In The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance. Ed. Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porra... more In The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance. Ed. Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porras. New York: Routledge, 2024. pp. 225–32.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 2023
This essay treats an extraordinary equestrian portrait of the New Spanish viceroy Bernardo de Gál... more This essay treats an extraordinary equestrian portrait of the New Spanish viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez created from little more than a looping, calligraphic line. Unique among viceregal painting, it has eluded definitive scholarly interpretation. A previously unexplored, printed calligraphic model is proposed. At stake, however, is not just source hunting but a reappraisal of the picture's intellectual context within a network of the period's renowned academicians and their thinking about handwriting. Moreover, new technical findings allow a revised dating of the picture in exposing the sitter's shifting identity. What emerges is a political reading of the portrait's original function as an act of deference to the Spanish crown and sign of investment in the renewal of Iberian culture's proper formation of imperial citizens-on both sides of the Atlantic. Ultimately, the essay thus points to the art-historical potential of wrestling with the history of writing, a domain often segregated from other visual arts but one that was critical for early modern artists and their audiences.
The archive has played a crucial role in art historical scholarship in helping to flesh out the i... more The archive has played a crucial role in art historical scholarship in helping to flesh out the identities of colonial artists, scribes, and writers. But the vagaries of history, colonialist violences, and postcolonial regimes mean that the archives undergirding such study are particularly unstable. This essay treats the role of archives (their lacunae as well as their surpluses) in shaping the historical methods and scholarly desires around these actors. Case studies are organized around objects made of ink and paper, the same materials as colonial documentation. These cases span a wide temporal range, a broad geographic frame, and a diverse set of period actors. Set out in reverse chronological order, they capture the longing and lament that colonial archives produce. The essay then turns to archival gaps that have been or might be filled, focalizing a range or methods—from historically sanctioned modes of recovery to patently fraudulent fictions—to explore generative methods of probing archival limits.
Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America, 2023
Ed. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
This volume addresses and expands the r... more Ed. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries.
Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting.
Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it.
Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual – Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur , 2022
This essay works within a transatlantic framework to excavate an early modern sensitivity to form... more This essay works within a transatlantic framework to excavate an early modern sensitivity to form and formal arrangement from practices of compositionally reconfiguring printed compositions. Tracing such operations generates a reappraisal of foundational conceptions of Baroque aesthetics and of the very notion of the Baroque as a style. The essay begins in colonial Latin America, where artists were frequently tasked with using European prints to produce works of art, but it then tacks in the opposite direction to argue that exploring Latin American compositional modes allows better seeing them in Europe as well – both in commonplace vis ual culture and in the highest echelons of artistic production. The Baroque comes to be defined as a compositional mode of artistic practice centered on form and its potential for syntactical recombi nation – a mode conditioned by the medium of print. This essay thus advocates for the ways that working across once-interconnected geographies can (and should) shift key historiographic concepts and aesthetic frameworks: here of Baroque compositional practice, the Baroque as a historiographic construct, and print’s unmined place within both.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture , 2021
To be lost and found at sea: What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues... more To be lost and found at sea: What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues this question by centering fragmented remains—large beeswax blocks and Chinese porcelain ware—from the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon lost while traveling from Manila to Acapulco at the end of the seventeenth century. By considering how durable commodities were recovered and reimagined, primarily by Indigenous inhabi- tants of the Oregon coast, this essay reflects upon the kinds of histories that can be written around and because of wrecked ships. Tacking between past and present, we use the Santo Cristo de Burgos to draw out the lineaments of a shipwreck’s art history, bringing into focus three interrelated themes, each critical to the material histories of wrecks: the interpretive recalcitrance of cargo, the reframing of value through recovery, and the production of material surplus in the watery depths.
“Patterns of Colonial Transfer: An Album of Prints in Mexico City,” Print Quarterly 34.4 (2017): ... more “Patterns of Colonial Transfer: An Album of Prints in Mexico City,” Print Quarterly 34.4 (2017): 393–99.
In The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance. Ed. Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porra... more In The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance. Ed. Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porras. New York: Routledge, 2024. pp. 225–32.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 2023
This essay treats an extraordinary equestrian portrait of the New Spanish viceroy Bernardo de Gál... more This essay treats an extraordinary equestrian portrait of the New Spanish viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez created from little more than a looping, calligraphic line. Unique among viceregal painting, it has eluded definitive scholarly interpretation. A previously unexplored, printed calligraphic model is proposed. At stake, however, is not just source hunting but a reappraisal of the picture's intellectual context within a network of the period's renowned academicians and their thinking about handwriting. Moreover, new technical findings allow a revised dating of the picture in exposing the sitter's shifting identity. What emerges is a political reading of the portrait's original function as an act of deference to the Spanish crown and sign of investment in the renewal of Iberian culture's proper formation of imperial citizens-on both sides of the Atlantic. Ultimately, the essay thus points to the art-historical potential of wrestling with the history of writing, a domain often segregated from other visual arts but one that was critical for early modern artists and their audiences.
