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To cite this article: Dana Leibsohn (2011): Art, Architecture and the Meaning of Things in Colonial
Latin America, Colonial Latin American Review, 20:3, 407-414
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Colonial Latin American Review
Vol. 20, No. 3, December 2011, pp. 407414
Review Essay
Art, Architecture and the Meaning of
Things in Colonial Latin America
Dana Leibsohn
Smith College
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Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire
CHARLENE VILLASEÑOR BLACK
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006
272 pp. (ISBN 0691096317)
The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain
MICHAEL J. SCHREFFLER
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007
191 pp. (ISBN 0271029838)
In The Language of Objects, Edward Sullivan argues that tangible things became the
measures of the reality of the Americas, as ‘places beyond the sea’ (55). With this
he alludes to two issues foundational to the art history of colonial Latin America:
how objects and images molded discursive and lived experiences in a world marked
by transoceanic exchange; and how ‘America’ took form, as place distinct from, yet
ISSN 1060-9164 (print)/ISSN 1466-1802 (online) # 2011 Taylor & Francis on behalf of CLAR
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2011.624336
408 D. Leibsohn
bound to Europe. The volumes reviewed here approach these themes along disparate
lines. Some highlight urban Spanish America, others the imaginaries of early modern
worship or collecting. It is worth noting right from the start, however, that these five
books press against older ideas about the role of material and ethnic economies in
forging visual culture in Spanish America, and in so doing complicate our thinking
about what constitutes colonial Latin American art. The implications of this I turn to
at the end of this review.
Arquitectura y empresa in Quito turns upon Susan Webster’s keen work with a
rare document, rich in detail: the libro de fábrica for the Cofradı́a del Santı́simo
Sacramento in Quito. Reading carefully from this account book and other Quiteñan
archival documents, Webster uncovers a great deal about architectural practices in the
late seventeenthearly eighteenth centuries. Her work maintains a tight focus on the
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Spanish-born architect José Jaime Ortiz and the projects he undertook between 1694,
when he arrived in Quito, and 1707, when he died. These ranged from the church
of the Sagrario and the Arco de Santa Elena, to the reconstruction and expansion of
numerous religious buildings and private residences.
Webster’s book straddles the genres of architectural biography and architectural
history. The approach is productive, allowing her to reconstruct Ortiz’s professional
ambitions, local religious directives, and quotidian life in urban Ecuador. The book
opens with a biographical sketch, but Ortiz’s architectural ventures form the crux of
Webster’s history. In the first of two main chapters, Webster focuses on the church
of the Sagrario. Here she identifies Ortiz as the man responsible for the design and
construction of this monument, a point heretofore at issue. She also discusses the
physical features of the church, the indigenous labor it required and Cofradı́a expen-
ses. Webster teases out the details of contract negotiations between Ortiz and the
cofradı́a in an impressive way, offering insight into the nexus of legal, religious and
architectural worlds in Quito. Her other main chapter, develops these themes by
describing Ortiz’s other architectural projects, and his dealings in real estate and
renovation.
Webster cleaves closely to her sources, and her descriptions of extant buildings
are clear and informative (although some architectural historians may wish for more
plans). She shows how Ortiz’s work and life are all of a piece, yet never lionizes
the architect. Her book provides excerpts from archival documents, including an
inventory of Ortiz’s belongings, and here we catch a glimpse of his personal tastes.
Webster also explains that while living in Quito, Ortiz traded in slaves, worked as a
building inspector, and bought, sold or renovated over twenty properties. From this
we sense the complexity of the man’s drive. What Webster cannot illuminate are
Ortiz’s professional inspirations and influences. Her documents are too spare on this,
and hers is very much a book of its sources. Yet her larger argument, while subtly
made, is important: Ortiz was both an exception in Quito and a harbinger of more
professionalized architectural practices. This is why his life matters to a broad history
of colonial architecture.
Colonial Latin American Review 409
In furthering our knowledge of urban visual culture, Webster’s book reaffirms the
role of cities in colonial Latin America. Perhaps one of the most distinctive features of
the book is the degree to which it exposes its own archival underpinnings: Webster’s
project represents a model of what deep archival work can divulge. In contrast to the
other books discussed here, Webster largely sets transatlantic connections aside. What
interests her most is what happened in Quito. And indeed, Arquitectura y empresa
offers a sobering lesson in how much on-the-ground work remains to be done in
the field of colonial visual culture, especially outside the metropoles of Mexico City
and Lima.
