señor Jesuchristo, de su Santísima Madre, y de los demás Santos y Santas del Cielo, y dandoles el respectivo culto y dexando a pesar de la ridícula moda las profana

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pinturas para los Cenadores, Galerias &c. concedemos ochenta dias de indulgencia a todas las Personas de uno y otro sexo que procuraren conservar en las piezas mas decentes de sus habitaciones a las dichas santas Imágenes, dándoles la veneracion debida, y saludándolas y rezando ante ellas á los sagrados Originales que representan.’ Con el mismo laudable objeto se han concedido otros quarenta dias por otro de los Illmos. Señores Diocesanos de nuestra América a todas las Personas que concurran a restablecer la misma católica práctica.” Gazeta de México 7:57, December 11, 1795, 491. 15. “[S]olo han venido dos docenas en papel de Olanda y para adorno de Gavinetes.” Gazeta de México 7:57, December 11, 1795, 498. 16. In order to not create a circular argument whereby the anxiety over taste is proven only by advertisements exploiting the selfsame anxiety, let me offer other manifestations of what I see as the individual desire to be seen as possessing good taste, setting aside institutional examples, such as the foundation of the Royal Academy of Three Noble Arts of San Carlos. To do so, I will maintain the theme of newspapers, using examples drawn from a competing paper, the Gazeta de Literatura de México, published between 1788 and 1795. In a letter to editor José Antonio Alzate an anonymous author criticizes other editorialists, declaring sarcastically that they “quieren ostentar un gusto tan delicado.” José Antonio Alzate, Gazetas de literatura de México (Puebla: Buen Abad, 1831), 2:44. Another letter writer begins his critique by stating that the reader will see that “no estamos los americanos tan escasos de buen gusto.” Ibid., 1:223. Likewise, another essayist, weighing in on the recent publication of Antonio Nebrija’s grammar, wonders about Nebrija’s supporters: “¿Y aun se quejarán nuestros nebrisenses de que los miremos como unos hombres faltos de gusto, y los mas malos apreciadores del mérito de las obras?” Ibid., 1:392. These and many other examples speak of the social ridicule that bad taste engendered. This leads me to conclude that the advertisements using this language of tastefulness played upon a fear of similar ridicule. 17. For two contemporary Mexican libraries possessing works by these authors, see Cristina Gómez Álvarez and Francisco Téllez Guerrero, Una biblioteca obispal: Antonio Bergosa y Jordán 1802 (Puebla: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1997); and Carlos Herrejón Peredo, “Benito Díaz de Gamarra a través de su biblioteca,” Boletín del Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas 2 (1988): 149–89. 18. “Cortes mas cultas de la Europa”; “los curiosos Literatos”; “Joya preciosa de la Imperial Corona de nuestro Soberano CARLOS . . . carecen . . . de un cúmulo de noticias muy peregrinas, que les serían de mucho provecho.” Gazeta de México 1, [1784], n.p. 19. The first Gazeta de México, edited by Juan Ignacio de Castorena y Ursúa, appeared in 1722 and lasted six months. From 1728 to 1739 Juan Francisco Sahagún de Arévalo Ladrón de Guevara directed the second iteration of the periodical, offering New Spanish readers local and European stories.

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20. Patricia Ann Drwall Adank, “Accommodation and Innovation: The Gazeta de México, 1784 to 1810” (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 1980), 91. 21. When López Cancelada assumed control of the Gazeta, the paper took a more clearly royalist position, a fact López explained to the Spanish supreme court upon his expulsion from the viceroyalty over his criticism of the viceroy. During his tenure as editor, López explained, he worked closely with the Audiencia de México: “Al mismo tiempo de hallarme ocupado en estos recomendables objetos, no cesé mi fidelidad y patriotismo en llevar adelante las grandes ideas de vuestros Decano de aquella Real Audiencia Don Ciriaco González Carvajal . . . y SubDecano Don Guillermo de Aguirre . . . sobre mantener con el mayor cuidado y vigilancia la opinión pública a favor de la Metrópoli en todas la Provincias de aquel vasto Reyno por medio de la Gazeta.” Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain, Mexico 2792, fol. 3v. 22. “A imitación de la Corte de Madrid y otras de Europa, se dé a luz en este Reyno una Gazeta de las noticias dignas de saberse.” Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City (hereafter AGN), Bandos, 1783, vol. 12, exp. 70, fol. 390. 23. “Todos los países cultos de la Europa han adoptado como verdadero medio para la instrucción universal y pública el de hacer saber en Gacetas semanarias ya hallazgos útiles a la humanidad y a las ciencias ya sucesos raros o asombrosos que sirven, o para la detestación, o para el buen ejemplo, y ya noticias de las demás potencias que hacen conocer la constitución de los Reinos, satisfaciendo el gusto de los curiosos en cualquier distancia[, s]emejante ramo de ilustración no establecido en estas [partes] hasta [hace] muy pocos años. . . . [P]ero no podrá corresponder a la esperanza de sus utilidades y ventajas mientras se escaseen a su Autor sucesos y noticias con que llenar dicho papel periódico.” AGN, Bandos, 1791, vol. 16, exp. 19, fol. 31. 24. “[H]echos gazetables.” Adank, “Accommodation and Innovation,” 236. 25. Ibid., 140. During periods of thin submissions, Valdés (and later López) drew information from European periodicals. Both editors additionally published European stories when events on the continent demanded. When Spain joined the coalition of countries at war with France in 1793, for example, Valdés published several dozen issues filled exclusively with news from the peninsula. 26. Since these scientific illustrations were not included as images to be valued principally for their beauty or aesthetic value, they fall outside the scope of this essay. 27. There were other newspapers in Mexico City during the Gazeta’s long run. The two most significant were the Gazeta de Literatura de México from 1788 to 1795 and the Diario de México from 1805 to 1816. In many ways, the Diario usurped the Gazeta de México’s privileged role as the viceregal capital’s major newspaper as the Gazeta floundered in the early nineteenth century. 28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 6.

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29. Ibid., 25. 30. Ibid., 62. 31. The Palomino treatise appears in Gazeta de México 7:63, December 23, 1795; the Málaga cathedral prints in 1:29, January 25, 1785; and the map 5:4, February 21, 1792. 32. The new Don Quixote edition was advertised in Gazeta de México 1:20, October 6, 1784; prints of pre-Columbian antiquities from Xochicalco were discussed in 1:44, August 9, 1785; and the illustrated encyclopedia was advertised in 7:55, October 20, 1795. 33. The full advertisement reads, El Autor de este Impreso, haviendo noticiado hallarse en ánimo de dar a luz por Subscripcion las obras mas selectas de nuestra Nacion, tanto de Oratoria [sic] como de Poesía, ha tenido despues por coneniente avisar al Público, que siendo este el medio mas facil, breve y cómodo, y aun acaso el único, para que los aficionados y amantes del buen gusto puedan adquirir esta apreciable colección, como que les sale casi a medio real por cada pliego; no pondrá mano a la empresa hasta en tanto que se congregue el número competente de Individuos que le asegure el despacho de la mayor parte de la impresion; pues cree que este proyecto tan recomendable por qualesquiera parte que se registre por la inmediata utilidad que de su verificacion ha de redundar a la Patria, no debe servirle en ningun modo de menoscabo de sus intereses. En esta inteligencia, deseando eficazmente surta el buen efecto que le mueve a la frente de ella, para que en todo tiempo se sepan los combres de los zelosos Patriotas que la han fomentado con su influxo y auxilio; y para que corra quanto sea posible la noticia no cerrerá la Subscripcion hasta el último dia del corriente Febrero, pues como tiene advertido, no se venderá exemplar alguno que no sea por Subscripcion. (Gazeta de México 1:30, February 8, 1785, 246) 34. Gil’s probate inventory and other documents relating to the division of his assets are found in the AGN, Ramo Intestados, vol. 178, exp. 16, fols. 198–544. The inventory is transcribed and analyzed in Ilona Katzew, “Algunos datos nuevos sobre el fundador de la Real Academia de San Carlos, Jerónimo Antonio Gil,” Memorias (Museo Nacional de Arte, México) 7 (1998): 31–65. The library of Bergosa appears in Álvarez and Guerrero, Una biblioteca obispal. Campillo’s library is inventoried in Cristina Gómez Álvarez and Francisco Téllez Guerrero, Un hombre de estado y sus libros: El Obispo Campillo. 1740–1813 (Puebla: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 1997). The list of Antonio de León y Gama’s books is in Roberto Moreno, Ensayos de bibliografía mexicana: Autores,

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libros, imprenta, bibliotecas (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1986). 35. The inscription on the plate explains that Viceroy Branciforte “hizo grabar esta Estampa que dedica a Sus Magestades, en Nuevo testimonio de su fidelidad, amor y respeto.” 36. This agrees with Jordana Dym’s analysis of the Gazeta de Guatemala, which she argues employed a rhetoric of “one people” in the captaincy general. See Jordana Dym, “Conceiving Central America: A Bourbon Public in the Gazeta de Guatemala (1797–1807),” in Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830, ed. Gabriel B. Paquette (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 102. Scholarship on the Real Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del País, an association of reform-minded Spaniards that made its way to New Spain and drew membership from Peninsulars and Creoles, reveals a similar shared interest in the good of the state. See Elías Trabulse, “Los científicos mexicanos socios de la Real Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del País,” in La R.S.B.A.P. y Méjico: IV Seminario de Historia de la Real Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del País, ed. María Cristina Torales Pacheco (Mexico City: Seminario de Historia de la Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País, 1993), 2:527–36. 37. On the sociedad de castas, see Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 38. Magali Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Painting (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 6. 39. See Kelly Donahue-Wallace, “Picturing Prints in Viceregal New Spain,” The Americas 64:3 (January 2008): 325–49. On casta painting, see Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); and more recently, Ilona Katzew and Susan DeansSmith, eds., Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). 40. Intellectual curiosity was, however, a characteristic of the Spanish man of taste. As Pedro Álvarez de Miranda writes in his analysis of the lexicon of the Spanish Enlightenment, “[E]1 buen gusto había llegado a ser algo más que la mencionada capacidad de discernimiento intelectual, para designar también la afición al estudio, a las letras y ciencias.” Pedro Álvarez de Miranda, Palabras e ideas: El léxico de la ilustración temprana en España (1680–1760) (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1992), 503. 41. My analysis of the Gazeta stories about pre-Columbian monuments reveals that authors avoided the vocabulary of aesthetic appreciation and tastefulness—beautiful, ordered, fine—until after 1800. 42. Bourdieu, Distinction, 6.

Chapter Six

The Plantation Landscape and Its Architecture Classicism, Representation, and Slavery

Charles Burroughs

Architecture both reveals and hides, and what a viewer is permit-

ted to see, or not to see, depends on many kinds of cultural determinations and social circumstances. In modern societies the concern with privacy is an obvious factor.1 A far older, though related, concern is that with honor. It was central for example, in ancient Rome, where honor depended on the control of women and service personnel, who were invariably slaves.2 As in other traditional societies, Roman honor might depend on the visibility of slaves, not just their labor. In this essay I focus on societies suspended between economic and social epochs, or—in crude terms—between tradition and modernity, in order to explore the circumstances under which the architectural display of a labor force in itself, perhaps influenced by the Roman model, might confer honor. Honor and shame are closely linked concepts: shame connotes a loss of honor; it is something to be avoided or overcome. In classical discourse about human behavior and ethical norms, however, shame had positive value.3 For the Romans, shame (pudor) marked off humans from animals and was grounded in human nature; proof was blushing, an involuntary reaction to certain stimuli that indicated the moral sense of an individual.4 The emphasis on the natural basis of shame was not disturbed by the assumption that it was reserved for free men, and to a degree for women, but had no place in the 114

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life of slaves.5 Throughout the long history of the empire, the sense of shame was crucial for the way a member of the Roman elite presented himself to the world, not only through his conduct, gestures, and dress but also the organization of his domestic environment. The notion of shame, I suggest, has been of crucial importance for the sort of architecture, especially residential architecture, that we call neoclassical. This is associated with one of the most shameful episodes of global history, the full realization of plantation regimes and the transatlantic slave trade in the long eighteenth century. The “polite” literature of the period is, however, silent about the sources of the wealth of its protagonists, and the same is largely true of architecture.6 Architectural classicism is by no means homogeneous, however, for it embraces disparate traditions of architecture and the shaping of domestic space. In the following I review American cultural landscapes from the era of “second slavery,” that is, of a vast expansion of plantation societies concomitant with industrialization.7 These can, I argue, be usefully understood through the lens of ideas about honor and, especially, shame, bound up with differing conceptions of the display, or even representation, of enslaved labor. At the heart of early modern architectural classicism stands the sixteenth-century architect Andrea Palladio, whose villa designs inspired countless emulators throughout Europe and the colonial world. A key event in this familiar story was Giacomo Leoni’s English edition of Palladio’s Four Books on Architecture, with slick copperplate engravings that caught the eye of patrons on both sides of the Atlantic.8 Simpler pattern books appealed to busy builders, and countless houses, grand and otherwise, were built or remodeled to conform to new expectations and funded, more often than not, from the proceeds of the burgeoning eighteenth-century commerce in sugar and slaves in the American colonies.9 The second of Palladio’s Four Books is an anthology of his designs for both urban and rural houses, beginning with the organization of a model aristocratic house.10 Well into the nineteenth century, the analogy between an ideal building and the human body was a familiar conception.11 Palladio takes it further, observing the customary concealment of certain parts of a body because they are neither beautiful nor “honest.” For Cicero this is in accordance with nature: “Human modesty (verecundia) merely imitates the handiwork of natura, which has designed the human body in such a way that the parts that have an honorable appearance (species honesta) are put right where everyone can see them, while the parts that involve the necessities of

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nature, being ugly (deformis), are tucked away out of sight.”12 Consistently, Palladio insists that in a building, as in a body, there are spaces and activities that either do not confer beauty or actively detract; he lists kitchens, storerooms, and laundry facilities. In a building, accordingly, the distinction of served and service areas is just as “natural” as the corresponding distinction in the body was thought to be. The crucial move is the transfer to the built environment of the shameful overtones traditionally applied to the naughty parts of a body. What is shameful, in this perspective, is the display of those who labor, who instead belong out of sight in a basement area, underneath the world of the socially acceptable. Applied to the upright human body, Palladio’s directional language echoes the relationship of the human head and torso to the “shameful” pudenda. A house does not merely symbolize the honor of the owner, therefore; it embodies it. The concern with honor is a familiar theme in the history of the Old South of the United States.13 The implications for architecture are, however, complex, not least because of an increasing tendency, at least in eighteenth-century England, to diminish the visibility of servants.14 When Palladio discusses rural residences, as opposed to elite housing in general, he again insists on the separation of served and service space. His villa designs fall into distinct types, or ways of managing this very separation: there can be an independent main house, typically fronted by a pedimented portico; or a compound structure uniting the main house and flanking dependencies; or (relatively rare in Palladio) a courtyard around which residential functions are arrayed. Broadly speaking, the first type is most typical of the English and Anglo-American tradition; the second occurs occasionally in Britain and the United States, especially at the high end, and we will meet it later in Brazil; and the courtyard type is generally absent from Anglo North America but has echoes in Luso-Hispanic territories.15 A further classical type featuring surrounding colonnades is entirely non-Palladian. In the following I will explore, in New World cultural landscapes, the fortunes of these “villa” or plantation house types and the implications of their contrasting representational or even symbolic character, as well as their functional aspect. An important issue at the outset is the relationship between Palladio’s discussion of rural residences and that of Vitruvius in the Ten Books on Architecture, the only surviving architectural treatise from antiquity. In his own second book Palladio reconstructs the layout of an ancient villa or farm complex, with a central courtyard. There is a telling divergence from

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Vitruvius’s explicit contrast of the courtyard of an urban house, located in the rear and used as a garden space, and that of a rural house, located in front and emphatically a work area.16 In Vitruvius’s account, neither the presence nor the display of slavery is shameful, for he makes no mention of the slaves who were surely occupied in and around the courtyard throughout the year. Nor does he address their housing, probably located around the courtyard, close to the work spaces and easy to control. Palladio, in contrast, hides servants, or at least assigns them a subordinate place within the hierarchically arranged architecture of a villa complex, whose unity and coherence assert the honor of the owner. Palladianism was the chief strand in a general and very widely diffused process of architectural transformation. Well into the nineteenth century, wherever resources permitted, some variety of classicism was the prevalent architectural idiom for the construction of an imposing house in England or in Anglophone American territories. The story was very different in Spain and its colonies. The first Spanish edition of Palladio’s entire treatise did not appear until 1797; it was based on Leoni’s early eighteenth-century edition. The translator José (or Joseph; he was Valencian) Antonio Ortíz y Sanz brought out a Spanish edition of Vitruvius in the same year.17 Both books were published by the court printer and so were evidently related to the reformist agendas of the Bourbon monarchy and the concern, resented in the colonies, over instituting a more rational administration.18 Thanks to the turbulent history of early nineteenth-century Spain, the books had little immediate effect. By the early nineteenth century, Palladian as well as Vitruvian models were certainly available to the Hispanic world, whether through publications or through direct or indirect knowledge of buildings in England or the new American republic. Scholars have increasingly explored the common history of as well as the connections between American plantation societies, stressing, for example, the movement of persons and ideas in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, when numerous planters came by way of Cuba to Louisiana.19 Before turning to Latin America, I will explore certain features of building in the Mississippi Valley, in part to outline a history of plantation architecture that throws Luso-Hispanic plantation architecture into relief. But I also want to draw attention to contrasts within Mississippi Valley plantation architecture that raise questions about the relationship of house and surroundings, including the slave quarters, as well as about conceptions of honor and its representation in the built environment.

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To briefly sum up a complex history, in the Mississippi Valley two major cultures and architectural traditions met. Long after the Louisiana Purchase a largely Francophone elite operated large plantations in the south of the region, with houses of two main types. The so-called Creole cottage, generally of one floor, is raised above the ground on brick piers, sometimes above a true basement. Typically a double-pitched roof spreads shallowly over verandas on the front and back, or sometimes on all sides. Access is generally by means of a central but not prominent stair rising to the front portico, which faces toward the river or bayou.20 More affluent and socially prominent landowners built mansions enclosed by porticoes in an arrangement that preceded the Greek Revival but would soon lend itself to Greek ornamentation, with posts treated as columns rising impressively through two stories, as in an ancient Greek peripteral temple.21 Even more than a Creole cottage, such a house presented much the same aspect to slaves working behind it as to a visitor approaching from the front: both types provided an excellent surveillance platform over the slaves’ work spaces and residential “quarters.”22 In contrast to the Creole cottage, on the whole exterior staircases are lacking in the “temple” type; instead, staircases are located within the body of the house or, very often, within the porticoes.23 It is as if the front stair was regarded as a feature of a lower class of dwelling, and not as conferring honor.24 Certainly, when an impressive front stair ascends to the second floor of a mansion, this tends to be a later addition.25 In contrast, the Palladian type of house favored by Anglophone Americans is emphatically directional; its ultimate model is the Roman, not Greek, temple.26 The elaborate façade with its grand stair greeted the visitor, while the relatively modest rear faced buildings and spaces mainly used by slaves. The Janus-faced French arrangement has no echoes in the Palladian tradition favored by the “English.” Indeed, some scholars see the emergence of the Creole house in relation not only to a larger French but perhaps also a Spanish colonial world.27 In general, Mississippi Valley plantation architecture offers a well-documented array of examples with striking contrasts among both formal and spatial tendencies, that is, between different kinds of classicism. Whether culturally French or “English,” plantation owners felt no shame at the source of their wealth and neat rows of slave cabins might be visible from the big house, orderly but lacking architectural elaboration. In Latin American plantation societies, in contrast, slave quarters were frequently conspicuous architectural features. I begin with the Paraíba

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Valley, inland from Rio de Janeiro, which flourished as a coffee-producing region in the early and mid-nineteenth century.28 The earliest plantation houses are fairly informal, but by the middle of the century more pretentious estate houses appear, often reflecting the proximity of Petrópolis, summer seat of the Brazilian imperial court. Many of the houses survived, though in varying degrees of preservation, the collapse of the regional coffee economy after c. 1870, when the center of production moved to the south.29 However, the appearance of the houses in the later nineteenth century is documented by extremely detailed panoramic views by the Italian painter Nicolau Antonio Facchinetti, who from 1849 established himself in Rio de Janeiro as a painter of views of the capital and its environs, as well as portraits.30 In images of country houses, Facchinetti gives prominence to the slave quarters, the senzala, within the plantation complex, the fazenda. As other evidence confirms, the senzala was typically fully visible to a visitor approaching a fazenda, whatever the architectural character of the latter.31 Though relatively grand, the estate known as Flores do Paraíso illustrates the point (figure 6.1). Facchinetti clearly indicates the tripartite arrangement of the main house and its dependencies—a Palladian motif. On the right is the production area with the drying ground (terreira) situated in front of a shed that still contains an American-made coffee-grinding mill. In front of the house we see a garden of the “picturesque” English type and an avenue of imperial palms flanking the approach from the main road. At the rear two wings of the horseshoe-shaped house extend toward the adjacent hill, from which an aqueduct brought water to power the mill; the wings—one containing the chapel, the other the kitchen—enclose a space that was laid out as a garden, with a central grotto-fountain. This perhaps originally constituted the pateo, a rectangular space around which many plantation complexes were organized.32 To the left is a stable range that linked the main house to the projecting senzala, the only part of the complex that today no longer exists: as it appears in the painting it consisted of a courtyard into which the slaves’ rooms opened. Remarkably, the route of the labor force from the senzala to the processing area must have taken them in front of the house. Perhaps the owners expected the slaves to be disciplined merely by regular and ritualized movement through an ordered space shaped by symmetrical buildings, that is, through the mere experience of architectural classicism! Certainly, the enforcement of discipline often took more explicit forms.33 A further factor was the hope of manumission, which was not uncommon in Brazil.34

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Figure 6.1. Nicolau Facchinetti. Fazenda Flores do Paraíso. 1785.

Private collection, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Courtesy DezenoveVinte—Arte Brasileira do Século XIX e Início do XX.

In the Paraíba region the conspicuous place of the Flores senzala within a residential-productive complex is not untypical. There is nothing like it in North America. There are, however, parallels in the sugar plantations that transformed the Cuban economy in the early nineteenth century.35 Many of these no longer exist, but their appearance is known from lithographs published in installments from 1855 and then in a lavish album of 1857 titled Los ingenios (Plantations) by a leading planter, Justo Germano Cantero, who funded the project and contributed the text, working with the immigrant French artist Eduard Laplante.36 The book continued an established tradition of the celebration of sugar production, using slave labor, in Cuba.37 Laplante’s panoramic images of sugar estates detail the various components of the estates and celebrate technological advances, though certainly the claim to visual accuracy coincides with the concern to represent the system of exploitation at its best. Justo Cantero was a remarkable figure: originally from San Domingo, he had trained as a doctor in the United States and had used his medical skill and, no doubt, considerable diplomatic ability to establish himself in Trinidad, at the time a rapidly developing part of the island, marked especially by the presence of planters who had fled Haiti.38 By the time of the publication of Los ingenios, Cantero himself owned a couple of the

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plantations, including Buena Vista in the Trinidad Valley (Valle de los Ingenios), southeast of Havana. A notable lithograph (figure 6.2) shows the relationship between Cantero’s house and the Iznaga Manaca plantation, with its well-known tower.39 Cantero had acquired this estate by marrying the widow of the former owner, whom he had befriended and, according to some accounts, had removed from the scene by means of poison. Cantero describes own house at Buena Vista, which crowns a small hill, as dominating the entire valley and providing views of other plantations. The print shows it facing toward the Iznaga tower and the distant sea. The lithograph of Buena Vista shows the house fronted by a portico, seen from the side but apparently of classical design and running the whole width of the building (curiously, it is not mentioned in Cantero’s text). A striking reference to the house’s environs as forming an “amphitheater” echoes Palladio’s famous account of the landscape setting of the Villa Rotonda (2.18). The lithograph emphasizes the working elements of the Cantero estate, not least the cluster of cabins, bohios, on the side of the hill. The claim to

Figure 6.2. Eduard Laplante. Buena Vista Plantation, Valle de los Ingenios.

From Justo G. Cantero, Los ingenios, ed. Luís Miguel García Mora and Antonio Santamaría García (Havana: Marquier, 1857; repr., Madrid: Centro Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, 2005), 201.

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accuracy of representation is explicitly and uniquely included within the image; on a low hill in the foreground three men stand in the rays of the rising sun, seeing the estate from roughly the same point of view as the viewer of the print. One of them—surely Laplante—writes on a tree, thereby inscribing himself within the landscape as if displacing the artist’s signature from the surface of the print, the representation, to the world represented within it. The image of Cantero’s Buena Vista plantation captures a social and economic landscape that was already in decline in 1857, when the Trinidad plantations were losing ground to regions better connected, notably by rail, to port facilities and with fertile land for expansion. There is some irony, then, in Cantero’s explicit purpose in producing a lavish book designed to illustrate the technological advances that were transforming the landscape of large parts of the island, not least through the adoption of steam power in the mills themselves and to power steam locomotives, allowing the opening of new areas of sugar production. Industrialization is frankly associated with slavery in the book, and Cantero surprisingly lays almost as much emphasis on the social machinery of the estates as on the literal machines, even if, as often noted, the individual slaves and/or laborers are tiny and hardly recognizable as belonging to any specific ethnic group. By now the flow of slaves was slowing and indentured laborers from China made up a sizable component of the workforce, as Cantero notes. One plantation featured in his book—Ingenio Intrépido (figure 6.3)—boasts a pagoda-like structure, which was, however, functional, as it contained the inevitable bell that ordered the workday.40 Such exotic architecture contrasts with the rational scene of production around it, but it is consistent with Cantero’s approving references to pleasure grounds, notably gardens a la Inglesa, on certain plantations.41 By dramatizing the presence of the Chinese, the pagoda may have served to draw attention away from the African origin and enslaved status of the majority of the workers. Cantero had no illusions about this. He nowhere doubts the institution of slavery itself, but he reserves particular praise for owners who treat their workforce well, providing solidly built quarters, sometimes with a treeshaded courtyard. By 1850, accommodation for the labor force in separate huts or bohios like those represented on Cantero’s own plantations, both Buena Vista and Güinía de Soto (figure 6.4), was old fashioned.42 Sufficiently affluent owners now housed their workers in barracones, often in the form of uniform structures around a square or rectangular courtyard (barracones de patio), entered by a prominent portal placed in the center of one long side.

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Figure 6.3. Eduard Laplante. Ingenio Intrépido. Lines of bohios appear to the left, beyond the “palomar chinesco.” The infirmary has the layout of a small barracón, with a single entrance “para impedir las communicaciones.” From Justo G. Cantero, Los ingenios, ed. Luís Miguel García Mora and Antonio Santamaría García (Havana: Marquier, 1857; repr., Madrid: Centro Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, 2005), 232.

Unlike bohios, customarily built by the occupants themselves, relying on techniques and models of African origin, barracones de patio were emphatically European or at least Euro-American in design.43 Several ingenios among those depicted by Laplante contain impressive barracones, whose rectangular or square layout and prominent gatehouse are clearly visible (figures 6.5, 6.8).44 Exterior walls, either windowless or at best containing small, high windows, were designed to admit air rather than light, and certainly not to allow exterior views. Such barracones not only housed slaves as individuals but also accommodated the raising of children—part of the answer to the looming labor shortage. Of course, as has often been pointed out, the barracón de patio was primarily an instrument of control and supervision, as well as of coerced community among the labor force.45 As with the notorious panopticon, the barracón de patio enforced social discipline through an architecture that provided the constant possibility of surveillance.

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Figure 6.4. Eduard Laplante. Ingenio Güinía de Soto. This plantation is located in the extreme northeast of the Trinidad Valley. The slaves’ bohios, called “ranchos” by Cantero, appear in the left background of the lithograph. From Justo G. Cantero, Los ingenios, ed. Luís Miguel García Mora and Antonio Santamaría García (Havana: Marquier, 1857; repr., Madrid: Centro Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, 2005), 136.

The Laplante lithographs illustrate a key shift in the history of the plantation as a space of control as well as of successive technologies and productive regimes.46 Though the shift from one type of slave housing to another in economically dynamic areas in Cuba has been recognized, as far as I know no previous observer has noted the contrast in Los ingenios between plantations with clustered bohios, forming a kind of village, and those in which the barracón extends into the social realm the rationality of the new technology (in the image of Ácana [figure 6.5] a steam locomotive dominates the foreground). In one print of a plantation with bohios, moreover, a man—evidently an overseer—walks with a raised whip behind a line of men, apparently chained in groups of four, crossing a wide expanse toward the plantation buildings (figures 6.4, 6.6).47 The men are perhaps so-called bozales, new arrivals from Africa about to be broken in to the plantation regime.48 This frank representation of violence subverts the general view of the lithographs in Cantero’s volume as showing the plantation as “a harmonious, civilized

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Figure 6.5. Eduard Laplante. Ingenio Ácana. At this plantation, located near Matanzas, Cantero praises the large size and stone construction of the “hermoso” barracón. In the lithograph it appears to the right in the middle distance. From Justo G. Cantero, Los ingenios, ed. Luís Miguel García Mora and Antonio Santamaría García (Havana: Marquier, 1857; repr., Madrid: Centro Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, 2005), 285.

space to support the notion of progress and to suppress the real relations of power and terror enacted therein.” 49 In his comments on this ingenio, moreover, Cantero characterizes the effect of smoke from the massive towers of the boiling house, set within forested surroundings, as worthy of the Italian baroque painter Salvator Rosa, notorious for his romantic paintings of rugged scenery, typically peopled by bandits (figure 6.7).50 Nothing could be more distant from the rationality claimed for the sugar industry in general; however, the plantation in question, Güinía de Soto, was located near Trinidad, not far from a wild coastal region that, with its coves and inlets, had long been known as a haunt of smugglers and lawless men, a landscape worthy of Rosa.51 Even more remarkably, the plantation belonged to Cantero himself. In his account of Güinía, Cantero draws attention to newly installed Derosne machinery that diminished reliance on increasingly scarce and expensive

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manual labor and produced sugar of an unrivalled whiteness.52 But the supremacy of the Derosne machinery was cut short in 1850 by a major technological advance occasioning a radical restructuring of both sugar production and the society of sugar; the new technology was beyond the means of most planters, many of whom now faced ruin. This was the era of the definitive decay of the Trinidad Valley. By the time of his association with Laplante on Los ingenios, Cantero knew that his properties were lagging behind evolving standards among his peers. It is difficult to assess the reasons for the inclusion in the image of Güinía of a man with the whip, a motif that shamelessly reveals the brutality that underlay the system, whatever the architecture, but that may have been especially associated with the bohio stage of development. Did Cantero himself harbor some skepticism about the disciplinary effectiveness of new architectural solutions, which he certainly didn’t introduce on his own plantations? The lithograph of the Ingenio Trinidad (figure 6.8) does not focus on the brave new technological world; rather, it presents a melancholic view of a rider passing remains of the virgin forest as he ascends a hill beyond

Figure 6.6. Detail: the man with the whip. Eduard Laplante. Ingenio Güinía de Soto.

From Justo G. Cantero, Los ingenios, ed. Luís Miguel García Mora and Antonio Santamaría García (Havana: Marquier, 1857; repr., Madrid: Centro Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, 2005), 136.

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Figure 6.7. Salvator Rosa. Ruins in a Rocky Landscape. C. 1640. Oil on canvas, 144.0 x 176.7 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art, gift of Rosenberg and Stiebel, Inc., 1958.472.

the edge of cultivated territory (compare the view of the Valle de la Magdalena [figure 6.9], near Matanzas, with its memories of massacre).53 At very least, Cantero’s rationalistic and optimistic tone, generally dominant in the lithographs as in his text, seems moderated on occasion by suggestions of an alternate attitude, which would have been justified by events.54 Whatever Cantero’s private views, he consistently praises the new-style barracones, especially as beneficial for the inhabitants. In the lithographs of Laplante the barracones are visible though often peripheral, and indeed the industrial facilities and workshops were typically completed before the construction of elaborate workers’ housing, as Cantero notes.55 The physical layout of the estates themselves includes the slave quarters as “monumental” elements in the representative architecture of the ingenios.56 This belongs in a tradition of classicism that certainly contrasts with Palladian models. As we saw, however, such patterns of spatial and visual organization echo ancient Roman practice. Though Cantero doesn’t cite Vitruvius in his introduction to his book, he parades a wide range of references to the major Roman writers on agriculture. He stresses the importance of symmetry in the layout of a plantation, perhaps echoing Vitruvius, for whom the concept is crucial

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Figure 6.8. Eduard Laplante. Ingenio Trinidad. Cantero praises the workmanship,

functionality, and square layout of the barracón, situated on higher ground, which contains baths for men and women. In Laplante’s lithograph it appears in the distance, to the right. From Justo G. Cantero, Los ingenios, ed. Luís Miguel García Mora and Antonio Santamaría García (Havana: Marquier, 1857; repr., Madrid: Centro Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, 2005), 166.

for his famous association of the human body and architecture.57 However much given to amusements, the elite audience for Cantero’s book comprised educated men, certainly enough to warrant his many classical references. Some readers surely knew Ortiz’s translation of Vitruvius, with its highly practical account of the agricultural villa and its courtyard. The emphasis on barracones in the Laplante lithographs and especially in Cantero’s texts provided colonial readers with an authoritative classical model compatible with the technological or even technocratic emphasis taken by Cantero, while also related to the venerable Hispanic tradition of courtyard architecture. In the modernizing haciendas of economically ascendant Cuba, then, allusions to a particular classical paradigm contributed to the assertion of social hierarchy and an idealized coercive and productive order. Alongside traditional view painting (Laplante’s association with Cantero began with two oil paintings executed for him), the new technique of lithography

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Figure 6.9. Valle de la Magdalena. The valley is also identified as the Valle de Matanzas, with reference to the historic massacre of settlers. The view is taken from “la loma del Paraiso.” From Justo G. Cantero, Los ingenios, ed. Luís Miguel García Mora and Antonio Santamaría García (Havana: Marquier, 1857; repr., Madrid: Centro Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, 2005), 207.

provided modernistic and, crucially, manipulable images of the transformations under way. According to Michael Zeuske, lithography was indeed favored over photography because it allowed and at the same time disguised the editing out of unwanted detail.58 Through a rhetoric of realism, lithography celebrated the achievement of a self-justifying, technologically progressive, yet inherently vulnerable modernity faced by constant challenges, from slave revolts and labor shortage to competition from other regions.59 In this process classicism no longer appears as a screen occluding the inevitable violence, as was the case in the Anglophone world of temple-fronted big houses, but rather in frank association with the apparatus of both production and coercion, including its human element.

_____ The author wishes to thank the Getty Foundation Collaborative Grant Program for support in developing this research and to thank Dale Tomich and Rafael Marquese for their example and fellowship and Renato Moreira for hospitality in Rio.

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1. Stephanie Coontz, The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families, 1600–1900 (London: Verso, 1988). 2. Robert Lendon, Empire of Honour: The Art of Government in the Roman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Carlin A. Barton, Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 3. Robert A. Kaster, “The Shame of the Romans,” TAPA 127 (1997): 9. 4. Barton, Roman Honor, 226: “The Romans yearned for and idealized autonomy and self-mastery, but the blush was one of the most important socializing mechanisms in ancient Rome precisely because it was involuntary and couldn’t be mastered.” The blush was the “sign/index of shame” (signum pudoris). 5. Romans assumed that slaves lacked pudor because they were unable to suffer diminution of status. Kaster, “Shame of the Romans,” 9. In the better-documented Atlantic world, slaves zealously preserved a sense of honor. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 337–38. 6. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Random House, 1993), 96. 7. Dale W. Tomich, “The Wealth of Empire: Francisco Arango y Parreno, Political Economy, and the Second Slavery in Cuba,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45 (2003): 4–28. Anthony E. Kaye, “The Second Slavery: Modernity in the Nineteenth-Century South and the Atlantic World,” Journal of Southern History 75:3 (2009): 627–50. 8. Charles Brownell, “Leoni Haunts Palladio’s Tomb: ‘Necessary Corrections’ to Four Books Continue to Distort Palladian Legacy,” Palladiana: Journal of the Center for Palladian Studies in America 3 (2008): 2. 9. Daniel D. Reiff, Houses from Books: Treatises, Pattern Books, and Catalogs in American Architecture, 1738–1950; A History and Guide (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001); John Harris, “The Pattern Book Phenomenon,” in Building by the Book, ed. Mario di Valmarana (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), 101–15; Mills Lane, Architecture of the Old South: Colonial and Federal (Savannah, GA: Beehive, 1996), 238–40. 10. For the English translation, see Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture, ed. Robert Tavernor and Richard Schofield (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 77. 11. According to Antoine-Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, “Disposition is to a building what configuration is to a body.” Dictionnaire d’architecture (1832), in Samir Younés, The True, the Fictive, and the Real: The Historical Dictionary of Quatremère de Quincy (London: Papadakis, 1999), 144. 12. Cicero, De Officiis 1.35.127, translated in Robert A. Kaster, Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 23. Cicero accepted the Stoic principle of the natural basis of ethics. Andrew R. Dyck, A Commentary on Cicero, “De Officiis” (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 302.

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13. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), ranges from slave owning to dueling. 14. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 219. 15. Mount Airy, Virginia, built in 1758–1762, includes dependent wings connected to the main house by passages. Frances Archer Christian and Susanne Williams Massie, Homes and Gardens in Old Virginia (Richmond, VA: Garrett and Massie, 2006), 53; Reiff, Houses from Books, 28. 16. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, “The Villa as Cultural Symbol,” in The Roman Villa: Villa Urbana, ed. Alfred Frazer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 46. 17. Los quatro libros de arquitectura de Andres Paladio, Vincentino, traducidos . . . por Don Joseph Francisco Ortiz y Sanz (Madrid: En la Imprenta Real, 1797; facsimile ed., Barcelona: Alta Fulla, 1987). See José García Melero, Literatura española sobre Artes Plásticas: Bibliografia aparecida en España entre los siglos XVI y XVIII (Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 2002): 64–66. 18. Jesús R. Escobar, The Plaza Mayor and the Shaping of Baroque Madrid (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11–12, 257–60; Gloria Mora Rodríguez, “The Image of Rome in Spain: Scholars, Artists and Architects in Italy During the 16th to 18th Centuries,” in Images of Rome: Perceptions of Ancient Rome in Europe and the United States in the Modern Age, ed. Richard Hingley, Supplementary Series 44 (Portsmouth, RI: JRA, 2001), 23–55. 19. Aaron Fogleman, “The Transformation of the Atlantic World, 1776–1867,” Atlantic Studies 6 (2009): 5–28; Thomas Benjamin, The Atlantic World: Europeans, Africans, Indians and Their Shared History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 20. Jonathan Fricker, “The Origins of the Creole Raised Plantation House,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 25:2 (1984): 137–53; Jessie Poesch and B. S. Bacot, eds., Louisiana Buildings, 1720–1940: The Historic American Buildings Survey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997); Fred Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 1714–1820 (Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 2004), 25. 21. The peristyle type, with surrounding colonnades, emerged in the New Orleans area by 1800, several years before the introduction of Greek ornamental features. For arguments in favor of a local evolution, see Lane, Architecture of the Old South, 40–42; Karen Kingsley, Buildings of Louisiana (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 21. 22. John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 6. See also pp. 151, 155, which discuss an apparent contrast with the Old South.

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23. Fricker, “Origins of the Creole Raised Plantation House,” 137–53. 24. A prominent case of the perhaps ideologically motivated retention of traditional, if idealized, Creole architectural elements is Destrehan plantation. W. Darrell Overdyke, Louisiana Plantation Homes: Colonial and Antebellum (New York: American Legacy Press, 1981); Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 52–54; Kingsley, Buildings of Louisiana, 173–74. 25. A prominent example is Parlange plantation, New Roads, Louisiana. Daspit, Louisiana Architecture, 32, dates the new front stair to c. 1840. See also Kingsley, Buildings of Louisiana, 415. Kingsley notes that axiality was introduced into the interior of “Creole” mansions, in the form of an “English” central hall (23–24). 26. Barbara S. Bacot, “The Plantation,” in Poesch and Bacot, Louisiana Buildings, 110. 27. Jay D. Edwards, “Creole Architecture: A Comparative Analysis of Upper and Lower Louisiana and Saint Domingue,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 10 (2006): 237–67, esp. 158–59. 28. Stanley J. Stein, Vassouras, a Brazilian Coffee County, 1850–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 7–17; Richard Graham, “1850–1870,” in Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822–1930, ed. Leslie Bethell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 116–17. 29. Stein, Vassouras, 213–49. 30. Rafael de Bivar Marquese, “A paisagem da cafeicultura na crise da escravidão: As pinturas de Nicolau Facchinetti e Georg Grimm,” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros 44 (2007): 55–76. On Facchinetti in general, see Carlos Martins and Valeria Piccoli, eds., Catálogo da exposição: Facchinetti (Rio de Janeiro: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2004); Carlos Eugenio Marcondes de Moura, ed., A travessia da Calunga Grande: Tres seculos de imagens sobre o negro no Brasil, 1637–1899 (Sao Paulo: Imprensa Oficial SP, 2000), 649–73. I am grateful to Dale Tomich and Rafael Marquese for guiding me through the valley. 31. On the photographs of Victor Frond, e.g., see Lygia Segala, “Prescriptive Observation and Illustration of Brazil: Victor Frond’s Photographic Project (1857–61),” Portuguese Studies 23 (2007): 55–70; Marcondes de Moura, A travessia da Calunga Grande, 649–73. 32. Stein, Vassouras, 166. On Facchinetti’s image of Flores, see Marquese, “A paisagem,” 60–64. 33. Stein, Vassouras, 134–38. For frank images of the corporal punishment of slaves, see Marcondes de Moura, A travessia da Calunga Grande, 376, 377, 428, 469. 34. Of course, manumission rates were not allowed to endanger the system of unfree labor. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 267–69; Graham, “1850–1870,” 124–26. 35. Rafael de Bivar Marquese, “Moradia escrava na era do tráfico illegal: Senzalas rurais no Brasil e em Cuba,” Annais do Museu Paulista: Historia e Cultura Material 13 (2005): 165–88, esp. 181, argues that the Brazilian and Cuban types of slave housing around a courtyard derive from a common model in Africa.