The archive has played a crucial role in art historical scholarship in helping to flesh out the i... more The archive has played a crucial role in art historical scholarship in helping to flesh out the identities of colonial artists, scribes, and writers. But the vagaries of history, colonialist violences, and postcolonial regimes mean that the archives undergirding such study are particularly unstable. This essay treats the role of archives (their lacunae as well as their surpluses) in shaping the historical methods and scholarly desires around these actors. Case studies are organized around objects made of ink and paper, the same materials as colonial documentation. These cases span a wide temporal range, a broad geographic frame, and a diverse set of period actors. Set out in reverse chronological order, they capture the longing and lament that colonial archives produce. The essay then turns to archival gaps that have been or might be filled, focalizing a range or methods—from historically sanctioned modes of recovery to patently fraudulent fictions—to explore generative methods of probing archival limits.
Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America, 2023
Ed. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
This volume addresses and expands the r... more Ed. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries.
Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting.
Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it.
Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual – Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur , 2022
This essay works within a transatlantic framework to excavate an early modern sensitivity to form... more This essay works within a transatlantic framework to excavate an early modern sensitivity to form and formal arrangement from practices of compositionally reconfiguring printed compositions. Tracing such operations generates a reappraisal of foundational conceptions of Baroque aesthetics and of the very notion of the Baroque as a style. The essay begins in colonial Latin America, where artists were frequently tasked with using European prints to produce works of art, but it then tacks in the opposite direction to argue that exploring Latin American compositional modes allows better seeing them in Europe as well – both in commonplace vis ual culture and in the highest echelons of artistic production. The Baroque comes to be defined as a compositional mode of artistic practice centered on form and its potential for syntactical recombi nation – a mode conditioned by the medium of print. This essay thus advocates for the ways that working across once-interconnected geographies can (and should) shift key historiographic concepts and aesthetic frameworks: here of Baroque compositional practice, the Baroque as a historiographic construct, and print’s unmined place within both.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture , 2021
To be lost and found at sea: What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues... more To be lost and found at sea: What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues this question by centering fragmented remains—large beeswax blocks and Chinese porcelain ware—from the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon lost while traveling from Manila to Acapulco at the end of the seventeenth century. By considering how durable commodities were recovered and reimagined, primarily by Indigenous inhabi- tants of the Oregon coast, this essay reflects upon the kinds of histories that can be written around and because of wrecked ships. Tacking between past and present, we use the Santo Cristo de Burgos to draw out the lineaments of a shipwreck’s art history, bringing into focus three interrelated themes, each critical to the material histories of wrecks: the interpretive recalcitrance of cargo, the reframing of value through recovery, and the production of material surplus in the watery depths.
“Patterns of Colonial Transfer: An Album of Prints in Mexico City,” Print Quarterly 34.4 (2017): ... more “Patterns of Colonial Transfer: An Album of Prints in Mexico City,” Print Quarterly 34.4 (2017): 393–99.
Baroque to Neo-Baroque: Curves of an Art Historical Concept
International Conference
Baroque to N... more Baroque to Neo-Baroque: Curves of an Art Historical Concept International Conference Baroque to Neo-Baroque: Curves of an Art Historical Concept organized by Estelle Lingo and Lorenzo Pericolo with Alessandro Nova and Tristan Weddigen Florence, 03 – 05 June 2019
This paper explores aesthetic judgment in relation to imperial craft practices in two adjoining r... more This paper explores aesthetic judgment in relation to imperial craft practices in two adjoining rooms at Schloss Schönbrunn. One, the “Millionenzimmer,” features sixty découpaged assemblages made by cutting up and recombining 266 Mughal miniatures. The other is lined with chinoiserie sheets: copies in blue ink on white paper of prints designed by Boucher and Pillement. The cultural otherness of these images complicates the idea of making as leisure-time activity, revealing fraught stakes of imperial control and self-formation.