In Creating the Cult of St. Joseph, Charlene Villaseñor Black seeks to explain the
intersection of religious devotion, visual culture, and normative social roles. Her
primary arguments concern the spread of Josephine devotion in Spain and Mexico,
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short-circuit historical complexity. One might also imagine a more forceful analysis
of gender categories, although by the end of the book, Black’s ideas on this theme
come through.
Ultimately, Black’s ambition to grapple with the role of images in shaping lived
realities is what distinguishes her work intellectually. At many points, she calls
attention to the chasm separating daily life from models of behavior articulated by
devotional images and texts. This fact may not surprise, but it does raise critical
interpretive issues: what kinds of work do religious images perform in the world; how
are they able to do this work, and is it possible for them to somehow ‘fail’ in the
discursive spaces in which they circulate? It would have been a pleasure to read Black
pushing harder on these subjects. Yet throwing them into relief is itself a valuable
contribution, for it challenges us to think ever more seriously about the work colonial
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Yet much here is important and new. The Art of Allegiance asks us to reconsider
the seventeenth century in Latin American art history. Schreffler also exposes how
images*and courtyards, and folded screens*summon royal power, he explains the
actual work they do, the ways in which visual culture and subjectivity sustain each
other. In this, Schreffler’s book provides one response to Black: if she queries the
relationship between art and lived reality, he begins to forge an answer.
Edward Sullivan’s book, The Language of Objects in the Art of the Americas, looks
across the full sweep of Latin America, from the fifteenth century to the present.
This situates colonial objects in a context of art-making that is not itself strictly
colonial, although early modernity occupies roughly half the book. While Sullivan
does not argue that recent artworks are necessarily, inextricably bound to the legacy
of colonialism (a position others have voiced), his book invites analysis of the
relationships between visual cultures of the Americas’ past and those of the present.
In ‘Wondrous Objects,’ one of the strongest chapters, Sullivan analyzes gifts and
commodities sent from the Americas to Europe, and how ‘objects themselves trans-
mitted powerful messages regarding the ‘‘nature’’ of the New World’ (4). Here, he
addresses habits of collecting and European cabinets of curiosity, as well as the
symbolic meanings of objectified indigenous bodies and still life paintings from the
Americas. Sullivan focuses primarily on Mexico and Brazil, offering an exceptional
analysis of Albrecht Eckhout’s paintings of the 1640s, of fruits and vegetables and
Brazilian types. Other chapters push forward in time, to scenes of the Mexico City
plaza, images of the Virgin from Peru, portraits of Sor Juana and crowned nuns, and
casta paintings. In a pair of chapters, ‘Naturalezas Vivas’ and ‘Naturalezas Muertas,’
Sullivan examines late colonial works, including Antonio Pérez de Aguilar’s ‘Alcena’
and portraits of deceased children (angelitos).
Sullivan is a graceful writer and his observations are lucid and persuasive. In
comparison to much art history of the colonial period, one feels the influence of
anthropology and theoretical work on objecthood here. Sullivan also references key
writers on Spanish America and Europe, as well as people who study visual culture and
colonial history more broadly. His notes, which are very fine on recent scholarship,
are themselves a contribution to the field. Sullivan’s book is also visually compelling.
412 D. Leibsohn
With almost 200 color plates, images are more than a nicety. The Language of Objects
makes it possible to see Latin American art well, ultimately making zemis and escudos
less remote, less impossible to know.
Sullivan’s commentaries can fall a little flat when it comes to wedding theory and
imagery. His desire to work across the hemisphere at times stretches analyses thin,
and some objects are never more than iconographic elements. Sullivan’s interpre-
tive strengths are nevertheless many. His writing on European habits of collecting is
highly evocative, so, too, is his analysis of casta paintings. In contradistinction to
much writing on casta canvases and their racialized bodies, Sullivan complicates their
meaning by highlighting their depiction of material things. He sees casta paintings
as indicators of the economic viability of Mexicans who were ‘entering into a more
fully developed transatlantic capitalist system’ (78). He also juxtaposes casta paintings
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with market scenes, images by Vicente Albán, and the work of Eckhout, opening
interesting questions about how commodities take on meaning across the Americas,
not strictly in one locale or moment in time. This approach, which stresses a compa-
rative, long-view of art-making, can be provocative. Indeed, Sullivan’s book reveals
how much further it is possible to press, how much new insight is still available, even
for images we now think of as familiar.