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36. There is a recent edition of this work: Luís Miguel García Mora and Antonio Santamaría García, eds., Los ingenios: Colección de vistas de los principales ingenios de azúcar de la Isla de Cuba, text by Justo G. Cantero, illus. Eduardo Laplante (Madrid: Centro Estudios y Experimentación de Obras Públicas, 2005). On Cantero’s book, see García Mora and Santamaría García, “Donde cristaliza la esperanza: Lectura de Los ingenios,” in García Mora and Santamaría García, Los ingenios, 17–82; Carlos Venegas Fornías, “El libro de los ingenios,” in Antonio Malpica, ed., Agua, trabajo y azúcar: Actas del sexto seminario internacional sobre el azúcar (Granada: Diputación Provincial de Granada, 1996), 87–99. 37. As emphasized, e.g., in Antonio Benítez Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 114. 38. Cantero’s extravagant townhouse in Trinidad has especially attracted attention; see Hugh Thomas, Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom, rev. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 146–47. There may be some dissension about Cantero’s origins. Venegas Fornías, “Libro de los ingenios,” 96, implies that Cantero was a native of Trinidad; García Mora and Santamaría García, “Donde cristaliza la esperanza,” do not specify Cantero’s origin. 39. Manaca plantation is located thirteen kilometers east of Trinidad. The tower is forty-three meters high and was built between 1835 and 1845 to allow surveillance of the slaves in the cane fields; it also contained bells that regulated the life of the plantation. However, for an insurrection in 1838, see Hernán Venegas Delgado, Trinidad de Cuba: Corsarios, azúcar y revolución en el Caribe (Havana: Centro de Investigación y Desarrollo de la Cultura Cubana Juan Marinello, 2005); 53. 40. García Mora and Santamaría García, Los ingenios, 230–33. 41. Cantero mentions a park “a la Inglesa” at Ingenio Armonía, in his view a model plantation. García Mora and Santamaría García, Los ingenios, 178. 42. Marquese, “Moradia escrava,” 181, dates the emergence of the new type of slave quarters to the 1840s. See also García Mora and Santamaría García, “Donde cristaliza la esperanza,” 9, 77; William C. Van Norman, “The Process of Cultural Change among Cuban Bozales During the Nineteenth Century,” The Americas 62.2 (2005): 191. For the persistence of bohios throughout the era of slavery, see Lisette Roura Álvarez, “El bohío: Vivienda esclava en las plantaciones cubanas del siglo XIX,” La Jiribilla: Revista de Cultura Cubana 9 (2010), accessed September 20, 2012, http://www.lajiribilla.cu/2007/n333_09/333_01.html. 43. Marquese, “Moradia escrava,” 181–82, connects the layout to practices documented on the African littoral, where captives were held prior to disembarkation. The monumental character of many of the Cuban examples suggests that this origin was, at best, of limited significance. 44. The following plantations are represented among the twenty-eight lithographs of Los ingenios as containing such barracones: Santa Teresa a Agüica, Monserrate, Trinidad, Armonía (shown only in plan, indicating two monumental entrances),

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Unión, Narciso, Purísima Concepción, Flor de Cuba, Tinguaro, San Rafael, and Ácana. Of five plantations with bohios, two belonged to Cantero himself. 45. Theresa A. Singleton, “Slavery and Spatial Dialectics on a Cuban Coffee Plantation,” World Archaeology 33 (2001): 98–114, esp. 100–104, discusses an intermediate stage in which the bohios were enclosed by a high wall, with a single entrance overlooked from the big house. No such arrangement appears in the Laplante lithographs. 46. Dale W. Tomich, “Material Progress and Industrial Architecture: Innovation on the Cuban Sugar Frontier, 1818–1857,” in Nature, Raw Materials, and Political Economy, ed. Paul Ciccantell, Gay Seidman, and David Smith (Amsterdam: JAI Elsevier, 2005), 289–309. 47. García Mora and Santamaría García, Los ingenios, 135. 48. On the absorption of new slaves, see Van Norman, “Process of Cultural Change,” 177–207. 49. Alison Fraunhar, “Picturing the Nation: ‘Marquillas cigarerras Cubanas’ and the Plantation,” Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation 22 (2006): 63–80, esp. 65. 50. García Mora and Santamaría García, Los ingenios, 136. It is not obvious how Cantero knew about Salvator Rosa, who as a Neapolitan was a Spanish subject. He was certainly well known among the European elite. John Sunderland, “The Legend and Influence of Salvator Rosa in England in the Eighteenth Century,” Burlington Magazine 115:849 (1973): 785–89; James S. Patty, Salvator Rosa in French Literature: From the Bizarre to the Sublime (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005), vii. The second edition of Lady (Sydney) Morgan, The Life and Times of Salvator Rosa, 2 vols. (London: H. Colburn, 1824), appeared in 1855. In 1851 the play Salvador Rosa by Narciso Ferrer y Sarasa was printed in Madrid for the Colegio de Sordo-Mudos (citation in the general catalog of the Biblioteca Nacional de España Madrid, http://catalogo.bne.es/uhtbin/cgisirsi/6amuNYi8Ke/ BNMADRID/69310127/123). Performance by deaf-mutes would certainly have increased the effect of wildness, and news of the event may have reached Cuba. 51. Delgado, Trinidad de Cuba. 52. Venegas Fornías, “Libro de los ingenios,” 91. The Derosne train was installed in the presence of Charles Derosne himself, indicating the symbolic as well as economic significance of the event. 53. García Mora and Santamaría García, Los ingenios, 166, 207. On environmental devastation in general, see Reinaldo Funes Monzote, From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History Since 1492 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 54. As noted by Venegas Fornías, “Libro de los ingenios,” 96, Cantero was in financial difficulty by mid-1857, and he was forced to sell Buenavista to a German company. Soon thereafter he mortgaged Güinía.

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55. Cantero, in García Mora and Santamaría García, Los ingenios, 185, 213, mentions Ingenio Unión and Ingenio el Narciso. 56. “Estos barracones fueron monumentales albergues carcelarios integrados al batey” Carlos Venegas Fornías, “Memoria del ingenio,” in Haciendas y estancias en América Latina, ed. Liliana Lolich, Ramón Gutiérrez, and Ricardo Pérez Monfort (Buenos Aires : CEDODAL; Mérida, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, 2006), 53 (italics mine). 57. Cantero uses the term “symmetry” in regard to the Ingenio Flor de Cuba: “Las numerosas fábricas, por su regularidad y symetría, ofrecen a cierta distancia al viajero el aspecto de uno de esos lindos pueblos manufactureros europeos.” He goes on to praise “la vida, el orden, y la industria” of European as well as Cuban examples, using a triad reminiscent of Vitruvius’s fortitude, utility, and delight. Vitruvius, De architectura 1.1; García Mora and Santamaría García, Los ingenios, 244. Vitruvius explicitly connects Symmetria (1.2) with the body analogy (3.1): “The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect. They are due to proportion. . . . Proportion is a correspondence among the measures of the members of an entire work, and of the whole to a certain part selected as standard. From this result the principles of symmetry. Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relation between its members, as in the case of those of a well shaped man” (italics mine). See Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914), http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/20239/20239-h/29239-h.htm. 58. Michael Zeuske, “Sklavenbilder: Visualisierungen, Texte und Vergleich im atlantischen Raum (19. Jahrhundert, Brasilien, Kuba und USA),” zeitenblicke 7:2 (2008): paragraph 10, http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2008/2/zeuske. 59. The “modernistic representation of technology and landscape” only hints at the force presupposed by the social discipline. Zeuske, “Sklavenbilder,” 6.

Chapter Seven

Buen Gusto and the Transition to Nation 1830–1850

Magali Carrera

As discussed in the introduction to this volume, buen gusto encom-

passed more than a visual style, operating to cohere colonial subjects of the viceroyalties and, subsequently, citizens of emerging nations around a sense of collective selfhood. Buen gusto, then, operated differently at different times, reflecting ongoing sociopolitical transitions. By the last decades of the eighteenth century, buen gusto would inform the corporate identity of New Spain’s Creole elite, who sought to maintain and certify their Spanish heritage as intricately embedded in the unique landscape and history of the Americas. Distinguishing themselves from españoles as well as naturales americanos (indigenous groups), Creoles envisioned a unique and complex socio-physical environment in which they interacted to construct and cohere an amalgam identification of españoles americanos. By the early nineteenth century this identity of español americano was no longer fully viable because, in the wake of independence, it implicitly invoked Spain. Thus, rather than identifying with a Spaniard identity in a local environment, Mexicanos, as citizens of the nation, had to be linked to the emerging geopolitical boundaries of the nation. Buen gusto would continue to operate to discern and refine the cultural content of these boundaries and emphasize connections to international culture.

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Mexican publishers demonstrate this redefining of Mexico’s cultural content in association with the critical discernment of buen gusto in history-writing projects of the 1840s. In 1843 William Hickling Prescott, an inf luential U.S. historian, published The Conquest of Mexico, with a Preliminary View of the Ancient Mexican Civilization, and the Life of the Conqueror, Hernando Cortés.1 The three-volume, twelve-hundred-page work, which included six illustrations, utilized diverse sources from previous centuries as well as materials from contemporary historians. Popularized through multiple editions and translations, this epic story of the conquest resonated with international readers as Prescott materialized ancient Mexico’s conquest and subjugation by Spain through the intense visual imagery described in the text. Two Spanish translations of the Prescott work would be published in Mexico City almost simultaneously beginning in 1844.2 Vicente García Torres published Historia de la conquista de México, con bosquejo preliminar de la civilización de los antiguos mejicanos y la vida de su conquistador Hernán Cortés (1844–1846), described as “escrita en inglés por William H. Prescott, autor de la historia de Fernando e Isabel.” For this two-volume edition, Lucas Alamán, a Mexican diplomat, politician, and historian, added extended commentary in numerous footnotes. Thirty-four plates were interpolated throughout the pages of the text. Ignacio Cumplido, another well-established publisher, also produced an edition of Prescott’s history, titled Historia de la conquista de México, con una ojeada preliminar sobre la antigua civilización de los mexicanos, y con la vida de su conquistador, Fernando Cortes (1844–1846). Prescott’s original text filled the first two volumes of this edition and a third volume contained seventy-one annotated plates. The images within each edition were diverse, including archaeological objects, maps, portraits, and historical reconstructions.3 The configuration of the illustrations in Cumplido’s edition, however, was distinct from that of García Torres’s edition. Rather than being arranged as discrete plates inserted into the text, the images in Cumplido’s edition were aggregated into a single volume, arranged serially. Instead of just illustrating textual references, this arrangement allowed Cumplido to guide the reader’s understanding of the comprehensive story of the ancient cultures and conquest through a visual narrative. This essay traces the development and deployment of an emerging civic dynamic of acute perception and discernment linked to buen gusto that appeared in Ignacio Cumplido’s publications of the 1840s, in particular, the

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gazette El Museo Mexicano. Here, good taste was deployed to promote critical intellectual competences that led the reader to higher levels of understanding and, at the same time, through shared capabilities, linked her or him to a community of citizens of the nation and the world. Buen gusto’s operation of critical discernment was both a perspective and a methodology that Cumplido would deploy in the Historia de la conquista de México publication project in order to not only cohere the volume’s numerous images but, more importantly, assist the reader’s understanding and visualization of the history of Mexico from a Mexican, rather than foreign, point of view. Such discernment enabled the reader to critique the hegemonic viewpoint of Mexico’s subjugation to empire that underpinned Prescott’s original text. Although a translation of the Prescott work, Cumplido ultimately authorized a different history that resisted imperialist historical tradition and recognized a national history.

Early Histories Curiosity about the history of the Spanish Americas initiated from the moment of Spanish contact and was manifest in diverse texts of the viceregal period. I begin with a brief overview of history writing and associated imagery produced during the centuries after Spanish contact in order to understand the breadth of sources that Prescott drew upon and Cumplido assessed in the Historia de la conquista de México project. Francisco López de Gómara (1511?–1566?), a Spanish historian, described the heroic campaigns of Hernán Cortés in the Spanish conquest of the Americas in his 1554 Historia de la conquista de México. Although Spanish authorities tried to suppress the book, it was published in many languages. At the same time, fragments of indigenous and Spanish-contact history emerged in administrative literature known as relaciones geográficas. This information would be subsumed into Spanish descriptions of the Indies such as the 1596 Descripción de las Indias by Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, a royal chronicler. The Descripción’s title page includes depictions of the lands of the Indies; indigenous deities; Acamapichtli, an Aztec king; and a portrait of the author. Subsequently, Herrera wrote a comprehensive, multivolume historical description titled Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos . . . (1601). The title page of each volume visually synthesized the written texts (figure 7.1). In Decada terzera (vol. 3), for example, ten picture blocks frame the title

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and dedication. In the upper left-hand corner a portrait of Hernán Cortés is set in a medallion facing a map of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. Depictions of key events of the conquest, such as the retaking of Tenochtitlán and imprisonment of the Mexica king, Cuauhtémoc, follow below this portrait. Herrera’s title page demonstrates early seventeenth-century assimilation of New Spain’s prehistory into the emerging histories of Spanish expansion. This tradition continued with royal cosmographer Antonio Solís’s (1610– 1686) Historia de la conquista de México, población y progresos de la América septentrional, conocida por el nombre de Nueva España, published in 1684,

Figure 7.1. Frontispiece. From Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Decada terzera: Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierra firme del mar oceano (1601). Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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which focused on Cortés’s invasion through the fall of Tenochtitlan. In these history texts, specific scenes and events—Moctezuma’s imprisonment, for example—would become pivotal and recurring elements of the narratives and illustrations of the conquest. By the end of the eighteenth century, history writing was integrated into the consolidation of the Spanish Empire. Publications on New Spain’s history continued in the eighteenth century as well.4 In 1746–1748 José Antonio Villaseñor (c. 1700–1759), a New Spain– born administrator of mines, wrote Theatro Americano, descripción general de los reynos y provincias de la Nueva España, which contained extensive geographic information about New Spain. His account opens, however, with a chapter that sketches the history of New Spain as beginning in antediluvian times and moves to indigenous histories—not with the Spanish conquest. Subsequently, in 1768, Spain-born Francisco Antonio Lorenzana, the archbishop of New Spain, published Historia de Nueva España. Unlike Villaseñor, he envisioned New Spain’s history beginning with Spain’s conquest, as his Historia was actually a compilation of Cortés’s descriptions of his victory over the Aztec-Mexica. In the frontispiece of the Historia, Cortés is visualized as presenting the world—really the New World—to the Spanish king while being observed by characters from the pages of Lorenzana’s history. Concomitantly, non-Spanish writers proliferated history texts as well. The History of America, published in 1777 by Scottish historian William Robertson, argued for standards to ascertain the development and progress of civilization. This author asserted an uncivilized, barbaric condition for the Aztecs as well as the general decadence of all New Spanish inhabitants and cultures. Aware of such claims about the degradation of the cultures in the Americas by Robertson and others, such as Cornelius de Pauw and Guillaume Thomas Raynal, Francisco Javier Clavijero, an exiled, New Spain–born Jesuit, wrote Historia antigua de México (1780–1781), a history of New Spain that told the story of the Aztec-Mexica migrations, as well as including a chronology of the indigenous groups, and concluded with the history of the conquest up to the imprisonment of the Aztec king, Cuauhtémoc. Although rather cursory, this review makes clear that by the end of the eighteenth century diverse writings told many histories of New Spain—soon to be independent Mexico. Within this tradition, certain events were consistently repeated. The texts and images of these historical fabrications, however, diverged as to where the history of New Spain began. Did it commence with precontact cultures or were these societies just a prelude to a history that began with Spain’s conquest of the Americas? This tension around an

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originating history was embedded in the contingent readings of primary and secondary sources. Such readings would continue into the next century.

Nineteenth-Century Histories In the early decades of the nineteenth century, and in the aftermath of Mexico’s wars of independence, there emerged an expanded interest in promoting a history of Mexico from a Mexican point of view. In this way, the Mexican nation might locate its identity and destiny in history, as Spanish subjects became Mexican citizens. Historical materials and texts from earlier centuries were reprinted. Carlos María Bustamante (1774–1848), a statesman and historian, published various manuscripts with the intention of “the enlightenment of American youth in the history of this continent of which we have few books” (emphasis in original).5 Bustamante’s Mañanas de la Alameda de México: Publícalas para facilitar a las señoritas el estudio de la historia de su pais is an important example of these early nineteenth-century texts and discourses on history written by Mexican authors. Published in 1835 and 1836, the fictional story begins with the narrator and doña Margarita, an intelligent, educated, and knowledgeable woman—that is, the epitome of tastefulness—taking an early morning stroll through the Alameda, a large public park in Mexico City. They observe Mr. Jorge and Milady, two English travelers, making disapproving remarks about the Diosa Libertad, a statue of the Goddess of Liberty located in the park. Overhearing these comments, doña Margarita approaches the couple and initiates an exchange that continues as a series of daily morning conversations in the Alameda through which she provides the two foreigners with historical information to allow them to better discern the sculpture’s meaning and, thus, the nation of Mexico. Through doña Margarita’s voice, Bustamante elucidates the events of the precontact cultures of Mexico and implicitly argues that originating history is critical to the formation of a Mexican state. Published without images, the text is made authoritative through the extensive use of footnoted references to sources from previous centuries, including the narratives of the Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo and the letters of Cortés, as well as the writings of Francisco Lopez de Gomara, Antonio de Herrera, Francisco Clavijero, and José Antonio Villaseñor. Bustamante, then, verbally exhibits Mexico through the aggregation of information from indigenous texts, maps, and archeological objects as well as Spanish primary and secondary sources. In placing doña Margarita’s

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lectures in the Alameda, she becomes a public mediator of history, making sure that correct and clear information is presented and properly elucidated and understood. Although the lectures are directed to a fictional English couple, Bustamante’s audience is the young citizens—“American youth”—of the nation. This focus on public education continued and expanded in print culture over the next decades. During the 1830s and early 1840s, various publishing houses in Mexico City became increasingly active.6 In 1840 Ignacio Cumplido (1811–1887) took over publication of the fledgling weekly El Mosaico Mexicano; ó, Colección de Amenidades Curiosas é Instructivas from its first editor.7 Broadening El Mosaico’s original focus on “naturaleza y la industria,” Cumplido added topics of science and poetry and increased collaboration with historians such as Bustamante. Considered Mexico’s first illustrated newspaper, El Mosaico Mexicano included much translated material from foreign sources, taking up extremely diverse topics such as ballooning, biography, and studies of flora and fauna. Cumplido also promoted the use of lithographs, which were easier and cheaper to produce than engravings.8 Utility, visuality, and identity with patria, then, are articulated in El Mosaico Mexicano’s texts and images. El Mosaico ceased publication in 1842. Cumplido would undertake a subsequent project—another weekly, El Museo Mexicano; ó, Miscelanea Pintoresca de Amenidades, Curiosa é Instructiva , initially published in March 1843. Providing an overview of his project, Cumplido explains in the introduction that periodicals like El Museo are in circulation in “civilized nations” and such a publication is much needed by “our nation.” He justifies the need for the distribution of knowledge because the memory of men of the past, recollection of important events, and awareness of original discoveries in the arts and sciences and precious information about ancient mysteries of the country and its natural history all warrant the right to be “preserved in a museum, awaiting the day when they go to take their place among works worthy of their grandeur and magnificence.” 9 Finally, he also promises that, to support his mission, the typography will be simple and clear and the illustrations will be of high quality and provide clarity. Cumplido was adamant that the inclusion of images/illustrations fostered discerning, that is, tasteful, viewing for improved understanding of the subject addressed in the text. Here, the editor links the improvement of the nation to the expansion of knowledge. Rather than translation of foreign articles, El Museo emphasized Mexican topics written by Mexican authors, incorporating high-quality

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writing and illustrations to address diverse topics. The articles focused on archeology, history, natural history, costumbres, and fashion and included poetry, literary reviews, and examples of music scores; the weekly also included specialized sections such as Panorama de Mexico and Estudios Morales. To attract readers, the publication combined two attributes, “lo útil con lo agradable,” the useful with the agreeable.10 Historical descriptions and discussions would be a consistent theme throughout the pages of El Museo. A section titled Estudios Históricos appeared regularly. One article on archeology for this section, for example, “Un viejo mundo en el nuevo,” discusses controversial recent research on antediluvian human occupation in the Americas.11 Topics also included biographical sketches of Mexican historical figures such as lawyers, politicians, Spanish conquistadors, and soldiers of the independence, together with brief recounting of certain past events. Transcriptions of historical documents, such as letters from the king to Cortés, as well as accounts of battles for independence were also incorporated.12 Cumplido’s overall objectives for El Museo were: (1) education of the general public with the purpose of cultivating intelligence and improving the quality of their habits; (2) expansion of a cultured and civilized nation; and (3) stimulation of the beneficial effects of science, arts, and literature.13 Importantly, in this publication Cumplido envisioned more than discussions of assorted topics; he sought ways to cohere the nation through promotion of enlightenment, patriotic commonality, and national improvement. It is in this context that specific citations of buen gusto appear within El Museo’s pages. For instance, assessing the state of visual arts appreciation, one writer observes that affection and buen gusto/good taste for the arts is expanding among the population.14 Within this discussion of art collecting, the author goes on to make clear that buen gusto is a practice of perspicacity and discernment that has to be fostered and developed and, at the same time, protected from negative influences. Citing the achievements of current collectors, he concludes, “It is an honor for our country to present a number, albeit limited, of people who are distinguished by their buen gusto and love of painting, and their zeal with which they seek to build these collections, where Mexican artists will find beautiful models, whose study will inspire the desire to correct and improve their work.”15 Clearly, cultivating buen gusto also had implications for the progress of the nation. Not limited to the visual arts, buen gusto is also referenced in El Museo in an overview of the state of jurisprudence in Mexico. A biography of don

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Francisco Javier Gamboa, a criollo jurist who published Comentarios de las ordenanzas de minas in 1761, offers not only a discussion of the law but also an analysis of the underlying jurisprudence and economic justification.16 Based in the rationality of classical antiquity, buen gusto is evident in juridical method and analysis. The author praises the rigorous method of Gamboa’s reasoning as demonstrating his buen gusto and the exactitude of his logic.17 In El Museo buen gusto is referenced within other topics, such as architecture, food, and literature. Framed within the objectives of Cumplido’s publication, three understandings of buen gusto in the first half of the nineteenth century become clear. First, buen gusto was not an innate ability but a process to achieve transformation toward and ascertainment of a higher level of perception, appreciation, and understanding. Secondly, such emerging buen gusto was susceptible to degradation if exposed to improper or mediocre resources. This is to say that in the right circumstances it transformed an individual but it needed to be mediated and reinforced constantly. Finally, at the same time, shared buen gusto could distinguish a patriotic community. Buen gusto was not only personal—it was national as well. It advanced commonality among citizens that went beyond geographic propinquity to distinguish affinity. While the term “buen gusto” was not always cited specifically, it was an embedded process that was endorsed and enacted throughout El Museo’s pages. For Cumplido, buen gusto was defined and assimilated into Mexican society as a dynamic that could be cultivated to attain intellectual competence or capacity and advance the nation. At every turn, Cumplido cultivated the public’s analytical abilities through the discernment of images. While improving the individual, buen gusto also promoted identification with the collective, emerging nation through common analytical competencies. El Museo’s historical articles, and the Estudios Históricos section specifically, emphasized the critical mediation of buen gusto required for the acquisition of knowledge and understanding. This dynamic continued in Cumplido’s translation of Prescott’s history of Mexico. When Prescott published The Conquest of Mexico in 1843, he conjured a history of Mexico as a divinely determined story of Spain’s subjugation of Aztec culture. He began to formulate the ideas for the work in 1838, preparing himself by reading various historical works, including those by Francisco López de Gómara, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, William Robertson, and Antonio Solís. By summer 1839 Prescott had outlined his history, deciding that the narrative was to be an expansive epic with Hernando Cortés cast as its hero. In addition, he

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deployed detailed physical descriptions of “the features of those parts of the country which are the scenes of operation, as existing at that time, . . . transporting the reader to the country, and to the age.”18 Prescott’s imagery, however, remains in textual descriptions, as the original publication incorporated only six lithographic images: volume 1 includes a portrait of Cortés and a map showing the conquistador’s journey from Veracruz to Tenochtitlan/ Mexico City (figure 7.2); volume 2 includes a portrait of Montezuma II and a map of the Valley of Mexico; and volume 3 includes a smaller portrait of Cortés. Clearly, Prescott’s twelve-hundred-page epic of the conquest was to be told through text, not by visual images. Prescott’s Historia de la conquista de México was published by Cumplido in 1844–1846. Providing an overview of the work, Cumplido explains to the reader that he has added critical and explanatory notes to

Figure 7.2. Hernando Cortés. From William Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico (1843). Magali Carrera’s collection.

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passages of Prescott’s text to rectify certain facts lightly passed over by the author and other, more substantial notes to restore the true history that the author leaves in doubt. Additionally, his publication includes reproductions of various monuments that elicited popular interest, had never been published, or were very rare and less well known, selected and annotated by Isidro Gondora.19 The first volume begins with the translation of Prescott’s original preface, which outlines the origin and purposes of the work. In the second volume, however, a supplementary section includes “Notas y esclarecimientos a la historia de la conquista de México del señor W. Prescott,” a historiography and critical commentary by José F. Ramírez, a respected historian who would become the director of the Museo National. Dated October 21, 1846, Ramírez’s piece begins by reviewing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century histories of Mexico, citing numerous writers and their works, including Robertson, Clavijero, Diego Muñoz Camargo, and Solís. Certifying his awareness of buen gusto, he particularly lauds Lorenzo Boturini’s Historia antigua de México, citing it as one of the best works of its kind, “por su método y por el buen gusto en la eleccion de sus noticias” (by its method and the buen gusto of the selection of its content).20 While respectful, Ramírez is highly critical of Prescott’s discussion of Aztec culture as inherently barbaric. He argues that this is a serious failing in Prescott’s work, stating that the Historia’s author descends into the “dust of trivial remarks,” such as qualitatively evaluating the sound of certain Mexican words (i.e., indigenous language), “a point about which . . . the ear of a man accustomed to hearing harmonies such as that of Yankee Doodle cannot be a very competent judge.”21 Ramírez concludes that, in spite of these failings, Cumplido’s edition of the Historia de la conquista de México is important to both “immortalize and nationalize” the writing of Prescott.22 Cumplido’s notes, Ramírez’s commentary, and Gondora’s explanatory texts reveal an effort to contextualize the Prescott translation in order to transform it into a nationalist history. The third volume, Esplicación de las laminas pertenecientes a la “Historia antigua de México y la de su conquista,” was published in 1846 and included seventy-one lithographic prints and associated commentary. Isidro Rafael Gondora, director of the Museo Nacional and the volume’s editor, explains in the introduction that he was invited by the publisher to provide images and commentary in order to add “better intelligence, perfection and beauty to the work.” Gondora emphasizes that for “improved understanding,” the images, which come from various sources, were collated into a separate

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“atlas,” as he calls the volume, in order to link the extended annotations with the images.23 Unlike in Prescott’s publication, the images in Historia de la conquista de México were not merely illustrative but critical to constituting the historical narrative. In deploying discernment clearly to a national audience, the tasteful images allowed Cumplido to engage the tasteful viewer through didactic imagery and incisive annotations. To accomplish this engagement, Gondora divides the plates into three sections: monuments and ancient history of Mexico (plates 1–26), the conquest epoch (plates 27–47), and twenty-four portraits fill the final pages. Each plate is associated with a detailed explanation and discussion; some of these essays consist of about half a page of text, others are over eight pages in length.24 The initial twenty-six plates

Figure 7.3. Quetzalcoatl, Dios del Viento. From William Prescott,

Historia de la conquista de México (1844–1846), vol. 3, plate 12. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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illustrate the monuments of ancient Mexico. Here, the reader encounters pre-Columbian objects such as the Aztec Calendar Stone, urns, small figurines, musical instruments, weapons, reliefs, and fragments of codices as well as images of pyramids. The images float on white backgrounds like natural history illustrations, with emphasis on the details of the objects, as in the carved relief of a head with elaborated headpiece identified as Quetzalcoatl, Dios del Viento (figure 7.3). The associated commentaries launch into discussions of related and diverse topics. For example, the Quetzalcoatl relief is explained in the context of a history of the movement of the semihistorical figure of Quetzalcoatl through Anahuac, the Aztec homeland. The essay goes on to discuss the illustration of a page from a codex, citing its previous publication or reference by authors such as Antonio León y Gama, Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, Alexander von Humboldt, and William Robertson as well as explaining the migration of the Aztec-Mexica and comparing it to Egyptian hieroglyphic images. In the eight-page discussion of the Aztec Calendar Stone, for example, Gondora cites previous studies of the object, summarizing its general interpretation, and concludes with a scathing indictment of writers like de Pauw, Raynal, and Robertson for failing to recognize the high level of civilization marked by the relief sculpture. On the final page he claims, “These authors regarded as barbaric any state of man that separates him from the kinds of culture and civilization which they have formed according to their schemas. We do not support these very striking distinctions between nations as barbarous and civilized.” 25 He continues, stating that he has, with scrupulous impartiality, examined all he could about the state of the ancient peoples. He warns that before classifying nations, their specific characteristics must be studied because different circumstances cause infinite variation of the marks of cultures.26 Similar to the exegesis of Bustamante’s doña Margarita, the text provides tools for interpreting the image and assessing historical context. Árbol Genealógico Azteca, plate 24 in the volume, points to a turn from explication of objects to the second topic of the first theme, ancient history of the Aztecs. Gondora writes that this genealogical tree of an Aztec king, “Acxolotl [sic],” provides proof that civilization had arrived in the indigenous Mexican nation prior to the conquest.27 Next, plate 25, Un Emperador Mexicano en el Consejo de los Reyes (figure 7.4) and plate 26, Coronacion de Yxtilxochitl [sic], depict precontact indigenous political and religious culture. In both images, the visual format emphasizes historical reconstruction of a court scene and the coronation. At this point in volume 3, the author uses

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this historical source to turn to an examination of the second theme, the history of the conquest, with the next twenty plates. The initial plates of this section depict key scenes that emphasize peaceful encounters and iconic events between Spanish and indigenous groups. They illustrate Cortés’s landing and his meetings with various indigenous groups and emissaries sent by Montezuma during Cortés’s journey from Veracruz to Tenochtitlan. The reader sees the presentation of gifts to Cortés at his arrival in Veracruz. Next the presentation of gifts from Moctezuma to Cortés is represented. Events such as Cortés meeting with

Figure 7.4. Un Emperador Mexicano en el Consejo de los Reyes. From William

Prescott, Historia de la conquista de México (1844–1846), vol. 3, plate 25. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

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the Tlaxcalans and the first baptism in New Spain are also depicted. This series of plates concludes with Moteuczoma Recíbe Solemnemente á Cortés (plate 34). Here the erect Moctezuma walks toward the seemingly respectful Cortés, whose hand is held across his chest and head is slightly bowed. Gondora’s extensive commentaries provide discerning perspectives on each event in these plates, citing various versions of the story by previous writers. These benign visual narratives of the early Spanish encounters pivot with the depiction of Cortés shackling Moctezuma, Cortés Manda Prender á Moctezuma (plate 35; figure 7.5). Here Cortés and his soldiers as well as members of the Aztec king’s court watch as Moctezuma’s ankles are cuffed. The story continues with illustrations of a series of battle scenes showing brutal confrontations between the Spanish and indigenous warriors. As the drama of the conquest unfurls, Gondora includes images that present the details of historical reconstruction. For example, Batalla de Tepeyac (plate 38; figure 7.6) and Toma de Popotzolan (plate 42) depict pitched battles between Spaniards on horses and indigenous warriors. In each of the plates Cortés leads the soldiers, with fallen indigenous warriors strewn on the ground. The associated commentary of the battle scenes cites Herrera, Tomás de Torquemada, and Bernardino de Sahagún as sources, each of whom references primary sources. This section concludes with depictions of the imprisonment of the Aztec-Mexica king Guatimotzin (Cuauhtémoc) and his execution, illustrated in plate 45, Sacrificio de Guatimotzin (figure 7.7). The final illustration of section two, plate 46, presents a map that outlines Cortés’s military operations in central Mexico. Plates 47 to 71 constitute the final section of the volume and are portraits of famous individuals related to Mexico’s history, in no particular chronological or thematic order. These include diverse individuals such as King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, Christopher Columbus, Clavijero, Humboldt, Bartolomé de las Casas, Cortés, and Antonio Solís. Although they follow the skeleton of Prescott’s narrative, the commentaries on the images diverge by extending the description of ancient cultures, emphasizing comparisons with primary documents, and continually highlighting various factual discrepancies among the numerous cited writers. This volume of plates is not conceived as illustrations of Prescott’s written text; rather, it is conceived to join Prescott’s and other writers’ histories of Mexico into a nationalist history.

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Figure 7.5. Cortés Manda Prender á Moctezuma. From William Prescott,

Historia de la conquista de México (1844–1846), vol. 3, plate 35. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

More importantly, the factual and intellectual discernment that Gondora iterates constantly in his commentary resists and denies the hegemony implicated in earlier writings. Here history is retold through a clear, linear, visual narrative that begins by displaying indigenous objects and historical reconstructions of Aztec culture, not with the portrait of Cortés as in Prescott’s original text. In fact, of the seventy-one prints in volume 3, only eighteen depict Cortés and his actions. Thus the preponderance of the images are not about Cortés, who was the focus of Prescott’s text, but about culture and events prior to the conquest. Cumplido’s intention of discerning a different Mexican history is clear when this edition is compared to Vicente García Torres’s, where the plates

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Figure 7.6. Batalla de Tepeyac. From William Prescott, Historia de la conquista de México (1844–1846), vol. 3, plate 38. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

were interpolated into the text rather than placed in a separate volume and in sequential order. García Torres’s illustrations include portraits of Moctezuma and Cortés, which were copied from Prescott’s original volume, as well as Aztec kings and Spanish soldiers. In contrast, Cumplido does not interpolate images; instead, through the ordered visual narrative of the third volume there is a clarification of the wholeness of Mexico’s history that can be discerned in the visualizations of the originating cultures and their historical narratives. Thus Prescott’s history of the conquest was not just translated and republished in Mexico by Cumplido, it was recontextualized in a manner that actively resisted the hegemony implicated in earlier history writings through an intensified interest in the visualization that developed in print culture and was mediated by critical discernment. Reflecting the determination of Cumplido to use visuality and exegesis for engagement and education, the intention of volume 3 is clear and conscious. With each image, the audience is instructed carefully on the validity and assessment of primary and secondary sources; that is, they are instructed to utilize taste, discernment, for understanding history. Here Cumplido encourages visual reading strategies for viewer understanding. As a result,

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Figure 7.7. Sacrificio de Guatimotzin. From William Prescott, Historia de la conquista de México (1844–1846), vol. 3, plate 45. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.

buen gusto becomes an embedded dynamic that promotes careful judgment and discrimination. Returning to the broader perspectives of this volume, in the early nineteenth century good taste reinforced the advancement of an emerging and re-examined Mexican history. As promoted and defined in Mexican print culture, buen gusto guided viewers’ competency to read an image by distinguishing an image’s citation of other sources and narratives. Within Cumplido’s publication of Prescott’s Historia de la conquista de México, buen gusto is an embedded dynamic that substantiates the visual strategy, which sought to effect an understanding of the compelling story of Mexico’s history and certify patriotic affinity through a common, Mexican-directed historical narrative. Rather than following tradition, as García Torres’s edition did, Cumplido’s third volume reinscribes Prescott’s history in issues of contingency and contradiction. As a result, while Prescott’s text told the history of Mexico’s conquest, the visual narrative of Cumplido’s third volume of the Historia de la conquista de México, mediated and authenticated through the dynamic of buen gusto, enacted the conquest of Mexico’s history and certified an emerging collective experience of nationness.

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1. The themes developed in this chapter were originally outlined in chapters 3 and 4 of my book Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 2. Throughout the preparation of the manuscript, Prescott exchanged letters with Lucas Alamán, a Mexican diplomat, politician, and historian who would publish his own three-volume history of the conquest between 1844 and 1849. Lucas Alamán, Disertaciones sobre la historia de la República megicana desde la epoca de la conquista que los Españoles hicieron, a fines del siglo XV y principios del XVI, de las islas y continente americano, hasta la independencia (Mexico City: Impr. de J. M. Lara, 1844–49). 3. For a general discussion of the images included within these two Mexican publications, see Elena Isabel Estrada de Gelero, “La litografía y el Museo Nacional como armas del nacionalismo,” in Los pinceles de la historia de la patria criolla a la nación mexicana 1750–1860, ed. Esther Acevedo and Jaime Cuadriello Fausto Ramírez (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2000), 153–69. 4. For an enlightening discussion of eighteenth-century history writing about Mexico, see “Toward a New Art of Reading and New Historical Interpretations” (chapter 1) and “The Making of a ‘Patriotic Epistemology’” (chapter 4) in Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 11–59, 205–65. 5. “La ilustración de la juventud americana en la historia de este contiente, de que tenemos poquisimos libros buenos” (italics in original). Quoted in Susan Schroeder, “Chimalpáhin, don Carlos María de Bustamante and The Conquest of Mexico as Cause for Mexican Nationalism,” in Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 36 (2008): 287–309, 298n34. 6. See Laura Suárez de la Torre, ed., Constructores de un cambio cultural: Impresoreseditores y libreros en la ciudad de México 1830–1855 (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, 2003). 7. See María Esther Pérez Salas C., “Los secretos de una empresa exitosa: La imprenta de Ignacio Cumplido,” in Suárez de la Torre, Constructores de un cambio cultural, 145–56. 8. See María del Carmen Ruiz Castañeda, “El Mosaico Mexicano, ó Colección de Amenidades Curiosas é Instructivas,” in Empresa y cultura en tinta y papel (1800– 1860), ed. Laura Suárez de la Torre (Mexico City: Instituto Mora, 2001), 529–36. See also María Esther Pérez Salas C., Costumbrismo y litografía en México: Un nuevo mundo de ver (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005), 145–56. 9. “Conservados en un Museo, mientras llega el dia en que vayan á ocupar su lugar en obras mas dignas de su grandeza y magnificiencia.” El Museo Mexicano; ó,

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Miscelanea Pintoresca de Amenidades, Curiosa é Instructiva 1 (1843): introduction, n.p. 10. Magdalena Alonso Sánchez, “Una empresa educative y cultural de Ignacio Cumplido: El Museo Mexicano (1843–1846),” in Suárez de la Torre, Empresa y cultura, 554. 11. El Museo Mexicano 2 (1843): 35–39. 12. Ibid., 348, 528–37, and 508–15, respectively. 13. Alonso Sánchez, “Una empresa educative,” 554. 14. “Afortunadamente comienza á generalizarse nosotros la aficion y el buen gusto por las bellas artes.” El Museo Mexicano,1 (1843): 267. 15. “Damos esta noticia, por que es honoroso para nuestro pais el poder presentar ya un número, aunque corto, de personas que se distinguen por su buen gusto y aficion á la pintura, y por el empeño con que procuran formar estas colecciones, donde los artistas mexicanos hallarán bellos modelos, cuyo estudio les inspire el deseo de corregir y perfeccionar sus obras.” Ibid., 1 (1843): 267. 16. Mariano Otero, “Apuntes para la biografía de D. Francisco Javier Gamboa,” El Museo Mexicano, 2 (1843): 53–64. See also Christopher Albi, “Challenging Spanish Imperialism: Francisco Javier de Gamboa’s Economic Ideas in EighteenthCentury Mexico,” (paper presented at ILASSA 24, Student Conference on Latin America, University of Texas Austin, February 2004), lanic.utexas.edu/project /etext/llilas/ilassa/2004/albi.pdf. 17. El Museo Mexicano, 2 (1843): 56–57. 18. C. Harvey Gardiner, The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling Prescott, 2 vols. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961), 2:29. 19. Gondora is identified as the writer of the essays in the introduction to volume 3. William Prescott, Historia de la conquista de México, con una ojeada preliminar sobre la antigüedad de los mexicanos, y con la vida de su conquistador, Fernando Cortes, ed. Ignacio Cumplido, trans. Joaquín Navarro, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Cumplido, 1844–46), 3:ii–iii. 20. José F. Ramírez, “Notas y esclarecimientos a la historia de la conquista de México del señor W. Prescott,” in Prescott, Historia, 2 (suplemento):vii. Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci, an Italian noble, spent eight years in New Spain, assembling a vast collection of paintings, maps, manuscripts, and native codices. 21. “Punto sobre el cual, dicho sea sin agravio, no puede ser juez muy competente el oido acostubrado á harmonías como las del Yankee Doodle.” Ibid., 2:xv. 22. “El esmero y empeño con que ha trabajado la prensa mexicano para inmortalizar por su parte y nacionalizar los escritos del señor Prescott.” Ibid., 2:xix–xx. 23. Prescott, Historia, 3:i. 24. The volume also includes an extended bibliography of primary documents and earlier history texts, such as those of Gómara, Herrera, and Clavijero. 25. Prescott, Historia, 3:54. Raynal, de Pauw, Robertson, and other eighteenth-century writers attempted to analyze New Spain through supposed universal principles.