La historia de la imagen de Nuestro Señor de Huanca, que se ubica a unos 50 kilómetros de la ciud... more La historia de la imagen de Nuestro Señor de Huanca, que se ubica a unos 50 kilómetros de la ciudad de Cusco, es difícil de precisar. Aunque la manufactura de la imagen milagrosa—pintada en la superficie de una roca enorme, en una huanca—es extraordinaria, los historiadores del arte no han encontrado evidencia suficiente para reconstruir una historia definitiva de esta imagen colonial. En vez de lamentar la relativa ausencia de información sobre este sitio de peregrinación, propongo analizar esta carencia como una faceta importante del arte colonial en los andes. Frente a la intratabilidad específica de los ídolos andinos los padres misioneros tenían que inventar estrategias nuevas al borde de lo estrictamente doctrinal (y como tal de que ellos no podían escribir). Propongo que este fenómeno se manifiesta en los vacíos del historial, que lo andino denegó una oportunidad de contar una historia estrictamente europea en el pasado, proceso que hoy nos aporta paradójicamente la posibilidad de rescatar una presencia, tan fugaz como sea, del enfrentamiento entre las epistemologías andinas y europeas.
An Art that Resists History: El Señor de Huanca and the Intractability of Idols in the Andes
The history of the image of Nuestro Señor de Huanca, located some 50 kilometers from the city of Cuzco, is difficult to explicate. Although the facture of the miraculous image—painted on the surface of an enormous rock, on a huanca—is extraordinary, art historians have not found sufficient evidence to reconstruct a definitive history of this colonial object. Instead of lamenting the relative absence of information about this pilgrimage site, I propose to analyze this lack as an important feature of colonial art in the Andes. Facing the particular intractability of Andean idols, missionary friars had to invent new strategies of persuasion at the limits of the strictly doctrinal (and, as such, ones they could not describe in official writings). I propose that this phenomenon is now manifest in the various holes in the historical record; features particular to the Andean experience denied the possibility of telling a strictly European history of and in the past. The results of this process now paradoxically offer us the possibility of recuperating, however provisionally, something of the confrontation of European and Andean epistemologies.
On the occasion of Rubens’s birthday, this lecture explores his afterlives. Rubens’s compositions... more On the occasion of Rubens’s birthday, this lecture explores his afterlives. Rubens’s compositions, in printed form, circulated broadly through the Catholic world, leaving copies in their wake. From the valley of Mexico to the Andean highlands to the shores of Goa, one can find works of art that hew closely to their Rubensian prototypes, and that helped visualize a Catholic faith on the move in the early modern period. But did “Rubens” travel with his compositions in a newly globalized world? This lecture will trace the contours of two interrelated phenomena: on the one hand, Rubens became a palpable symbol for New World artists, a lens through which they understood their own artistic practices, and on the other, Rubens would become disconnected from the figures he helped create, figures that would take on lives of their own.
Early modern art history is premised on intertextuality and the identification of period viewers ... more Early modern art history is premised on intertextuality and the identification of period viewers primed to understand how works reference one another. The global turn has revealed how intertextuality breaks down across wider geographies, but this discourse of failed transmission threatens to stall at the simple reification of cultural specificity.To produce a different model of reference that accounts for how artworks can mean in ways unforeseen by their original audiences and severed from their makers, this paper focuses on an allegorical figure from a composition by Rubens that became a miracle-working statue in Mexico. The miracle-working image, in turn, became its own origin point for the production of copies, while Rubens’ “original” engraving continued to circulate. This paper works to disturb established binaries of original and copy while claiming that methodologies engineered for a global context can push towards a new art history for Europe as well.
This paper explores the webs of replication that prints facilitated across the expanses of the Sp... more This paper explores the webs of replication that prints facilitated across the expanses of the Spanish Empire. In the print’s journey through space, and through the New World workshops that reconstituted them into paint, compositions could shed their authors, becoming anonymously produced intertexts rather than indices of authorial intent. But the print, with its extensive metadata inscribed at the page’s bottom edge, also engendered new paradigms for thinking about authorship. This paper centers on Cristóbal de Villalpando’s paintings for Mexico City’s cathedral, compositions that reconfigure prints by Peter Paul Rubens and Maarten de Vos. Villalpando, I suggest, faced a printed canon rather than a painted one, and this shaped the ways he defined his own authorship; his strange signing practice, “inventor,” indexes this dynamic, given that this term originally referred to printed and not painterly practice. The paper sets this “inappropriate” signature, a type of mimicry, in a postcolonial frame.