What to make of all this scholarship, all this visual and material history? For those
of us who teach, this question is hardly trivial. One viable answer comes via The Art
and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, in which Kelly Donahue-Wallace presents
a history of painting, sculpture and architecture. This focus on ‘high art’*in contrast
to the broad field of visual culture*allows Donahue-Wallace to examine selected
examples in depth and draw comparisons across regions and time periods. This is
one of her book’s real strengths. While debates about a colonial canon still animate
art historians, her volume features works most will consider central to the field:
cathedrals, monastic complexes, and domestic architecture; altar screens and devo-
tional images; religious paintings and portraits. Donahue-Wallace brings her own
teaching experience to bear in this book, and one senses what she values in the
classroom. This includes a solid bibliography and useful glossary, and well-organized
prose that eschews the language of taste (at no point do we learn which monument or
painting was the finest or most expressive, although she says quite a bit about the
power of images in the past).
This book surveys Spanish America, but not Brazil. It privileges the metropolitan
centers of Mexico City and Lima, yet also discusses Cuzco and cities in New Granada
and La Plata. As an introductory volume, much rests on Donahue-Wallace’s ability to
synthesize scholarship in the field. Here she does exemplary work. A distinct sense of
interpretive practice comes through but does not overwhelm. Excerpts from primary
documents*inventories, travelers’ accounts, chronicles and guild documents*
constitute another plus. Donahue-Wallace’s choices are smart, and extend well
beyond any mundane sense of historical context. The inventory from the painter Luis
Juarez’s house, for instance, lists paintings and pillows, coconut cups and jewels,
Colonial Latin American Review 413
furniture and rugs. While this will not surprise specialists, for students it opens onto
a world of lived experience no discussion of paintings alone can achieve.
The book covers each century, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth, via
two primary chapters, one emphasizing religious architecture and related arts, the
other painting. To take one example, Donahue-Wallace’s discussion of Huejotzingo
covers the plan, labor force, primary documents, sculpture, architectural elements,
and façade decoration; later, when she turns to La Asunción in Chucuito, she raises
similar topics, encouraging comparative analysis. Donahue-Wallace also attends to
rituals of devotion and festival processions, not strictly the physical features or sty-
listic histories of monuments. One of the most useful chapters in the book focuses on
cities, addressing town planning, domestic architecture and uses of public space.
Given the role specialized studies assign to civic topographies and urban identities,
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and intellectual work. In fact one notable aspect of the books under review is that
they open many new possibilities for sophisticated theoretical and methodological
research on colonial urbanity.
What did it mean to see a picture, walk through a courtyard, or hold a sacred
object in one’s hand? This kind of query is fundamental to art historical and visual
culture studies these days. Did this meaning shift if one was in Madrid not Mexico
City, Huejotzingo, not Manila; or if the gesture was that of Creole woman, not a
native Andean? For any art history of Latin America, the power of place*what some
have called the ‘implications of geography,’ others the ‘politics of location’*still
beckons, but how much does it matter? The studies here are eloquent and compelling
on the art and architecture of New Spain and New Granada, Peru and Brazil. And
in presenting ambitious work on the agency of objects, on how material things
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produced the history of Spanish America (and not merely the other way around),
they make clear how much has transpired in art history since the mid-1970s. More
often than not, however, understanding the ‘Latin American-ness’ of colonial art is
cast as a historical problem rather than (also) a theoretical one. This is not necessarily
a failing. To know the realities of the Americas is*as from its inception?*a project
of factual inquiry. It is also a project that will, for a long time still, invite reckoning
with epistemologies of place and imagination. As these books reveal, there is much
that can be said about the vicissitudes and complexities of both projects. In this these
volumes are savvy guides, they point to promising paths but do not walk them all
for us.
References
Kaufmann, Thomas DaCosta. 2004. Toward a geography of art. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 297.
Weismann, Elizabeth Wilder. 1975. The history of art in Latin America 15001800 Some trends and
challenges in the last decade. Latin American Research Review 10.1: 750.