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Through these eighteenth-century European discourses, there emerged the general view that Spain’s explorers and early writers were incapable of understanding what they saw in the Spanish Americas. In addition, New Spain was viewed as a basically degenerate place. Gondora’s criticism likely comes from the writings of Alexander von Humboldt. In Researches Concerning the Institution and Monuments of the Ancient Inhabitants of America von Humboldt sought to correct the ideas of de Pauw, Raynal, and Robertson, believing that preconceived notions and schema predisposed their descriptions and conclusions about the Spanish Americas. 26. Prescott, Historia, 3:54. 27. Ibid., 3:113.

Chapter Eight

A Western Mirage on the Bolivian Altiplano Robert Bradley

About fifteen years ago, Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori cited

three unrivaled pre-Columbian sites in South America: Machu Picchu, Chavín de Huántar, and Kuelap. Of the three, Kuelap is by far the most neglected by the modern gaze, even though it has been known to the Western world since the mid-nineteenth century. In contrast, Hiram Bingham’s lost and misinformed expedition introduced Machu Picchu to the Western world in the early twentieth century. Despite this late entry, Machu Picchu has somehow attracted the lavish attention of almost one million foreign visitors annually. Kuelap, in comparison, receives about one foreign tourist per day. Pre-Columbian scholars not specializing in Inca topics can easily envy Machu Picchu’s popularity. But the attention of the Western world has always been fickle in regard to South America’s aboriginal ruins. For instance, before Machu Picchu gained prominence in the Western imagination, a steady flow of informed European and American travelers made their way to the remote eastern shores of Lake Titicaca. They went there, following an established path, to record the image of a small stone construction from the pre-Hispanic Tiwanaku culture: the Gateway of the Sun. Tiwanaku is the name scholars have given to the people who occupied the Bolivian Altiplano more than thirteen hundred years ago. Tiwanaku culture and language disappeared hundreds of years before the initial contact between 157

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the Inca and the Spanish, but ever since the Spanish conquistador Pedro Cieza de León wandered onto the site, Tiwanaku has intrigued the Western imagination. The “golden age” of Tiwanaku tourism began during the late eighteenth century and ended when the ruin was eclipsed by the previously mentioned icon of all South American tourist destinations, Machu Picchu. Today Tiwanaku is still a required stop on any designated circuit of Bolivian attractions, but at present the real aficionados of the ruin are the most diehard of travelers: the archaeologists. Decades of fieldwork at the site have revealed that Tiwanaku masons were masters of stone construction. Indeed, the stone carvings at Tiwanaku are some of the finest in the pre-Columbian Andean region. This is a significant statement when one considers the masonry from the region’s other famous pre-Columbian cultures: Chavín de Huántar and Tiwantinsuyu (the Inca Empire). Tiwanaku artwork features monoliths in a stylized and oversized human form and clava heads masterfully set in sunken courtyards. But the architectural constructions at Tiwanaku that most piqued the Western imagination were always the carved gateways. The most famous of these gateways was the freestanding post and lintel construction dubbed the Gateway of the Sun (figure 8.1). From a purely visual standpoint, the intense focus on this monument seems somewhat misguided. The Gateway of the Sun was intended to be an entrance for a building. It is all but certain that this stone frame was not discovered in situ, and the original location for the structure has been the focus of intense debate. In addition, the carvings on the left and right sides of the construction are very low relief compared to the deeply incised central imagery; therefore, it is likely that the pre-Columbian Tiwanaku artists never finished this portal.1 But the incomplete condition of the monument has not stopped various individuals from trying to decipher the symbols carved on the gateway. All this interest was assigned to a block-like gray slab doorway. One nineteenth-century traveler, E. George Squire, sought to record the Gateway of the Sun’s features with the greatest care and he gave the dimensions of the gateway in his text as thirteen feet five inches long, seven feet two inches high, and eighteen inches thick.2 Whereas the scale and vertical beauty of Machu Picchu seem to warrant the fame associated with this site, the humble measurements of the Gateway of the Sun, protected now by an unsightly fence of barbed wire, belie the attention this structure has attracted. About twenty years after the conquest of the Inca Empire by Spain, Pedro Cieza de León became the first European visitor to the ruins of Tiwanaku. Although Cieza’s mission was that of a soldier, he wrote a

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Figure 8.1. The Gateway of the Sun in barbed wire enclosure.

Photograph © Robert Bradley, 2002.

particularly lucid record of the conquest and its aftermath. But when Cieza was confronted with Tiwanaku he was so dazzled by the site that he digressed from his typically disciplined observations. In his notes Cieza stated that Tiwanaku was likely the oldest ruin in all Peru.3 Perhaps Cieza’s epic visit and grandiose account set the stage for hyperbole at Tiwanaku, because in the years that followed the Gateway of the Sun became the focus of a type of visual tall tale. Somehow this unfinished gray stone doorway would develop into the primary objective for the enlightened Western traveler’s American journey. Many years after the Spaniard’s visit, famous VIPs were guided to the site in an extension of the eighteenth-century European Grand Tour. The Grand Tour was the journey undertaken by northern European gentlemen before they settled down to a life of aristocratic preoccupations. The tradition of the tour itself began roughly in the early seventeenth century and waned, or perhaps changed, with the coming of the Enlightenment. Certainly the Grand Tour had a great influence on this florescence of humanism. Typically the tour would be a journey made by British nobles to the Italian peninsula so that these mostly young male patricians would get a chance to

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view Roman copies of ancient Greek statuary. If they were very well connected they might view the newly excavated sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, made famous by the pioneering work of proto-archaeologist Johann Winckelmann. This elite group would then return with an enviable array of souvenirs, which could be as humble as a watercolor self-portrait, made in the prime of their youth, or as extravagant as a freestanding classical-era marble. Maybe an enlightened gentleman would commission a fanciful landscape or view painting by Venetian artists like Giovanni Antonio Canal (known as Canaletto) or his nephew, Bernardo Bellotto. These paintings of lost ancient worlds were moody souvenirs commissioned to remind the travelers of their odyssey. But also, “Italy was the land of ruins. [And] the prestige exerted by the monuments that remained of the Roman Empire had been something very real, especially at Rome, since the Renaissance. And at Rome ruin-pieces became quite serious and archaeological; even when capriciously distributed in a landscape, each monument was recognizable as itself.” 4 The growing importance of tourism in the time leading up to the Enlight-​ enment cannot be overstated. Edward Chaney pointed out in The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance that “the aspiring courtiers, diplomats and professionals of an increasingly secularized nation-state [in this case he is referring to England] justified their visits to papist Italy on the useful principle derived from Homer by Horace that Ulysses was wise ‘For that he knew men’s manners and saw many cities.’” Chaney further noted that the Grand Tour evolved out of and, in Protestant northern Europe, reacted against “the medieval practice of pilgrimage in response to demand for a non-superstitious justification for travel, [therefore] the Grand Tour began as an exclusively educational phenomenon.”5 The sophistication of the Grand Tourists and the journey they embarked upon progressed considerably during the eighteenth century, so that by its end these gentlemen generally seemed poised for a more arduous quest for knowledge. To satisfy this heightened sense of adventure they literally amplified the risk already associated with travel as they embarked on more distant trips to North Africa and the Middle East. Certainly the early Grand Tour excursions to Italy and southern Europe helped to produce the hardy and prepared tourist that followed. Because for two hundred years, or at least since the celebrated tour of Inigo Jones in 1614, northern aristocrats became accustomed traveling to distant locales in a European sphere in almost constant conflict. From the beginning of the Protestant Reformation to the end

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of the Napoleonic Wars, western Europe was in a protracted state of turmoil ranging from low-level diplomatic tension to intense military conflict. Jeremy Black has observed that “international and civil war affected [in this case] British tourists to a varying extent. [But] the circumstances in each conflict were different and much depended on the attitudes and position of the individual traveler. . . . [Additionally,] the relationship between war and tourism was a complex and ambivalent one. Travel required permission— though the degree of stringency varied greatly.”6 In other words, then, like today, the well-prepared, well-informed, and of course, well-financed traveler could negotiate most social and political turmoil. When Grand Tourism began to steadily decline in the nineteenth century, the desire for a profound educational experience in travel shifted to become a more geographically encompassing adventure focused on the natural sciences. Although these trips were broader and often longer in duration, a journey to the South American Altiplano setting to see the Gateway of the Sun, for example, was directly related to the previous centuries of Grand Tour excursions. Of course, the men associated with these distant and arduous travels were different from the earlier Grand Tour participants. As previously mentioned, they were more focused on natural history, and sometimes their excursions would bypass a return to a more conformist existence and continue on to last a lifetime. But again, their distant expeditions came out of the same tradition of travel to southern Europe, North Africa, and the Levant that had occurred during the prior two hundred years. Among the products associated with the Grand Tour, portrait and landscape painting are today relegated to museums of art, while the scientific explorations and results of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are firmly placed within the environs of the natural history museum. At present a gulf between these disciplines separates the earlier and later travel experiences. Certainly the division between the humanities and science, more prevalent now than in the past, is the major factor why the Grand Tour and the scientific journey of discovery are not viewed as parts of a continuum. David Freedberg recently addressed this disconnect in The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History: “Scholarly and scientific practices, as everyone knows, have become much more fragmented than they were in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the division between ‘humanists’ and ‘scientists’ was far less marked. Indeed, the ability of seventeenth-century scholars to combine scientific and humanistic interests, to use Near Eastern languages as well as Western ones, to move

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with obvious intellectual comfort from history to law to moral philosophy, is more likely to inspire bewilderment than admiration in the modern reader.” 7 In his studies of Dutch colonial art, Freedberg challenges the boundary between classicism, as the study of art history, and the scientific discoveries that ushered in the modern era. Therefore, in Freedberg’s museum of art, for example, a page of beautifully illustrated insects and larvae by Maria Sibylla Merian could comfortably hang next to a Canaletto landscape. Some modern scholars have continued to assign a prominent position to the Gateway of the Sun in pre-Columbian studies without considering why this structure was designated as significant by their less discipline-specific predecessors, who universally recorded Tiwanaku’s Gateway of the Sun as a freestanding passageway of primary importance to the pre-Columbian population. Of course, “modern” natural scientists filtered the blatant errors typical of the earlier era. Examples of these types of digressions include erroneous assumptions about the extreme antiquity of Tiwanaku and elaborate diffusionistic theories suggesting distant geographical origins for the creators of this Altiplano site. But other inaccuracies were more subtle and enduring. To observe these slight errors of perception, an examination of the history of early travelers to the Gateway of the Sun is useful. One of the first and perhaps the most famous scientific voyages of discovery was made by the great German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. Laura Dassow Walls notes, “In March 1799, Humboldt was presented to the king and queen of Spain, to whom he outlined his desire to visit, at his own expense, the interior of Spanish America. Humboldt was granted two passports, one from the secretary of state and another from the colonial administration.”8 Humboldt’s tour of Latin America lasted for more than five years, and he spent the next four decades of his life publishing the findings from his expeditions. In Vues des Cordillères, Humboldt discussed the site of Tiwanaku at length and even provided a drawing of the ruin. Curiously, Humboldt was the exceptional early tourist to Tiwanaku in that he did not focus on the Gateway of the Sun. That privilege would go to the great French anthropologist Alcide d’Orbigny. In his 1839 book Voyage dans l’Amerique Meridionale, d’Orbigny presented a reconstructed drawing of the gateway (figure 8.2). In his record of his trip, d’Orbigny reported that a local guide had led him to the monument.9 The informant who initially took the Frenchman to the site had somehow convinced d’Orbigny of the gateway’s importance, even though the gateway at this time probably lay broken and partially buried. Despite the

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actual condition of the construct, d’Orbigny recorded it fully upright and in one piece in his drawing. After d’Orbigny wrote about the gateway and published his drawing, numerous nineteenth-century travelers followed his path to the Altiplano and the Gateway of the Sun. For almost a hundred years after d’Orbigny’s visit, the Gateway of the Sun remained the preeminent preColumbian attraction for elite foreign visitors in South America. Another early traveler who made his way to Tiwanaku was Léonce Marie François Angrand. Angrand came to Peru in 1834 on a diplomatic mission

Figure 8.2. Alcide d’Orbigny. The Gateway of the Sun. Engraving. From Voyage dans l’Amerique Meridionale (1839).

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and became obsessed with the exotic locale. Diplomatic missions alleviated travel expenses and provided the interested country with information of value in the colonial era. For example, John Lloyd Stevens’s early archaeological excavations in Mexico and Central America were financed by U.S. interests intent on finding the best route for a canal crossing from the Caribbean to the Pacific. By his artwork it seems that Angrand was taken by his assignment. He painted fantastic watercolors of events like carnivals and cockfights, but his primary passion was the study of architecture.10 Angrand’s architectural drawings, like that of the usnu at Vilcashuamán, were very accurate, recording the structure exactly as it was in the mid-nineteenth century. But for some reason when he turned his pen to the Gateway of the Sun, Angrand, like d’Orbigny before him, drew the monument intact and not in a ruinous condition (figure 8.3). Leaving aside his disinclination to define the correct appearance of the gateway, Angrand’s representation of the monument is meticulous and an early tour de force of pre-Columbian architectural evidence. In his drawing Angrand even noted the low relief and unfinished state of the repetitive figures carved on the far corners of the gateway.11

Figure 8.3. Léonce Angrand. The Gateway of the Sun.

From Antiquities americaines extrait (1849).

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In the mid-nineteenth century the famous naturalist and explorer Johann Jakob von Tschudi visited the ruins of Tiwanaku. After his travels Tschudi and Mariano Rivera published a book titled Antigüedades peruanas. Curiously, these authors were again disinclined toward exact representation and instead chose to illustrate the Gateway of the Sun in a sensationalistic and inaccurate manner (figure 8.4). Tschudi and Rivera’s drawing of the doorway more or less accurately illustrates the carvings displayed on the construction’s top lintel. This composition is centered on a figure often referred to as the staff god and d’Orbigny and Angrand also show this image in their text. But Tschudi and Rivera then went on to add Inca kings to the unembellished slab sides of the monument. Colonial records intent on propping up the accomplishments and authority of the Inca state sought to establish historical ties between Tiwantinsuyu (the Inca Empire) and the ancient Tiwanaku. This relationship is unlikely because the Tiwanaku polity disappeared from the Altiplano centuries before the formation of the Inca Empire. In addition, the Inca were descended from an ethic minority centered in the area of modern-day Cuzco, three hundred miles away from the Tiwanaku heartland.12

Figure 8.4. Mariano Rivera and John James von Tschudi. The Gateway of the Sun. From Antigüedades peruanas (1851).

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In the center of Tschudi’s gigantic portal (again, the Gateway of the Sun is in reality only about seven feet tall), he placed some guides pointing up to the enormous lintel. The top of the structure is shown with small fetish figurines typically associated with lowland indigenous groups. It is possible that Tschudi’s and Rivera’s editors forced these inaccuracies on the authors in order to sell more books, but in this early era of Altiplano exploration, inexact representations of the Gateway of the Sun are the rule. In the early 1860s E. George Squire managed to organize a U.S. diplomatic mission to Peru: “His physician recommended a sea voyage and a complete change of scene. [And like Angrand and Stevens before him] Squire was able to combine this cure with his penchant for Peruvian archaeology by obtaining a commission as a United States governmental purchasing agent to Peru.” 13 Squire visited many ruins while in Peru, and he also undertook a journey to the site of Tiwanaku in Bolivia. At Tiwanaku, Squire, like others before him, sought out the Gateway of the Sun. He called this monument remarkable and was even compelled to illustrate two views of it in his book Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas. By his own words Squire noted that many drawings of the Gateway of the Sun he had been given “have been exceedingly erroneous.” He then went on to state that he himself “sought to reproduce its [the Gateway of the Sun’s] features with the greatest care, using the line, the pencil, the photograph and the cartridge-paper mould.” 14 But even after he gave the dimensions of the gateway in his text (again, thirteen feet five inches long, seven feet two inches high and eighteen inches thick), Squire proceeded to illustrate the portal as oversized (figure 8.5). The gateway in Squire’s “exact” reproduction looms over the horses and travelers. The staff god figure in the center of the monument has increased to almost the size of the strange man, or woman, sitting at the far right corner of the structure. To his credit, Squire did note that the Gateway of the Sun was broken.15 Some travelers celebrated the Gateway of the Sun without the arduous journey to the Altiplano. Jean-Frederick Maxmillien, Count de Waldeck, immortalized the Gateway of the Sun even though he never traveled to South America. Waldeck lived a colorful life as an adventurer and neoclassic painter. He fought with Napoleon’s expeditionary force in Africa and later traveled to Mexico. In Mexico, Waldeck recorded Mayan ruins with his very romanticized and inaccurate style. He famously transfigured elephant heads into Maya glyphs. From his own account, Waldeck disliked the hardships associated with travel in this forested area of southern Mexico,

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Figure 8.5. Ephraim George Squier. The Gateway of the Sun. From Incidents of Travel and Explorations in the Land of the Incas (1877).

so it is likely that he would have detested the primitive infrastructure of nineteenth-century rural Bolivia. Indeed, as previously mentioned, Waldeck never ventured to South America, but his circumstantial knowledge did not stop him from painting an image of the Gateway of the Sun. We do not know exactly what source he used for his painting, but like many others, Waldeck imagined the gateway as oversized. Interestingly enough, his version is much closer in proportion to the monument’s actual dimensions then Squire’s representation. However, Waldeck inverted the break on the left piece of the gateway and put the fractured end on the outside and not in the center.16 Of course, this mistake is indicative of a lack of firsthand knowledge, but this deficiency did not deter the painter-explorer from being compelled to create his own version of this nineteenth-century South American icon. Given Waldeck’s profile, his need to create a version of the Gateway of the Sun was inevitable. Although most of his life and adventures took place in the nineteenth century (he lived over a hundred years), Waldeck was an eighteenth-century man. Clearly, his neoclassical style of painting and propensity for moody representations of pre-Columbian ruins reference a

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bygone era. It is likely that, given Waldeck’s creative inclination, he would have been irresistibly inclined to copy visual representations of the Gateway of the Sun produced during this era. The advent of photography ushered in a time of mechanical reproduction and removed the viewer-artist’s hand from the creation of images of the Gateway of the Sun. The first photographic evidence of the gateway is revealing in that it seems to directly contrast with previous imagery. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the famous archaeologist Max Uhle shot a photograph of the German explorer Alphons Stübel as he cavalierly used the Gateway of the Sun as a leaning post (figure 8.6). The less than awe-inspiring reality of the actual gateway reproduced in this photograph is startling after considering the monument’s previous hundred-year-old visual record. The gateway is indeed fractured, as in Squire’s reproduction, but Stübel, even while slouching, looms over the topmost part of the monument. Of course, the bottom of the Gateway of the Sun was partially buried at this time, but this precise and dry representation of the gateway was a considerable break from the past. Stübel’s pose in this photograph almost seems to intentionally lampoon the exaggerations of the early illustrations. By the beginning of the twentieth century images of the Gateway of the Sun became separated from whimsy by photography. But the monument still had a profound impact on the imagination of at least one more voyager: Arthur Posnansky. Posnansky was an Austrian archaeologist who became obsessed by the Gateway of the Sun. In Tihuanacu: The Cradle of the American Man, Posnansky presented theories about the gateway that bordered on madness. For instance, Posnansky stated that by penetrating the mentality of the ancient Tiwanaku he was able to read the main hieroglyph (the staff god) in relation to the symmetrical and asymmetrical bird-like friezes. “In the sketched drawing of the principle hieroglyphic of the Sun Door, one notes in a very impressive manner the idea of a calendar, which thousands of years ago, an intelligent caste of ‘Priest-Astronomers,’ possessed of advance scientific culture tried to represent. In the simplest form possible, we shall reveal at once the astronomical phenomena which those priests observed and their ideas about the Universe, in the light of the mentality of those days.”17 Posnansky then continued with page after page of astronomical psychobabble in which he imagined a relationship between the great hieroglyph (the Posnanskian Spring Equinox) and one of the bird figures, which he called the “Sun with the Bugle Player.”18

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Figure 8.6. Alphons Stübel and Max Uhle. The Gateway of the Sun. From Die Ruinenstätte von Tiahuanaco im Hochlande des alten Perú (1892).

Posnansky likely borrowed the idea of a calendar and a caste of “Priest-Astronomers” from the contemporaneous work of Mayanist Sir Eric Thompson. For forty years Thompson’s domination of Maya studies ultimately delayed advancements in deciphering Maya hieroglyphs. Thompson saw Maya glyphs as allegorical and undecipherable to all except ancient calendar priests. This misconception later turned out, of course, to be erroneous. Maya scholar Michael Coe has noted that Thompson imagined these priests “as basically High Church Anglicans like himself, and he felt a deep affinity with those ancient wise men and astronomers.”19 Posnansky seemed to have a similar affinity with the Tiwanaku elite, and his ramblings about the iconography of the Gateway of the Sun having secret calendric meaning are symptomatic of what Coe called Thompson’s neurosis of the ancient order.20 But whereas Thompson ignored much of the mounting evidence that would ultimately lead to understanding the glyphs, Posnansky invented a calendric system from the iconography of an archeological leftover. Posnansky’s monomania was initially incited by the Gateway of the Sun but his wild ideas did not

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end there: Posnansky continued on with a theory of Tiwanaku as the cradle of American civilization. In other words, he imagined the site as the point of origin for all New World peoples! So why then did Posnansky, and the previously mentioned earlier travelers, fixate on such an unimposing monument as the Gateway of the Sun? Again, it is important to stress that the construction was originally intended as a door frame. The gateway has some interesting artwork but it is a block-like gray slab portal less than seven feet high. Since the evidence suggests that the Gateway of the Sun was never completed, it was certainly of less significance to the Tiwanaku people than it was Arthur Posnansky.21 Therefore, why was so much effort and attention bestowed on archaeological debris? If we look back at the imagery associated with the Grand Tour, it is apparent that some grandiose referent was released in the minds of these educated Western travelers when they experienced the layout of the ruins at Tiwanaku, the epicenter being the Gateway of the Sun. What I am referring to is some common or learned historical image universally taught and viewed by these observers.22 Keep in mind, Western male elites were steeped for decades in the tradition of the Grand Tour. This journey focused on understanding and experiencing antiquity. Many early travelers to pre-Columbian ruins did not even consider the ruins to be part of the cultural heritage of the locals. Typically, these picturesque sites were assigned to biblical or classical antiquity, and the residents delegated a role as simple caretakers of a glorious past beyond their comprehension. Keeping the Grand Tour in mind, then, these enlightened tourists mapped classical Western antiquity onto the Altiplano location of Tiwanaku (and specifically the Gateway of the Sun). In the case of Tiwanaku, the site then was imagined as an imperial Roman ruin and the Gateway of the Sun, seemingly freestanding and centrally placed, became the major icon of these ruins, a Roman honorary or triumphal arch.23 A Roman honorary arch was a public monument with one or more passageways erected in honor of a specific person. The triumphal arch could mark the entrance to a city or a civic complex but these monuments were built to celebrate the accomplishments of the honoree.24 Honorary arches were held in high esteem by Grand Tourists, and the following passage from a letter of 1726 by Edward Southwell is indicative of the place of reverence the honorary arch had in the imagination of these gentlemen: “triumphal-arches, pillars and statues which were erected to the Patriots at home and the avengers abroad, are instances of the gratitude and honour the Romans paid those benefactors by whose means they reaped the advantages of war and the blessings of peace.” 25

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Additionally, the widely known and distributed images of ruins by Canaletto and other Venetian landscape and view painters were also embedded in the elite Western imagination. As Michael Levey observes, “[These paintings,] which are so often thought typical, were chiefly produced for tourists [northern aristocrats] not natives [Venetians]. What continued to be a fundamental need within the city was for pictures consciously removed, in subject as in style, from mundane reality: scenes of mythology, whether pagan or Christian, and (to a lesser extent) history.”26 Canaletto’s capriccios (fancies) often have archways that provide architectural perspective, a tradition dating back to the early Renaissance (figure 8.7). But the archways in the Canaletto capriccios also provide a temporal perspective by showing the ruinous grandeur of an ancient era. These dream-like

Figure 8.7. Giovanni Antonio Canal (Canaletto). River Landscape with a Column,

a Ruined Roman Arch and Reminiscences of England. 1754. National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.

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landscapes are the archetype for the images of Waldeck and Squire and the enlightened traveler’s fascination with the Gateway of the Sun evolves from this tradition. The use of classic terms and ideas to define the pre-Columbian world is commonplace. To list just a few examples: the great age of Mesoamerican florescence is designated the Classic Era; Inca ceramics, made to carry and ferment chicha beer, are called aryballos; and, most important for this discussion, the Gateway of the Sun’s lintel, carved with staff god and “angels,” has been referred to as an architrave. Certainly the Gateway of the Sun has some of the elements of a chief beam from Greek architecture, but placing this unfinished doorway squarely in this tradition and attaching symbolic importance to the iconography on this monument is an error.27 Georgia de Havenon has recently put forward an excellent historiography of the Gateway of the Sun in which she highlights the obscure 1866 visit of British geologist Richard Inwards to the site of Tiwanaku. De Havenon notes that Inwards’s record was particularly susceptible to flights of fancy: “But for all his measured research, it would appear that Inwards just could not, whether consciously or unconsciously, separate his vision of a reconstructed Tiwanaku from his European roots. Inwards’ drawing of a restored Tiwanaku that looks just like Venice, including a gondola in the foreground, clearly reveals his Eurocentric bias.” 28 In many ways Inwards’s image most accurately and honestly reveals his Western affinity because in his illustration Tiwanaku becomes a land of reed gondolas and passageways akin to Canaletto’s Venice. One Roman archway can be compared effectively to the Gateway of the Sun: the Arch of Constantine. This late Roman arch is an assemblage of poorly executed late Roman art put together with spolia (reused sculptures of earlier high-quality craftsmanship). While the work itself appears impressive, it is, upon consideration, a monumental example of the decline of the Roman Empire. Similarly, the haphazard location and the unfinished condition of the Gateway of the Sun could evince the downfall of the polity of Tiwanaku. Despite the centuries of fantasy, the debate about the importance of the Gateway of the Sun is far from over. Recently, some scholars have revisited Arthur Posnansky’s bizarre theories and they have carefully attempted to rescue a kernel of truth from that confused logic. Leonardo Benitez and Tom Zuidema have both written articles suggesting that an analysis of the iconography of the Gateway of the Sun in relation to the solar calendar could be done with effect. Zuidema’s brilliant structural analysis of the gateway accurately notes that Posnansky’s study was well intended but flawed. In brief, Zuidema

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criticizes Posnansky’s logic in associating the central deity with the solar month of September and argues that instead the Austrian should have organized the central figure around the December solstice. In doing so, Posnansky would have made a more accurate study of the iconography in harmony with the colonial record concerning the Inca calendric system.29 It seems safe to argue that even though Zuidema is one of the greatest living Andean scholars and the body of his work is truly comprehensive, the foundation for his paper, an unfinished stone doorway never in situ and likely given prominence in ethnographic studies only because of an erroneous referent, is flawed. Perhaps we should err on the side of caution when addressing a people without a name and a voice, long disappeared. Twenty-first-century scholars have access to powerful research tools: computer software that can specifically address and record repetitive themes in iconographic representation, satellite imagery, and superb archaeological technique. The library collections detailing pre-Columbian and colonial records are more carefully archived than ever before in human history, but some truths seem to evade our understanding. However well intended and sophisticated Western scholars are, their work has profound implications in the Andean world, and sometimes these well-intended efforts are misconstrued. Social violence on the Bolivian Altiplano at the beginning of the twenty-first century has been at least peripherally linked to insensitive archaeological interpretations that focus on gleaning significance from the past without addressing the pressing current issues of Bolivian ethnic identity.30 Of course, circumspection should complement pre-Columbian studies, and several scholars have offered restrained but insightful conclusions about the Gateway of the Sun and its iconography.31 But perhaps the Gateway of the Sun can teach us more about ourselves, and how we form our ideas concerning the past, than it will ever teach us about the forgotten people of the Altiplano we call the Tiwanaku.

Notes

1. See Jean-Pierre Protzen and Stella Nair, “The Gateways of Tiwanaku: Symbols or Passages?” in Andean Archaeology II: Art, Landscape and Society, ed. Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum, 2002), 189–224. Also see Krzysztof Makowski Hanula, “Royal Statues, Staff Gods and the Religious Ideology of the Prehistoric State of Tiwanaku,” in Tiwanaku: Papers from the 2005 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum, ed. Margaret Young-Sánchez (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), 158.

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2. E. George Squire, Incidents of Travel and Explorations in the Land of the Incas (1877; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1973), 288–89. 3. Pedro Cieza de León, The Incas, trans. Harriet de Onis (1554; repr., Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), 283–84. Also, at this time Tiwanaku was part of the Viceroyalty of Peru. 4. See Michael Levey, Painting in Eighteenth-Century Venice, 3rd ed., Pelican History of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 76. 5. Edward Chaney, The Evolution of the Grand Tour: Anglo-Italian Cultural Relations Since the Renaissance (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 203–4. 6. Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 159. 7. See David Freedberg, The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2. 8. Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 36. 9. See M. Alcide d’Orbigny, Voyage dans les deux Amériques (Paris: Furne et Cie, 1854), 293–94. 10. Marisa Mujica, Perú, 10,000 años de pintura (Lima: Universidad de San Martin de Porres, 2006), 172–73. 11. Silverman and Isbell, Andean Archaeology II, 198. 12. For a discussion of the Inca and earlier expansionistic cultures, see Juha J. Hiltunen, Ancient Kings of Peru: The Reliability of the Chronicle of Fernando de Montesinos; Correlating the Dynasty Lists with Current Prehistoric Periodization in the Andes (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1999). 13. Gordon R. Willey, introduction to Squire, Incidents of Travel, vii. 14. Ibid., 288–89. 15. Squire added that every traveler before him had said the Gateway of the Sun was in the same position, except d’Orbigny, who said it had fallen down. Squire’s translation of d’Orbigny’s French could be deficient here. 16. It is likely that the Waldeck image was flipped in reprinting, but even though the break on the smaller part of the gateway is on the opposite side, the fracture of the smaller fragment would still be facing inward. This is not the case, so Waldeck took some artistic license in lieu of using a proper visual referent. 17. See Arthur Posnansky, Tihuanacu: The Cradle of the American Man (New York: J. J. Augustine, 1945), 7–8. 18. Ibid., 9. 19. Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 130. 20. Ibid., 130, 141. 21. Alphons Stübel and Max Uhle, Die Ruinenstätte von Tiahuanaco im Hochlande des alten Perú: Eine kulturgeschichtliche Studie auf Grund selbsständiger

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Aufnahmen (Leipzig: Verlag von Karl W. Hiersemann, 1892); Protzen and Nair, “Gateways of Tiwanaku.” 22. See Tom Cummins, “From Lies to Truth: Colonial Ekphrasis and the Act of Crosscultural Translation” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 153–74. 23. Recently, Krzysztof Makowski Hanula has also noted the association of the Gateway of the Sun and an honorary arch: “The monolithic gateway, like a Roman triumphal arch, emerges alone amid the ruins of the great plaza, which is almost completely buried by earth and rubble.” Makowski, “Royal Statues,” 138. 24. Fred S. Kleiner, The Arch of Nero in Rome: A Study of the Roman Honorary Arch Before and Under Nero (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 1985). 25. Black, British Abroad, 279. 26. Levey, Painting in Eighteenth-Century Venice, 7. 27. William J. Conklin, “Tiahuanaco and Huari: Architectural Comparisons and Interpretations” in Huari Administrative Structure: Prehistoric Monumental Architecture and State Government, ed. Bill Isbell and Gordon F. McEwan (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1991), 281–92. 28. Georgia de Havenon, “The Power of Icon: Reference to the Gateway of the Sun from the 19th Century to the Present,” in Young-Sánchez, Tiwanaku, 138. 29. Tom Zuidema, “Tiwanaku Iconography and the Calendar,” in Young-Sánchez, Tiwanaku, 83. 30. David Kojan and Dante Angelo, “Dominant Narratives, Social Violence and the Practice of Bolivian Archaeology,” Journal of Social Archaeology 5:3 (2005): 383–408. 31. For example, Krzysztof Makowski Hanula’s examination of the Gateway of the Sun in reference to a suggested Tiwanaku pantheon is complex but compelling. See Makowski, “Royal Statues.” Also, in the same volume, Susan Bergh’s detailed study of Andean duality in Wari/Tiwanaku art is convincing for the prudent ambiguity of the analysis. Bergh, “The Bird and the Camelid (or Deer): A Ranked Pair of Wari Tapestry Tunics,” in Young-Sánchez, Tiwanaku.

part three

Dividing Lines Practices and Problems

Chapter Nine

The Language of Line in Late Eighteenth-Century New Spain The Calligraphic Equestrian Portrait of Bernardo de Gálvez (1796)

Ray Hernández-Durán The birth of print signaled not the death of script, but its conceptual rebirth. —Jessica Berenbeim, “Script After Print: Juan de Yciar and the Art of Writing” Art History’s continuing adherence to a theory of immanent aesthetic value . . . has prevented historians from fully examining the ways in which the work is related to all the other institutions and practices that constitute social life. —Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, introduction to Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation

On November 30, 1795, the standing viceroy in New Spain, Manuel de la

Grúa, marqués de Branciforte, wrote a letter to Manuel Godoy, chief minister at the Spanish royal court, requesting permission to erect an equestrian sculpture in honor of Charles IV, the king of Spain.1 Three months later, on March 5, 1796, Godoy submitted his response approving the request. That following summer, on June 15, the decision was widely publicized in New Spain with the construction ceremoniously initiated on July 18. Although the official inauguration of the remodeled Plaza Mayor was not scheduled until 179

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December 9, 1796, a preliminary wood version of the royal monument, designed by academy professor Manuel Tolsá, was to be installed sometime before October 11 and remain until the final bronze work was completed and erected in the redesigned plaza (figure 9.1).2 The pomp surrounding the commission and unveiling of the large-scale sculpture reflected Branciforte’s politically motivated adulation of the king, but as a high-profile public work reflecting imperial interests at a time of growing political and social unrest in the American viceroyalties, what kinds of responses could the monumental equestrian figure have elicited locally? I propose that one approach to answering this question warrants a comparative analysis with a presumably unrelated yet concurrent commission.

Figure 9.1. Manuel Tolsá. Equestrian Monument to Charles IV. 1803. Bronze. Mexico City, Mexico. Photo by Emily Umberger.

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In addition to the scheduled presentation on October 11 of Tolsá’s preliminary design for the official monument, another equestrian image was completed on October 25. The alternate work, however, was not a representation of the king of Spain nor even of Branciforte but of a former Novohispanic viceroy, Bernardo de Gálvez (figure 9.2).3 Although the large-scale painting draws from a long tradition of equestrian imagery and royal portraiture, no other work like it appears to be known in either New Spain or Spain. With this portrait as a point of departure, therefore, I would like to approach the visual culture of late eighteenth-century Mexico City not with the representative or exemplary in mind but with the exceptional and unique. In spite of what currently seems to be a lack of primary documentation about the original work and minimal scholarly attention, I wish to consider what a singular painting like the Gálvez portrait can contribute to our understanding of this period’s artistic practices and their significance. By examining the elements that can be regarded as rendering this work anomalous in relation to its context of production, what issues, problems, or questions can be raised?

The Portrait The monumental oil depicting don Bernardo measures approximately 7 feet 31 1/16 inches by 7 feet 1 3/4 inches (222 x 218 cm). The viceroy is elegantly posed astride a rearing stallion with his left hand grasping the reins and his right hand placed on his hip. The equestrian figural group occupies the majority of the picture space and the viewer’s low perspective enhances the figural group’s grand scale. The viceroy’s head and hands, including such details as hat, ascot, and medal, as well as the ground on which the steed is situated, are the only pictorial elements rendered in what can be loosely identified as a naturalistic mode of representation. The bodies of the man and animal are constituted entirely of a white ribbon-like line, which contrasts sharply with the matte black field out of which it is excised. The monochromatic background in place of any reference to a larger natural landscape accentuates the flatness and gesture of the white strokes, yielding a curiously modern, disembodied representation. In the lower right-hand corner of the painting there is an inscription that reads, “Se acabó dia 25 de octubre, año 96. Fr. Pablo de Jesús, pintor.” 4 The portrait can thus be regarded as a posthumous or commemorative work, since the year of its production, 1796, is precisely one decade after the death of the viceroy in 1786. A second, almost illegible inscription is located in the

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Figure 9.2. Fray Pablo de Jesús and padre Jerónimo. Portrait of Bernardo de Galves. 1796.

Oil on canvas. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX/reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City, Mexico.

lower center of the painting—“T. P. San Jerónimo lo Rasgueo”—and presumably refers to the calligrapher who created the bodies of the imperial official and his horse.5 In line with the colonial practice of integrating text with images, the following epigraph, painted in large, white, upper-case letters on a black ground, emulating printed text, is located below the image: “EL EXCMO. SENOR CONDE DE GALVES.” 6 The technique in the calligraphic portion of the image has typically been identified in the extant literature on this work as esgrafiado. Associated primarily with ancient Roman, Arabic, and Spanish artistic traditions, esgrafiado consists of scratching or engraving a design on a prepared surface to reveal the color or texture beneath the top layer. Esgrafiado is primarily identified with ornamental applications, such as those found on architectural façades, ceramics, and metalwork, in particular, técnica de golado, a common surface treatment found in silver work. Mexican art historian

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Manuel Toussaint described the technique in this painting as rasgueo (the noun that refers to the act of forming a line or to lines elegantly drawn) and the images as rasgos, a flourish or stroke, which refers to the making of a line.7 More recently, Spanish scholar Inmaculada Rodríguez Moya referred to the Gálvez painting in the following manner: “It is an equestrian portrait made using a novel technique, given that it is created with esgrafiado, scratching the black paint such that the white color beneath it appears, in such a way that a continuous calligraphic line renders the horse and its rider.” 8 However, closer to Toussaint’s characterization of the technique as rasgueo or rasgos, examination of the painting reveals that the white calligraphic marks were not scratched into the black surface, as has been claimed by certain writers, such as Rodríguez Moya; rather, the entire image was painted (figure 9.3).9 The canvas itself comprises two smaller panels that were stitched together to produce a larger painting surface; a horizontal seam runs across

Figure 9.3. Detail: horse’s left rear leg. Fray Pablo de Jesús and padre Jerónimo.

Portrait of Bernardo de Galves. 1796. Oil on canvas. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX/reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City, Mexico. Photo by William Gassaway.

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the central axis of the painted surface. The black ground was applied to the canvas first, followed by the white calligraphic lines, which appear to have been done entirely freehand. The gray-green areas in the lower part of the canvas were painted after the calligraphic elements, since it is evident, particularly in the lower left section of the image where the horse’s tail overlaps with the ground, that the artist carefully filled in the spaces in between the white lines. The more naturalistic face and hand elements were probably painted last. Focusing on the pictorial idioms referenced, we see an unconventional blending of decorative modes of art production with the fine art of portrait painting, creative approaches that can be seen as also corresponding to printmaking practices, illustrated by the lettering of the text in the lowest register of the painting but also in the composition, as will be demonstrated.

The Formal Idiom: Possible Sources and Graphic Modes of Production Given the absence of commensurate works in the local Novohispanic context, we must consider possible imported sources, which in this case directs our attention to the well-documented circulation of European prints in the American territories and thus to the influence of Spanish imperial visual languages. Doing so, we encounter a range of images with calligraphic properties that may represent precursors to the Gálvez painting, either as exemplars of an emulated practice or as direct formal models. In a royal document titled Papeles pertenecientes a la Reyna Madre y D. Juan de Austria (1678) we find an engraved equestrian portrait of the Hapsburg Juan José de Austria, son of Philip IV (figure 9.4). The image is identified as a calligraphic print, made and inscribed by Franco Sánchez, a member of the court of the last Hapsburg monarch, Charles II, who was the half brother of Juan José. The print depicts the gallant general riding a rearing horse. He holds the reins in his left hand and in his right hand, similar to Tolsá’s later sculpture, he holds a baton indicative of military and royal authority. The figure’s face and hair are rendered in a somewhat naturalistic style while the bodies of the man and animal are schematically referenced by loose, gestural graphic marks. There is no background except for the white of the paper. The calligraphic flourish on which the equestrian group stands serves as a frame for text identifying the king and his court, the artist, the manuscript, and its date of production. Similarly, the elaborately framed

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script at the top of the page identifies the subject, here addressed as “The Most Serene Sir Don Juan de Austria.”10 Another calligraphic print, closer in time and subject to the Gálvez painting, is the engraved equestrian portrait of Charles IV, identified as engraved and inscribed by Mariano Marco (figure 9.5). This engraving, too, depicts the regal subject on a rearing horse. Unlike the figure in the

Figure 9.4. Franco Sánchez. Don Juan José de Austria. 1678. Engraving. From Papeles pertenecientes a la Reyna Madre y D. Juan d. Austria. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, Spain.