The parish church of Andahuaylillas’ famous pentalingual baptistery arch, which bears translation... more The parish church of Andahuaylillas’ famous pentalingual baptistery arch, which bears translations of the Latin baptismal phrase into Spanish and three indigenous languages, has become an icon of pastoral translation in viceregal Peru. But Bocanegra’s translation efforts were part of a broader, hegemonic system of colonial translation in which texts, images, spaces, and even bodies were ordered through translation and inscription. The church indexes a great colonial paradox: translation was both a mechanism to impose colonial order and was simultaneously a process that, itself, had to be carefully framed and controlled. Therefore, at San Pedro, a dizzying array of early modern forms of translation are marshaled both to demonstrate that they can be ordered through interlocking structures of rigid frames and that they, in turn, could be put to the service of both Christianity and colonial society. Throughout the decorative cycle, angels alight carrying images of holy figures, evoking translation in the sense of medieval translatio, the movement of holy bodies and relics; European print sources are medially translated to fresco secco by Bocanegra’s team of artists; Hebrew words, abbreviated monograms and native Andean symbols are juxtaposed with their Latin equivalents; religious bodies are inscribed and translated in ceremonies that give them new Christian names and identities.
This paper explores the various decorative elements at Andahuaylillas, which have never before been brought together under the rubric of translation, in order to argue that colonial images and spaces functioned in systems of translation that had to be carefully ordered so that they could, in turn, impose order on the indigenous bodies that moved amongst and within them. The religious supplicant thus becomes the final pictorial element at Andahuaylillas, a translated body that is subjected to the ordering logic of the frame.
In his Memoriales, Fray Toribio de Benavente makes an odd assertion that indigenous craftsmen in ... more In his Memoriales, Fray Toribio de Benavente makes an odd assertion that indigenous craftsmen in sixteenth-century Mexico created “Roman mosaics of feathers and gold.” This is but one of many strange glosses in period sources on a new form of image making: Christian iconography crafted through the indigenous medium of featherwork. This talk tries to make sense of such inconsistent readings of materiality and temporality. Catholic responses to the Protestant Reformation provide a frame, suggesting that New World came to represent the possibility of a return to an undivided, pure Catholic realm.
These new feather objects are implicated in this move backwards through time. They acted as New World icons in a revivified era of images in the New World, a retreat from an era of art in Europe that had led to such catastrophic events as the Reformation and iconoclasm. The indigenous craftsmen were heralded for their ability to copy, to produce substitutional pictorial statements that hinged on notions of perfect transcription, true likeness to divine prototypes, and a lack of inventive authorship: in short, their ability to produce icons. Feather images, whose natural materials seemed to deny human intervention, were understood as the most revered form of the icon, the acheiropoeiton, or image produced without the use of human hands.
This essay treats the erotic works produced (often collaboratively) between roughly 1588-91 by me... more This essay treats the erotic works produced (often collaboratively) between roughly 1588-91 by members of Karel van Mander's so-called "Haarlem Academy." It uses this case study to suggest that early modern art making created a space next to life in which slippages could occur between homosocial relationships, the category by which we almost reflexively now understand early modern male friendships, and homoerotic practices. Hierarchical power relations inherent to collaboration, as well as to early modern academies more generally, facilitated these dynamics because they structurally replicated essential conditions understood to be constitutive of homoerotic relationships. Historiographically, this essay takes as its imperative the need to escape the positivist trap of both the written record and the linear progression from sexual relationship, to document, to visual re-presentation. Instead, it insists upon taking art as the beginning of an examination, rather than the end, of material practices that transform the relationships between bodies. In turn, the piece proposes ways in which formal readings of works coupled with interrogation of collaborative artistic production can help explore the ways that works of art can do more than re-present homoerotic relationships and, instead, instantiate them.
Call for Papers
The Dutch Americas
Historians of Netherlandish Art Sponsored Session
111th CAA An... more Call for Papers The Dutch Americas Historians of Netherlandish Art Sponsored Session 111th CAA Annual Conference New York, NY, February 15—18, 2023 Organizers: Stephanie Porras (Tulane University) and Aaron M. Hyman (Johns Hopkins University)
Fish wrappers, cigarette rollers, toilet paper, the backing for embroidery, lining for baking pan... more Fish wrappers, cigarette rollers, toilet paper, the backing for embroidery, lining for baking pans, the raw material for papier mâché—these are but a few of the uses that the page was subjected to outside the normative economies of reading and viewing. But texts and images also often functioned in less pragmatic and more freighted ways: as numinously charged surfaces to be touched upon one's person, as personal possessions hidden inside mummy bundles for the enjoyment of the deceased, as symbols to be iconoclastically destroyed, or as divine conduits to be ceremonially ingested. Sometimes books and images, which by their nature inform, instruct, invite annotation, and implore users to follow their designs, incited such uses beyond mere reading or viewing. We seek interrogations of uses and reuses of the page that emphasize instances in which material necessity was charged with a semantic or symbolic dimension. When was the sheer need for paper or parchment complicated or compounded by the content of the page? Or when might repurposing have been prompted by alternative understandings of a book's materials, in their own right? During this conference session, three participants will give 20-minute presentations, followed by a half-hour discussion led by a moderator.