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viceregal painting, the Bourbon king in this instance wields a drawn sword in his extended right arm. Although the lines are sharper and the flourishes are more controlled in this image than in the previous print of the Hapsburg Juan José, the lines are just as schematic and the flourishes less dense and less complex than in the Gálvez portrait. However, the head and face of the subject are naturalistically portrayed while the bodies of the man and horse are again constituted by calligraphic flourishes. Based on these two images and others I have examined, including a later portrait of Ferdinand VII (1831), which is the most compositionally similar to the Gálvez painting, there appears to have been an established tradition of engraved calligraphic portraiture in Spain. Although the equestrian form is recognizable and has long been identified with imperial imagery, dating back to at least the Roman equestrian monuments, such as that of Marcus Aurelius (c. 161 BCE), what would explain such a graphic approach to royal portraits and what could it have signified? In Europe, a formal and conceptual elaboration of calligraphy occurred following the invention of the printing press. Almost immediately, proponents of script began publishing manuals that, although acknowledging the utility of the printed word, defended the significance of manuscript. The earliest examples of such handwriting manuals were produced in Italy, which then inspired similar works in other parts of Europe. As Jessica Berenbeim observes, “In the mid-sixteenth century, the prevalence of print had redefined the practical role of script as a medium of textual communication; furthermore, it also redefined the conceptual meaning of script as a visual medium.” 11 In an article on Juan de Yciar, who was the first to publish a calligraphy manual in Spain, in 1548, Berenbeim carefully traces the conceptual elaboration of script to which she refers in the prior statement. According to her study, this conceptual and formal development consists of three distinct associations: symbolic values ascribed to writing, the identification of writing with bureaucratic practices, and the identification of script with the fine arts. Because script, given its process and form, was seen as embodying an individual hand, there was an interest in categorizing it as a fine art rather than as a mechanical or artisanal mode of production, unlike printed text. Script was thus seen as more appropriate for nonliterary texts, such as liturgical works and, interestingly, bureaucratic documents. The latter association was significant in the early modern Ibero-Atlantic world and is particularly meaningful in light of Antonio de Nebrija’s famous response to Queen Isabella equating writing with empire when she questioned the

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Figure 9.5. Mariano Marco. Charles IV, King of Spain. C. 1790.

Engraving. Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, Spain.

significance of the first Spanish grammar, published in 1492. Script or writing served as a tool in the bureaucratic, social, and spiritual administration of the Catholic Spanish Empire, thus exhibiting symbolic as well as practical functions. The conception of the “living hand,” associated with sacred scripture, facilitated the identification of script with the spiritual or mystical dimensions of nobility. Given the conceptual values assigned to script, we also find emblematic associations. As Berenbeim adds, given the parallels between instruments of writing and the instruments of the Passion, scribal practice

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Figure 9.6. Manoel de Andrade de Figueiredo. Calligraphic equestrian figure. 1722.

Engraving. From Escola Nova. Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal.

was regarded as a sacred act imbued with nobility and Christian virtue.12 The religious or sacred associations of script were further extended to include chivalric symbolism, a conceptual correspondence that facilitated the iconographic association of writing with the image of Santiago Matamoros, whose martial symbolism and equestrian form were seen as embodying the ideal of Christian chivalry. As such, the image of Santiago became emblematic of the kind of script presented in Yciar’s manual. The epigraph in an engraving from a calligraphy manual dated 1722 reinforces this correspondence (figure 9.6). The printed image depicts an equestrian knightly figure carrying a banner inscribed with text that alludes to the fame, nobility, and sacredness of the written letters on the page. In this one image, we see the multiple signifying potentials of the graphic mark seamlessly conjoined through image

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and writing, both of which, although formally constituted by calligraphic flourishes, exhibit different modes of signification. Such calligraphic practices with their complex associations survived well into the nineteenth century. Yciar’s manual alone went through eight editions and his work was well known in eighteenth-century Spain. Given the symbolic valences of script and prints it should come as no surprise to see this visual idiom subsumed into the language of royal portraiture. Given the propagandistic interests of the Bourbon monarchy, the resulting association in a chivalric form of such values as nobility, virtue, and prestige with the representation of the king would have served an important function. In light of the production, circulation, and symbolic potency of these kinds of images in the eighteenth century, these prints may represent a link between this royal visual language and the Gálvez painting. The circulation of European works of art in the Americas and their relationship to colonial art production have long been recognized in the literature. In these discussions, the role of prints in the colonial context is well documented. Although the local production of prints and books in the American territories is a topic that has been receiving more attention in recent years, the function of imported European prints as conduits for the transoceanic transmission of European pictorial subjects, compositions, and styles has long been recognized as a central feature of colonial art production. While this practice was also found in Spain and other parts of Europe, given both the physical distance of the American viceroyalties from European art centers and the ubiquitous workshop system for artistic training and art production in places like Mexico City and Lima, the illustrative or didactic potential of the print becomes especially significant. Paralleling, or perhaps related to, the symbolic economy of script and calligraphy, prints were valued for more than their mimetic capacity or facile reproduction and accessibility. As Kelly Donahue-Wallace has ably shown, the printed medium, associated as it was with truth and virtue, possessed some measure of signifying power, exemplified by religious prints but also evident in the reception of nonreligious images.13 She confirms that both the church and the state recognized the broad appeal of prints and exploited it to communicate a variety of ideals to a wide audience.14 If we consider Spanish printed portraits in relation to the larger transatlantic print trade and the function of prints in the colonial context, we may be able to postulate a correlation between the Gálvez portrait and these kinds of royal print sources. It is probable that such calligraphic prints circulated widely, as was

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the case with other prints and royal images, and that fray Nicolás de Jesús and padre Jerónimo were not only acquainted with such works but also drew from them or from similar languages as they conceptualized and worked on the Gálvez portrait. Although the calligraphic form and subject of the equestrian image of Gálvez can be traced to European forms, such points should not be read as suggesting that this image has absolutely no correspondence to colonial visual languages or to the American viceregal context. Formal commonalities between the Gálvez portrait’s calligraphic elements and other linear forms of expression found in the viceregal Americas, in particular writing conventions of the period, are evident. The importance of writing as a legal, primarily urban practice in the consolidation, maintenance, and execution of power in the colonial period has been recognized by scholars such as Ángel Rama, Walter Mignolo, Tom Cummins, and most recently, Jessica Berenbeim. For example, in The Lettered City Ángel Rama proposed that it was through written texts and the very act of writing that Spanish officials and various authors gave form to ideas in a way that rendered them legible to elite colonial society and instrumental in terms of their application in various cultural spheres, such as in the courts and publicly through royal pronouncements. This happened at a time when signs or symbols, such as pictures and language, were no longer perceived to be mere reflections of the surrounding world but became regarded as abstract ideas functioning within a body of knowledge in which writing boasted a permanence and autonomy from the material world and from history.15 In the Ibero-American colonial context, then, the very act of writing constituted power, a la Nebrija, and was thus an indomitable structuring presence in the world since it gave palpable form to various abstractions associated with such things as authority and virtue. Ultimately, the legitimacy of institutional ideologies was tied to the act of writing and to the permanence of its product, the written text. Calligraphy, in a variety of manifestations, was ubiquitous among the elite spheres of colonial cultural activity. Texts, some of which included elaborate signatures with culminating flourishes known as the rúbrica, were integral components not only in documents such as contracts, letters, and manuscripts but in a broader range of pictorial frameworks, including religious images, portraits, history paintings, pinturas de casta, murals, and emblems, among others. Given the importance of written script and of family names as signifiers of identity and social status, the individual appears to be

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indivisible from the graphic sign, the presence of which legitimized whatever document bore its mark, be it pictorial or textual. Although the calligraphic elements that give form to the Gálvez equestrian image function quite differently from those constituting the written word on a page, the formal parallels are not mere coincidence. We must consider the active presence of transdomain correspondences, such as those examined by Tom Cummins and Joanne Rappaport, who have posited conceptual, structural, and operational parallels between colonial urban space, architecture, text, and images.16 From a multimodal perspective, the legibility and signifying potential of an image like the Gálvez portrait must have been directly tied to a legible, preexisting convention that recognized the broader signification of script and calligraphy beyond mere ornament or their function as transmitters of linguistic or literary content.17 As such, the marks constituting the graphic elements on the page may have been read in relation to power, presence, and truth, exemplifying the connotative dimensions of drawing. In this instance, the gestures constituting the painting can be seen as occupying an interstitial space between two signifying polarities, that is, writing/text and picture/image.18 If the legibility and significance of the graphic mark were indeed an index of authority, as Nebrija, Rama, Berenbeim, and others have observed, what happens when a mode of graphology associated with writing, such as calligraphy, is used to construct a picture? What properties of writing are potentially carried over into the pictorial realm? Looking at the colonial context, and assuming that the graphic mark would have been understood as a signifier of authority, status, and virtue, the construction of a calligraphic equestrian portrait, not of the king nor even of the standing viceroy but of a long-deceased figure like Bernardo de Gálvez becomes significant, particularly in late eighteenth-century Mexico City.

The Subject: Content and Context Although there were various types of equestrian images circulating in the viceroyalties, for example, religious images of Santiago de Matamoros trampling infidels (Moors, natives, or Asians, depending on where the image was produced and displayed), historical conquest images that depict Hernán Cortés on horseback, depictions of viceregal entries with officials on horses, and/or royal equestrian images, such as Titian’s portrait of Charles V at Mülberg and Manuel Tolsá’s monument to Charles IV, the painted equestrian

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viceregal portrait, assuming the latter can be regarded as a definable genre of royal portraiture, is curiously absent from the extant colonial corpus. Quarter-length and full-length portraits of viceroys were more common and thus are familiar subjects of study in the scholarly literature; however, portraits of viceroys on horseback are rare. As of this time, only three painted viceregal equestrian portraits have been identified: the anonymous painting of Pedro Fernández de Castro, Count of Lemos (late seventeenth century), Cristóbal Lozano’s portrait of Manso de Velasco, Count of Superunda (1746), both Peruvian, and the Gálvez portrait, the only known example from New Spain. The Peruvian portraits, in addition to being painted in the mannered naturalism associated with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art in the Andean region, seem to be associated with specific, documented events. In the case of Lozano’s portrait of Manso de Velasco, the painting depicts the viceroy on a trotting horse in the foreground of a bare landscape with the idealized city of Lima in the distant background (figure 9.7). The low horizon monumentalizes the vicreregal figure in relation to the city, over which he towers. According to Spanish art historian María Concepción García Sáiz, the painting commemorates Velasco’s rebuilding of Lima after a disastrous earthquake razed the city.19 Similarly, Pedro Fernández de Castro is commemorated for his role in organizing the celebrations of 1668 in honor of Rosa de Santa María, otherwise known as Santa Rosa de Lima (figure 9.8). In 1669 Santa Rosa was officially declared patroness of Lima, then of the “New World,” and finally, of the Philippines in 1670, followed by her canonization in 1672, the year of Fernández’s death. The viceroy and his horse are depicted in an extreme tenebrist style. The setting is veiled in shadows, thus foregrounding the viceregal figure in a characteristically theatrical baroque manner. According to Argentine curators Gabriela Braccio and Gustavo Tudisco, Fernández, a noble Peninsular, was known to have sympathized with Peruvian Creole interests and supported the Santarosan movement to found an Indian church in the Americas under the banner of this local saint—not surprisingly, in his right hand he holds a banner with an image of the titular saint.20 In the Americas, before the Gálvez painting was completed various royal portraits had already been circulating, in the form of paintings, prints, and coins, with at least one dominant royal equestrian image in Mexico City, the equestrian sculpture representing Charles IV by Manuel Tolsá. Colonial art historian Clara Bargellini indicates that although this equestrian sculpture is

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Figure 9.7. Cristóbal Lozano. Don Manso de Velasco, Count of Superunda. 1746.

Oil on canvas. Museo de América, Madrid, Spain.

the only one recognized by most people, there actually had been other equestrian sculptures of Spanish kings in the American territories. She suggests that Tolsá’s work may actually have been the fourth equestrian sculpture of a Spanish king in the Americas, citing the portrait of Charles III by the sculptor Antonio Bernasconi, which was erected in 1789 in the Plaza Mayor of la Nueva Guatemala.21 As such, the equestrian image in the Spanish viceroyalties, in its various manifestations (religious, historical, and political) and across a range of media, had to have been an established and widely regarded visual symbol of institutional power by the latter part of the eighteenth century. Given the longstanding significance of the equestrian subject and the timing of the production of the Gálvez portrait, I propose that Pablo de Jesús

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Figure 9.8. Anonymous. Don Pedro Fernández de Castro, Count of Lemos.

Late seventeenth century. Oil on canvas. Museo de Arte Español Enrique Larreta, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

and Jerónimo’s painting could be examined with Tolsá’s sculpture in mind as a link in a long concatenation of equestrian images, but one, as I suggest, that may have been created specifically in response to the Plaza Mayor monument. When viewed in relation to each other, a relationship emerges that frames the Gálvez painting as an intentional quotation of the public royal image.22 It is generally understood that the viceroy personified the royal figure in the

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viceroyalties and that he was, as Alejandro Cañeque notes, “the king’s living image,” or “el otro yo del Rey” (the other I of the king).23 However, this image merits consideration in light of the uncommon status of equestrian viceregal portraits. In relation to its two peer works, the Gálvez portrait stands out in terms of its formal language and subject matter. What could this portrait be commemorating, if, as seen with the two Peruvian equestrian paintings, such works would have been commissioned to mark specific events or accomplishments? Furthermore, from the lengthy roster of Bourbon viceroys, why would Bernardo de Gálvez have been singled out? A brief review of what is known about this notable political figure may provide some clues that lend a certain measure of credibility to what can only be speculation at this point. From the late 1770s through the mid-1780s, Bernardo de Gálvez established himself as a successful military leader and politician, primarily in the northern provinces of Texas and Louisiana. His uncle, José de Gálvez, the inspector general of New Spain, appointed him to lead an expedition against the Apaches in Nueva Vizcaya, a battle he won. After a series of additional military victories, he was appointed governor of Louisiana. During his tenure in this official function, he not only contributed to the American Revolution’s success by defeating and ousting the British from the lower Mississippi Valley, he promoted trade with France and played a prominent role in ceding Louisiana to the French.24 During this period, his father, Matías de Gálvez, had served as the viceroy of New Spain in Mexico City. After several promotions and following the elder Gálvez’s death, Bernardo was assigned to fill the position vacated by his father. Although his term as the Novohispanic viceroy was indeed brief, from 1785 to 1786, don Bernardo appears to have earned the love and admiration of the local population in Mexico City through his noble deeds, generosity, and charm. According to John Walton Caughey’s biography of Bernardo de Gálvez, in 1785, upon learning that the public granary was empty, without hesitation or any royal escort, he rushed into the streets and headed to the storage site in order to ensure that enough maize would be provided to the poor the following day, an act that won him popular favor while simultaneously outraging the viceregal court.25 Don Bernardo even drew from his own family fortune to provide relief during periods of famine and pestilence in the Valley of Mexico. These and other acts instantly made him a celebrated hero with the people. Interestingly, there were murmurs suggesting that don Bernardo supported Mexico’s independence from Spain, which, if achieved, would have allowed him to take the throne as Mexico’s first emperor.26

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Perhaps exacerbated by injuries he had sustained as a young man, his bout with a fever toward the end of one of several epidemics resulted in his untimely death at the age of thirty-eight, although there were reports that he may have been poisoned by his own court, perhaps in response to royal concerns of possible subversive intentions. Then, in an unprecedented manner, ten years later, a large-scale equestrian portrait of the deceased viceroy was created. Considering this portrait’s form and content in relationship to its date of production raises a number of questions revolving around the work’s possible meaning.

Mexico City in 1796: Politics and Art Although the Bourbons took over the Spanish throne in 1700, it wasn’t until 1759, during the reign of Charles III (1759–1798), that the effects of the Bourbon Reforms crystallized in the Americas as an effect of the efforts of the viceroys Francisco de Croix, Antonio María de Bucareli, Martín de Mayorga (under whose auspices the Academy of San Carlos was founded), the noted Bernardo de Gálvez, and Juan Vicente de Güemes, Second Count of Revillagigedo. Consequently, we can approach the roughly five decades from 1759 through 1810 as a distinct political period characterized by increased disaffection among segments of the American populace, primarily due to the disruptive effects of Bourbon policies, and by concern expressed by various viceregal officials in response to the growing discontent they witnessed. Spanish historian Manuel Lucena-Giraldo, discussing the conceptual and practical limitations of reform in the Americas in the late eighteenth century, notes the apprehension regarding royal economic policy expressed by several imperial officials, among them José de Ábalos, intendant of Venezuela, who in 1781 sent a letter to the king suggesting that Spain consider relinquishing control of several territories in the Americas and allow the foundation of independent monarchies. Ábalos’s radical proposal is recognized as having been generated in response to the Tupac Amaru uprising in Peru in 1780. As Lucena-Giraldo states, “No doubt he [Ábalos] believed the American upheaval was related to new taxes, distributions of imported products by force—repartos—and regulations on tobacco and other crops put into practice by José de Gálvez, the all-too-powerful minister of the Indies.”27 Such economically oppressive measures and the disruptive effects they occasioned among those Americans who were invested in commercial ventures

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fueled the perceived need among segments of the viceregal population, primarily the Creoles, for autonomous rule, especially given what began to appear as an opportune moment for secession, given Spain’s increasingly compromised status in Europe. In line with the political climate, the sculpture of Charles IV was originally meant to console loyal Mexicans and serve as a reminder of their obligations to the Crown. In the end, however, this intention, originally to be documented on the sculpture itself, was revised in order to suggest “the shared satisfaction that fills us with consolation, which is another reason to recognize the beneficence and love with which his Majesty sees us.”28 In other words, the original intent appears to have been softened as a way to avoid exacerbating what clearly were already strained relations with the local population in the viceregal capital. Clara Bargellini observes that the sermon given during the unveiling of the sculpture identified Charles IV as a gift from God that privileged the Novohispanic population among all of the peoples of the earth. This strategic interpretation was meant to equate the monarch with the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe as yet another event that distinguished the Americas from other nations, perhaps a strategy to win over a population that was increasingly discontent with imperial authority. Beyond the official sculpture’s ideal intent, the fact that the monument’s installation in the Plaza Mayor effectively displaced the local market, which had long occupied that location as an important commercial center in the local economy and was legally prohibited upon the remodeling of the plaza, did not aid the imperial cause. Underlining the concern over possible revolt, the sermon given at the monument’s dedication, in an admonitory manner, critically qualified recent events in Europe as tainted by insurrection, ingratitude, and patricides. The sermon instead presented the public sculpture of Charles IV as “a monument of love and gratitude . . . [and] holy virtues that shine among us . . . so that we can illuminate the dark climate of America just when those lights are further extinguished in the enlightened nations of Europe.”29 One of the primary concerns of the viceroy in 1796 consequently was to protect New Spain from revolutionary ideas during the war between Spain and France, or what was then considered to be the first conspiracy for Mexico’s independence. This concern became urgent following the successful revolutions in France and nearby Haiti. In the realm of late colonial art production the Bourbon implementation that yielded the most significant effect was the founding of the Academy of

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San Carlos in 1785. A primary objective of the academy in Mexico City was to introduce buen gusto, a visual aesthetic identified with neoclassicism. Spanish Enlightenment thinkers and policy makers associated the reformist and propagandistic role of neoclassicism with such traits as gravity, sobriety, simplicity, and truthfulness. As historian Charles C. Noel writes, “Good taste was a question of virtue, a gateway to the avenue of truth and uprightness. Most would have agreed . . . that the purpose of the arts was to attain for man ‘his true, solid happiness, for they make virtue agreeable and, by means of beauty, excite us to pursue [it,] . . . promoting the good of the state, inspiring its members . . . to heroic deeds which promote private and public happiness.’”30 A principal function of the academy in Mexico City was to “modernize” Spain’s ultra-Atlantic kingdoms by introducing good taste via the academy’s role as both the center for art instruction and the principal authority in terms of regulating art production and architectural construction. The Academy of San Carlos in New Spain, controlled by the state and with such values driving its practices, was to serve as a tool in the regulation of cultural production, economic practices, and political identity. As Susan Deans-Smith states in her detailed examination of attempts by colonial artists to found an academy in New Spain, “When the Royal Academy of San Carlos was finally established in Mexico City in 1783, its origins were to be found not in the initiatives of local artists but in the interests of the Spanish monarchy.” 31 Permanent public monuments representing royal figures and/or conveying official ideologies had been relatively uncommon in New Spain until the founding of the academy.32 Given the Bourbon interest in the propagandistic utility of neoclassical art, monumental public works such as the Tolsá sculpture were believed to be ideal tools for the dissemination of Enlightenment ideals and virtues to the larger population. In relation to this ideology and the practices it engendered, what significance could a painting like the Gálvez portrait have had? Since official institutions like the academy controlled public architectural and sculptural commissions, painting and printmaking, including artisanal crafts, had to have been the only available formats for unofficial or more popular articulations, especially if we consider such works as originating in private workshops. Such independent sites of local art practice would have been the principal if not sole outlets for the production of artworks that contested official government claims, if not as a

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direct statement to royal officials then perhaps as a mobilizing tool among like-minded Novohispanic subjects. Neoclassicism, associated with the new political rationalism, caught on primarily in the major urban centers and among segments of the upper classes. Among the common population, including also many Creole elites, as in the racially mixed, native rural areas, older artistic expressions and practices continued to dominate. There were instances where neoclassical designs and/or forms infused with baroque elements yielded a hybrid architectural style identified as neóstilo in studies of architectural construction in the northern territories of New Spain. There are also cases of highly recognized Creole artists, such as the famed late eighteenth-century Mexico City architect Francisco Guerrero y Torres, who outright defied the authorities and continued to construct baroque palaces and churches for elite Novohispanic patrons.33 The latter phenomenon is significant given the Gálvez portrait’s emphatic, perhaps even anticlassical, flourishes that seem to highlight the artist’s virtuosity. In other cases, as Mexican art historian Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz has pointed out, elite Creoles acquired art imported from abroad or through contraband, if not directly from local artists, a practice that concerned the imperial administration mostly due to its economic implications, since the academy aimed in part to gain some measure of control over artisanal production and markets.34 As such, within the realm of visual culture, the tensions that academy activities produced in Novohispanic artistic practices mirror larger political tensions manifested in related cultural domains, such as the economic. The political debates that began to take shape during this time inevitably and quite logically informed art production both inside and outside of the academy’s sphere of authority; consequently, we are able to approach the production and reception of certain examples of late colonial art as shaped by encoded political discourses. Jaime Cuadriello, discussing the work of Miguel Cabrera in the mid-eighteenth century, has stated that eighteenth-century painting in New Spain began to evince by midcentury a clear political intent tied to an emergent Creole identity and distinctly American intellectual traditions and cultural accomplishments.35 It was in this sociopolitical environment that the Gálvez portrait was commissioned, created, and viewed; consequently, I ask whether this work could be regarded as a visual articulation corresponding to the broader sociopolitical climate in the Americas as the effects of the Bourbon Reforms, along with Peninsular

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critiques of Creole society, increasingly elicited defensive reactions from segments of the Novohispanic population. The Gálvez painting is anomalous because it is the only known portrait of its kind in the Americas to date; however, a consideration of its multivalent correspondences to other dominant visual practices allows us to view it as representative of colonial modes of art production. The blurring of boundaries seen in this work suggests technical, formal, and conceptual correspondences between this portrait and other colonial art forms, a quality of the work that is central to understanding its significance, then and now. An important feature of the portrait that makes it a uniquely colonial invention is the manner in which a small-scale, print portrait of the king in Spain was translated into a monumental painting of a viceroy in Mexico City. This phenomenon—the creative appropriation and translation of prints into paintings—seems to be a pattern in American art production, given the nature of the colonial context and its relationship to the Iberian metropole. Additionally, the production of this monumental equestrian image of Bernardo de Gálvez following the highly publicized dedication of the sculpture of Charles IV suggests that this painting may have been an intentional statement rather than the result of mere synchronicity or coincidence. The monumental painting of don Bernardo could be approached as a doubling of the official royal image. But was it a mere repetition or could it have been a counter to the official royal Bourbon portrait of Charles IV?36 There were discrepancies between the Bourbon government’s interests and the political realities of a viceregal society, whose concerns and objectives also had to have found material form through a visually conveyed symbolism. As Clara Bargellini observes regarding Tolsá’s monument, “The intention of the work wound up being inconsistent with the events that a few years later would conclude the viceregal epoch.”37 Contemplating the Gálvez portrait and its possible significance with this in mind, I recall Roland Barthes’s reference to Baudelaire, who spoke of “the emphatic truth of gesture in the important moments of life.”38 In other words, an entire social situation can be, in a synecdochic fashion, encoded in a single gesture. This is an observation I find applicable in this case and one that motivates the question, could the Gálvez portrait have been an early symbol of a Creole protonational identity, in spite of its having been later relegated to the margins of modern national memory?

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Following the death of don Bernardo, the poets Bruno Francisco Larrañaga and his brother José Raphael Larrañaga were commissioned to write a poem commemorating Gálvez’s political and military achievements, which they titled El sol triunfante: Aclamacion de las proezas, y honores politicos y militares de el excmo. Señor D. Bernardo Galves, conde de Galves. The epic poem, which includes different literary genres, such as prose and sonnet, was dedicated to don Bernardo’s wife, señora doña Felicitas Maxan, condesa de Gálvez and vicereine of New Spain, and honors in the grandiloquent literary manner of the period the political and military accomplishments of the beloved Novohispanic viceroy using stylized, allegorical language. In the introduction to the 1990 reprint of El sol triunfante, Fredo Arias de la Canal states, “Bernardo was without a doubt the last Spanish hero in America,” a declaration that, if accurate, may suggest a partial explanation for the calligraphic portrait’s peripheral status.39 After 1821, following Mexico’s official declaration of independence from Spain, a sociopolitical context shaped by an emergent nationalist agenda would have set a different stage for the reception of this type of image than would have been the case a few decades earlier. Don Bernardo’s identification as a member of the Bourbon royal family, in spite of any Creole sympathies he might have had, would have conflicted with the patriotic sensibilities that were emerging in the nascent, struggling country. The anti-Spanish tendencies that surfaced at different moments in the history of early republican Mexico have been well documented in recent dec​ades by various scholars.40 Recognizing the prevalence of such xenophobic reactions in nineteenth-century Mexico may suggest a possible reason why Gálvez’s effigy would have been ignored as a symbol of Mexican nationalism in lieu of imagery associated with elements signifying a common local experience, such as the Mexican landscape, Aztec culture, or Catholicism. Formal peculiarities aside, could Fredo Arias de la Canal’s declaration that Bernardo de Gálvez was the last great Spanish hero partly explain the ambivalent status of the calligraphic portrait in Mexican historical consciousness? To honor his contributions to the Crown, a new coat of arms was bestowed upon don Bernardo and the House of Gálvez by royal order in 1783. The elaborate crest contains a number of heraldic emblems, one of which seems to parallel, and perhaps even foreshadow, Arias’s statement: a battleship with the word “Galveston” painted on its starboard. Don Bernardo is depicted standing onboard the vessel, steering it. A banderole floats above the scene and states, “Yo

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solo” (I alone), a fitting characterization for this man and his portrait’s enigmatic presence in the contemporary imagination.

Notes











The epigraphs are from Jessica Berenbeim, “Script After Print: Juan de Yciar and the Art of Writing,” in Word and Image 23:3 ( June 2010): 241; and Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey, introduction to Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), xviii. 1. Clara Bargellini, “La lealtad americana: El significado de la estatua ecuestre de Carlos IV,” in Iconología y sociedad: Arte colonial hispanoamericano (Mexico City: UNAM, 1987), 207–20. 2. The actual bronze sculpture was not erected until December 9, 1803. Ibid., 212. 3. This essay is based on preliminary research on the Gálvez portrait and as such represents a formative stage in a larger, ongoing project. I would also like to note that there is a resemblance between the figure in this equestrian portrait, identified as “Bernardo de Galves,” and images of Charles IV. This similarity is something I find curious and would like to further explore. 4. “It was completed on October 25, 96. Fray Pablo de Jesús, Painter.” 5. “T. [?] Father San Jeronimo engraved it.” See also Francois Cali, L’art des conquistadors (Paris: Arthaud, 1960), 281, fig. 88. 6. “The Most Excellent Sir Count of Galves.” 7. Manuel Toussaint, Pintura colonial en México (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1990), 175; and Manuel Toussaint, “Colonial Art,” in Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art (Mexico City: Museum of Modern Art and Instituto de Antropología e Historia de México, 1940), 93. 8. See Tomás Pérez Vejo and Marta Yolanda Quezada, De novohispanos a mexicanos: Retratos e identidad colectiva en una sociedad en transición (Mexico City: INAH, 2009), 31; and Inmaculada Rodríguez Moya, La mirada del virrey: Iconografía del poder en la Nueva España (Castellon de la Plana, Spain: Universitat Jaume, 2003), 97. 9. I would like to thank William Gassaway, PhD candidate, Columbia University, for his assistance with the close-up photography of the painting. 10. “El serenissimo Sr. D. Juan de Austria.” 11. Berenbeim, “Script After Print,” 231. 12. Ibid., 236. 13. Kelly Donahue-Wallace, “Prints,” in Encyclopedia of Mexico: History, Society, and Culture, ed. Michael S. Werner (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997), 1191. 14. Kelly Donahue-Wallace, “Abused and Battered: Printed Images and the Female Body in Viceregal New Spain,” in Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America, ed. Kellen Kee McIntyre and Richard E. Phillips (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 129.

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15. Ángel Rama, The Lettered City, trans. Charles Chasteen (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 1, 6. 16. See Tom Cummins and Joanne Rappaport, “The Reconfiguration of Civic and Sacred Space: Architecture, Image, and Writing in the Colonial Northern Andes,” Latin American Literary Review 26:52 (July–December 1998): 174–200. 17. For more on multimodal discourse analysis, see Kay O’Halloran, Multimodal Discourse Analysis: Systemic Functional Perspectives (London: Continuum, 2006). 18. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 56. 19. García Sáiz writes, “In 1746, the viceroy, the count of Superunda, on horseback in the open air, on the outskirts of Lima. This was a novelty in the eighteenth century, for not until 1796 do we again find an equestrian portrait of a viceroy, this time the count of Gálvez by Fray Pablo de Jesús.” María Concepción García Sáiz, “Portraiture in Viceregal America,” in Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin American Portraits, organized by Marion Oettinger Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 82–83. 20. Gabriela Braccio and Gustavo Tudisco, “El Virrey, la encarnación del ausente,” in Ser y parecer: Identidad y representación en el mundo colonial (Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Hispanoamericano “Isaac Fernández Blanco,” 2001), 13. 21. Bargellini, “La lealtad americana,” 217. 22. Tolsá’s sculpture was an imitation of another imperial equestrian image, Francois Girardon’s sculpture of Louis XIV (c. 1695). Miguel Bretos, “Portraiture and the Age of Independence,” in Oettinger, Retratos, 150. 23. Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2004). 24. There are sculptures of Bernardo de Gálvez in Washington, D.C., in recognition of Spain and New Spain’s contributions to the American Revolution and U.S. independence, and in Galveston, Texas, which is named after him. 25. John Walton Caughey, Bernardo de Gálvez in Louisiana, 1776–1783 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1934), 253–54. 26. To what extent these rumors can be related to José de Ábalos’s proposal in 1781, following Tupac Amaru’s revolt in Peru, is at this time uncertain, but they seem to cohere with the paranoid political climate at the Bourbon court. 27. Manuel Lucena-Giraldo, “The Limits of Reform in Spanish America,” in Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and Its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830, ed. Gabriel B. Paquette (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 308. 28. Bargellini, “La lealtad americana,” 211. 29. David Brading has noted that many priests joined the rebellion against the Spanish Crown, especially following Miguel Hidalgo’s call for insurgency. Such political activism appears to have been in part a response to the French Revolution and the Catholic Church’s persecution in Europe. Brading observes

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how these ultra-Atlantic cultural events became topics of sermons delivered in New Spain from the 1790s on. Similarly, Pamela Voekel observes that the nationalist impulse came not from France, North America, or even Spain but from parish and cathedral pulpits in places like Veracruz, Mexico City, and Puebla. See Bargellini, “La lealtad americana,” 215; David Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacán 1749–1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 108–9; David Brading, Nueve sermones guadalupanos (1661–1758) (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 2005), 50–51; and Pamela Voekel, “Piety and Public Space: The Cemetery Campaign in Veracruz, 1789–1810,” in Latin American Popular Culture: An Introduction, ed. William H. Beezley and Linda A. Curcio-Nagy (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2000), 19. 30. Charles C. Noel, “In the House of Reform: The Bourbon Court of EighteenthCentury Spain,” in Paquette, Enlightened Reform, 150. 31. Susan Deans-Smith, “‘This Noble and Illustrious Art’: Painters and the Politics of Guild Reform in Early Modern Mexico City, 1674–1768,” in Mexican Soundings: Essays in Honour of David A. Brading, ed. Susan Deans-Smith and Eric Van Young (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2007), 96. 32. Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz, “Las reformas borbónicas en el arte de la Nueva España (1781–1821),” in Y todo . . . por una nación: Historia social de la producción plástica de la Ciudad de México, 1761–1910, ed. Eloísa Uribe (Mexico City: Instituto de Antropología e Historia, 1984), 25–26. 33. Ibid., 30–31. 34. Ibid., 22–24. 35. Jaime Cuadriello, “Triunfo y fama del Miguel Ángel americano: El nombre de Miguel Cabrera,” in Arte, historia, e identidad en América: Visiones comparativas, ed. Gustavo Curiel, Renato González Mello, and Juana Gutiérrez Haces (Mexico City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994), 407. 36. I wish to add that the physiognomic resemblance of Gálvez in the equestrian portrait to that seen in portraits of Charles IV has been recently noted, suggesting the need to further examine possible sources for this monumental work as well as the process of its production and its subsequent social biography. 37. Bargellini, “La lealtad americana,” 220. 38. Barthes, Image Music Text, 56. 39. Bruno Francisco Larrañaga and José Raphael Larrañaga, El sol triunfante: Aclamacion de las proezas, y honores politicos y militares de el excmo. Señor D. Bernardo Galves, conde de Galves (1785) (Mexico City: Frente de Afirmación Hispanista, A.C., 1990). 40. Harold D. Sims points out, for example, that in 1827, six years after Mexico’s official declaration of independence, motivated by old resentments and doubt about remaining Spaniards’ loyalties, the Mexican government forcibly expelled

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all Spanish individuals from the country by passing legislation that made their presence illegal. Approximately thirty-five years later, following France’s attempts to invade Mexico, the minister of justice and public education requested that the predominantly European faculty and staff of the Academy of San Carlos stage a public protest against France’s attacks. The professors in question—the Spaniards Rafael Flores and Pelegrín Clavé and the Italians Javier Cavallari and Eugenio Landesio—refused to participate in the protest and were promptly dismissed from their posts based on their status as foreigners and their failure to demonstrate support for the country. See Harold D. Sims, La expulsion de los españoles de México (1821–1828) (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1974); Eduardo Báez Macías, Guía del Archivo de la Antigua Academia de San Carlos 1844–1867 (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1976); and Archivo de la Antigua Academia de San Carlos, Mexico City, documents 6028–29, 6358, and 6360.

Chapter Ten

Art and Viceregal Taste in Late Colonial Lima and Buenos Aires Emily Engel

Viceroy Manuel de Amat y Junient was a zealous Bourbon Reform–era

leader in the Viceroyalty of Peru. His memoirs and correspondence teem with lengthy descriptions and praise of his accomplishments in improving colonial bureaucracy, reestablishing the vigor of the military, and ensuring public order throughout the region. Though proud of all of his successes, Amat tenderly described the architectural achievements he facilitated in his Relación de gobierno of 1776.1 Amat’s commentary reveals his opinion on the importance of public works to remedy the disorder plaguing the viceregal capital. He states that improved public facilities provided accessible spaces for rest and rejuvenation, a bridge between affluent and popular social classes. Although he does not explicitly describe the structures he sponsored, all of the architecture created under Amat’s reign exhibits visual qualities now classified by art historians as neoclassical, a style that revived classical artistic form and content in an often overly simplified manner. Implicit in Amat’s use of neoclassical architecture to provide enhanced social services is the capacity for artistic style to resonate with users and viewers in the dynamic colonial environment. In late colonial South America, neoclassical art and architecture is most often associated with official Spanish authority; however, as this essay demonstrates, taste for neoclassically styled art and architecture did not 206

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simply serve the Bourbon reconquest agenda. As Immanuel Kant proffers, aesthetically pleasing works of art invite contemplation and criticism of style, form, and content. Attempting a universal standardization of taste, Kant links the concept of taste with morality and, therefore, virtue. Although a totalizing conception of taste cannot be applied universally, Kant’s connection between taste and morality resonates in late colonial South American practice, especially in light of Amat’s characterization of his neoclassical architectural projects.2 Although Charles III, his agents, and the nobility developed a taste for neoclassical art and architecture in late eighteenth-century Spain, the style was not purposefully deployed to the American colonies, despite other cultural reforming efforts. Accounts of viceregal tenure addressed to the Crown, like that by Amat cited above, contain no references to commissioning artworks as part of a royally mandated program of visual propaganda. On the contrary, the viceroys of late colonial South America independently supported public works and personally sponsored artworks, such as portrait paintings, and architecture.3 Viceregal collection and patronage of American art indicate an aesthetic preference for the style and content of artworks created in-colony, which often combined traditional, highly ornamented attributes with the simple refinement of neoclassicism. In his analysis of viceregal collecting practice, Gauvin Bailey suggests that most works of art produced for viceroys residing in the Americas represent the retention of links to Europe and a newfound affinity for their temporary colonial home. Bailey’s argument implies a connection between the sponsorship of artwork and the construction of identity. More than a type of tourist art, viceregal sponsorship of the arts cannot be parsed in terms of viceregal identity as a personal experience and as an aspect of colonial authority. In this essay, I argue that in sponsoring works of art or architecture, the Bourbon South American viceroys palpably contemplated and constructed “American” components of their evolving identities. Collecting art considered to be in good taste within American contexts buttressed viceregal status and contributed to individual prestige for the immigrant Spanish bureaucrats residing in foreign territories. Viceregal preferences in the arts did not originate in Spain; rather, viceregal taste incorporated local and international elements of style. In the second half of the eighteenth century in the urban capitals of South America, public discourse did not regularly incorporate the term identidad (identity); however, the proliferation of viceroy-sponsored art and architecture indicates an emerging concern with self-identification by way of

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painted, printed, or sculpted representations executed in fashionable styles with relevant content. The viceroys were not completely colonizing royal agents nor were they colonized Spanish American subjects, and the works of art they sponsored while in office jockeyed their official, personal, and humanitarian goals by demonstrating their aesthetic erudition and worldly sophistication. Official portraits and public architecture exhibit definable stylistic criteria. Style, or a cohesive visual aesthetic, is not necessarily historically labeled. Art historians can, however, turn to the remaining body of work to delineate elements of a regional or period style. Kelly Donahue-Wallace suggests, “It is important to note . . . that nothing that could be called a colonial style existed in viceregal Latin America, even within a discrete historical period. The forms preferred in each region of Spain’s American viceroyalties differed, sometimes dramatically. . . . Just as the style employed in works of art and architecture played a significant role in the formation of colonial culture, so too did the content or iconography of the objects and monuments.”4 The colonial environment of late eighteenth-century South America provided opportunities for international stylistic trends to overlap, with global and local significance for patrons and collectors. The portraits and architecture patronized by the viceroys often fuse recognizable international artistic styles from the second half of the eighteenth century. For example, a portrait of one of the last Peruvian viceroys that will be discussed later in this chapter was created specifically as a stylistically hybrid object (figure 10.1). This portrait at first glance appears traditional, harkening back to seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish portraiture with its voluminous red velvet curtain, statically posed subject, and prominent coat of arms. The artist has created a highly polished image with his crisp figural style and acute attention to detail; these visual elements produce a legible concept through a standardized composition. The explicitly historicizing iconography and style of this portrait were common traits in late colonial South American official portraiture. Subjects and patrons could have selected more modern, neoclassical portrait compositions with little background detail, loose brushwork, and psychological poise, such as in Raphel Ximeno y Planes’s portrait of Miguel Tolsá from late eighteenth-century Mexico (figure 10.2). Instead, the deliberately traditional images served the political purposes of their patrons as they navigated late colonial social relations. As the portrait in figure 10.1 also demonstrates, traditional visual elements were often juxtaposed with neoclassical traits, as with the severe,

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unornamented architecture illustrated on the right side of the painting. Here the revival of classical style is employed in the reform efforts of the Bourbon viceroy in his official capacity as an agent of the Spanish Crown. Together, the use of more recent baroque tradition and the revival of ancient architectural elements impose upon the images a sense of timelessness, making the colony referred to by the works seem consistent and stable when in fact it faced increasing political instability. Viceregal sponsorship of the visual arts, in particular painting and architecture, implies an aesthetic preference for artworks created in South

Figure 10.1. Pedro Díaz. José Fernando de Abascal. 1804.

Museo Histórico Nacional del Peru, Lima, Peru.

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Figure 10.2. Raphael Ximeno y Planes. Miguel Tolsá. After 1794. Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City, Mexico.

America by American artists using unique stylistic elements and genres, such as the viceregal portrait, which visually recalled their tenures and accomplishments. In this essay I use the term “colonial” to describe the artistic style that appealed to the South American viceroys and to delineate an approach to art making that was part of a global artistic awareness, an overtly historicizing traditionalism, and a transatlantic revival of classical aesthetics. Artists in Lima and Buenos Aires developed a crisp approach to painting that acutely rendered detail in a legible, standardized compositional format occasionally adorned with a flourish of ornament. This style cannot be separated from the political context in which it was produced, infusing it with imperial connotations. Viceroys across South America collected artworks produced on the continent and supported local artists, indicating their

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appreciation of the artistic output. They often utilized their taste for American art to assert local authority and reinforce regional relationships as well as to grapple with the fluctuating nature of their personal identities. Although the monarchy did not dictate official policies regarding the use of political paintings in its colonies, the viceroys regularly commissioned works of art for official exhibition. For example, viceroys throughout Latin America funded portrait series to document the power and longevity of Spanish imperial domination. The exact circumstances surrounding the commissioning of viceregal portraits for the viceregal palaces in Lima or Buenos Aires have yet to come to light in official documents. However, Michael Schreffler cites a 1666 account of viceregal portraits in the sala de real acuerdo (chamber of royal administration and governance) of the Real Audiencia in Mexico City. A seventeenth-century author describes a series of viceroy portraits as displayed “high on the wall, hanging from a beam are twenty four, half-length portraits of the viceroys that New Spain has had, from the very famous hero Hernán Cortés, her conqueror and first governor, although without title of viceroy, to the Marqués de Mancera, who today governs her.”5 The New Spanish paintings are described as being half-length portraits displayed in the governing chambers of the Real Audiencia.6 In cities that had both a high court and a viceroy, one of the many titles bestowed on the viceroy was presidente de la Real Audiencia. Schreffler argues that groups of portraits like those of the viceroys of New Spain were used by the Spanish monarchy to manage the government of the viceroyalty, a function that had a great significance in the early decades of Spanish domination across the Americas but that diminished in the eighteenth century when imperial relations were well established.7 Because only viceregal portraits hung in the sala de real acuerdo, he points out that the viceroy was the only member of the Audiencia who had the ability to look at his own painted image in the meeting chamber, effectively activating the series and seeing himself as an object of representation. In this action, Schreffler suggests that the legal relationship between the viceroy’s service and the king congealed in the mind of the viceroy because the act of gazing mirrored the linkage between the viceroy and his royal patron.8 However, by the mid-eighteenth century, viceregal portraiture could not be experienced by the Bourbon-era viceroys without influence from Enlightenment notions of selfhood, identity, and authority, as well as full visual recognition of the paintings as colonial American artworks. Whereas in the seventeenth century the viceregal portrait series helped to cement absent absolutist rule in America, the accumulation of

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portraits proved to have culturally specific purposes in eighteenth-century South America that interwove identity, authority, and taste. Viceroy portraits in South American viceregal palaces were part of a larger program of art patronage directed by the viceroys themselves. 9 The former viceregal palaces in Lima and Buenos Aires no longer contain portraits of the royal representatives.10 It is unknown whether the palace in Buenos Aires housed a collection of portraits of the porteño viceroys; however, the Spanish travelers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa describe the exhibition of royal and viceregal portraits in Lima in their mid-eighteenthcentury account compiled for the king: “The viceroy . . . gives daily public audience to all sorts of people; for which purpose there are in the palace, three very grand and spacious rooms. In the first, which is adorned with the portraits of all the viceroys, he receives the Indians and other castes. In the second, he gives audience to the Spaniards; and in the third, where under a rich canopy are placed the pictures of the King and Queen then reigning, he receives those ladies who desire to speak to him in private.”11 As the eighteenth-century travelers observed, portrait paintings were integrated into the possession of authority and the broader social fabric of late eighteenth-century Lima. Juan and Ulloa characterize the arbitration of viceregal authority as multilayered and connected to paintings, political portraits in particular. Following the social hierarchy, separate audience salons spatially regulated its visibility. A public, localized colonial right to rule was more effective when dealing with Indians or castas (castes), whereas a private, imperial authority was necessary to empower the viceroys when confronting the highest echelons of Lima society. Vision and the reception of official portraiture were racialized when access to official spaces was delimited based on ethnic difference; “Indians and other castes” were relegated to the perimeter while Spanish and Creole elites were invited into the intimate depths of the palace. Authority was visualized in one way for subjects of buen calidad (good quality) and in another way for those of less pristine roots, but in both cases colonial artists, styles, and content came together in a public visual program implicitly approved by the viceroy. The Peruvian art historian Ricardo Estabridis views the interest in portraiture exhibited by viceroys as directed toward the goal of immortalizing their personas as enlightened rulers and the glory of their reigns in Peru.12 It is likely that the viceroys themselves experienced art as deployed across a variable spectrum depending upon whom the viewer was and the visual source cited. Moreover, modulated authority circumstantially demarcated boundaries around the

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viceroys as individuals who were aware of the social parameters denoted by historical and contemporary artistic styles. At the turn of the nineteenth century, Viceroy Gabriel de Avilés del Fierro organized a gallery of viceroy portraits for the sala principal (main room) of the Buenos Aires fortress. The gallery included portraits of Avilés himself and his predecessors, all depicted in their official capacity as the highest-ranking official in the Viceroyalty of the Rio de La Plata.13 Avilés observed the relationship between the representation of the viceregal lineage in portraits that combined traditional and neoclassical stylistic elements (by this time the viceroyalty had accumulated six previous viceroys) and the real power wielded by the viceroys.14 An aesthetic appreciation for colonial portraits was significant in both public and private settings. It is likely that at least two porteño viceroys commissioned their own portraits to be painted for personal consumption. For example, a portrait of Antonio de Olaguer Feliú, who served as interim viceroy in Buenos Aires from 1797 to 1799, depicts the viceroy in three-quarter bust format, wearing the cross of the noble Order of San Carlos III, iconographically referencing his historical position and power (figure 10.3).15 A portrait of Viceroy Joaquín del Pino (r. 1801–1804) was also preserved by the descendants of the viceroy, demonstrating the social value placed on these artworks as both historical documents and aesthetically pleasing ornaments (figure 10.4). With an unadorned background that moves toward the simple refinement of neoclassicism, this painting shows the viceroy holding the bastón of office, his identity and position outlined in a traditional text inscription in a shield.16 Although formulaic composition and a rough style characterize this painting, it was highly valued by the viceroy and his descendants, who prominently displayed and preserved it for decades, in part due to the colonial elements of style it exhibits, namely legibility and figural recognition. As family heirlooms passed from generation to generation, the personally commissioned viceregal portraits indicate a connection between the private identity of the sitter and the resulting pictorial image. Familial accumulation of historical portraits attests to the continued significance of the official appointment to successors and reveals that, despite a revolutionary break with Spain, the social hierarchy retained vestiges of its colonial structure well into the twentieth century. The private chambers of the viceregal palaces in Lima and Buenos Aires were also imaginatively adorned with luxurious paintings and decorative arts. Although the viceregal retinue often brought works of art with them to South

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Figure 10.3. Unidentified artist. Antonio de Olaguer Feliú. Eighteenth century. Museo Histórico Nacional, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

America from Spain and Europe, it was common for the viceroy and vicereine to commission works of art from the most locally renowned artists for private consumption. In 1777 the vicereine, the marquesa de Guirior, hired limeño artists to decorate her private apartments in the viceregal palace with Chinesestyle landscape wall paintings. At the end of the eighteenth century, Asian art objects circulated widely, in part due to the continued trade of the Manila galleon, which brought goods from across Asia to the west coast of Mexico and on to Europe.17 Elites in both the Americas and Europe acquired a taste for fine and decorative arts inspired by Asian techniques, motifs, and subject matter.18 Like many vicereines, the marquesa de Guirior incorporated the most current artistic styles into her refined style of living, inspiring new trends in chinoiserie at the viceregal court. In addition, Julian Jayo, a well-respected Lima artist, painted five partially nude female figures in wall paintings inspired by fashionable French artistic subjects.19 By selecting particular court painters and fashionable, aesthetically sophisticated mural programs for their living quarters, Viceroy and Vicereine Guirior demonstrated their status as highly cultured

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individuals who possessed an interest in art informed by an international taste and aesthetic awareness. Similarly, in the Rio de la Plata, Viceroy Raphael de Sobremonte (r. 1804– 1807) owned a small, decorative ivory box, or delicate pastillero, adorned with the portrait of his wife, doña Juana Larrazábal de Sobremonte (1763–1817), who is shown sporting fashionable attire and a French-style wig.20 Juana Larrazábal married Rafael de Sobremonte in 1781, linking the office of the viceroy and Sobremonte as an individual to one of the most distinguished families in Buenos Aires.21 Larrazábal’s discreetly intimate portrait offers a rare glimpse into the way decorative arts operated on many levels between viceroys and vicereines throughout South America. Contradicting the typical historical interpretations of Buenos Aires as an isolated frontier with limited sociocultural potential, the porteño viceroys also patronized and collected works of art, while, like the Lima viceroys, they were aware of their sociocultural connotations. Many viceroys brought their art collections, including additions acquired while in office, like the pastillero of Viceroy Sobremonte, back to Spain with them upon completing their assignments.22 An equestrian portrait of Peruvian viceroy José Antonio Manso de Velasco by the renowned Lima artist Cristóbal Lozano was likely imported into Spain by the viceroy when he returned at the end of his viceregal tenure in 1750 (figure 10.5). In an unconventional depiction, Viceroy Manso de Velasco is shown in the painting riding on horseback through a suburban landscape with the city of Lima and San Cristóbal hill, rising from the barren coastal desert, glimpsed through the sauntering legs of the horse. In the aftermath of the 1746 earthquake that struck the city of Lima, Viceroy Manso de Velasco not only demonstrated his ability to retain urban order and civility, he also expressed a firm commitment to reconstructing the architectural façade of the city for practical reasons with aesthetic goals. The stark juxtaposition of the officially festooned viceroy with the unstructured rural environment may have been the result of the viceroy’s reflection on his relationship with Peruvian geography and unpredictable natural phenomena, such as earthquakes and tsunamis. Though not explicitly illustrated in this portrait, the viceroy sponsored neoclassical-style architecture with overt political iconography, as shown in another portrait of the viceroy created around the same time (figure 10.6). Upon returning to Spain, Viceroy Manso de Velasco and other art-collecting viceroys, such as Viceroy Sobremonte of Buenos Aires, would have had the opportunity both to personally contemplate the nature of their

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Figure 10.4. Unidentified artist. Joaquín del Pino. C. 1804.

Museo del Parque Lezama, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

viceregal tenure and to demonstrate to Spanish relatives and colleagues the extent of their American experiences through these works of art. At the same time, these paintings demonstrate knowledge of local South American contemporary art, artists, and aesthetic preferences. Not surprisingly, Viceroy Amat was a devoted patron of the arts during his time in office (1761–1776). Amat went beyond commissioning portraits of himself for personal use; he initiated several public art and architecture installations while in office. Among many other projects, he facilitated the construction of the Iglesia de las Nazarenas.23 Amat replaced many of the religious paintings in the church with new works of art that reflected the artistic tastes popular in Madrid at the time, including rococo and neoclassical elements.24 The contemporary church interior and main altar retain the stylistic flavor of their eighteenth-century origins (figure 10.7). The viceroy turned to the visual arts as a way of building personal and professional relationships in the city where he governed, as well as enhancing his reputation as a devoted philanthropic patron in limeño society with sophisticated taste for intercontinental

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Figure 10.5. Cristóbal Lozano. José Antonio Manso de Velasco. 1746.

Museo de America, Madrid, Spain.

art. A portrait of the Peruvian viceroy documents his sponsorship of Las Nazarenas church in Lima and was created in honor of his achievement; the painting remains in the collection of the church to the present day (figure 10.8). The painting is a typical eighteenth-century South American viceroy portrait characterized by a historicizing composition and detailed iconography, a style favored by local elites and recognized by the viceroys as a uniquely American aesthetic vocabulary. Viceregal interest in style went beyond the personal into the public realm, where the regional governors employed a calculated use of taste and aesthetic style to establish social status and prestige in the competitive and often vitriolic social circles of elite Lima and Buenos Aires. Amat did not stop after his success with Las Nazarenas; he took advantage of the assets his administration had seized from the Jesuit order when it was expelled from the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1776 to sponsor a far-reaching public art program. Amat was also instrumental in constructing several new

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Figure 10.6. José Joaquín Bermejo. José Antonio Manso de Velasco. Eighteenth century. Museo Histórico Nacional del Peru, Lima, Peru.

hospitals in the city, as well as improving military architecture, including the Real Felipe fortress of the city at Callao. A decree published in 1765 underscores the connection between the virtuous character of the viceroy and that of the distant king by stating that a new hospital demonstrates their regal clemency toward the community, specifically the poor and needy.25 The colonial style chosen for the buildings indicated that good taste had larger social implications and burdens for the moral character of the viceregal patron. Amat himself was indisputably dedicated to maintaining existing and opening new medical facilities in the city of Lima, which served simultaneously as platforms for his aesthetic agenda and moral responsibility. Like many of his viceregal compatriots, Amat also managed aesthetic improvements to the urban landscape of the cities he temporarily occupied.

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Figure 10.7. Iglesia de las Nazarenas. Main altar. Photograph by Emily Engel.

Buildings constructed under his administration include the bullfighting arena in Acho (1768), the arena for cockfighting across from Santa Catalina, a theater, and a variety of paseos throughout the city.26 Amat sponsored an elaborate pleasure garden on the bank of the Rimac River opposite the city of Lima, known as the Paseo de Aguas, which was completed in 1773. The Paseo de Aguas exhibits an official neoclassical style characterized by a massive austerity designed to give the urban masses the impression of imperial stability and dominance.27 A portion of the original architectural and sculptural program remains in situ today (figure 10.9). The core structure of the Paseo de Aguas was composed of six simple yet weighty neoclassical arches. In what we can now recognize as a colonial style, the arcade flanked a reflecting pool reminiscent of the Renaissance and baroque fountains of Rome.28 This combination of contemporary international stylistic trends with traditional forms mirrors the practice described above in the context of portrait collections. The purpose of the Paseo de Aguas and other projects advanced by Amat was a deliberate beautification of the urban landscape of Lima, as

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Figure 10.8. Unidentified artist. Viceroy Manuel de Amat with the Iglesia de las Nazarenas. Eighteenth century. Museo Histórico Nacional del Peru, Lima, Peru.

well as the improvement of social infrastructure using traditional and revival architectural styles popular in both America and Spain. Amat clearly saw his sponsorship of public works as a remedy for alleviating the oppressed status of the plebian majority, a component of Bourbon Reform politics that often incorporated indirect tactics in its recolonization efforts. Amat also opposed the abuse of wealth by the fortunate members of Lima society; he openly acknowledged his prejudices regarding the appropriate application of wealth and position to the improvement of society.29 He considered the sponsorship of public works to be not only an acceptable, but a preferred method for properly extending the benefits of elite wealth to the entire city of Lima. Honor and virtue could be publicly advertised and

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Figure 10.9. Paseo de Aguas. Photograph by Emily Engel.

cultivated in the individual character of a viceroy through supporting public works projects that exhibited good taste as part of moral obligation. In a similar fashion, Viceroy Nicolás del Campo lamented the decayed streets of Buenos Aires and supported a project to improve them under the leadership of the engineer Joaquín Mosquera.30 The enthusiasm with which many viceroys prioritized public city works is indicative of the close relationship between the visiting bureaucrats and the city councils. Cabildos across South America were the main sponsors of public works projects. For example, the Lima city council frequently funded improvements to the city gates, expansion of waterworks, and even installation of public monuments. Official military architecture, however, was independently managed. In Lima, Viceroys Superunda and Amat presided over the reconstruction of the Real Felipe fortress at Callao, which served as the military bastion of the viceregal capital.31 The porteño fortress was no less significant to viceregal governance in the capital of the Rio de la Plata, so the viceroys ensured its construction and interior decoration with the appropriate royal insignia and monuments. Following Spanish architectural customs, the style of American buildings buttressed local viceregal power through the use of royal and Spanish visual referents. The

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purpose of the projects and the style taken by their final forms coalesced to indicate the morality and erudition of the sponsoring viceroy with the goal of advancing his social status as an individual. A portrait of Viceroy José Fernando de Abascal offers a unique representation of the relationship between the viceroys and architectural patronage as Spanish domination began to decline in the viceroyalty (figure 10.1). In the middle and upper right of the canvas, the artist Pedro Díaz illustrates two important additions to the Lima cityscape advanced by Abascal, the central structure in the city cemetery and the royal medical school.32 The tiered, neoclassical structure in the cemetery is sketched in charcoal on a curling sheet of paper spilling out from underneath a book on Abascal’s desk.33 In the background of the painting, the distant medical school is framed by a rounded arch flanked by ionic engaged pilasters and crowned with a simple entablature, a simple, predictable aesthetic that carried meanings of timelessness, consistency, and stability. While the façade is relatively unadorned, large-scale figural sculptures are equally dispersed across the roofline, reminiscent of ancient Greco-Roman architecture but with neoclassical simplicity. A horizontal sheet also illustrates two unspecified military embattlements in a drawing labeled “Baluartes.” Although he does not illustrate them (it is likely that the two structures were not yet designed at this time), Díaz textually represents two additional structures, the Colegio del Principe and the Cuartel de la Concordia. Several years after the painting of Viceroy Abascal was completed, Patricio Colón, a confidant of the viceroy, composed a letter praising his architectural achievements as memorials to his successful reign: The fame of the noble works of Your Excellency, and of your wise administration extend throughout the lands. The magnificent cemetery that was built in this capital under your auspices and direction will prove more enduring than the pyramids of Egypt; a truly august monument to your name, and will always connote memory of you. The medical school that Your Excellency established, with an ambitious, vast, and expansive plan will give you real and true glory, because your good works are not limited to only those inhabitants of the viceroyalty that you govern, but will extend across America where you will be equally remembered; sweet is the pleasure of doing good for mankind and when death is inevitable for those who live under the governance of a philosopher viceroy!34

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Colón does not focus on the beauty or the skillful engineering exhibited by the “magnificent cemetery” or the medical school, indicating that aesthetic taste combined with formal austerity and public utility to establish a timeless personal identity for the viceroy. Instead, he explains how the cemetery will remain in the city of Lima as enduring evidence of Abascal’s august name, prolonging his memory long after his tenure concluded. The medical school was built according to “a wise and grandiose plan,” and as importantly, it will also render Abascal true and royal glory. Colón, and it is likely other limeños, considered the aesthetic and practical architectural improvements among Abascal’s most lasting gifts to the city of Lima and Viceroyalty of Peru. Ultimately, Colón declares Abascal a “philosopher viceroy” who contemplated the importance of patronage of the arts to his personal legacy and the greater region under his charge. Abascal aggressively defended royal policies while stationed in the Viceroyalty of Peru, such as suppressing freedom of the press and quickly funding efforts to limit highland insurgency. However, Abascal and the other South American viceroys were not simply focused on their official role as the “alter ego” of the king, nor did they attend only to a political agenda that would benefit them upon return to Spain. By commissioning permanent works of art and architecture, the South American viceroys displayed a clear awareness of a grander and lasting legacy in the colonies they governed. An integral component of the way the viceroys imagined themselves as leaders in the Spanish territories was based on their Spanish heritage and upbringing.35 As Peter Cherry and Marcus Burke have shown, art collecting and patronage were essential components of Spanish elite identities from the time of the Catholic monarchs forward.36 John Elliot characterizes the identities of people of Spanish descent as psychologically tied to the motherland; in other words, Spanish American identities were formulated around a contrast between Spanish peninsular heritage and the experience of colonialism in specific American contexts.37 Whitney Davis suggests that a person’s historical experience of images and their creation organizes his or her interpretation of images and cultural artifacts produced by others.38 American cultural interactions were essential for viceregal integration of their European roots and foreign political achievements. Ann Twinam argues that social identity in colonial Spanish America was divided into public and private dimensions. As the examples offered in this essay demonstrate, stylistic preferences in viceregal art collecting parallel the division of public and private, with neoclassical art and architecture

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more often chosen for public consumption while private artworks retained a more eclectic stylistic assemblage. Twinam’s conclusions ultimately suggest that identity was actively constructed by an individual through constant social interactions.39 For example, viceregal identifications involved balancing static imperial definitions and expectations of the role with personal interactions and changes in self-knowledge.40 In addition to its royal mandate, viceregal authority took on a strong local dimension. While viceregal governance was essential in the absence of a visible sovereign, it was also independent of real-time royal supervision. Viceroys crafted their own relationships with art and architecture as related to their official governance of and tenure within South America. As my analysis demonstrates, viceregal identities were in a constant state of realignment, taking into account a myriad of outside sociopolitical influences.41 During the eighteenth century, intellectual currents increasingly empowered individuals, celebrating their unique attributes, skills, and contributions. Theorists espoused the “proper formation of male citizens” in texts that glorify specific behaviors and prohibit others that would degrade the self-constitution of upper-class men.42 The viceroys regularly took advantage of the experience of sponsoring works of art to demonstrate and maintain their social status as proper, respected members of colonial society, as well as to subconsciously establish locally relevant aspects of their personal identities. As a result, they experienced the act of posing for a portrait with full knowledge of its stylistic and historical connotations. Viceroys incorporated the arts and culture into prestigious governance, as public works that improved community services, and as reinforcements in determining social relations. As upper-class Spaniards or military officials, many viceroys also considered the commissioning of works of art and architecture to be an integral component of an elite identity instrumental in sustaining a cultivated public image. In the early nineteenth century the Argentine viceroy Santiago Liniers (r. 1807–1809) regularly corresponded with his counterpart in Lima, Peru, Viceroy Abascal. Liniers expressed his thoughts not only on the visual arts but also on the complicated nature of his personal status as a Spanish bureaucrat whose identity was infused with his American experiences. In one brief letter, Liniers alludes to his own identity and the boundaries that contain it. At the close of his letter, Liniers expresses his concern with the boundaries of his power, knowledge, abilities, and physical persona in saying, “But in those matters of high government and state the work I achieved

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conformed to my known limits, which upset me, but without separating me from a picture of the energy, decorum, and dignity that corresponds to my role.” 43 The viceroy plainly articulates his desire to cooperate with local officials; however, he is cogent of the parameters of his own identity as both the royal representative and a powerful American administrator. In 1810, Liniers wrote to Abascal at the end of thirty-five years of service to the Spanish Crown. Liniers laments the intracolonial nature of viceregal identity (the result of the transient nature of royal service) through the poignant metaphor of a prostitute being used and pushed aside after loyal service: The awards, promotions, titles are flattering when they are considered as the result of a high concept and as evidence of it but contrary, and offensive, to the delicateness [of] honored men, you can imagine that there are stipends on their awards, the prostitute finds her compensation in the business of her prostitution, but the honored condemn the conventions, and only desire love and its corresponding affects. This is my friend the case in which I find myself, I believe thirty-five years prove my loyalty and love for my adopted homeland, but they have deceived me, and I am vilified feeling about to leave. To that only one moment that had made possible my doubt in everything I worked to gain.44 By comparing his loyalty and royal service to the work of a prostitute who is temporarily exploited without exacting reliable commitment from her clientele, Liniers finds himself longing for a homeland that can support him in his retirement, a reward for his own loyalty and morality.45 Viceroy Liniers dedicated his career to both the viceregal and monarchical political systems only to find himself left without reward for his good reputation. Several letters that were exchanged between Abascal and Liniers in the early 1800s express the porteño viceroy’s loyalty and dedication to the patria (motherland). Feeling deceived, Liniers turned to his friend and fellow viceroy as one who could comprehend his displacement. The authority, achievements, and success of these viceroys, garnered in the distant American territories, were as transitory as the Spanish American identity Liniers had constructed for himself over thirty-five years. Ultimately, colonial South American art or architecture could not fix or stabilize viceregal identities. Since identity is specific to time and place, as well as an undulate

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process, viceroys such as Liniers and Abascal continuously cultivated Spanish American identities while stationed in the Americas.46 They were not one-dimensional agents of the Spanish Crown but individuals grappling with an unprecedented amount of authority and responsibility, while at the same time virtually free from direct management. The late colonial viceroys actively inserted themselves into the local cultures in which they were stationed in order to govern more effectively, as well as to achieve personal goals. Their supple identities were woven and rewoven, incorporating and limited by American experiences, relationships, and philosophies. Temporary bureaucrats like the viceroys who circulated throughout South America at the end of the eighteenth century cannot be assumed to be a unified community that mirrored their Spanish ancestors or their contemporaries in Europe.47 According to Ann Laura Stoler, “Colonial cultures were never direct translations of European society planted in the colonies, but unique cultural configurations, homespun creations in which European food, dress, housing and morality were given new meanings in the particular social order of colonial rule.” 48 Viceregal sponsorship of public works, painting, and other visual media drew on European, Spanish, and American precedents; however, the viceroys developed an aesthetic appreciation for colonial South American art in response to its visual properties and sociopolitical possibilities. Collecting portraits and sponsoring public architecture were part of a process through which the viceroys began identifying themselves as temporary Americans with moral obligations and desire for social prestige. My observation of viceregal correspondence, political texts, and the visual arts suggests that viceregal identity depended in part on the collecting and patronage of art and architecture as strategies for retaining status among peers who were equally aware of the importance of style as a marker of social position. Most late colonial viceroys were stationed in South America for many years before their appointment to the highest office. They economically exploited their positions of authority, using their status as an opportunity for acquiring personal fortune and fame. The viceroys selected prominent American artists to capture and create a specifically local aesthetic that could contrast with that of Spain and align the viceroys with their American subjects, a negotiation that shaped their personal identities and characterized late colonial political relations in South America. They often included contemporary art and colonial culture as components of elevated and prestigious governance, as public works that improved community services, and

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as reinforcements in determining social relations.49 As upper-class Spaniards or military officials, many viceroys also considered the commissioning of colonial art and architecture to be an integral component of an elite identity instrumental in sustaining a cultivated public image of a tasteful patron. The viceroys operated as “flexible citizens,” unterritorialized individuals with shifting loyalties, who were able to operate across boundaries to their political and economic advantage.50 In the process of creating temporary personal identities, an act necessary for carrying out their commissions in the South American capitals, the viceroys benefited from physical interaction with works of art.

Notes









1. Manuel de Amat y Junient, Memoria de gobierno (Relación de gobierno que hace el Excmo. Sor. Dn. Manuel de Amat y Junyent Vi-rey que fue de estos reynos del Peru, y Chile a su sucesor, el Excmo. Sor. Dn. Manuel de Guirior, comprehensive desde 12 de octubre de 1761 hasta 17 de Julio de 1776), ed. Florentino Pérez Embid (c. 1776; repr., Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1947), 168–72. 2. Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophesy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 309. 3. I use the term “sponsor” because the viceroys were not only patrons of the arts, they also frequently advocated and funded projects they did not initiate. 4. Kelly Donahue-Wallace, Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521– 1821 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), xxii–xxiii. 5. Isidro Sariñana, “Llanto del occidente,” 1666, folio 14r, cited in Michael Schreffler, The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 72. 6. Rodríguez describes three series of viceroy portraits in New Spain: those in the cabildo, the palace, and the art academy. Inmaculada Rodríguez Moya, La mirada del virrey: Iconografía del poder en la Nueva España (Barcelona: Universitat Jaume 1, 2003), 95. 7. Schreffler, Art of Allegiance, 95. 8. Ibid., 104. 9. The viceregal palace in Lima was completed in 1603 and repaired often throughout the colonial period, when damage was sustained during earthquakes; however, the palace, which was originally located on the north side of the main plaza, is now destroyed. 10. According to Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, there is a portrait of Viceroy Manuel de Amat y Junient in the presidential palace in Lima. Personal communication, March 2006. Former Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo also intimated that

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the presidential palace contains a series of bust-length viceroy portraits. Personal communication, September 2008. However, the author cannot yet confirm the existence of additional viceregal portraits in that collection. 11. Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South America, trans. John Adams (London: John Stockdale, 1807). 12. Ricardo Estabridis, “El retrato del siglo XVIII en Lima como simbolo de poder,” in El barroco peruano (Lima: Banco de Credito, 2002), 135–71. 13. José Mariluz Urquijo, “La copia de un cuadro de Salas realizada por varios pintores guaraníes (1793),” Anales del Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas, no. 8 (1955): 124–25, 292. 14. In an 1804 letter to his successor, Viceroy Abascal, Miguel Días de Antonanas describes Avilés as a “buen servador del Rey” (dedicated servant of the King) underscoring his commitment to the relationship between the viceregal office and the distant monarchy, as well as the successful nature of his viceregal tenure in Lima. Archivo General de Indias, Seville (hereafter cited as AGI), diversos 1, ramo 1. 15. Aldolfo Luis Ribera has speculated that the renowned porteño artist José de Salas may be the creator of this painting, although this attribution has not been verified. Ribera, El retrato en Buenos Aires, 1580–1870 (Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1982), 60. The painting was handed down through the Olaguer family from Antonio Olaguer Feliú to Carlos Villate Olaguer, who then donated the painting to the Museo Histórico Nacional, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1898. 16. Ribera also speculates that this painting was completed after 1804 and that José de Salas may have been its creator. Ibid. Although it is unclear whether the painting was donated to the Museo del Parque Lezama by Maria and Elena Brito del Pino in 1932 or by Asilo del Pino on October 1, 1890, in either case, a descendant of the former viceroy retained the portrait in the familial collection prior to bestowing it upon the museum. 17. Trade from Mexico through Acapulco brought more limited quantities of Asian sumptuary goods to South America prior to the eighteenth century. See Gauvin Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), for a detailed discussion of the relationship between Asia and Latin America during the Spanish colonial period. 18. On New Spanish taste for chinoiserie, see Schreffler, Art of Allegiance, among others. 19. Mariano Felipe Paz Soladán Boza, “Panorama de la pintura virreinal peruana: Escuela limeña,” in Barroco andino (La Paz: Viceministerio de Cultura de Bolivia, Unión Latina, 2003), 240. 20. Illustration not available. 21. Viceroys commonly forged local alliances while in office, creating relationships that worked to their personal benefit rather than guarding the reputation of the official office to which they had been entrusted.

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22. To date, the author has not found archival reference to the reception of imported artworks in eighteenth-century Spanish contexts. 23. Amat also had his portrait painted while in office as captain general in Chile prior to his appointment in Lima. The painting now hangs in the Museo de la Nación in Santiago. 24. In 1776 Amat also financed a new decorative repertoire of furniture in the Iglesia de la Merced in Lima; the sacristy cabinets were fashioned in a highly ornamented rococo style. Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, “‘Arte mestizo’: Baroque, 1680– 1750,” in El comercio: Arte y arquitectura (Lima: El Comercio, 2004), 68. 25. In 1765 he issued a decree announcing the planned construction of a new hospital for the poor, to be administered by the order of Las Nazarenas. Manuel de Amat y Junient, Decreto creando un Hospicio Real de pobres con el nombre de Jesús de Nazareno (Lima, 1765), available in the Biblioteca Nacional del Peru, Lima. 26. Peru indígena y virreinal (Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior [SEACEX], 2004), 127–28. 27. Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Art of Colonial Latin America (London: Phaidon Press, 2005), 123. Also, for Mexico, see Schreffler, Art of Allegiance. 28. Leonardo Mattos-Cárdenas, “Utopias y realizaciones en la Lima del siglo XVIII,” in Peru indígena y virreinal, 127–29. 29. See a second 1776 manuscript edition of his Relación in the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid: Manuel de Amat y Junient, “Relación que hizo de su govierno el Exmo. S.or D.n Manuel de Amat, y Junient,” 2 vols., Lima, 1776 (c. 1774), folio XIII. 30. Nicolás del Campo, marqués de Loreto, Relación que el Marques de Loreto dejo a su succesor, E., El Virreynato que obtubo de Buenos Ayres Don Nicolas de Arredondo: Instruyendole del estado en que le hallo, y de todo lo ocurrido en el discurso de su gobierno (Buenos Aires, 1790), folio 30; it was transcribed by Hieronymus Salinas in 1793. The third viceroy of the Rio de la Plata, Nicolás del Campo, marqués de Loreto, instituted the greatest bureaucratic transformation of Buenos Aires. For example, in 1783 he established the Audiencia and converted the intendencia to a superintendencia. 31. The construction followed the 1747 plan by French architect Luis Godín. 32. The cemetery was designed by the prolific early nineteenth-century architect Matías Maestro (1776–1856); he also designed the nearby church of Santo Cristo, which has a neoclassical façade. 33. A partially revealed document in a portrait painting is often iconographically interpreted as indicative of the achievements of the sitter and was a common trope in eighteenth-century portraiture in Europe. Anne-Marie Passez, Antoine Vestier, 1740–1824 (Paris: Fondation Wildenstein, 1989), 144–45. 34. “La fama de los nobles echos de V.E., y de su sabia administración se extiende por todas partes. El magnifico Cementerio que bajo sus auspicios y dirección se ha erigido en esa capital sera mas duradero que las Piramides de Exipto; un

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Monumento verdaderamente augusto de su nombre, y que hará eterna su memoria en ella. El Colegio de Medicina que V.E. establese, por un plan tan vasto, tan sabio, y también combin.do le dará una Gloria, aun mas real y verdad, pues que sus beneficios no estaran limitados a solo aquellos havit.tes ni al Reyno que govierna, sino que serán extensivos a toda esta América donde será igualmente grata su memoria; que dulce es el placer de hacer bien a los Hombres y quan embidiable la muerte de los que viven bajo las ord. de un Virrey Filosofo!” Patricio Colón, “La fama de los nobles echos de V.E., y de su sabia administracion . . . ,” Lima, c. 1808, AGI, diversos 1, ramo 1,1. 35. Memories of their youth, families, and royal patron in Spain structured their experiences, both internally and collectively. Studies on the relationship between memory and identity have suggested that, for humans, “remembering the past is crucial for our sense of identity: to know what we are confirms that we are.” David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 5. 36. Peter Cherry and Marcus Burke, Collections of Paintings in Madrid, 1601–1755 (Los Angeles: Provenance Index of the Getty Information Institute, 1997). 37. J. H. Elliott, introduction to Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Nicolas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 5–7. 38. For Davis, psychoanalysis is intimately connected with material investigations and is therefore important for art historians who are trying to take account of the historical processes in which human culture is embedded. Although I do not adopt a psychoanalytic methodology in my work, Davis’s approach is helpful for elucidating a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between the viceroys and their portraits. Whitney Davis, Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 23–26. 39. Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). 40. Within early modern South American historical contexts the processes of constructing and negotiating situated subjectivities, or “identity,” were influenced by both place of birth and current place of residence, as connected to the physical body and its experiences and as socially constructed in actions and relationships. My research reveals that the patronage, creation, and reception of portraits and other artworks were situations where urban identifications took place, particularly in local political negotiations that shifted intra-viceregal dynamics. 41. Magali Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 153.

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42. Rebecca Haidt, Embodying Enlightenment: Knowing the Body in EighteenthCentury Spanish Literature and Culture (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 9. 43. Santiago Liniers, personal correspondence, January 27, 1810, Cordova: 1810, AGI, diversos 1, ramo 1.7, 2. 44. Santiago Liniers, personal correspondence, Cordova: 1810, AGI, diversos 1, ramo 1.7, 2. 45. See Alfredo Moreno Cebrián and Núria Sala i Vila, El “premio” de ser virrey: Los intereses públicos y privados del gobierno virreinal en el Perú de Felipe V (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto de Historia, 2004). 46. Accounts of individuals from a variety of historical backgrounds who actively constructed their own identities in the courts and other public forums demonstrate that people throughout the Spanish American territories turned to social systems as a way to have their fabricated identities recognized as true and official. See Carrera, Imagining Identity. 47. See Bronislaw Malinowski as cited in Ann Laura Stoler, “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicolas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 321. 48. Ibid. 49. It was not merely collecting art that provided status; the viceroys and their American peers recognized the importance of astutely amassing collections of aesthetically tasteful objects. As international figures, the viceroys took pride in their position and achievements. By sponsoring and collecting art that was both current and colonial, they reinforced their social prestige in both Spain and America. Good taste, as a mode of aesthetic discernment, was part of being a powerful colonist and imperial overlord. 50. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2002), 206; Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: Cultural Logistics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

Chapter Eleven

From Baroque Triumphalism to Neoclassical Renunciation Altarpieces of the Cathedral of Cuzco in the Era of Independence

Maya Stanfield-Mazzi

In the years leading up to and following Peru’s independence from

Spain in 1824, Peruvians professed many different loyalties, in politics, religion, and art. Movements such as the revolt led by the native Andean leader Túpac Amaru II (1780–1783) called for a complete break from Spanish rule but professed allegiance to the Catholic Church.1 Native elites in Cuzco sided with the Crown in order to retain their traditional privileges and only gradually joined the struggle for independence.2 Creoles in Peru also tended to back the Crown and initially united in favor of independence only when they felt their conservative values threatened. Some clerics supported the independence movement, while anticlerical sentiments arose both before and after independence.3 In art, various styles, corresponding to the baroque, rococo, and neoclassic, coexisted during the period. The architectural style known today as the Andean hybrid baroque continued robustly into the nineteenth century in Arequipa and areas outside the major centers of Cuzco and Lima.4 The painting style established in Cuzco during the second half of the seventeenth century also persisted into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and was often deliberately archaizing.5 No major shift in the models of artistic training and production occurred before independence that might be comparable to Mexico City’s founding of the Royal Academy of San Carlos 232

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in 1781, but changes were evident on a regional basis. As the Bourbon Reforms led to an upsurge of colonial officials arriving from Spain, there was certainly an awareness of artistic changes occurring in the metropole. The political upheavals of the period also incited patrons and artists to respond to the current situation, whether in terms of style or iconography. For example, Ramón Mujica Pinilla illustrates a move toward neoclassicism in painting of the period, which shifted its allegorical symbolism from communicating Christian doctrine to advocating the ideals of independence.6 Shifts can also be discerned in public architecture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Much of Lima was remodeled in a neoclassical style after the earthquake of 1746, especially by the Basque priest Matías Maestro y Alegría in the early nineteenth century.7 In the highlands few major constructions were undertaken, however. In Bolivia the Cathedral of Potosí, begun in 1809 and designed by the Catalonian architect and priest Miguel de Sanahuja, features a distinctive façade that has been characterized as “neoclassical with baroque edges.” 8 The later Cathedral of La Paz, completed in the late 1830s under the French architect Felipe Bertrés with the support of taxes levied by Bolivia’s first president, Andrés de Santa Cruz, exhibits a more purely neoclassical style that served as a triumphal response to independence.9 And in Ecuador, the town of Riobamba was reconstructed based on Enlightenment models.10 No such large-scale projects were undertaken in Cuzco, although the city was key to political developments of the independence era and had been the colony’s principal artistic center. In order to discern changes we can, however, consider modifications to existing structures. One key alteration to existing churches consisted of changes to their altarpieces (retablos), those symbolic works of architecture meant to organize and present images of the divine to church celebrants. At the esteemed Cathedral of Cuzco (figure 11.1), two key developments occurred in this vein during the period in question (1780–1830). In 1792 a massive new main altarpiece was begun, made of wood and entirely covered in smooth silver plaques. The altarpiece was completed in 1803, during Peru’s final decade under Spanish rule. Then, after the movement for independence (1809–1824), the gold and silver baroque altarpiece housing the Lord of the Earthquakes, the early colonial statue that was the most venerated cult image in the cathedral, was dismantled. The Christ’s confraternity donated its silver to support the Peru-Bolivia Confederation, intended to establish a strong and independent southern Andean nation. The replacement altarpiece was a vaguely neoclassical construction made of

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stucco that, due mainly to its materials, stood in contrast to all other retablos in the church. This essay examines both of these developments in terms of their formal and symbolic implications and in relation to the shifting political landscape of the late colonial and early independence periods. I argue that the replacement of the cathedral’s main altarpiece should be seen as the final major triumphal statement to be made within the cathedral. Although its forms reflect the new rationalism promoted under Spanish Bourbon rule and its smooth silver surface represented a clear break from earlier altarpieces, the new altarpiece was ultimately a celebration of the role of the church in Spain’s colonial enterprise. The only nuance between this statement and earlier triumphal claims was a Creole assertion that Cuzco had played an important role in creating a powerful Spanish Empire. In addition, the changes to the Lord of the Earthquakes altarpiece signify a cautious renunciation of the colonial tradition, specifically a renunciation of the metallurgical symbolism that had been used to communicate Spain and the church’s triumph. The altarpiece thus expressed in Christian ideological terms the support that Cuzco’s Creoles had finally given to the independence movement.

Figure 11.1. Francisco Becerra and others. Cathedral of Cuzco. 1560–1654.

Cuzco, Peru. Photograph © Maya Stanfield-Mazzi.

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The Cathedral of Cuzco, a Monument of Triumph In all of the Viceroyalty of Peru, Cuzco’s cathedral was perhaps the monument most associated with Spanish triumphalism. Its location, materials, and classicizing baroque architecture spoke to Spanish victory over Inca rule and the triumph of Christianity in the Andes. The church was begun in 1560 as a more “decent” replacement for a much smaller church that had been built in 1538 on the site of what is today El Triunfo (The Triumph), the sacrarium built in 1729–1732 on the south side of the new cathedral to commemorate the Spanish conquest.11 The Virgin Mary was believed to have appeared at that location in 1536 to assist the Spanish troops in defeating the Inca forces, an event often depicted in later works of art.12 The new monument was built just north of the early church on land purchased from the Spaniard Alonso de Mesa, over part of the Inca ruler Viracocha’s palace and east of what had been the Inca city’s main plaza, the Haucaypata.13 Construction proceeded for nearly a century under the supervision of Spanish architects and relying on the labor of many native Andean stonemasons. Monetary contributions of wealthy Spaniards, enriched in turn by native tribute payments, financed construction.14 The powerful viceroy of Peru Francisco de Toledo (r. 1569–1581), responsible for executing the last claimant to the Inca throne, donated twenty thousand pesos for the project, which were matched by both the city’s bishop and the town council.15 The church served as the parish church of Cuzco’s Spaniards and Creoles, who resided in the city’s center after Toledo’s removal of Inca nobles to outlying “Indian” parishes. The cathedral was constructed of materials that had been significant in Inca times, including sand from the Haucaypata, which had made the plaza a symbolic cocha, or sacred lake.16 Its cornerstone was a monolith brought from the Inca fortress and ceremonial site of Sacsayhuaman, and stones were still being removed from that site in 1646.17 The stones of Sacsayhuaman were associated with Inca mythohistory, including Inca military triumphs. But they were also associated with the defeat of the Incas by the Spaniards, since much fighting took place at the fortress.18 In outward appearance, the cathedral simply presented an amalgam of European architectural styles. The plan was that of a basilica, whose nave and side aisles were spanned with Gothic rib vaulting. The façade, when completed in 1658, gave an elegantly baroque face to the wide, squat structure, which towered over the plaza, hence remade as the Spanish center of the city (figure 11.1).

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The façade also articulated the message of triumph, and the new main altarpiece of 1803 would refer back to it. Pairs of Corinthian columns are arranged at differing depths to the sides of the main portal. The portal takes the shape of a round arch, a form that since early colonial times had come to signify Christian triumph in the Andes.19 An ornately framed cartouche above the door bears the Latin inscription “ASSUMPTA, ESTMR,” referring to the patroness of the cathedral as declared in 1560, Our Lady of the Assumption.20 That advocation was understood by many to have been the same that appeared to the Spaniards and helped them defeat the Incas in 1536, and a medal bearing an image of the Virgin of the Assumption had been placed under the cathedral’s Inca cornerstone.21 Above the main portal is a broken curved pediment that leads the eye upward to a second horizontal level, articulated by an arched window and smaller Corinthian columns that alternate with niches. On the crowning level, which rises above the upper edge of the structure as a round gable, a pair of even smaller columns leads up to small statues of Peter and Paul and a cross. Various stylized ornaments along the horizontal upper edges of the structure simulate merlons, thus imparting a fortified appearance to the building. The cusqueño Creole author Diego Esquivel y Navia, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, even called the ornaments “bastions and battlements.”22 The side portals make a final Spanish triumphal statement. They feature rusticated round arches that are capped by pediments containing the arms of the Spanish Crown. Raptorial birds appear to either side of each shield, heraldic representatives of the city of Cuzco under Spanish rule.23 Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn have noted that, despite its European appearance, the Cathedral of Cuzco was a colonial hybrid.24 In Andean thought, natural materials were seen as possessing sacred essences, both in and of themselves and as traces of larger sacred beings such as mountains.25 By this reasoning, those who remembered that the cathedral was built of Inca materials may have imputed sacredness to the structure on those terms. Furthermore, many different people had been involved in its construction— including many native Andean stonemasons. The traditional construction methods they used may have allowed the structure to survive the massive earthquake of 1650 intact, thus increasing its importance. Nevertheless, the power inequalities that had led to Sacsayhuaman and the Inca plaza being rebuilt as the cathedral caused the structure to primarily signify the triumph of Spain and Christianity over the Incas.

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The Cathedral’s Heavenly Architecture Throughout the Iberian world, altarpieces served to structure and communicate divine hierarchies and functioned as scenic backdrops for the liturgy.26 Their organizational logic privileged proximity to the Eucharistic Host, housed in a tabernacle behind a church’s main altar, and to the image of the church’s patron saint, usually located above the Host on the main altarpiece. Especially privileged images were honored in their own altarpieces, but the proximity of those retablos to the main altar was also significant. Less permanent than buildings but more stable than the ephemeral constructions erected for festivals, altarpieces were occasionally remodeled or replaced in order to reflect prevailing architectural styles. Their sacred images were also sometimes moved or replaced as their status changed and in response to the wishes of patrons. As early as the 1570s, attention was paid to the Cathedral of Cuzco’s interior adornment, including its fictional architecture of altarpieces. In 1637 Cuzco’s cathedral officials contracted with the master joiner (ensamblador) Martín de Torres, from Badajoz, Spain, to create the church’s main altarpiece out of cedar following two sketches that he was given.27 This earliest main altarpiece does not survive, but Torres created other altarpieces for the cathedral, such as that now dedicated to a statue of Christ bearing the cross known as the Lord of Unu Punku (figure 11.2).28 The altarpiece employs an understated baroque vocabulary similar to that seen on the façade of the church and corresponds to the same midcentury period. It presents an easily discernible structure of two main cuerpos, or horizontal registers, and three calles, or vertical sections. The latter are articulated with composite columns on plinths, and the side niches, which house paintings, feature broken curving pediments that open into smaller niches, also supplied with paintings. On the upper level the frame of the central painting (a descent from the cross) breaks the entablature but in a sharply rectilinear profile. In all, Torres’s altarpiece presents a clear structure with a few baroque flourishes providing upward movement. The wood was entirely gilded after the altarpiece’s creation, thus imparting a heavenly glow to the architectural framework. The golden tone may also have held deeper significance in relation to theological discourses about precious metals that developed in the viceroyalty as mining boomed in the seventeenth century. Spanish writers looking to justify the conquest of Peru argued that it was the Old Testament land of Ophir, from which Solomon had brought gold and jewels for the Temple in

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Jerusalem.29 And the Jesuit priest Carlos de Carvajal wrote in 1688 (in a work published in Lima) that Christ was an alchemist who transformed humans, described as being made of base metals, into pure gold.30 The Andean sense of materials being sacred in and of themselves was thus given Christian meaning and articulated visually by way of the altarpiece, a golden house for the Christian divine. While Torres was not trained as an architect, his altarpieces demonstrate a clear employment of an architectural vocabulary. Joiners continued to be hired to construct altarpieces in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but their works departed from the strict structural frameworks of Torres. One of the grandest altarpieces of the church, that dedicated to the statue of the Immaculate Conception known as “La Linda” (the pretty one), illustrates the subsequent style adopted by altarpiece designers (figure 11.3).31

Figure 11.2. Martín de Torres. Altarpiece of the Lord of Unu Punku. 1650. Cathedral of Cuzco, Peru. Photograph courtesy of the Archbishopric of Cuzco.

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The work retains the cuerpo and calle structure, but many of its architectural forms are embellished with dense sculptural ornamentation. The dynamic twisted Solomonic column is employed, which, especially in the New World, connoted the Temple of Solomon and the establishment of a New Jerusalem on earth.32 No contract survives for this altarpiece’s creation, but its gilding was contracted in 1712 from Joseph Núñez de la Torre, a master batihoja (gold beater).33 The resplendent gilding of the piece must have been a major undertaking, considering the density of the sculptural ornamentation, and would seem to further the metaphors related to gold and Christian holiness. The particularly Peruvian (and Cuzcan) source for the altarpiece’s gold was known and made clear in the contract: it was to come from the mines of Carabaya, located to the south and within the Bishopric of Cuzco.34

Figure 11.3. Joseph Núñez de la Torre and others. Altarpiece of “La Linda.” C. 1712.

Cathedral of Cuzco, Peru. Photograph courtesy of the Archbishopric of Cuzco.

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No permanent solution was found for the main altar of the cathedral during the bulk of the colonial period. It is unclear whether the altarpiece created by Torres in 1637 survived the massive earthquake of 1650 and what was erected in its place if it did not. One painting from the mid-eighteenth century depicts the main altar without an altarpiece.35 The altar appears covered with a repoussé silver frontal and a silver tabernacle rises above it to support the monstrance, but extending out to the sides of the tabernacle are textile panels rather than any solid retablo. A wooden altarpiece that is now located against the back wall of the cathedral may have been intended to serve as the main altarpiece (figure 11.4).36 Its rococo style corresponds to developments in Spain of the later eighteenth century, and its introduction in the cathedral might be seen as representative of the second wave of Hispanicization brought by the Bourbon Era.37 As in other late baroque altarpieces in the cathedral, such as that dedicated to the Sweet Name of Mary, the architectural framework is obscured by rich carved ornamentation, in this case consisting of large leafy and scrolling forms.38 A large f lame-like rocaille surmounts the central upper niche, and four androgynous atlantids serve as columns at the outer edges. Whatever the exact intention for this altarpiece, it was nevertheless destined to remain in the shadows, never gilded and only occasionally peeking through the main altarpiece that would be completed in subsequent decades. A decade after the Túpac Amaru Rebellion, in 1792 officials of the cathedral Juan Vicente Castillo and José Pérez Armendáriz contracted with the architect José Lucio y Villegas for the creation of a new retablo mayor (figure 11.5).39 Pérez Armendáriz, then treasurer, was a Peru-born Creole who would later become bishop of Cuzco. He and Castillo acted with the support of the city’s new Spanish bishop, Bartolomé María de las Heras, who had taken power in 1790. The altarpiece was to have two sides, its front of wood and entirely covered in “curiously worked” plates of silver and its reverse of gilded wood.40 Commissioned from an architect and not a joiner as in the past, the work was a significant undertaking intended to update the cathedral in response to current styles and intellectual modes, while also paying homage to the church’s past. Lucio, who is referred to in the contract as “Don” and as a resident of Cuzco whose mother resided in Lima, was likely a Spanish or limeño architect. Lucio had already proposed a design for the altarpiece in

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Figure 11.4. Anonymous. Altarpiece behind the main altar. Late eighteenth century.

Cathedral of Cuzco, Peru. Photograph courtesy of the Archbishopric of Cuzco.

1792, but he and Heras may have been aware of the plans for the new main altarpiece of the Cathedral of Lima, which was completed in 1802 and is attributed to Matías Maestro.41 Both works are freestanding pavilions, and their lower levels are similar in featuring bunches of columns that support a horizontally undulating entablature. But the Lima altarpiece was built of masonry and painted and gilded, following Spain’s orders of 1777 requiring that new altarpieces be built of durable materials such as marble, jasper, or bronze.42 The Cuzco altarpiece was different and revolutionary in presenting perhaps the first silver altarpiece in all of Latin America. The use of silver allowed for reference to colonial conceptions of sacred materials purified by the Christian divine. By being encased in silver instead of gold, the altarpiece also pointed to the true cornerstone of the colonial economy and proudly proclaimed the importance of Peru to Spain.

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Figure 11.5. José Lucio y Villegas. Main altarpiece. 1792–1803. Cathedral of Cuzco, Peru. Photograph courtesy of the Archbishopric of Cuzco.

The design of the altarpiece, which features multiple freestanding columns, called for large and continuous pieces of lumber. The wood was brought with much difficulty from two towns east of Cuzco, Paucartambo and Challabamba.43 The silver was also sourced in massive quantities—as donations from local institutions and from Manuel Boza, a priest and mine owner in Chumbivilcas, south of Cuzco. After Bishop Heras visited his parish in 1802, Boza gave multiple plaques of silver to help complete the project.44 Not all of Cuzco’s donors were happy to part with their silver ornaments, however. The prioress of Santa Teresa complained to the bishop and requested lamps for her church in exchange, and the confraternity of the Lord of the Earthquakes within the cathedral made careful records of the silver ornaments it donated.45 The altarpiece references the cathedral’s façade in its groupings of columns at different depths but disposes with the clear cuerpo and calle structure of the façade and the church’s other altarpieces (figure 11.5). Raised on a

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pedestal adorned with simple garlands, a central section is set off by groups of small Tuscan columns, six in each group. On the lower level these columns frame a niche meant for the display of the Host on festive occasions such as Corpus Christi.46 The columns are sparely ornamented with garlands of grapes, symbolic of the Eucharist. An undulating entablature crowns these columns and leads to a similar second level. There groups of smoother columns frame the statue of the Virgin, whose space is open to the rear window of the church. These columns support a mixtilinear pediment with a large medallion at its peak. On the outer sides of the altarpiece are, again, groups of six columns. The columns extend from the lower level to the upper level and support an even larger curving pediment, which features a larger medallion connected to the one below. At the very top is a small silver statue of a woman, likely an allegorical representation of faith. Also in tune with the cathedral’s façade are the multiple strategies used to encourage upward movement. Curving lines on the lower pedestal as well as the dramatic curving pediments echo baroque forms. But overall, the altarpiece stands in contrast to other works within the cathedral, with its uniform silver tone and smooth, largely unornamented columns. The work is less planar than its counterparts, and the partial transparency of its upper sections, allowing for glimpses of the rococo altarpiece and the church’s back window, furthers its dimensionality. The altar frontal was also remade to feature three medallions linked by garlands, in a much simpler composition than that seen on baroque frontals. The central medallion features an inscription lauding the role of Bishop Heras in creating the new altarpiece with “5,000 marks of silver.” 47 This was a massive quantity, equal to about twenty-five hundred pounds. The altarpiece is both an architectural edifice and a mountain of silver, literally and figuratively. The use of silver to cover an entire retablo was truly radical, but this change did not reflect radical theological or political thinking. Rather, we must look back to the colonial period for its meaning as a work of baroque triumphalism. Early colonial artists such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala had stressed the importance of Peru to the Spanish Crown by presenting the rich silver mountain of Potosí topped by the Pillars of Hercules, a classical reference of the early colonial era that symbolized the prodigious extent of the Spanish Habsburg Empire (figure 11.6). In the same era, the Augustinian friar Alonso Ramos Gavilán spoke metaphorically of metals being purified within Mary by the rays of the sun of justice. Those metals, he said, would adorn the triumphal church in its last days.48 In 1622 a triumphal cart in Lima paraded a statue of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception on a mountain of silver.49 Later colonial artists equated the Cerro Rico of Potosí, the greatest source of

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silver in the viceroyalty, more directly with the Virgin Mary, presenting the mountain as the Virgin’s very body. While perhaps drawing on a native Andean understanding of the mountain as sacred and divine, one such work presents the Roman pontiff and a Spanish Bourbon king (Charles III or IV), along with local clerics and Peruvian Creoles, as the rightful heirs to the mountain’s riches (figure 11.7).50 The Pillars of Hercules are lowered to frame the mountain/Virgin while the Trinity floats above, in a diagram that locates Peru firmly within the Spanish and Catholic worlds. By the time the altarpiece was installed in the cathedral, Bolivia had been separated from Peru as the Viceroyalty of La Plata (founded in 1776). Cuzco was displeased with its severance from Bolivia, as its colonial

Figure 11.6. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. Ciudad la villa rica e imperial de Potosí

(The rich and imperial city of Potosí). C. 1615. Photograph courtesy of the Royal Library of Copenhagen.

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Figure 11.7. Anonymous. The Virgin of the Mountain. Eighteenth century.

Photograph courtesy of Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz, Bolivia.

economy had flourished due to the city’s location along the trunk route from Potosí to Lima. The altarpiece can thus be further qualified as a particularly Cuzco-centric statement celebrating Peru’s mineral riches and the centrality of Cuzco by way of alchemical Christian symbolism. The altarpiece often displayed the Host in a monstrance within a golden radiance, which in Spanish parlance was known as a sun, or sol.51 The monstrance visualized Ramos Gavilán’s sun of justice and when on the altarpiece was topped by Mary, her hands raised to heaven just as in the painting. Relating more directly to the Cuzcan setting, the colonial preacher Juan Meléndez had linked the Christian sun to colonial triumph, remarking that the Inca sun god had been replaced by the “true Sun Christ.”52 And Mary on the cathedral’s altarpiece is the same Virgin of the Assumption of the church’s founding, thus still referencing the triumphal vision of Mary from the conquest. The altarpiece’s silver had come from local mines and the city of Cuzco, just as the gold for the La Linda altarpiece had come from within the

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bishopric. While “neo” classical in form, the altarpiece harks back to the classical roots of Spanish colonial enterprise and reiterates the cathedral’s triumphal statements, albeit tempered with Creole pride. Most notably, the designers of the altarpiece revisited the strategies of the Virgin of the Mountain by collapsing the image of a silver mountain into that of the Pillars of Hercules. By placing the sun of Christ and the Virgin Mary in the center, they found a unique way to reiterate Spanish imperial claims while also claiming the importance of Cuzco to Spain. The allegorical figure on the work’s peak nodded to the prevailing neoclassical taste for female allegorical symbols but symbolized faith rather than liberty.53

Renunciation in the New Era Not until nearly three decades after the completion of the main altarpiece was an altarpiece created in response to the new era. The movement toward independence had been protracted, especially in Cuzco, which not only saw the Túpac Amaru Rebellion but was the center of a major uprising in 1814. This latter revolt, which Luis Miguel Glave argues was a key factor in the more widespread independence movement, counted on the support of multiple sectors of Cuzco’s society, including Inca nobles, Creole elites, and commoners.54 One supporter was the Peruvian-born bishop at the time, José Pérez y Armendáriz, who, as we have seen, had commissioned the main altarpiece in 1792.55 Once the 1814 Revolution was suppressed, the viceregal government was relocated to Cuzco for a period, but the later revolutionary movements counted on the city’s support to secure Peru’s independence in 1824. After independence, the liberated territories were fraught with internal conflicts that ultimately precluded Simón Bolívar’s dream of a unified South American nation. But shades of the Bolivarian ideology can, I think, be seen in the changes to the altarpiece of the Lord of the Earthquakes. The British military officer William Miller, who served under Bolívar during the liberation of Chile and Peru, wrote an account of the festivities held in honor of Bolívar on his arrival in Potosí in 1825. Bolívar’s journey from Lima, through Cuzco and La Paz, and on to Potosí “had been one continued triumph.”56 Nearing the mining center, Bolívar’s cortege passed through multiple triumphal arches and was greeted by all sectors of society, including costumed dancers, in the baroque festive tradition. When brought to the summit of the Cerro Rico, however, Bolívar proclaimed that the immense riches buried in

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the Andes and under his feet “vanished into nothing” when compared with the glory of bringing liberty to the Andes.57 This spirit of renunciation in favor of the new era can also be seen within Cuzco’s cathedral. In 1825 the prefect of Cuzco, Agustín Gamarra, called for a “reformation” of the monument. Perhaps he hoped for some renovation of its architectural features in line with the neoclassical style, which by that time was associated with the independence movement. But the reforms at that point only consisted of removing a series of paintings depicting the conquest, including one that depicted the Virgin descending on Cuzco to defeat the Incas.58 Then, in 1830, Gamarra, by then president of Peru, ordered that gold and silver be donated to cover the expenses involved in creating the PeruBolivia Confederation.59 Cuzco supported the confederation because it would maintain the commercial ties with Bolivia that had led to the city’s prosperity in colonial times.60 There were also personal ties with Cuzco that lent support to the confederation on ideological grounds. Santa Cruz, the authoritarian president of Bolivia, had attended the Franciscan college there, and key negotiations for the confederation were held in the town of Sicuani, east of Cuzco. So it fell to the confraternity of Christ of the Earthquakes, which had been in charge of the advocation’s chapel since the early eighteenth century, to make a donation. Ultimately 497 marks (248 lbs.) of silver were removed from the chapel and the confraternity’s storeroom. Then a new stucco altarpiece was commissioned by the sodality’s foreman, Rafael Rivero y Silva, from a Mercedarian friar in Cuzco, Eusebio Soto.61 Contributions of silver were made from throughout Cuzco, but the main altarpiece of the cathedral remained intact, as did, seemingly, most of the cathedral’s treasures.62 The Christ of the Earthquakes confraternity was the only entity within the cathedral to make a strong statement of support. The statue known as the Lord of the Earthquakes, created in Peru in the late sixteenth century, had become legendary in the late seventeenth century.63 It was believed that the statue was taken in procession after the earthquake of 1650 and ceased the aftershocks of the quake.64 By the end of the seventeenth century the statue, a large and dramatic image of Christ crucified, was enshrined in a chapel on the right side of the cathedral, directly preceding the crossing and in full view of the main altar. The statue, alone on its altarpiece, was accompanied on either side by sculpted images of the Virgin Mary and John the Evangelist, which had their own altars with silver frontals. Colonial-era paintings indicate that the Christ’s altarpiece featured Solomonic columns to either side of the

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statue and a trilobed niche that traced the shape of the cross.65 The altarpiece as a whole was probably made of gilded wood, but in 1783 a new altar frontal, steps leading to the altarpiece, and a concha (rocaille) over the statue were created in silver. The material, valued at a total of eighty-two marks, was primarily given as a donation by the Creole author Esquivel y Navia at the time of his death.66 The altar frontal, commissioned from the silversmith Idelfonso Carrasco and richly adorned with tracery and symbols of the Passion, still survives today. But the rest of the altarpiece’s silver, including the steps and concha, was removed in 1830. The altar frontals for the statues of Mary and John, created only in 1787, were also removed.67 The wooden altarpiece was eliminated and replaced with a stucco structure, and the statues were placed with the Christ instead of behind their own altars. The new altarpiece, before renovations in 1987 that returned it to a more metallic “colonial” state, was executed in the “neoclassical with baroque edges” style of the period (figure 11.8).68 The niche housing the three statues retains the trilobed form of the colonial era, but two angels appear in relief on the round gable above the niche, bearing garlands to crown the holy image. Evidencing yet again the taste for allegory that was especially popular in the independence era, these figures symbolize victory, an idea that was appropriate to the era but not unsuitable in the church setting. Corinthian columns adorned only with ribbon-like bands flank the niche. On the outer edges, larger fluted Corinthian columns support an entablature that gives way to a crowning level. This level features a window and engaged fluted pilasters, and its edges are adorned with scrolling leafy forms. While the classical forms of the altarpiece are in tune with the neoclassicism of the independence era, they also rhyme with the more classicizing altarpieces in the cathedral, such as that of the Lord of Unu Punku (figure 11.2). What was truly different about this altarpiece was its material—not wood, gold, silver, or even noble stone but the basest of elements, lime plaster.69 Stucco had been used for altarpieces in Lima and elsewhere when stone was lacking, but it was not widely used in Cuzco. Seen within the Andean context, the change in materials should be understood as deeply significant, as a renunciation of the metallurgical symbolism that had united the church with Spain and its colonial enterprise. The sacred image remained on the altarpiece, however. Venerable traditions related to the statue continued, such as the dressing of the sculpture in rich skirts known as sudarios. By midcentury the traditional white lace was replaced with colored fabrics with gold embroidery, perhaps allowing the

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Figure 11.8. Eusebio Soto. Altarpiece of the Lord of the Earthquakes. 1830.

Cathedral of Cuzco, Peru. Photograph courtesy of the Confraternidad del Señor de los Temblores.

statue to stand out from its new, lighter setting.70 In this sense the Andean respect for material essences survived, but the sacred materials were applied to the statue itself. While the renovation of the altarpiece is not known to have occasioned great protest, when the bishop of Cuzco proposed cleaning the statue in 1875 an angry mob chased him from the cathedral.71 The statue, growing progressively blacker due to the buildup of soot, also continued to be carried in procession to respond to local disasters such as droughts and earthquakes. In 1740 the statue had been taken out in procession to protect Spain from an English maritime attack.72 But in 1841, a century later, the statue was placed in the nave of the cathedral in celebration of nine days of

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prayer requesting the “pacification” of Bolivia.73 The Peru-Bolivia Confederation eventually failed, and Gamarra died fighting over it in 1841. But this last show of support for the confederation, achieved through the participation of the sacred Christ statue, serves to confirm that the renovation of the altarpiece in 1830 must have had strong political symbolism. The Cathedral of Cuzco emerges as a key location from which to observe the changes that occurred in artistic styles in the colonial and independence eras, especially in relation to changing political allegiances. The close link between church and state, and the use of the cathedral to make what were largely political statements, should not be surprising. The church had long been embroiled in political concerns, and was even more so in the independence era.74 The main altarpiece was naturally a central location from which to articulate both theological and political proclamations. But the altarpiece of Christ of the Earthquakes, housing the statue that by the eighteenth century had become the centerpiece of Cuzcan Christianity, was an even more apt location from which to express changing political ideals. Modern scholars have largely ignored the new main altarpiece of 1803, presumably seeing it as a vulgar work not in tune with the cathedral’s colonial masterpieces. But its survival within the church today suggests that church officials and the community have felt the main altarpiece to be a worthy housing for their divine images. Scholars have spoken even more negatively of the changes to the Christ of the Earthquakes altarpiece in 1830, seeing the changes as a sign of submission to politics and the “modern” style of the era.75 The Christ’s confraternity echoed this sentiment by remodeling the altarpiece in 1987, its silver-encased columns adorned with grapes in imitation of the main altarpiece. Nevertheless, when the changes to the two altarpieces are viewed in tandem and with concern for art, religion, and politics, they serve as fascinating expressions of Cuzco’s struggles in the independence era.

Notes 1. María Luisa Laviana Cuetos, Túpac Amaru (Seville: Editoriales Andaluzas Unidas, 1990), 88. 2. Jorge Cornejo Bouroncle, Pumacahua, la revolución del Cuzco de 1814: Estudio documentado (Cuzco: [H.G. Rozas], 1956); Luis Miguel Glave, “A Historical and Cultural Perspective on the 1814 Revolution in Cuzco,” in New World, First

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Nations: Native Peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes Under Colonial Rule, ed. David Patrick Cahill and Blanca Tovías (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), 196–217. 3. Manuel Jesús Aparicio Vega, El clero patriota en 1814 (Cuzco: Convenio Municipalidad del Cusco—Cervesur, 2001); David Patrick Cahill, From Rebellion to Independence in the Andes: Soundings from Southern Peru, 1750–1830 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2002), 15–42. 4. Ramón Gutiérrez, Carlos Pernaut, and Graciela Viñuales, Arquitectura del altiplano peruano (Buenos Aires: Libros de Hispanoamérica, 1978); José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, Arquitectura andina 1530–1830: Historia y análisis (La Paz: Colección Arsanz y Vela, 1985), 320; Gauvin A. Bailey, The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 2. 5. Teresa Gisbert, “Andean Painting,” in Gloria in Excelsis: The Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and Bolivia, ed. Barbara Duncan and Teresa Gisbert (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1986), 27. 6. Ramón Mujica Pinilla, “Identidades alegóricas: Lecturas iconográficas del barroco al neoclásico,” in El barroco peruano, vol. 2 (Lima: Banco de Crédito, 2003), 250–336. 7. Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, “Avatares del ‘bello ideal’: Modernismo clasicista versus tradiciones barrocas en Lima, 1750–1825,” in Visión y símbolos: Del virreinato criollo a la república peruana (Lima: Banco de Crédito, 2006), 112–59. 8. Mesa and Gisbert, Arquitectura andina, 381–82. 9. Ibid., 392–93, 396. 10. Jesús Paniagua Pérez and Alfonso Ortiz Crespo, “El proyecto de una ciudad ilustrada para América: El diseño de Riobamba,” in Arte de la Real Audiencia de Quito, ed. Alexandra Kennedy (Hondarriba, Spain: Editorial Nerea, 2002), 162–83. 11. Jesus M. Covarrubias Pozo, Cuzco colonial y su arte: Apuntes para la historia de los monumentos coloniales del Cuzco (Cuzco: H. G. Rozas, 1958), 12. 12. Carolyn Dean, “The Renewal of Old World Images and the Creation of Colonial Peruvian Visual Culture,” in Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America, ed. Diana Fane (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1996), 172–73. 13. Covarrubias Pozo, Cuzco colonial, 12–13. 14. Ibid., 13–36. 15. Ibid., 15. 16. Tom Cummins, “A Tale of Two Cities: Cuzco, Lima, and the Construction of Colonial Representation,” in Fane, Converging Cultures, 160. 17. Covarrubias Pozo, Cuzco colonial, 23. 18. Brian S. Bauer, Ancient Cuzco: Heartland of the Inca (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 98–105; Carolyn Dean, “Creating a Ruin in Colonial Cusco: Sacsahuamán and What Was Made of It,” Andean Past 5 (1998): 164, 167.

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19. Valerie Fraser, The Architecture of Conquest: Building in the Viceroyalty of Peru, 1535–1635 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 20. Covarrubias Pozo, Cuzco colonial, 13. 21. Ibid. The advocation is best attested in paintings of the event, which clearly show a crowned Virgin of the Assumption. Cf. José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, Historia de la pintura cuzqueña (Lima: Fundación A. N. Wiese, 1982), figs. 315, 509. A stone statue of the Virgin of the Assumption was also placed in a tabernacle on the future site of El Triunfo in the mid-seventeenth century. Diego de Esquivel y Navia, Noticias cronológicas de la gran ciudad del Cusco, ed. Félix Denegri Luna, Horacio Villanueva Urteaga, and César Gutiérrez Muñoz (1748; repr., Lima: Fundación Augusto N. Wiese, Banco Wiese, 1980), 2:145. But some believed the descending Virgin to have been that of the Immaculate Conception. Dean, “Renewal of Old World Images,” 172. 22. Esquivel y Navia, Noticias cronológicas, 2:144. 23. Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 146–47. 24. Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 15–16. 25. Penny Dransart, Elemental Meanings: Symbolic Expression in Inka Miniature Figurines (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1995); Gabriela Siracusano, El poder de los colores: De lo material a lo simbólico en las prácticas cuturales andinas: Siglos XVI–XVIII (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica de Argentina, 2005). 26. Ramón Gutiérrez, Barroco iberoamericano: De los Andes a las Pampas (Barcelona: Lunwerg, 1997), 146–47; and Catherine Wilkinson Zerner, “The Visionary Spatial World of the Ibero-American Retable Altarpiece” (paper presented at the College Art Association Annual Conference, New York, 2011). 27. Jorge Cornejo Bouroncle, Derroteros del arte cuzqueño: Datos para una historia del arte en el Perú (Cuzco: Editorial Garcilaso, 1960), 140–41. 28. The chapel was originally dedicated to an advocation of the Virgin Mary known as “La Antigua,” which was moved to another chapel in the cathedral. Mesa and Gisbert, Arquitectura andina, 245–46. The Lord of Unu Punku, or “Water Gate,” refers to an underground spring beneath the chapel. Abraham Valencia Espinoza, Taytacha Temblores: Patrón jurado del Cuzco (Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Andinos, 1991), 118–22. 29. Sabine MacCormack, On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 262, 263–65. 30. Mujica Pinilla, “Identidades alegóricas,” 312. 31. Jesús Lámbarri Braceso, “Imágenes de mayor veneración en la ciudad del Cusco,” in Escultura en el Perú (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 1991), 266–67.

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32. Teresa Gisbert and José de Mesa, “La escultura en Cusco,” in Escultura en el Perú, 213. 33. Covarrubias Pozo, Cuzco colonial, 43. 34. Ibid., 43. 35. Cristina Esteras Martín, “Acculturation and Innovation in Peruvian Viceregal Silverwork,” in The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530–1830, ed. Elena Phipps, Johanna Hecht, and Cristina Esteras Martín (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), fig. 64. 36. Víctor Angles Vargas, La Basílica Catedral del Cusco (Cuzco: Víctor Angles Vargas, 1999), 104. 37. Cf. Francisco Ollero Lobato and Jesús Miguel Palomero Páramo, Noticias de arquitectura (1761–1780) (Seville: Ediciones Guadalquivir, 1994), plate 16. 38. The altarpiece dedicated to the Sweet Name of Mary houses a statue of Mary known as the Virgin of Choconchaca. Angles Vargas, Basílica Catedral, 112. 39. The full contract appears in Bouroncle, Derroteros del arte cuzqueño, 233–37. 40. Ibid., 235. 41. Ibid.; Wuffarden, “Avatares,” 136–38. 42. Ramón Gutiérrez and Cristina Esteras Martín, Arquitectura y fortificación de la ilustración a la independencia americana (Madrid: Ediciones Tuero, 1993), 150. 43. Graciela María Viñuales, El espacio urbano en el Cusco colonial: Uso y organización de las estructuras simbólicas (Lima: Epígrafe Editores, 2004), 85. 44. The parish, the head of a rural doctrina, was Santa Tomás. Boza’s mines were known as Huanso. Covarrubias Pozo, Cuzco colonial, 53. 45. Viñuales, El espacio urbano, 85; Archivo Regional del Cusco, Peru (hereafter cited as ARC), Dirección 62, “Libro de Inventarios de . . . bienes correspondientes a la Cofradía del Santo Christo de Temblores de esta Santa Yglesia Cathedral,” July 13, 1806 (fols. 2r–v). 46. On other occasions the niche houses a crucifix or an image of Christ (figure 11.5). 47. Angles Vargas, Basílica Catedral, 116. 48. Alonso Ramos Gavilán, Historia del santuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana (1621; repr., Lima: Ignacio Prado Pastor, 1988), 194–95. 49. Mujica Pinilla, “Identidades alegóricas,” 310. 50. Ibid., 311. 51. Esteras Martín, “Acculturation and Innovation,” 63. 52. Juan Meléndez, Tesoros verdaderos de las Yndias . . . (Rome: Nicolas Angel Tinassio, 1681–1682), 608. 53. Joan B. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 38–44. 54. Glave, “Historical and Cultural Perspective,” 196–217. 55. Angles Vargas, Basílica Catedral, 298.

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56. John Miller, Memoirs of General Miller, in the Service of the Republic of Peru, 2 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1973), 2:302. 57. Ibid., 2:304, 309. 58. Viñuales, El espacio urbano, 75; Wuffarden, “Avatares,” n125. 59. Valencia Espinoza, Taytacha Temblores, 35; Violeta Paliza Flores, Arquitectura cusqueña en los albores de la república (1824–1934) (Cuzco: Editorial Universitaria UNSAAC, 1995), 99. 60. Ronald Bruce St. John, The Foreign Policy of Peru (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner, 1992), 13–14. 61. Archivo del Arzobispado del Cusco, Peru (hereafter cited as AAC), LX, 3, 55, July 2, 1852, fols. 5v–6r; Valencia Espinoza, Taytacha Temblores, 37; Paliza Flores, Arquitectura cusqueña, 100. 62. Valencia Espinoza, Taytacha Temblores, 35. 63. Pedro Querejazu Leyton, “Sobre las condiciones de la escultura virreinal en la región andina,” Revista Arte y Arqueología (1978): 140. 64. Lámbarri Braceso, “Imágenes de mayor veneración,” 191–250; Valencia Espinoza, Taytacha Temblores; Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, “Shifting Ground: Elite Sponsorship of the Cult of Christ of the Earthquakes in Eighteenth-Century Cusco,” Hispanic Research Journal 8, no. 5 (December 2007): 445–65. 65. Cf. Mesa and Gisbert, Historia de la pintura cuzqueña, fig. 512. 66. ARC, Asuntos Eclesiásticos, Legajo 07, 1776–82, fol. 17r; ARC, Documentos notariales, Prot. 243, 1787, scribe Carlos Rodríguez de Ledezma, fol. 61r. 67. AAC, VIII, 5, 93, 1787, fol. 44. 1787, unn.; ARC, Dirección 62, “Libro de Inventarios . . . ,” 1806, fol. 7v. 68. The 1987 altarpiece was created in wood with gilding and, like the cathedral’s main altarpiece, silver plating. Jorge Escobar Medrano, “Restauración de la capilla del Señor de los Temblores,” in Confraternidad del Señor de los Temblores Cusco bodas de plata 1978–2003, ed. José Miguel Venero Villafuerte and Manuel Jara Serrano (Lima: Corporación Gráfica Navarrete, 2003), 14. 69. The main altarpiece of El Triunfo was created in stone in the late 1760s. Angles Vargas, Basílica Catedral, 283, 344. 70. AAC, LX, 3, 55, fol. 4v. 71. Raúl Porras Berrenechea, ed., Antología del Cusco (Lima: Librería Internacional, 1961), 307. 72. Esquivel y Navia, Noticias cronológicas, 2:272. 73. ARC, Libros de fábrica de la Catedral del 1 al 16, 1800–1841, unn. 74. Cahill, From Rebellion to Independence, 17, 29. 75. Valencia Espinoza, Taytacha Temblores, 35–36.

Chapter Twelve

Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Late Nineteenth Century An Appraisal in the Context of the 1881 Centennial of Mexico’s Academy of San Carlos

Stacie G. Widdifield

The majority of the essays in this volume shape the problems of buen gusto

(good taste) and classicism in Latin America from the perspective of the late eighteenth-century initiation of the Bourbon Reforms and their aftereffects, as well as the initiation of nation building in the first half of the nineteenth century. They also demonstrate that classicism and its apparent correlates of good taste and the academy did not effect a totalizing trauma to the late colonial artistic body politic. Certainly classicism was deployed to serve the late eighteenth-century reformist agenda of the Bourbon regime across Latin America. To use the lexicon of multiple essays, however, it circulated simultaneously with, and did not necessarily supersede, local and especially baroque idioms. We learn that the articulation of classicism and good taste is most apparent in the arena of urban transformation across the long nineteenth century. Monumental architecture and sculpture exert a very strong gravitational pull in these essays. In this realm are investigated a range of stylistic accommodations to local needs, a dynamic hybridity as made visible in both exterior and interior spaces. Attendant to this is what we might think of as an arithmetic of the original wherein operates a presumed standard grounded in architectural treatises such as the works of Vitruvius or

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Palladio or models such as plaster casts of ancient and Renaissance sculptures or, ironically, even an ancient Andean ruin. Deviations from these standards are calculated as meaningful operations in the broader process of accommodation and adaptation of classicism in the process of its Americanization. This group of essays does not share the historical scholarly perception that neoclassicism is merely a phenomenon of foreign imposition consumed by an elite. They foreground the flexibility of neo​classicism in responding to national and local exigencies in Latin America, ranging from late eighteenth-century public government buildings in Lima to plantations in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba to centennial projects in 1910 Colombia. A number of essays highlight the critical role of an emerging mass media in the dissemination of classicism and good taste. Strongly inflected by Benedict Anderson’s propositions regarding the formation of communities and nations, these essays show how print culture commands a leading role in guiding the public to see images as well as to acquire them. Looking or reading publics are enjoined to bring themselves properly into alignment with good taste as well as with the nation. In this process, good taste may or may not be understood as classicism, much less as always and everywhere articulated by the academy. Print culture is, effectively, a visual technology that makes its impress on behaviors, both imagined and performed. Ultimately, the engines of political and artistic confrontations of the late eighteenth century (neoclassicism/baroque, academy/guild) and the complexities of the projects of citizen formation of the first half of the nineteenth century have compelled a significant amount of attention. What of good taste in the late nineteenth century, when the nation is more or less built and the academy a relatively stable institution whose dismantling of guilds has been long since achieved and in which the marketplace as well as new technologies may play an increasing role in the arbitration of good taste? This is the situation in late nineteenth-century Mexico, just at the moment when the National School of Fine Arts celebrated its centennial in 1881.1 The 1881 centennial celebration of the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City presents an opportunity to direct our interrogation of good taste away from particular monuments and the impact of traditions of scholarship. The centennial generated an opportunity for looking back to the institution’s foundation as well as to assess its performance and evaluate contemporary expectations of the school. Thus, in these two ways the 1881 centennial exhibition operates in sync with what are now very well-known Porfirian practices

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designed to formulate Mexico’s heroic history and to produce its modern future. I would like to initially examine the operation of good taste in the context of the centennial through a cluster of primary-source documents of the period. These include: the 1881 speech delivered by the director of the school, correspondence written by the directors between 1877 and 1881, and the catalogue of the 1881 exhibition held at the school, as well as criticism published in the Mexico City press. I will also bring into play two examples of Porfirian projects that intersect with implications of the centennial material. At the opening of the centennial exhibition, also the school’s twentieth, the director, Román S. Lascuráin, read a speech in which he intertwined a general history of the institution with an analysis of its finances, physical plant (repairs and renovations), acquisition of works for its art and library collections, exhibitions, and curriculum.2 In essence, the speech was about institutional stewardship as well as the school’s responsiveness to the progress and advancement of the nation. The speech narrated a history in which the academy was shepherded by governments both imperial and national through a series of obstacles, from the foundational negotiations as the School of Engraving, to periodic crises both political and economic following the country’s achievement of independence, to its current and triumphant place under the protection and support of the primer ciudadano (the first citizen), that is, President Manuel González, who was elected to serve as Porfirio Díaz’s stand-in from 1880 to 1884. The president was there to receive the plaudit.3 The text is peppered with the vocabulary characteristic of the discourse of the late nineteenth-century Mexican nation-state and resonant of the Díaz regime’s motto, “order and progress”: advancements, progress, utility, investment, betterment, prosperity, perfection, and of course, good taste. In its appeal to the administration, a number of whose members as well as the diplomatic corps were also in attendance at the opening festivities of the centennial exhibition, the speech charted a course between the school’s duty to the development of the fine and the practical arts.4 Both were understood to contribute to the cultivation of good taste as well as to a feeling for the beautiful, in turn enhancing the luster of the nation as a whole. This dual focus reminds us that the academy’s original purpose was precisely to train fine artists and artisans with curricula suitable to the needs of both.5 Certainly one of the royal academy’s aims was to dismantle the guilds by institutionalizing artisanal practices as well as inculcating classicism as the language best suited to advancing Bourbon initiatives. By 1881 guilds were hardly the adversary. Indeed, beginning with the establishment of the

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Escuela de Artes y Oficios (School of Arts and Trades) by conservative politician Lucas Alamán in 1843, multiple arts and trade schools offered a variety of courses, in support of the needs of the growth of manufacturing, industry, and public works.6 The relationship between high art and artisanal training and practice has been underestimated.7 A sense of its import is suggested by the attention given to artisans in documents written by the academy’s directors between 1877 and 1881.8 J. Hipólito Ramírez, who held the directorship of the academy for a brief period between 1876 and 1877, provided an assessment of the state of the academy in which he described the increase in the number of artisans attending classes, especially at night. He proposed holding classes in the dining rooms to accommodate them.9 In his 1878 state of the school assessment Lascuráin also noted the increase in artisans who attended the various evening drawing classes, calculating that no less than two hundred students had been enrolled consistently during the academic year. Lascuráin saw the education of artisans by the academy, to be aided by steady funding from the Porfirian administration, as a national good: “These studies are surely one of greatest benefits that the Government can lend to society in the realm of public instruction.”10 The foundation of these classes was drawing, namely, figure, line, and industrial drawing (including the copying of classical architectural models), drawing from prints, and the copying of ornament (especially for molds of architectural elements). This was, in short, a classical education and shared core elements with the curriculum established for full-time students following a fine art track. Artisanal training was geared toward the creation of a sector of workers who could contribute to the dramatic increase in the demand for public works and domestic architecture as well as the concomitant expansion of the market for small-scale ornamental work and, finally, for the pictorial reproduction of images. Both Ramírez and Lastcuráin understood very clearly the economic imperative of this artisanal, classical training for late nineteenth-century Mexico. They called attention to the potential for the production of images by artisans in lithography, photography, terra-cotta, and plaster casting as well as electroplating (galvanoplastia). The academy directors clearly understood the role that artisanal education could play in the expansion of an economy of image production, circulation, and consumption. The idea was to take advantage of new and efficient technologies of reproduction, train a skilled workforce, and disseminate good taste (often classically conceived).

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The academy exhibition contributed directly to this enterprise. One of the directives organizing the 1881 exhibition stated that patrons, that is, “subscribers,” could choose a gift of either “three photographs or two photographs and a print, of the best original [works of art] presented, accompanied by a text explaining the subject matter.”11 This is merely one indication of the exponential increase in reproductions of works of art given as collectible souvenirs of originals, involving the joint efforts of high artists and artisans.12 The appointment of Román Lascuráin as director could hardly have been more auspicious for supporting the growth of an economy of images; indeed, he was installed originally as an interim director of the school in April 1877, but he held the post until 1902.13 Different from the majority of his predecessors, he was educated in Germany and had traveled widely in Europe before returning to Mexico. He was a businessman and philanthropist. He held a number of appointed posts during the Díaz administration, including the directorship of the Escuela de Artes y Oficios para Mujeres (School of Arts and Trades for Women). Lascuráin’s political, cultural, and economic contributions to the nation were summarized in his biography in the 1888 trilingual (French, English, Spanish) Los hombres prominentes de México (Prominent men of Mexico). His position as “director of the Academy of Fine Arts” appeared first in the tally of his accomplishments.14 The ordering of his achievements suggests that Lascuráin brought to his duties as director of the school his notable professional acumen and a sensitivity to its modern economic and cultural potential. There is no doubt that the 1881 exhibition administratively overseen by Lascuráin gave a demonstrable presence to artisanal production. Visitors to the academy exhibition would have seen this category of work in the displays designated as from “outside of the Academy.” Historically included in this category were works by Mexican artists (including women) and foreign artists from their own studios and works from private collections, as well as work submitted from other institutions. Works from outside of the academy had been shown routinely in the academy exhibitions since midcentury, but in 1881 there was a dramatic and quantitative increase in their presence. Clearly, this is in part due to the significance of the centennial itself, since it provided an obvious moment to showcase multiple institutions. It remains true, however, that the scope of artisanal production in the 1881 exhibition was unprecedented. Among the schools represented by a variety of drawings and/or models and casts were: the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria (National

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Preparatory School), the night classes of the Gran Círculo de Obreros (Great Workers Circle), the Escuela Católica de Artes y Oficios (Catholic School of Arts and Trades), the Instituto Franco-Mexicano (Franco-Mexican Institute), the Instituto Baz, and the Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios (National School of Arts and Trades).15 One gauge of the relationship between the academy and the training of fine artists and the training of artisans in trade schools is an article published in the biweekly periodical La Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios that describes the participation of that institution’s students in the 1881 exhibition.16 The anonymous piece relates that the school’s students exhibited a range of drawings (life, industrial, and line studies) as well as lithographs and ornamental plaster casts and terra-cotta decorations. In praising one student for earning an honorable mention for a terra-cotta flower arrangement at the 1881 show, the author delineates the distinctions between originals and reproductions, the aesthetic character and the medium. It is a pitch for the development of the decorative terra-cotta industry, for the aesthetic recognition of the reproduction and a means to reverse its status as a practice sin gusto (without taste). The academy’s bestowal of a prize for this one work indicated the potential tastefulness to be achieved by this growing industry. The most spectacular fulfillment of this potential between art and industry was in the enterprises of the celebrated academy sculptor Jesús Contreras, whose Fundición Artística Mexicana (Mexican Artistic Foundry) produced over half of the life-sized bronze sculptures of national heroes for the Reforma between 1889 and 1902 (see below) and, most relevant here, whose Alfarería Artística (Artistic Pottery) churned out terra-cotta decorations for middle-class and elite domestic consumption during much of the same period. As art historian Patricia Pérez Walters has shown, Contreras effectively negotiated public and private funding and the making of large-scale public works as well as mass-market, small-scale objects of ornament and decoration demanded by a range of sectors of Porfirian society.17 Contreras’s industrial-artistic success, however, was achieved after his return from Paris in 1889. In smaller and different ways, the links between the academy and arts and trade schools that would propel this success was already taking place. To be sure, since the foundation of the academy in the late eighteenth century, artists trained in the extensive fine arts curriculum had taught artisans in night classes at the institution itself. In the late nineteenth century, however, we see academy faculty taking up more posts in arts and trade schools. A detailed and statistical account of this in future studies

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would allow us to see the increasing interaction between institutions as well as the intricacies of what we might call the interchange of good taste and classicism on a more practical level. We know that academy artists taught at such institutions as the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria and the Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficio. Epitacio Calvo, for example, an academy sculptor who also contributed four statues to the Reforma group, taught decorative modeling at the Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficio. Moreover, he was already directing academy sculpture students as well as artisans in foundry work in small forges in his own studio as early as 1877. This relationship was definitively encouraged by director J. Hipólito Ramírez.18 If the 1881 centennial was evidently designed as an acknowledgment of the academy’s past, it was most certainly also about its future, as the speech read by Lascuráin as well as the other documents considered in this essay attest. Lascuráin, and so too Ramírez, desired an increase in the permeability of the academy to commercial mediums of reproduction as well as a greater presence of nonacademy works that demonstrated how academic skills could be put to commercial use. Of course, the directorial documents I have considered do not neglect support for the high art training that was the primary focus of the academy. The 1881 centennial speech read by Lascuráin narrates a skeletal history of celebrated, major artists from the late eighteenth century on. Lascuráin and the public also understood the role of the academy exhibition as the premier public venue in which artists could demonstrate their skills and talents individually and, as a group, educate the public; in short, the exhibition offered an opportunity to disseminate and cultivate good taste. Typically, contemporary criticism published in the Mexico City press in the nineteenth century did not give this task to artisans or their work. I suggest, however, that the criticism written in the context of the 1881 centennial acknowledges the possibilities of a relationship between fine and artisanal contributions to the aesthetic good of the academy and, by extension, the nation. The two major reviews written in response to the 1881 exhibition organized their commentary into two principal parts: an appraisal of the state of fine arts and the academy and more detailed commentary about specific works or categories of works. Relevant to this inquiry, and as a parallel to the 1881 centennial speech, I wish to emphasize briefly the first component.19 These responses to the 1881 exhibition stressed the importance of good taste generally and the academy’s responsibility for promoting it. Similar to the sentiments accentuated in the centennial speech, good taste was a measure of the nation’s worth, its level of civilization, its progress, and

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its advancement. As the well-known painter Felipe S. Gutiérrez intoned, the fine arts (read: good taste) were “the thermometer of civilization.”20 On balance, reviewers found the temperature of the artistic body to be fairly tepid. As Gutiérrez put it, “Taste for the fine arts remains stationary. . . . As far as the increase in taste in our society, we doubt this will occur.” 21 We may summarize the factors responsible for this anemic state. Especially in terms of visual arts, there was a lack of government commissions, notably for public sculpture and monuments. Although public monuments had been erected throughout the nineteenth century, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century their production would increase substantially with the organization of projects proposed and/or directly funded by the government. Such projects include the Paseo de la Reforma statues (multiple artists, 1889–1902), the monument to Benito Juárez in the National Palace (Miguel Noreña, 1891), the hemicycle to Benito Juárez on the Alameda (Guillermo Heredia and A. Lanzaroni, 1910), and the Column of Independence on the Paseo de la Reforma (Enrique Alciati and Antonio Rivas Mercado, 1910). Public monument building would serve two purposes: to inculcate good taste in the citizenry through easily accessible works of art and to provide gainful employment for artists. Unfolding from this was the complaint that there were insufficient exhibitions of art, in other words, the public lacked adequate access to art. Critics wished for the establishment of more public museums and the display of small-scale works in private and commercial spaces. The goal was to expand significantly the historically active venues for the display of art in the National Museum and artists’ studios and at salons in a limited range of venues such as storefronts, theater or hotel lobbies, or private parlors.22 One of the problems was how to effect a change in public perception of art, how to popularize it, as one critic summarized; this would carry with it the task of finding a relevant language in which to discuss art. The press was enjoined to take on this task. As the pseudonymous El Procurador stated, the public merely attended exhibitions of fine art as they “attended the zarzuela, the bullfight . . . only to amuse themselves and pass the time.” 23 A critic might just as well “scribble something about the polar regions or write a meditation on how inhabitants of the moon live” as write on the fine arts.24 The press was asked to publish more articles on art and include more reproductions of the works themselves. Of course, these articles and reproductions (lithographs, photographs, engravings, etc.) were poised to stand in for the original object and its display. One measure of

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good taste, by extension, was a function of the acquisition of the publication in which the article and image appeared. The press was being asked simultaneously to appeal to a mass audience and to enhance and protect the elite character of fine arts at the academy. This desired text-image formulation of good taste in mass media is an index of the increasingly ironic situation of the academy as the bastion of high art production and exhibition, on the one hand, and the training ground for artisans and site for the display of practical arts, on the other. Future studies will need to rethink this relationship in more practical terms, that is, in the gathering of what we might call arts employment statistics— who worked where and produced what? The relationship of fine art and artisanal practices is certainly inflected by the issue of employment. Not surprisingly, we see multiple indications that academic artists found it difficult to make a living and had to seek work evidently unbecoming of their elite education. Fine artists petitioned the school’s administration to buy their works; the directors lamented the declining enrollment of full-time students because they could not pay tuition or find work to help them do this; critics complained that academic artists were reduced to decorating walls. As Gutiérrez complained, “In the Mexican Academy, they attempt to form sound artists so that later they can go into the street to paint portrait busts and miracles on little retablos.”25 Highly trained artists such as Julio Ruelas and Leando Izaguirre sold their illustration or caricature skills to popular magazines such as El Mundo Ilustrado. Certainly every academic artist who took a position teaching drawing or ornamental modeling at an arts or trade school needed the job. Felix Parra, a skilled academic painter whose own period of European training was funded personally by Román Lascuráin, held the post of professor of decoration and ornament at the academy itself. According to Lascuráin’s biography, Parra was “full of gratitude toward the man who had carved out such a bright future for him.”26 Future studies should investigate the expansion of the teaching of decoration and ornament not only as a response to the rapid rise in construction of domestic and public architecture as well as sculpture that required the application of adornments in classical and other historical styles but also as a node of intersection between the academy and commerce, between the single and multiple. In the last instance, we may recall that a student from the Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios won a prize for his terra-cotta flower arrangement at the 1881 exhibition. This is praise of a commercial work by the academy. A counterpoint to this is academic painter Felipe Gutiérrez’s

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praise for works he observed in the same general section designated for works from outside the academy in which were displayed mold-made electroplated sculptures and ornamental decoration. He insisted that while these were works produced by mechanical means, and thus could not be judged from the point of view of art, “we may admire them all the same.”27 Gutiérrez’s commentary, then, is addressed as much to the production of the object as to the finished product. This is an opening of one domain of taste into another, an interpenetration of high art and artisanal practices. It also raises a question of who owns and who produces good taste. The technologies of the mold could produce multiples and one-offs: a terra-cotta flower arrangement as well as an equestrian statue, an egg and dart molding or a monumental image of Charles IV. This was an accommodating practice for commercial and academic artists alike. Indeed, the mold, broadly construed, might be summoned to index broader notions of good taste as well as the interactive processes of making history and modernity, of making the model citizens so essential to the national project of the Porfiriato. To explore this further, I return to Ireneo Paz’s 1888 Los hombres prominentes de México, in which was published Román Lascuráin’s biography. His was among the 232 stories of prominent individuals who had served and continued to serve the nation. It was one of a number of projects initiated or completed in the 1880s that effectively celebrated the republic’s illustrious (primarily) men whose representation required both marks of individual distinction and mold-made uniformity.28 Each man is represented in a skillfully made lithographic portrait based on a photograph (figure 12.1). Visual devices to express the unique character of the sitter include the slight turn of a head off center or a positioning of a sitter’s gaze on some implied object of contemplation. Molding the figures into a certain uniformity, by contrast, are the black and white character of the lithograph itself, the traditional bust-length format, the relative centering of the image on a page, and the inclusion of the sitter’s signature. The consistent use of a triple-column format to accommodate the biographies in Spanish, French, and English also contributes to this uniformity. We would expect that in an undertaking of this scale, the exigencies of commercial printing would contribute meaningfully to the regularizing of the content. To reframe this in political terms, the technology of production nationalizes these disparate individuals into exemplary, productive citizens of the state. The most spectacular sculptural counterpart to the Hombres Prominentes is what came to be known in its own day as “the statues of the

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Figure 12.1. Santiago Hernández. Portrait of Román S. Lascuráin. Lithograph. From Ireneo Paz, Los hombres prominentes de México (Mexico City: Impr. y litografía de la Patria, 1888), courtesy of University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.

Reforma.” Effectively a result of a government initiative, this project resulted in an orderly staging of eighteen pairs of life-sized statues of national luminaries representing sixteen states and the Federal District, erected between 1889 and 1902. The Reforma project represented each man through specific physiological and iconographic attributes and poses. Yet each bronze figure was set on a stone pedestal of similar height, spaced relatively evenly on both sides of the Paseo de la Reforma, effectively compressing into visual homogeneity the diversity of these individuals.29 The central government effectively called the states to order through their sculptural surrogates, performing a centralist victory over the federalists, whose antagonism had rent apart the republic for much of the nineteenth century.

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Moreover, the Reforma project—so too, the academy centennial—underscores the problem of hierarchies of artistic training and the relationship between production and finished product.30 Every statue was associated with the reputation of one of eight highly skilled, academic sculptors as well as with the efficient manufacturing process of one of the four foundries in which the works were made.31 The artist’s and the foundry’s name were carved into the upper base of a number of statues. This makes physically present the tension between high art and artisanal workshop practices and is a modern framing of the venerable art historical problem of the genius in the workshop. The sheer scale of the Reforma project presses us to consider it in the realm of art and labor relations in a late nineteenth-century modernizing Mexican state. In this context, the high artist is increasingly associated with the very commerce from which the academy itself was founded to shield him. A different formulation, and a small but telling index of this, is both the visual work and the biography of Santiago Hernández in Paz’s Los hombres prominentes. Hernández produced all the lithographic portraits for the volume. To visually claim creation of each portrait, the artist’s signature—a trademark capital H—is typically and subtly placed in the lapel of a sitter’s jacket (figure 12.2). Hernández was a prolific and well-regarded commercial artist whose works were published in commercial forms, and like most such artists, he was trained outside of the academy. His biography labors to establish his skills and artistic credentials, declaring that “he owes his career to his own individual efforts.” Hernández’s talents are, however, framed in the context of high art, of the academy. Portraits, it is said, are his specialty, a specialty owing to the “good taste he possesses for composing.”32 As with the pairing of an artist’s and a foundry’s name on the Reforma statues, Hernández’s training and by extension his lithographic multiples are set in relation to his individual, unique accomplishments. Composing (as opposed to making or copying) was understood to be a cerebral process, traditionally a hallmark of academic artists, most notably history painters. Hernández’s reputation was not molded by academic training but was based on his “career”—a term burdened with the taint of commerce. To be designated a skillful composer, though, is to shine with academic luster; similarly, the portrait bust format polished the sitter’s reputation.33 The academy and its tastefulness rhetorically framed the commercial core of Hernández’s lithographs and his biography. This indicates an increasingly evident tension in the realm of late nineteenth-century art production.

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Figure 12.2. Santiago Hernández. Portrait of Santiago Hernández. Lithograph. From Ireneo Paz, Los hombres prominentes de México (Mexico City: Impr. y litografía de la Patria, 1888), courtesy of University of Arizona Libraries, Special Collections.

These are small things individually: high art forced to reckon with commercial art inside the academy, where judging is all (terra-cotta flowers and mass-produced electroplated sculptures); a visual contest for claiming creation of a bronze sculpture (where the sheer quantity of sculptures forces the issue); academy directors encouraging artisanal training when high artists are out of work (build more foundries and enlarge the cafeteria); and critics bemoaning the public’s lack of engagement with the academy’s exhibitions (a mere pastime, not a noble pursuit). The thermometer of civilization tells us it’s cold outside.

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The academy, in its nineteenth-century form, was receding from public view. Only three more exhibitions followed the 1881 centennial (1886, 1891, and 1899). Critics wrote fewer words about the shows as a whole, much less about individual works. The diminishing of the academy’s public role as primary arbiter of taste occurred at the same moment the Porfirian administration was organizing its participation in international exhibitions. The 1881 centennial exhibition itself seems like a local rehearsal. Mexico made its debut on the world stage in 1876 at Philadelphia’s centennial exposition but stepped fully and confidently onto the modern industrial, scientific, and technological stage with the 1889 Paris fair. While there is a robust scholarship on a variety of aspects of Mexico’s presence at the fairs, art historians should further examine the effects of the fairs on a critical discourse of good taste.34 What language could accommodate the wonders of industrial machinery and the terra-cotta flower arrangement as well as the noble history painting (or its replacement)? What language could signal to the public a consistency of values about the way things should look? It would be easy to take up Gutiérrez’s metaphor of the body and follow the academy of the 1880s and 1890s into a moribund state. More useful would be to pursue this as a turn in modern Mexican culture in which commerce and technology inflect the visual field and conceivably generate a new language of tastefulness.

_____ My deepest gratitude to Paul Niell, my coeditor, for his exceptionally intelligent, thoughtful, and collegial efforts. The inception and completion of this volume are due to his limitless energy.

Notes



1. Among the few discussions of the 1881 exhibition are Fausto Ramírez, “México a través de los siglos: La pintura de historia durante el porfiriato,” in La fabricación del estado, vol. 2, Pinceles de la historia (Mexico City: MUNAL, CONACULTA/ INBA, 2003), 110–49; and Stacie G. Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 73–75, 101–2. 2. “Reseña formada por la Secretaría recibida por D. Román Lascuráin en la solemnidad del Centenario de la Fundación de la Academia,” Gaveta 60: 1880–1884, Número 7492, Archivo de la Antigua Academia de San Carlos, Biblioteca Lino

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Picaseño, Facultad de Arquitectura, UNAM, Mexico City. My profound gratitude to María Concepción Márquez Sandoval for replacing the copy of this that I lost, as well as a transcription. The document (not the document itself) is also mentioned in Eduardo Báez Macías, Guía de la Antigua Academia de San Carlos, 1867–1907 (Mexico City: UNAM-IIE, 1993), 2:272, document 7492. This document presents a problem that cannot be addressed here, namely the relationship between the Junta de Profesores (the Committee of the Faculty) and the administration (Lascuráin). The question to be addressed is how administration and faculty collaborated on the speech and, thereby, the direction of the school. 3. “El centenario de la fundación de la Escuela de Bellas Artes,” La República, November 8, 1881, in Ida Rodríguez Prampolini, ed., La crítica de arte en México el siglo XIX (Mexico City: UNAM-IIE, 1964), 3:131. 4. Article 2 of the official program established for the organization and the 1881 exhibition states, “Se pronunciará un discurso inaugural en el que se hará una relación histórica del la fundación y progreso de la institución y sus vicisitudes.” Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter cited as AGN), Galería 5, Gobernación, Ramo Ministerio de Justicia y Bellas Artes, caja 3-bis, exp. 93. 5. On the early academy, see, among other works, Susan Deans-Smith, “‘A Natural and Voluntary Dependence’: The Royal Academy of San Carlos and the Cultural Politics of Art Education in Mexico City, 1786–1797,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29:3 (2010): 278–95, and her essay in this volume; and Sonia Lombardo de Ruiz, “Las reformas borbónicas en la academia arte de la Nueva España (1781– 1821),” in Y todo . . . por una nación: Historia social de la producción plástica de la Ciudad de México, 1761–1910, ed. Eloísa Uribe (Mexico City: Instituto de Antropología e Historia, 1984), 1–31. 6. See “Gobierno de Santa Anna: 1843,” in Hacer ciudadanos: Educación para el trabajo manufacturero en México del siglo XIX, ed. Estela Eguiarte (Mexico City: Univ. Iberoamericana, 1989), 99–111. 7. For studies that do consider practical, technical, industrial, commercial, or artisanal education, see, for example, Mílada Bazant de Saldaña, Historia de la educación durante el porfiriato (Mexico City: Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1993); Eguiarte, Hacer ciudadanos; María Herrera Feria, et al., La educación técnica en Puebla durante el porfiriato: La enseñanza de las artes y oficios (Puebla: Benemérita Universidad de Puebla, 2002); and Uribe, Y toda . . . por una nación. 8. Documents from the 1877–1881 period of Ramírez’s and Lascuráin’s tenures may be found in the AGN, Galería 5, Gobernación, Ramo Ministerio de Justicia y Bellas Artes, cajas 1, 2, 2-bis, 3, 3-bis. 9. AGN, Galería 5, Gobernación, Ramo Ministerio de Justicia y Bellas Artes, caja 2, 1877, exp. 48. 10. AGN, Galería 5, Gobernación, Ramo Ministerio de Justicia y Bellas Artes, caja 3, 1878, exp. 271.

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11. Artículo 90: “A los suscritores se les obsequiará con tres fotografías o dos fotografías y un grabado de los mejores originales que se presentan, acompañadas de un texto que explique los asuntos. Y si fuere posible se repartirián al mediadas de la Exposición.” AGN, Galería 5, Gobernación, Ramo Ministerio de Justicia y Bellas Artes, caja 3-bis, exp. 93. These images and the explanatory texts were distinct from the general catalogue of works organized for each exhibition, described here in Article 50. 12. To cite but one of many other examples, photographs of the bronze portrait bust of Dr. Rafael Lucio were distributed on the occasion of the statue’s unveiling at the memorial service held following his death in 1888. Discursos pronunciados en la ceremonia de la inauguración del monumento del Dr. Rafael Lucio en la Escuela de Medicina de México (Mexico City: El Gran Libro, Biblioteca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia), 9 (available in the Biblioteca del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City). 13. For a complete list of directors, see Báez Macías, Historia de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (Antigua Academia Nacional de San Carlos), 1781–1910 (Mexico City: Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, UNAM, 2009), 69–70. 14. Ireneo Paz, “Ramón Lascuráin,” in Los hombres prominentes de México (Mexico City: La Patria, 1888), 371–72. 15. See Romero de Terreros, Catálogos de las exposiciones de la Antigua Academia de San Carlos (Mexico City: UNAM, 1963), 525–44. 16. “Los profesores y alumnos de la Escuela Nacional de Artes Oficios en la Exposición de Bellas Artes,” La Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios (Hemeroteca Nacional, Mexico) 5:1, June 19, 1882, 1. 17. See Patricia Pérez Walters, Alma y bronce: Jesús Contreras, 1866–190, (Mexico City: Conaculta), 2002. 18. AGN, Galería 5, Gobernación, Ramo Ministerio de Justicia y Bellas Artes, caja 2, exp. 48. 19. El Procurador, “El gusto por las bellas artes,” El Siglo XIX, November 7, 1881, p. 128, reprinted in Rodríguez Prampolini, La crítica de arte, 3:129–32; Felipe S. Gutiérrez, “La exposición artística de 1881,” El Siglo XIX, in Rodríguez Prampolini, La crítica de arte, 3:81–125. 20. Gutiérrez, “La exposición artística de 1881,” 3:125. 21. Ibid., 3:81–82. 22. For a discussion of the significance of the shift from academy exhibition spaces to private or commercial ones, see Stacie G. Widdifield, “Art and Modernity in Porfirian Mexico: Julia Escalante’s Graziella and the Lechero,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29:3 (2010): 336–53. 23. “El gusto por las bellas artes,” 3:129. 24. Gutiérrez, “La exposición artística de 1881,” 3:81. 25. Ibid. 26. Paz, Los hombres prominentes, 371.

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27. Gutiérrez, “La exposición artística de 1881,” 3:91. 28. For a recent study of the monumental sculptural representation of a heroic woman in sculpture and in lithographically illustrated texts, see Stacie G. Widdifield, “Under Lock and Key: The Making of Josefa Ortiz de Domínguez in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” in Miradas disidentes: Géneros y sexos en la historia del arte, ed. Alberto Dallal (Mexico City: IIE, UNAM, 2008), 123–41. 29. For more on the complexities of the Reforma project, see, for example, Barbara A. Tenenbaum, “Streetwise History: The Paseo de la Reforma and the Porfirian State, 1876–1910,” in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. William H. Beezley and Cheryl English Martin (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1994), 28–150; and Angélica Velázquez Guadarrama, “La historia patria en el Paseo de la Reforma: La propuesta de Francisco Sosa y la consolidación del estado en el porfiriato,” in Arte, historia e identidad en América: visiones comparativas, ed. Gustavo Curiel (Mexico City: UNAM-IIE, 1994), 2:333–44. 30. Among these issues is the impact of a generational shift in academy artists and related stylistic tensions between academic classicism and realism, the financial organization of the foundries, and the particular political implications of the selection of the men chosen to represent the states and the Federal District. 31. Enrique Alciati, Ernesto Scheleske, Epitacio Calvo, Gabriel Guerra, Melesio Aguirre, Juan Islas, Primitivo Miranda, and Federico Homdedeu were collectively responsible for sixteen of the statues and Jesús Contreras for the remaining twenty. Homdedeu’s and Contreras’s statues were made in Contreras’s government-supported foundry, the Fundición Artística Mexicana. The works of the other artists were produced in one of the following foundries: Duchateau, Fundición de Tacubaya, or Caradente Tartaglio (also known as Tomás Caradente). This is information I collected by examining each of the statues on the Reforma itself. Pérez Walters, Alma y bronce, also includes a list of the statues, with some slight differences in attribution from my own. 32. Paz, Los hombres prominentes, 488. 33. A very different but equally suggestive example of this is the language used in Paz’s biography of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, the celebrated and accomplished diplomat, radical liberal politician, man of letters, and military hero. Altamirano, an “Indian child” under whose “dark forehead” smoldered “a hidden force and precocious intelligence,” was raw material shaped by the various educational institutions he attended, that is, the academy. It remained that “his face was far from being of the Grecian mold.” Long considered in analyses of the discursive figure of the Indian, Altamirano here is subjected to the visual technology of the academic. His Indian otherness is temporarily transformed when he speaks: “upon discussing history, science, and literary subjects” his “face brightens up and is embellished.” Paz, Los hombres prominentes, 69. This application of the classical to Altamirano raises a number of issues regarding the representation of

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the figure of the Indian that cannot be taken up here. On this issue, see, for example, Widdifield, Embodiment of the National; and Rebecca Earle, The Return of the Native: Indians and Myth-Making in Spanish America, 1819–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 34. See, for example, the invaluable study by Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Crafting a Modern Nation: Mexico at the World’s Fair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Contributors

Carla Bocchetti is an assistant professor and the director of the historical archive at the Universidad del Rosario in Colombia and a former assistant professor in the Department of Literature at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies at Harvard University. Her work considers the adaptation of Greco-Roman classicism in nineteenth-century Latin America, and she has published internationally on the subject in such journals as the ERAS Journal, and Revista ARGOS: Revista Anual de la Asociación Argentina de Estudios Clásicos. She is the editor of the recent volume La influencia clásica en América Latina. Robert Bradley has spent the past eleven years studying the pre-Columbian architecture of the Chachapoya culture in Peru’s northeastern cloud forest. He has written a book about the most celebrated ruin in this region, titled The Architecture of Kuelap. At present he is deeply involved in a project that will map a shrine dedicated to a pre-Columbian heroine. Dr. Bradley’s article “Sudado de Raya: An Ancient Peruvian Dish” was published in the winter 2012 issue of the journal Gastronomica. Currently he is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Texas–Pan American. Charles Burroughs is the Elsie B. Smith Professor of Liberal Arts in the Department of Classics at Case Western Reserve University. He is a historian of built environments and visual culture in Italy and, more recently, in the Luso-Hispanic Americas. His publications include From Signs to Design: Environmental Process and Reform in Early Renaissance Rome, as well as his more recent book, The Italian Renaissance Palace Façade: Structures of 273

274

contributors

Authority, Surfaces of Sense. Currently, he is working with an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars from the United States, Brazil, and Cuba on plantation landscapes and architecture, as well as representations of these, in the Americas in the era of the “second slavery,” which includes the early and mid-nineteenth century. Magali Carrera is a professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the author of Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings, published by University of Texas Press in 2003. Her new book, Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Cartography and the Narration of Nation in Nineteenth-Century Mexico, was published by Duke University Press in 2011. Susan Deans-Smith is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the award-winning book Bureaucrats, Planters, and Workers. The Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon Mexico and coeditor of Mexican Soundings: Essays in Honour of David A. Brading, with Eric Van Young, and Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America, with Ilona Katzew. Her recent essays include “‘Dishonor in the Hands of Indians, Spaniards, and Blacks’: The (Racial) Politics of Painting in Early Modern Mexico” (2009) and “‘A Natural and Voluntary Dependence’: The Royal Academy of San Carlos and the Cultural Politics of Art Education in Mexico City, 1786–1797” (2010). She is currently completing a book, “Matters of Taste: The Politics of Culture in Mexico and the Royal Academy of San Carlos (1781–1821).” Her research has been supported by fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, the Spanish Cultural Ministry, and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. She currently serves on the editorial board of Colonial Latin American Review. Kelly Donahue-Wallace is an associate professor of art history at the University of North Texas and has published widely on the significance of printmaking in colonial New Spain. Her articles have appeared in the journals The Americas, Print Quarterly, Colonial Latin American Review, Tiempos de América, Mexican Studies/Estudios mexicanos, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Colonial Latin American Historical Review, and Aurora: Journal of Art History. Her research has been funded by Spain’s Program for Cultural Cooperation, the Institute for International Education,

contributors

275

and the Lilly Library. She is the author of the recent and critically acclaimed survey of colonial Latin American art history Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521–1821, published by the University of New Mexico Press. She is currently working on a study of the Spanish engraver Jerónimo Antonio Gil and his work in Spain and New Spain. Emily Engel is an assistant professor of art history in the Herron School of Art and Design at Indiana University. In 2009 Engel received a postdoctoral research fellowship from the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has published on eighteenth-century art in South America, in particular the relationship between politics and artistic production, as well as on pilgrimage and the religious arts, in Religion and the Arts and Dieciocho. Engel is currently working on a book project exploring civic art sponsorship in urban South America at the end of the viceregal period. Ray Hernández-Durán is an associate professor of Ibero-American colonial arts and architecture at the University of New Mexico. He is currently a member of the national AP Art History Development committee and AP Art History Curriculum Review committee. Among his awards are a MacArthur Fellowship, two Fulbright-Hays Fellowships, and most recently, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant through the New Mexico Humanities Council. His publications include the article “Modern Museum Practice in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: The Academy of San Carlos and La antigua escuela mexicana,” which appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of NineteenthCentury Art Worldwide: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture. His essay “Maravilla Americana: The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Ideal Spectator” appeared in the 2009 volume Religion as Art: Guadalupe, Orishas, and Sufi, edited by Steven Loza and published by the University of New Mexico Press. Paul B. Niell is an assistant professor of art and architectural history at Florida State University. He has published on the architecture and cultural landscapes of early modern Cuba and the Caribbean in the journals Hemisphere: Visual Cultures of the Americas, Cultural Landscapes: A Journal of Cultural Studies, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Latin Americanist, and Colonial Latin American Review. He is currently working on a book project on neoclassical art and architecture, heritage practice, and urban space in late colonial Havana, Cuba.

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Isaac D. Sáenz is currently on the faculty of architecture, urbanism, and arts in the Center of Postgraduate Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria in Lima, Peru. He held a David Woodward Memorial Fellowship in the History of Cartography during 2007–2008 from the University of Wisconsin–Madison to support his project “Urban Cartography and Enlightenment in Late Viceregal Peru, 1687–1800.” He is author of the book Ciudad y fortificación: Las murallas ribereñas de la ciudad de Lima, 1687– 1872, and his articles have appeared in a number of Peruvian academic journals, including Lima CAP, Arquitextos, and Urbana en línea. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2006. Her fellowships include a National Resource Fellowship and a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship, and she is now an assistant professor of art history at the University of Florida. She has published on the art of colonial Peru, focusing especially on the eighteenth century. Her article in Hispanic Research Journal, “Shifting Ground: Elite Sponsorship of the Cult of Christ of the Earthquakes in Eighteenth-Century Cusco,” outlines the political relationships inherent in devotion to a well-known cult image housed in Cuzco’s cathedral. An article in Colonial Latin American Review, “The Possessor’s Agency: Private Art Collecting in the Colonial Andes,” considers questions of taste and value in relation to private art collections in colonial Peru. She has also written on donor portraits from the colonial Andes, and her forthcoming book is titled Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes. Stacie G. Widdifield is a professor of art history at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She has published widely on the art and visual culture of late nineteenth-century Mexico, including the book The Embodiment of the National in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexican Painting. Her article “Art and Modernity in Porfirian Mexico: Julia Escalante’s Graziella and the Lechero,” appeared in 2010 in the Bulletin of Latin American Research. She also has published work in Art Journal and Journal X and an essay on Josefa Ortiz de Dominguez in the edited volume Mirada’s disidentes, published by the Instituto Investigaciones Estéticas. She coedited the volume La amplitud del modernismo y de la modernidad with Mexican art historian Esther Acevedo. Currently she is working on an interdisciplinary project titled “The HydroAesthetics of the Mexico City Water System: From the Caja de Agua to the Cárcamo, 1900–1952.”

Index

Page numbers in italic text indicate illustrations. Abad Villareal, don Pedro, xiii Ábalos, José de, 196, 203n26 Abascal, Fernando de, 26, 209, 222–23, 224–26, 228n14 Academy of Drawing and Painting of San Alejandro, Havana, Cuba, 52 Academy of San Carlos, Valencia, Spain, xiii Academy of San Luis, Zaragoza, Spain, xiii Acamapichtli (Aztec king), 138 Ácana plantation, 124, 125 Acevedo, Esther, xix aché (spiritual matrix), 63 Acosta, José de, 62 Acxolotl (Aztec king), 148 Adank, Patricia, 101 Africans, 62–66, 71n53. See also bozales Afro-Cubans, 62–65 age of ideas, 82 Aguayo, Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y, 7, 100 Alamán, Lucas, 137, 154n2 Alameda, Mexico City, 141–42 Alameda del Callao, Lima, Peru, 26, 27, 31, 33–34, 36–40 Alameda de los Descalzos (La Alameda), 36

alamedas (public walks), 31, 34, 36–38, 47n27 Alandete, Concepción Micolao de, 79 Alberti, Leon Battista, xiv Alcíbar, José de, 97 Alison, Archibald, xxiii, 16 Altamirano, Ignacio Manuel, 271n33 altarpieces: in Cathedral of Cuzco, xxx, 233–34, 234, 236–50, 238, 239, 241, 242, 249, 250, 254nn68–69; in cathedral of Mexico City, 17; Christ of the Earthquakes, xxx, 247, 250; Espada y Landa on, 51–52; La Linda, 238–39, 239, 246 Álvarez de Miranda, Pedro, 113n40 Alzate, José Antonio, 7, 110n16 Amaru, Túpac, II, 232 Amat y Junient, Manuel de, 31, 34; portraits of, 216, 220, 227n10, 229n23; public works and, 206–7, 216–21, 229nn24–25; Relación de gobierno, 206 American Revolution, 195, 203n24 Amerindians, xix, 58 Anatomic Amphitheatre of the School of Medicine, Lima, Peru, 26, 31 Andean hybrid baroque, xxx, 232 Anderson, Benedict, xxxivn31, 101–2, 256

277

278

index

Andrade de Figueiredo, Manoel de, 188 Angrand, Léonce Marie François, 163–64, 164, 165 Angulo Iñíguez, Diego, xvi Antigüedades peruanas (Tschudi and Rivera), 165 antiguo (old), xviii Aponte conspiracy (1812), 66 Argentina, 79 Arias de la Canal, Fredo, 201 Armendáriz, Pérez, 240 Arrate, José Martín Félix de, 52, 61–62 art: collecting, 143, 207–8, 210–11, 215, 223– 24, 226, 231n49; patronage, xxvi, xxx, 208, 212, 215–17, 222–24, 226–27; public opinion on, 67n15; sponsorship, 207–8, 207–11, 220–21, 224, 226, 227n3, 231n49. See also las tres bellas artes arts employment statistics, 263 aryballos (Inca ceramics), 172 Athena (goddess), 74 Augustus, 79 Avilés del Fierro, Gabriel de, 213, 228n14 Ayuntamiento, Mexico City, 7–8, 11 Aztecs: Calendar Stone, 148; history of, 61, 75, 85, 139–40, 144, 146, 148, 151–52 bad taste. See mal gusto Bailey, Gauvin, 207 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 50 Bargellini, Clara, xxi–xxii, 5, 192–93, 197, 200 baroque style, xiii–xiv; Andean hybrid baroque, xxx, 232; characteristics of, xix, 237; examples of, xv–xvi, 96, 199, 209; ultra-baroque, xvi; views of, 25–26, 40–41 barracones, 122–24, 127–28, 133n44 barracones de patio, 122–23, 133n43 Barthes, Roland, 200 Batalla de Tepeyac, 150, 152 battle of flowers, 78 Battle of the Books, 79 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 200

beauty, xxiv, 35 Bello, Andrés, 40 Bellotto, Bernardo, 160 Benitez, Leonardo, 172 Benito de Churriguera, José, xvi Berenbeim, Jessica, 179, 186–87, 191 Bergh, Susan, 175n31 Beristáin de Souza, José Mariano, 13–14, 17, 22n37 Bernasconi, Antonio, 193 Bertrés, Felipe, 233 Bingham, Hiram, 157 biombos (screens), 97, 109n13 Black, Jeremy, 161 blushing, 114, 130n4 Bocchetti, Carla, xxvii body, human, architecture and, 115–16, 128 bohios (huts), 121–24, 134nn44–45 Boime, Albert, 10 Bolívar, Simón, xxvii, 81, 246–47 Bolivia: Cathedral of Potosí, 233; as Viceroyalty of La Plata, 244. See also Gateway of the Sun; Peru-Bolivia Confederation Borromini, Francesco, xvi Boturini, Lorenzo, 146, 155n20 Bourbon reforms: impacts of, 30, 52, 196– 98, 233, 240, 255; policies, xiii, 28, 33, 206–7, 209, 220, 234, 257 Bourdieu, Pierre, xxiv, 95, 107 Boza, Manuel, 242 bozales (new arrivals from Africa), 124 Braccio, Gabriela, 192 Brading, David, 203n29 Bradley, Robert, xxix Brambila, Fernando, 8 Branciforte, Manuel de la Grúa Talamanca de Carini y, xxvi, 4–5, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 15, 179–80 Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla, Pedro, 31, 35–36 Brazil, 63; Paraiba Valley in, xxviii, 118–19; plantations in, xxviii, 118–20, 132n35 Brewer, John, 95

index Brodsky, Joseph, 82 Bryson, Norman, 179 Bucareli, Antonio María de, 196 Buena Vista plantation, 121, 121–22, 134n54 buen calidad (good quality), 212 buen gusto (good taste), xxiii–xxv; characteristics of, 25, 51, 198, 262–63; class and, xxiv, 95, 104–7; definition of, 94– 96, 107, 144; in El Museo Mexicano, 143–44; packaging, 10–11, 13–14; revival of, xiii; Sangronis and, 3–4, 19n5; as term, xviii, xxvi–xxvii, 16 Buenos Aires: portraiture in, xxx, 210–13; public works in, 221, 229n30 Burke, Edmond, xxiv, 95 Burke, Marcus, 11, 223 Burroughs, Charles, xxviii Bustamante, Carlos María, 141–42, 148 Byron, George, 84 cabildos, 26, 31, 39, 53, 60, 221 Cabrera, Lydia, 62 Cabrera, Miguel, xx–xxi, 199 calendars, 148, 168–69, 173 calidad (quality): buen, 212; of Spaniards, 105–6 calligraphy, 182–86, 188, 188–91 Calvo, Epitacio, 261 Campo, Nicolás del, 221, 229n30 Canaletto, 160, 162, 170–72, 171 La canción de las ruinas de Itálica (Caro, R.), 82–83 Cañeque, Alejandro, 195 Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, 41, 62, 85 Cantero, Justo, xxviii, 120–29, 133n44, 135n57 Cantos de las Musas Mexicanas con motivo de la colocacion de la estatua equestre de bronce de nuestro augusto soberano Carlos I, 13 capitalism, 73–74 captain general, 67n7 “Carmen Saeculare,” 79 Caro, Miguel Antonio, 81–83

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Caro, Rodrigo, 82–83 Carpentier, Alejo, 82 Carrasco, Idelfonso, 248 Carrera, Magali, xxviii–xxix, 51, 105 Cartagena de Indias, Colombia: centenary celebrations in, xxvii, 78–80, 80; Centenary Park in, xxvii, 73–77, 80 Carvajal, Carlos de, 237–38 Casas, Luis de la, 51 castas (castes, or racially mixed populations), xxiii, 105; paintings, 66, 106; relations with, 30, 212 Castera, Ignacio, 8 Castillo, Francisco del, 43 Castillo, Juan Vicente, 240 Castorena y Ursúa, Juan Ignacio de, 110n19 Cathedral of Cuzco, 233–50, 234; altarpieces in, xxx, 233–34, 234, 236–50, 238, 239, 241, 242, 249, 250, 254nn68–69; architecture of, 237–39; main altar of, 237, 240–46, 241, 242; as monument of triumph, 235–36 cathedrals: Cathedral of Havana, Cuba, xv–xvi, xvi; Cathedral of La Paz, 233; Cathedral of Lima, Peru, 28, 35–36, 240–41; Cathedral of Potosí, 233; Málaga, 103, 105; of Mexico City, 17 Caughey, John Walton, 195 Cavallari, Javier, 204n40 ceiba trees, 49, 52–53, 55, 57, 61–63 cemeteries: Havana, Cuba, 51; of Lima, Peru, 26, 28, 32, 32, 222–23, 229n32 Centenary Park, Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, xxvii, 73; flora and fauna in, 77; statues in, 74–76, 75, 80, 86n2 Chaney, Edward, 160 Charlemagne, 13 Charles II (Hapsburg monarch), 184 Charles III (king of Spain): courtly arts of, xiii–xiv; Pompeii and Herculaneum excavations and, xviii; portrait of, 13, 193; reign of, 196, 207 Charles IV (king of Spain): courtly arts of, xiii–xiv; Marco portrait of, 185–86, 187

280

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Charles IV equestrian statue, xxix–xxx, 3–18; Bargellini on, 5, 192–93, 197, 200; Branciforte and, xxvi, 4–5, 7–8, 10–11, 13, 15, 179–80; bronze version of, 5, 6, 7–8, 11, 13–15, 23n52, 180, 202n2; commemorative medals of, 11, 12; commission of, xxvi, 4, 5, 7–10, 11; criticism of, 15–18; desecration attempts on, 15, 23nn51–52; Diario de México and, xxvi, 11, 13; engravings of, xxvi, xxviii, 5, 6, 8, 11, 93, 94; Gálvez, B., statue compared to, xxix–xxx, 185–86, 194, 198, 200–201, 202n3, 204n36; Gazeta de México and, xxvi, 11, 15–16, 93–94; inauguration of, 11, 13, 180; literary competition for, 13, 22n39; models of, 11, 12; prints of, 10–11; RASC and, 8–10, 11, 93; Tolsá and, xxvi, xxix–xxx, 3–5, 10–11, 13–15, 17–18, 180, 180–81, 191–94, 198, 200, 203n22; wood version of, 5, 8, 9, 15, 180 Charles V, 191 Charlot, Jean, xvii, xviii Chavín de Huántar, 157, 158 Cherry, Peter, 223 children with birth defects, 106, 107 Chile, 79 Chinese laborers, 122 chinoiserie, 214 chivalry, 188–89 Christ of the Earthquakes, xxx, 247, 250 churrigueresca (churrigueresque), xvi Cicero, 115 Cieza de León, Pedro, 158–59 civic identity, 73–77, 80, 82 civilization over barbarism, xiv, 58, 66 class, xxiv, 95, 104–7 classical antiquity: commentaries on, 13, 15–16, 23n64; invention of, 84; rationality of, 144; significance of, 83 classical references, 83–86 Classic Era, 172 classicism: Greco-Roman, xiii–xiv, xviii, 222; ideals of, 4; imprinting and consumption of, xxvii–xxix; promotion of,

xiii, xxv–xxvii, 52; role of, xix; in Spanish colonial landscape, xiv–xvi; as tool of imperial power, xxiii Clavé, Pelegrín, 204n40 Clavijero, Francisco Javier, 140, 141, 146, 150 clergy, xxv coartación (slave self-purchase), 64 cocha (sacred lake), 235 Coe, Michael, 169 coffee plantations, 119 Colombia, 42, 256. See also Cartagena de Indias Colón, Patricio, 222–23 colonial style, 208, 210, 213, 218–19 Columbus, Christopher, 150 Column of Independence, 262 Comentarios de las ordenanzas de minas (Gamboa), 144 communocentric references, 56 Compañón, Jaime Martínez de, 43 “Compilation of the Laws of the Kingdoms of the Indies,” 52 concha, 248 Conquest of Mexico (Prescott), xxix, 137– 38, 144–47, 150–52 La conquista del Peru (Castillo, F.), 43 Constant, Benjamin, 83 Constantine, 13; Arch of, 173 Contreras, Jesús, 260 Corinth, 86 The Coronation of the Emperor and Empress, 56 Cortés, Hernando: campaigns of, 138, 140– 41; Moctezuma and, 17, 23n64, 140, 149–52, 151; portrait of, 139, 144–45, 145, 191, 211 Cosgrove, Denis, 77 cosmopolitanism, 72–73, 77, 87 Costansó, Miguel, 7–8 Counter-Reformation, xv courtyard architecture, 116–17, 128 Coyoacán, parish church of, 17 Creole cottage, 118

index Creoles, 75; definition of, xxxiin5, 28; as españoles americanos, 136; neoclassicism and, xxii, xxvi–xxvii, 43–44, 199; Peninsulars compared to, 104–5; in Peru, 26–28, 30–32, 37–44; Spaniards and, 30, 31 criollismo (Creolism), 28 criollos, xxxiin5, 28. See also Creoles The Critique of Judgment (Kant), xxiv Croix, Francisco de, 196 Cuadriello, Jaime, xix, 199 Cuartel de Santa Catalina, Lima, Peru, 29 Cuauhtémoc (Mexica king), 139, 140, 150 Cuba: Africans in, 62–66, 71n53; antiquity in, 60–62; census in, 64–65, 71nn53–54; Indians of, 61–62; loyalty in, 59–60; place and, 59, 60, 66; plantations in, xxviii, 120, 128, 132n35; slavery in, 63–66, 71n54; Valle de los Ingenios, xxviii. See also Havana, Cuba cuerpo and calle structure, 237–38, 242 cultural patriotism, 4, 14, 20n9 Cummins, Tom, 191 Cumplido, Ignacio: Historia de la conquista de México, xxix, 137–38, 144–47, 152–53; El Museo Mexicano and, 137–38, 142–44 Cuzco, Peru, xxx, 165; earthquake in, 236, 240, 247. See also Cathedral of Cuzco DaCosta Kaufmann, Thomas, 10 David, Jacques-Louis, 50, 56 Davis, Whitney, 223, 230n38 Dean, Carolyn, 236 Deans-Smith, Susan, xxvi, xxviii, 198 De architectura (Vitruvius), xiv De español y morisca nace albina, 106 De Havenon, Georgia, 172 Delacroix, Eugene, 74 de la Torre, marqués, 52, 53 democracy, 73–74, 83 de Pauw, Cornelius, 140, 148, 156n25 De re aedificatoria (Alberti), xiv

281

Derosne, Charles, 134n52 Derosne machinery, 125–26, 134n52 Descripción de las Indias (Herrera), 138–39, 139 Destrehan plantation, 132n24 dialogism, 50 Diario de la Habana, 51, 54, 59, 61 Diario de México, 15, 16, 111n27; Charles IV equestrian statue and, xxvi, 11, 13; contributions to, 14 Dias de Antonanas, Miguel, 228n14 Díaz, Porfirio, 257, 259 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 61, 141, 144 Diego, Juan, xxi, 209, 222 Diosa Libertad, 141 diplomatic missions, 163–64, 166 Discurso sobe el estilo alegórico de la remota antigüedad, y sobre su influencia en la historia, 15 Discurso . . . sobre el estilo sublime y del dibujo entre los Griegos (Winckelmann), 15 Donahue-Wallace, Kelly, xxii, xxviii, 5, 189 Don Quixote, 103, 104 d’Orbigny, Alcide, 162–63, 163, 164, 165, 174n15 Dupaix, Guillermo, 23n64 Earle, Rebecca, 75, 76 earthquakes: in Cuzco, Peru, 236, 240, 247; in Lima, Peru, xxvi, 27, 28, 33–35, 37, 43, 192, 215, 227n9, 233 ecclesiastical authorities, 57, 57 Economic Society of the Friends of the Country of Havana. See Patriotic Society Elliot, John, 223 emotions, xv Un Emperador Mexicano en el Consejo de los Reyes, 148, 149 Engel, Emily, xxx England, 75; education in, 84–85; Kew Gardens in, 77; urban and garden planning in, 74

282

index

engravings, xxviii; of Charles IV equestrian statue, xxvi, xxviii, 5, 6, 8, 11, 93, 94; scientific, 101, 111n26. See also prints Enlightenment, 113n40; influence of, xx, xxiii, 43, 159–60, 198, 211, 233 Enríquez, Nicolás, 96–97, 104, 105 La Época, 78, 86n2 Erasmus of Rotterdam, 85 Escuela de Artes y Oficios, Mexico City, 258 La Escuela Nacional de Artes y Oficios, 260 Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, Mexico City, 259–61, 263 esgrafiado, 182 Espada y Landa, Juan José Díaz de, 51–52, 57, 60–61, 63 españoles, 105, 106–7, 136 españoles americanos, 136 Esplicación de las laminas pertenecientes a la “Historia antigua de México y la de su conquista” (Gondora), 146–50 Esquivel y Navia, Diego, 236, 248 Estabridis, Ricardo, 212 Esteban Murillo, Bartolomé, xviii estípite, xvi, xvii, xviii ethnicity, 31 Eucharistic Host, 237, 243 The Evolution of the Grand Tour (Chaney), 160 Exposition Universelle (1889), 79 extramuros (outskirts), 34 The Eye of the Lynx (Freedberg), 161–62 Fabregat, Joaquín, xxvi, xxviii, 6, 93–94, 94 Facchinetti, Nicolau Antonio, 119, 120 fazenda (plantation complex), 119 Ferdinand (king of Spain), 150 Ferdinand VI (king of Spain), 7–8 Ferdinand VII (king of Spain), 49, 60, 186 Fernández, Justino, 95–96 Fernández de Castro, Pedro, 192, 194 Ferrol, La Coruña, 34 The First Cabildo, 54–55, 55, 57–59

The First Mass, 57–58, 58 Fisher, John, 30 Flores, Rafael, 204n40 Flores do Paraíso, 119–20, 120 Four Books on Architecture (Palladio), 115 France, 77; quarrel of Ancients and Moderns in, 79; Spain war with, 111n25, 197 Freedberg, David The Eye of the Lynx, 161–62 French Revolution, 5, 83, 197, 203n29 Fuente, José de la, 42 funeral practices, 25, 32 Gálvez, Bernardo de: Charles IV equestrian statue compared, xxix–xxx, 185– 86, 194, 198, 200–201, 202n3, 204n36; equestrian portrait of, xxix–xxx, 181– 84, 182, 183, 189–91; life and career of, 195–96, 201; poem for, 200–201; Washington, D.C. sculptures of, 203n24 Gálvez, José de, 195, 196 Gálvez, Matías de, 100, 195 Gamarra, Agustín, 247, 250 Gamboa, Francisco Javier, 144 García, Gregorio, 62 García Sáiz, María Concepción, 192, 203n19 García Torres, Vicente, 137, 151–53 gardens: Kew Gardens, 77; a la Inglesa, 122, 133n41; planning, 74 Gateway of the Sun, xxix, 159, 159, 161–73; Angrand and, 163–64, 164, 165; d’Orbigny and, 162–63, 163, 164, 165, 174n15; Squire and, 158, 166–67, 167, 171, 174n15; Tschudi, Rivera and, 165, 165–66; Uhle, Stübel and, 168, 169; Waldeck and, 166– 68, 171, 174n16 Gazeta del Gobierno, 100 Gazeta de Literatura de México, 110n16, 111n27 Gazeta de México, xxviii; advertisements and stories in, 93–108, 109n11, 109n13,

index 110n16, 111nn25–26, 112n33, 113n41; Charles IV equestrian statue and, xxvi, 11, 15–16, 93–94; history of, 100, 110n19, 111n21, 111n27 Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America (Vickery and Styles), xxiv Gerard, Alexander, xxiii Gil, Jerónimo Antonio, xvii–xviii; commemorative medals by, 11, 12 Girardon, Francois, 203n22 Glave, Luis Miguel, 246 Godin, Luis, 34, 35, 229n31 Godoy, Manuel, 5, 15, 23n53, 179 Goethe, Wolfgang von, 84 gold, 237–39, 241, 247 Gondora, Isidro Rafael, xxix, 146–50, 156n25 González, Gil, 62 González, Manuel, 257 good quality (buen calidad), 212 good taste. See buen gusto Gothic taste (gusto gótico), xviii, 25 “Una graduanda y su amiga” (A graduate and her friend), 86 grandeza mexicana, 96 Grand Tour, 84, 159–61, 170 Greco-Roman classicism, xiii–xiv, xviii, 222 Greece: architecture, 118, 131n21; references to, 72, 75, 83–87, 172 Greenwood, Emily, 82 grid: Hippodamian, 27; pattern, 34, 43 Güemes, Juan Vicente de, 196 Guerrero y Torres, Francisco, 199 guilds: displacement of, xvii, 256; importance of, xxi, xxvi, 26, 37; in New Spain, xvii, xxi Güinía de Soto plantation, 122, 124, 125–26, 126, 134n54 Guirior, marquesa de, 214 gusto, 16. See also taste gusto gótico (Gothic taste), xviii, 25 Gutiérrez, Felipe S., 262, 263–64, 268

283

Gutiérrez-Haces, Juana, xx hacendados (landowners), 51, 60 Hacia Otra Historia del Arte en México, xviii–xix Haiti, 63 Haitian Revolution, 5, 117, 197 Hamilakis, Yannis, 85 Hanula, Krzysztof Makowski, 175n31 Haucaypata, 235 Havana, Cuba, xxv; Academy of Drawing and Painting of San Alejandro in, 52; Cathedral of, xv–xvi, xvi; cemetery of, 51; Palace of the Captain General in, 52, 53; Palace of the Second in Command in, 52; Plaza de Armas in, xxvii, 49, 52; Tacón Theater in, 79. See also El Templete Hellenism, 80, 85, 86 Henry IV (king of France), 13 Heras, Bartolomé María de las, 240, 242–43 Herculaneum, excavation of, xviii, 41, 82, 160 Hernández, Santiago, 265, 266, 267 Hernández-Durán, Ray, xxix Herrera, Antonio de, 61–62, 141, 150; Descripción de las Indias, 138–39, 139; Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos, 138–39 Hidalgo, Miguel, 203n29 Hippodamian grid, 27 Historia antigua de México (Boturini), 146, 155n20 Historia antigua de México (Clavijero), 140 Historia de la conquista de México (Cumplido), xxix, 137–38, 144–47, 152–53 Historia de la conquista de México (García Torres), 137 Historia de la conquista de México (López de Gómara), 138 Historia de la conquista de México (Solís), 139–40

284

index

Historia de Nueva España (Lorenzana), 140 Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos (Herrera), 138–39 The History of America (Robertson), 140 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 84 Holly, Michael Ann, 179 Los hombres prominentes de México (Paz), 264 honor, 114–18, 130nn4–5 Horace, 79 Huánuco Viejo, Peru, 42 Huitzilopochtli (god), xv Humboldt, Alexander von, 150; on Laocoön Group, 79; on RASC, 3; Vues des Cordillères, 11, 162; writings of, 148, 156n25 Hume, David, xxiii–xxiv Hutcheson, Francis, xxiii–xxiv huts (bohios), 121–24, 134nn44–45 Ibarra, José de, xx, 96 identity: civic, 73–77, 80, 82; as fluid and reflexive, xxx; memory and, 230n35; past and, 77, 80; patria and, 142, 225; progress and, 72–74; taste and, xxviii, 104, 136; viceroys and, 207–8, 223–27, 231n46 Iglesia de las Nazarenas, Lima, Peru, 216– 17, 219, 220 imagined community, 101–2, 105 Immaculate Conception, 238, 243, 252n21 Inauguration of El Templete, 55–58, 56, 57, 63–66, 64, 65 Inca ceramics (aryballos), 172 Incas, 61; complexes, 42–43; history of, 41– 43, 75, 157–58, 173, 235–36, 247; Rome compared to, 85 Indians: Amerindians, xix, 58; of Cuba, 61–62; women, 75 indigenous groups (naturales americanos), 136 indigenous thatch construction (quincha), xxvii, 27, 34, 36

Inés de la Cruz, Sor Juana, xv, xxxiin5 Ingenio Intrépido, 122, 123 ingenios. See plantations Los ingenios (Cantero), xxviii, 120–29, 133n44, 135n57 Ingenio Trinidad, 126–27, 128 An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Hutcheson), xxiv Inquisition, 101, 105 Inwards, Richard, 172 Iriarte, Tomás de, 103–4 Irwin, David, xiiii Isabel (queen of Spain), 150, 186–87 Italy, 86, 160 Izaguirre, Leando, 263 Jamaica, 62–63 Jameson, Robert, 60 Jaspe, Felipe, 74 Jayo, Julian, 214 Jerónimo, padre, 182, 182–83, 183, 190 Jerusalem, 74, 237, 239 John the Evangelist, 247 Jones, Inigo, 160 José de Austria, Juan, 184–86, 185 Juan, Jorge, 212 Juárez, Benito, 262 jurisprudence, 143–44 Jusdanis, Gregory, 85 Kant, Immanuel, xxiii–xxiv, 207 Kew Gardens, England, 77 knowledge: acquisition of, 142, 144, 160; propagation of, xiii Kubler, George, xvii, xviii Kuelap, 157 Kusunoki, Ricardo, 37 labor, 76, 80; Chinese laborers, 122. See also slavery La Carolina, Jaén, 34 La Granja de San Idelfonso, Spain, 34 Lagunillas collection, 79 La Linda, altarpiece of, 238–39, 239, 246

index Landesio, Eugenio, 205n40 landowners (hacendados), 51, 60 Laocoön Group, 79 Laplante, Eduardo, xxviii, 120–28 Larrañaga, Bruno Francisco, 200–201 Larrañaga, Bruno Joseph de, 14 Larrañaga, José Raphael, 200–201 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 69n31, 150 Lascuráin, Román S., 257–59, 261, 263–64, 265 Laugier, Marc-Antoine, 61, 70n40 Leibsohn, Dana, 236 Leoni, Giacomo, 115, 117 León y Gama, Antonio, 104, 148 letrados (literate classes), xxvi The Lettered City (Rama), 190 Levey, Michael, 170–71 Lezama Lima, José, 76 Liberty Leading the People, 74 “The Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the Moderns” (Constant), 83 Lima, Peru, xxv; Alameda del Callao in, 26, 27, 31, 33–34, 36–40; Anatomic Amphitheatre of the School of Medicine in, 26, 31; Cathedral of, 28, 35–36, 240–41; cemetery of, 26, 28, 32, 32, 222–23, 229n32; Cuartel de Santa Catalina in, 29; earthquakes in, xxvi, 27, 28, 33–35, 37, 43, 192, 215, 227n9, 233; Iglesia de las Nazarenas in, 216–17, 219, 220; Molinos de Pólvora of Lima, 29; Paseo de Aguas in, 219, 221; Portada del Callao in, 38, 38; Portada de Maravillas in, 26, 39, 39–40; portraiture in, xxx, 210–13, 215; public works in, xxvi, 26, 28, 32, 39, 206, 219–21; Tribunal del Consulado of, xxvi, 37, 39–40, 47n29; tsunami in, xxvi, 28, 33–35, 37, 215 limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), 65 Liniers, Santiago, 224–26 literary gatherings (tertulias, tertulianos), xxv, 51, 99 literate classes (letrados), xxvi

285

lithography, 142; Los ingenios, xxviii, 120– 29, 133n44, 135n57 living hand, 187 Llave del Nuevo Mundo (Arrate), 52, 61–62 Lomné, Georges, 83 López Cancelada, Juan, 100, 111n21 López de Gómara, Francisco, 138, 141, 144 Lord of the Earthquakes, 233–34, 242, 246, 247–50, 249 Lord of Unu Punku, 237, 238, 248, 252n28 Lorenzana, Antonio, 140 Louisiana Purchase, 118 Louis XIV, 203n22 Lozano, Cristóbal, 25, 30–31, 192, 193; portrait by, 192, 193, 215, 217 Lucena-Giraldo, Manuel, 196 Lucio, Rafael, 270n12 Lucio y Villegas, José, 240, 242 MacCormack, Sabine, 75 Macfadyen, James, 62–63 Machu Picchu, 157, 158 Maestro, Matías, 25, 26, 32, 229n32, 233, 241 Malabet, Pedro, 74 Málaga cathedral, 103, 105 Malaspina Expedition (1789–1794), 8 mal gusto (bad taste), xviii; Melchor de Jovellanos on, 19n4; Sangronis on, 3–4, 19nn4–5 Manaca plantation, 121, 133n39 Mañanas de la Alameda de México (Bustamante), 141–42 Mancera, Marqués de, 211 man of taste, 95–96, 113n40 Manso de Velasco, José Antonio, 33, 34, 36; portraits of, 192, 193, 215, 217, 218; Real Felipe fortress and, 221 manumission, 119, 132n34 Marco, Mariano, 185–86, 187 Marcus Aurelius, 186 Margarita, doña (fictional character), 141– 42, 148 Maria Josepha (queen of Spain), 49

286

index

Marian devotion, xxi Márquez, Pedro, 96, 105 marriage, 65, 105 Martínez, Frédéric, 87Matamoros, Santiago, 188, 191 Maxan, Felicitas, 201 Maxmillien, Jean-Frederick. See Waldeck, Count de Mayans, 166, 169 Mayorga, Martín de, 196 medals, commemorative, 11, 12 media, types of, xxiii Melchor de Jovellanos, Gaspar, 16, 19n4 Meléndez, Juan, 245 memorias (society reports), 51 memory, 230n35 mendicant complexes, xiv El Mercurio Peruano, xxvi, 26, 30, 31, 37– 38, 40 Merian, Maria Sibylla, 162 Mesa, Alonso de, 235 mestizaje (racial mixing), 31 mestizos (mixed Spanish and Indian descent), 28, 30, 31, 72 mexicanidad, 96–97 Mexico: independence and, 105, 107, 195, 201, 204n40; jurisprudence in, 143–44; nation and, xxix, 102, 136, 141–43, 150, 153; Rome compared to, 13–14; Spain relationship with, 4, 14, 137–41, 144–45, 149–50; wars of independence, 141 Mexico City, xxv; Alameda in, 141–42; Ayuntamiento, 7–8, 11; cathedral of, 17; entrada arches, xv, xxxiinn5–6; Escuela de Artes y Oficios in, 258; Escuela Nacional Preparatoria in, 259–61, 263; map of, 103, 104; painters in, xxi–xxii; Palace of Mining in, xix, xx; Plaza Mayor in, xxvi, xxviii, 5, 6, 8, 14, 179, 197; politics and art in, 196–201; Real Audiencia in, 211; Sagrario Metropolitano in, xvi, xvii. See also Charles IV equestrian statue; Royal Academy of San Carlos

Micolao, Conchita, 88n16 Miller, William, 246 Minor, Vernon Hyde, xxiv–xxv, 95 The Miracle of the Well, xix–xx, xxi missionaries, xiv Mississippi Valley plantations, 117–18 Moctezuma, 17, 23n64, 140, 149–52, 151 modern (modern), xviii Molinos de Pólvora of Lima, 29 Monarquía Indiana (Torquemada, J.), 61 Montesclaros, marqués de, 36 Morales Duárez, Vicente, 47n33 morality, 207 morena (African female), 63 Morillo, Pablo, 76 Morlete Ruiz, Juan Patricio, 97 El Mosaico Mexicano, 142 Mosquera, Joaquín, 221 Mount Airy, Virginia, 131n15 Moxey, Keith, 179 Mujica Pinilla, Ramón, 233 mulatto, 72 El Mundo Ilustrado, 263 Muñoz Camargo, Diego, 146 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 99 El Museo Mexicano, 137–38, 142–44 Napoleon, 56, 166 nation: Anderson on, xxxivn31, 101–2, 256; cultural transition from viceroyalty to, xxiii; Mexico and, xxix, 102, 136, 141– 43, 150, 153; representations of, 75–77 national consciousness, xxix, xxxivn31 nationalism: iconography of, 75; motivation of, xviii National School of Fine Arts, 256 naturales americanos (indigenous groups), 136 Navarro, Dolores González-Ripoll, 60 Nebrija, Antonio, 110n16, 186, 190, 191 neoclassicism: Creoles and, xxii, xxvi–xxvii, 43–44, 199; definition of, xiiii; emphasis of, 3–4; neoclassical spectacle, xxvii, 78; in Peru, 26–28; pompai, 78;

index promotion of, xiii–xiv, 233; taste and, xxv, 206–7; traits of, 208–9, 256; urban performance and, xxvii; visual culture and, xvii–xxiii neóstilo, 199 Neptune (god), xv New Districts and Headquarters Regulation (Nuevo Reglamento de Barrios y Cuarteles), 36–37 New Spain: guilds in, xvii, xxi; history of, 140, 155n25; idea of, 102 newspapers, xxvi, xxviii; imagined community and, 101–2, 105; national consciousness and, xxxivn31. See also specific newspapers New Towns program, 33–34 Nicolás de Jesús, fray, 190 Nieto, Mauricio, 40 Nipperdey, Thomas, 14 Noel, Charles C., 198 Nueva Grenada, 31 Nueva Guatemala de la Asunción, Guatemala, 34 Nuevo Reglamento de Barrios y Cuarteles (New Districts and Headquarters Regulation), 36–37 Núñez de la Torre, Joseph, 239 The Odyssey, 85 “Of the Standard of Taste” (Hume), xxiv O’Higgins, Bernardo, 26, 37 Olaguer Feliú, Antonio de, 213, 214, 228n15 Olavide, Pablo de, 33 old (antiguo), xviii Omaña y Sotomayor, Don Gregorio, 98 orichas (deities), 63 Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo (García, G.), 62 Ortiz, Fernando, 60–61 Ortíz y Sanz, José Antonio, 117, 128 Osorno, marqués de, 37 outskirts (extramuros), 34 Pablo de Jesús, Fray, 181–83, 182, 183, 193

287

Pacahacamac, Peru, 42 Paestum, 82 Palace of Mining in Mexico City, Mexico, xix, xx Palace of the Captain General, Havana, Cuba, 52, 53 Palace of the Second in Command, Havana, Cuba, 52 Palermo, 34 Palladianism, xxviii, 117 Palladio, Andrea: on body and architecture, 115–16; Four Books on Architecture, 115; Villa Rotonda and, 121; writings of, xxviii, 54, 115–18, 255 palm trees, 77, 82 Palomino, Antonio, xviii, 103 panopticon, 123 Papeles pertenecientes a la Reyna Madre y D. Juan de Austria, 184 Papel Periódico de la Habana, 51 Paraiba Valley, Brazil, xxviii, 118–19 pardo (mixed-race, African and European male), 63 Paris fair (1889), 79, 268 Parlange plantation, 132n25 Parma, María Luisa de, 11, 12 Parra, Felix, 263 Paseo de Aguas, Lima, Peru, 219, 221 Paseo de la Reforma, 262, 265 paseos, 34, 36 past, identity and, 77, 80 pastillero, 215 patria, 142, 225 patriotic community, xxix, 144 Patriotic Society, xxvii, 51, 52, 54 patriotic taste, 10–11, 13–14 patriotism, cultural, 4, 14, 20n9 Paz, Ireneo, 264, 271n33 Peninsulars, 28, 51, 59, 104–5 Peralta, Pedro de, 30 Peralta, Víctor, 30 Pérez Armendáriz, José, 240 Peru: building restrictions in, xxvi–xxvii, 35–36; Creoles in, 26–28, 30–32, 37–44;

288

index

funeral practices in, 25, 32; Huánuco Viejo, 42; independence and, 30, 40, 232–34, 246, 250; neoclassicism in, 26– 28; New Towns program in, 33–34; Pacahacamac, 42; urban space in, xxvi–xxvii, 25–44. See also Cathedral of Cuzco; Cuzco; Lima Peru-Bolivia Confederation, 233, 247, 249–50 Peru: Incidents of Travel and Exploration in the Land of the Incas. By (Squire), 166 Philadelphia Exhibition (1876), 79, 268 Phillip II (king of Spain), xv, 13 photography, 168 Pillars of Hercules, 243, 244, 246 Los Pinceles de la Historia, xviii Pino, Joaquín del, 213, 216 place: aesthetics and, 4; Cuba and, 59, 60, 66; signifiers of, xix; taste and, 16, 18 plantation complex (fazenda), 119 plantations: Ácana plantation, 124, 125; in Brazil, xxviii, 118–20, 132n35; Buena Vista plantation, 121, 121–22, 134n54; coffee, 119; courtyard architecture on, 116–17, 128; Creole cottage on, 118; in Cuba, xxviii, 120, 128, 132n35; Destrehan plantation, 132n24; Flores do Paraíso, 119–20, 120; gardens a la Inglesa on, 122, 133n41; Greek architecture on, 118, 131n21; Güinía de Soto plantation, 122, 124, 125–26, 126, 134n54; Ingenio Intrépido, 122, 123; Ingenio Trinidad, 126–27, 128; Manaca plantation, 121, 133n39; Mississippi Valley, 117–18; Parlange plantation, 132n25; slavery and, xxviii, 114–20, 122–24, 126–27, 132n35; sugar, xxviii, 120–22, 125–26 Plaza de Armas, Havana, Cuba, xxvii, 49, 52 Plaza Mayor, Mexico City, xxvi, xxviii, 5, 6, 8, 14, 179, 197

Poema de la música (Iriarte), 103–4 poetry, 51, 78; for Gálvez, B., 200–201 Police Regulations (Reglamento de Policía), 37 political cartoons, 83, 84 Poma de Ayala, Felipe Guaman, 243, 244 pompai, 78 Pompeii, excavation of, xviii, 41, 42, 160 Ponz, Antonio, 99 Portada del Callao, Lima, Peru, 38, 38 Portada de Maravillas, Lima, Peru, 26, 39, 39–40 portraiture, xvii; in Buenos Aires, xxx, 210– 13; documents in, 222, 229n33; in Lima, Peru, xxx, 210–13, 215; viceroys and, xv, xxx, 208–22, 227n6, 227n10, 230n38, 230n40. See also specific individuals Posnansky, Arthur, 168–68–170, 172–73 Potosí, 243–44, 244, 246; Cathedral of Potosí, 233 pre-Columbian sites, 157–58, 162–64, 167, 170, 172–73 pre-Hispanic architecture, xv, xxvii, 31, 36, 40–44 Prescott, William Hickling, xxix, 137–38, 144–47, 150–52 Priest-Astronomers, 168–69 primitive hut, 70n40 printing press, 186 prints: of Charles IV equestrian statue, 10– 11; of Málaga cathedral, 103, 105; of Plaza Mayor, Mexico City, xxvi, xxviii, 6; role of, xv, xxvii–xxix, 189–90, 256 probate inventories, 103 El Procurador, 262 progress: expression of, 79; identity and, 72–74 public walks (alamedas), 31, 34, 36–38, 47n27 public works: Amat y Junient and, 206–7, 216–21, 229nn24–25; in Buenos Aires, 221, 229n30; in Lima, Peru, xxvi, 26, 28, 32, 39, 206, 219–21

index Puerto Rico, 59 purity of blood (limpieza de sangre), 65 quality. See calidad Quetzalcoatl, 147, 148 quincha (indigenous thatch construction), xxvii, 27, 34, 36 racial mixing, 65, 105–6. See also castas; mestizaje; mestizos; pardo Rama, Ángel, 190, 191 Ramírez, Alejandro, 52 Ramírez, Fausto, xix, xx, 4 Ramírez, J. Hipólito, 258, 261 Ramírez, José F., 146 Ramos Gavilán, Alonso, 243, 245 Rappaport, Joanne, 191 RASC. See Royal Academy of San Carlos rasgos, 183 rasgueo, 183 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas, 140, 148, 156n25 Real Audiencia, Mexico City, 211 Real Felipe fortress, Callao, 37, 218, 221 Real Sociedad Bascongada de Amigos del País, 99, 113n36 Recopilación de las leyes de los reynos de Indias (Phillip II), xv Reforma project, 260, 261, 262, 264–66, 271nn30–31 Reglamento de Policía (Police Regulations), 37 Regole generali di architettura (Serlio), xiv Relación de gobierno (Amat), 206 relaciones geográficas, 138 republic, 74–76, 75, 80 retablos. See altarpieces reused sculptures (spolia), 172 Revillagigedo. See Aguayo, Juan Vicente de Güemes Padilla Horcasitas y revolutions, xxii. See also American Revolution; French Revolution; Haitian Revolution

289

Reygadas, Fermín de, 14 Ribera, Aldolfo Luis, 228nn15–16 Ribera, José de, xviii Riobamba, Ecuador, 233 Rivera, Mariano, 165, 165–66 River Landscape with a Column, 171 Rivero y Silva, Rafael, 247 Robertson, William, 140, 144, 146, 148, 156n25 rococo style, xiii, xiv, xx; examples of, 229n24, 240, 243 Rodríguez, Lorenzo, xvi Rodríguez Cabrera, Francisco, 54 Rodríguez Juárez, Juan, xx Rodríguez Moya, Inmaculada, 183, 227n6 Rollin, Charles, 99 Roman references, 72, 74, 118, 127, 160 Roman triumphal arch, xiv, 170–72 Rome, 74, 79; comparisons to, 13–14, 85; praise of, 16; slavery, honor and, 114–15, 130nn4–5 Rosa, Salvator, 125, 127, 134n50 Rosa de Santa María, 192 Royal Academy of San Carlos (RASC), Mexico City, xxxi; centennial celebration of, xxxi, 256–68; Charles IV equestrian statue and, 8–10, 11, 93; founding of, 196–98, 232–33; Humboldt on, 3; Madrid satellite school of, 9–10; role of, 3, 16, 17, 198, 204n40, 257–59, 268 Royal Academy of San Fernando, Madrid, Spain: founding of, xiii, 17, 54; Melchor de Jovellanos’ oration for, 16 Royal Academy of Three Noble Arts of San Carlos, 110n16 rúbrica, 190 Ruelas, Julio, 263 ruins, 82–83 The Ruins (Volney), 82–83 Ruins in a Rocky Landscape, 127 Ruiz, Sonia Lombardo de, 199 Ruiz Cano, Francisco Antonio, 28, 34–35 Ruiz Cano, José, 26

290

index

sacred lake (cocha), 235 Sacrificio de Guatimotzin, 150, 153 Sacsayhuaman, 235, 236 Sáenz, Isaac, xxvi Sagrario Metropolitano, Mexico City, xvi, xvii Sahagún, Bernardino de, 150 Sahagún de Arévalo Ladrón de Guevara, Juan Francisco, 110n19 Sala del Crimen, 17 Salas, José de, 228nn15–16 Sampere, Juan, 99 Sanahuja, Miguel de, 233 Sánchez, Franco, 184, 185 San Fernando de Bellavista, 33–34, 35 Sangronis, Francisco Saavedra de, 3–4, 19nn4–5 Santa Cruz, Andrés de, 233, 247 Santería religion, 62 School of Engraving, 257 Schreffler, Michael, 211 science, 161–62; enlightened principles and, 25, 31–32 scientific engravings, 101, 111n26 screens (biombos), 97, 109n13 script, writing and, 186–91 self, formulation of, 76–77 senzala (slave quarters), 119–20 Serlio, Sebastian, xiv shame, 114–16, 130nn4–5 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos, 148; Mexico City entrada arches by, xv, xxxiin5 silver, 233, 241–48 Sims, Harold D., 204n40 slavery: in Cuba, 63–66, 71n54; honor and, 114–18, 130nn4–5; plantations and, xxviii, 114–20, 122–24, 126–27, 132n35. See also coartación; senzala Sobre las antigüedades Romanas y los antiguos Templos del Cristianismo, 15 Sobremonte, Juana Larrazábal de, 215 Sobremonte, Raphael de, 215 society publications, xxviii society reports (memorias), 51

Solís, Antonio, 61, 144, 146, 150; Historia de la conquista de México, 139–40 Solomonic column, xvi, 239, 247 El sol triunfante: Aclamacion de las proezas, y honores politicos y militares de el excmo. Señor D. Bernardo Galves, conde de Galves (Larrañaga, B. F. and Larrañaga, J. R.), 200–201 Soto, Eusebio, 247, 249 Southwell, Edward, 170 Spain: Academy of San Carlos, Valencia, xiii; Academy of San Luis, Zaragoza, xiii; France, war with, 111n25, 197; La Granja de San Idelfonso in, 34; Mexico relationship with, 4, 14, 137– 41, 144–45, 149–50; triumphalism of, 235–36; Visigothic and Islamic sites excavations in, xviii; visual styles in, xiii. See also Royal Academy of San Fernando Spaniards: calidad, 105–6; Creoles and, 30, 31 spiritual matrix (aché), 63 spolia (reused sculptures), 172 Squire, E. George, 158, 166–67, 167, 171, 174n15 Stanfield-Mazzi, Maya, xxx Stevens, John Lloyd, 164 Stoler, Ann Laura, 226 Stübel, Max, 168, 169 Styles, John, xxiv, 4, 18 sudarios, 248 sugar plantations, xxviii, 120–22, 125–26 sun, 245–46 Superunda, conde de. See Manso de Velasco, José Antonio Sweet Name of Mary, 240, 253n38 symmetry, 135n57 Tacitus, 79 Tacón Theater, Havana, Cuba, 79 taste, xxiii–xxv; aesthetics and, 5, 13, 15, 18; books on, 99; identity and, xxviii, 104, 136; man of taste, 95–96, 113n40;

index neoclassicism and, xxv, 206–7; patriotic, 10–11, 13–14; place and, 16, 18; reform of, xvii–xviii. See also buen gusto; gusto gótico; mal gusto taste community, xxv taste cultures, 4 Teatro Heredia, 79 Teatro histórico (Urrutia y Montoya), 62 técnica de golado, 182 temple architecture, 118 El Templete, Havana, Cuba, xxvii, 49–66, 50; historiography of, 50, 67n4; inauguration of, 49, 51, 59; portico of, 53– 54, 54 The Ten Books on Architecture (Vitruvius), 28, 116–17 Tenochtitlán, 139–40 terra-cotta decorations, 260, 263–64, 268 tertulias, tertulianos (literary gatherings), xxv, 51, 99 Theatro Americano (Villaseñor), 140 Thompson, Eric, 168–69 the three fine arts. See las tres bellas artes three noble arts (painting, sculpture, and architecture), xxiii, xxvi Tihuanacu: The Cradle of the American Man (Posnansky), 168 Titian, 191 Tiwanaku culture, xxix, 157–59, 162–63, 165–66, 168–70, 172–73, 175n31 Toledo, Alejandro, 227n10 Toledo, Francisco de, 235 Tolsá, Manuel, xix; Charles IV equestrian statue and, xxvi, xxix–xxx, 3–5, 10–11, 13–15, 17–18, 180, 180–81, 191–94, 198, 200, 203n22; Palace of Mining, Mexico City, xix, xx; Ximeno y Planes’ portrait of, 208–9, 210 Torquemada, Juan de, 61–62 Torquemada, Tomás de, 150 Torre, José María de la, 49 Torres, Martín de, 237–38, 238, 240 Toussaint, Manuel, xvii, xviii, 183 town planning, ordinances for, xv

291

traveler/scientist/reporter, role of, xxix trees: ceiba, 49, 52–53, 55, 57, 61–63; palm, 77, 82; Tree of Guernica, 61, 62; Tree of Liberty, 61 las tres bellas artes (the three fine arts, painting, sculpture, and architecture), xiii Las Tres Tazas (Vergara y Vergara), 86 Tribunal del Consulado, Lima, Peru, xxvi, 26, 37, 39–40, 47n29 El Triunfo (The Triumph), 235, 252n21, 254n69 Trojan War, 86 Tschudi, Johann Jakob von, 165, 165–66 tsunami, Lima, Peru, xxvi, 28, 33–35, 37, 215 Tudisco, Gustavo, 192 Tupac Amaru uprising (1780), 196, 203n26, 232, 240, 246 Twinam, Ann, 223–24 Uhle, Max, 168, 169 Ulloa, Antonio de, 212 ultra-baroque, xvi Unanue, Hipólito, 26, 37–38, 41–42, 44 United States, xxii urban performance, xxvii urban space: in Peru, xxvi–xxvii, 25–44; redefinition of, xxv–xxvii Urrutia y Montoya, Ignacio de, 61–62 Valdés, Manuel Antonio, 100–101, 102, 111n25 Valle de la Magdalena, 127, 129 valle de la Magdelena, plan of, 42 Valle de los Ingenios, Cuba, xxviii Velayos, Emmanuel, 30, 43 Velázquez, Antonio, 17 Velázquez, Diego, 55, 59 Vergara y Vergara, José María, 86 Vermay, Jean-Baptiste: Academy of Drawing and Painting of San Alejandro and, 52; paintings by, 49, 52, 54–58, 55, 56, 57, 58, 63–66, 64, 65

292

index

viceroys, 206–27; alliances and, 215, 228n21; identity and, 207–8, 223–27, 231n46; portraiture and, xv, xxx, 208– 22, 227n6, 227n10, 230n38, 230n40. See also specific individuals Vickery, Amanda, xxiv, 4, 18 Villa Rotonda, 121 Villaseñor, José Antonio, 140, 141 Viracocha (Inca ruler), 235 Virgin Mary, 235, 244–47, 252n28; statue of, 243, 253n38 Virgin of Guadalupe, xix–xxii, xxii, 197 Virgin of the Assumption, 236, 245, 252n21 Virgin of the Mountain, 245, 246 visual culture, xvii–xxiii Vitruvius: De architectura, xiv; The Ten Books on Architecture, 28, 116–17; writings of, xv, 54, 127–28, 135n57, 255 Vives, Francisco Dionisio, 56, 56, 59, 63– 64, 65 Voekel, Pamela, 203n29 Volney, C. F., 82–83 Voyage dans l’Amerique Meridionale (d’Orbigny), 162 Vues des Cordillères (Humboldt), 11, 162

Walcott, Derek, 82 Waldeck, Count de, 166–68, 171, 174n16 Walls, Laura Dassow, 162 Walters, Patricia Pérez, 260 Webb, Daniel, 16 Widdifield, Stacie, xxxi Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 15, 84, 96, 160 women: Indians, 75; statues of, 74–76 writing and script, 186–91 Wuffarden, Luis Eduardo, 227n10 Ximeno y Planes, Rafael, 94; The Miracle of the Well, xix–xx, xxi; praise for, 17; Tolsá portrait by, 208–9, 210 Yciar, Juan de, 186, 188–89 youth, 76, 80 Zeuske, Michael, 129 Zuidema, Tom, 172–73 Zumárraga, Juan de, xix Zúñiga y Ontíveros, Felipe de, 100