Please submit a proposal of no more than 500 words, along with an abridged CV, by 25 October 2016 at: rarebookschool.org/bibliography-conference-papers
Like its early modern counterparts, the Spanish Empire ran on paper. Decrees and relaciones criss... more Like its early modern counterparts, the Spanish Empire ran on paper. Decrees and relaciones crisscrossed the Atlantic, imposing and contesting rules of imperial comportment. Ships’ logs, tax ledgers, bills of sale and receipt registered the mundane, the rare, and the precious. Bibles, breviaries and catechisms spread the word of the crown’s corollary, Catholicism, as printed woodcuts and engravings helped visualize a new religion for neophytes and indigenous artists—often unfamiliar with religious iconography and the means of its dissemination.
But within the framework of colonial registration, paper intersected with and impinged upon the lives of imperial subjects in profoundly personal ways. Baptismal and marriage registers, receipts of dowry, wills and final inventories of personal goods are all testaments to the ways that paper punctuated lives; at charged moments people turned to pieces of paper--with varying degrees of choice and mediation--in acts of remembrance, obligation, and contestation. Though at times disregarded as banal and formulaic, these widespread encounters traverse the binary that aligns paper with a lettered European world and excludes indigenous and African viceregal subjects from this textual economy.
This panel seeks to explore how these sheets of paper, bound into books, collated into the reams of a notary’s legajo, folded into the pilgrim’s satchel, or tucked away into a locked escritorio, functioned as objects in their own right. The turn towards materiality and objects in colonial studies need not be opposed to text. We invite proposals that foreground the materiality of paper as it mediates the two types of history described above; that treat the symbolic and representational aspects of paper while attending to its material dimensions; that explore how subjects engaged paper as a concrete object and not merely a blank space for the registration of abstracted ideas. We encourage submissions that pay attention to the relationships between paper and the shape of the viceregal archive--its limitations, exclusions, form, structure--and point to diverse ways in which historical subjects did and scholars might now engage it.
A standard narrative of Renaissance art uses the revival of classical antiquity to explain a new ... more A standard narrative of Renaissance art uses the revival of classical antiquity to explain a new celebration of the male nude. But such an explanation often drains the erotic content out of what can be highly sexualized bodies, allowing them to be naturalized under the rubric of that by now almost meaningless phrase “the heroic male nude.” Feminist interventions have carefully attended to the unclothed female, reconstructing a gendered gaze and exploring the complex webs of political and social relations that framed her. The male nude, on the other hand, has most often been explained in the specific context of homosociality and the cultural discourse, which surrounded it. Even so, there still seems to be an art historical blind spot for the incongruity of male nudity, the multivalent ways in which it can mean, that this panel seeks to account for and dis-mantle.
Papers would ideally handle both art historically specific cases and the corresponding methodological or historiographical issues. We wish to assemble papers that treat works from geographically diverse areas of Europe and from artists who have been underrepresented in related scholarship.
Beyond Biography: Artistic Practice and Personhood
in Colonial Latin America, University of Flor... more Beyond Biography: Artistic Practice and Personhood in Colonial Latin America, University of Florida, Gainesville, October 10-11.
Abstract: “Washing the Archive” probes histories of colonial loss, focusing on the losses that ac... more Abstract: “Washing the Archive” probes histories of colonial loss, focusing on the losses that accrued around a papal bull (the Bula de la Santa Cruzada) that was printed in Madrid in 1578, circulated in the Spanish Americas (Chile), and now is housed in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues this question by centering f... more What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues this question by centering fragmented remains—large beeswax blocks and Chinese porcelain ware—from the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon lost while traveling from Manila to Acapulco at the end of the seventeenth century.
Abstract: “Washing the Archive” probes histories of colonial loss, focusing on the losses
that a... more Abstract: “Washing the Archive” probes histories of colonial loss, focusing on the losses
that accrued around a papal bull (the Bula de la Santa Cruzada) that was printed in Madrid in 1578, circulated in the Spanish Americas (Chile), and now is housed in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a “life-work model” employed in colonial art history ha... more Within shifts affecting colonial studies, a “life-work model” employed in colonial art history has been left unexamined. Developed by a contemporary of Michelangelo, Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511-74), this methodology was grounded in particular European social conditions that allowed the creation of the "artist" whose "artwork" was the inalienable product of a single mind and hand. Following the art historical paths laid by Vasari in the Viceroyalties leads to dead ends: indigenous artists who efface their individuality; painters who exist with little social or historical context; and artworks whose conservation denies finding the traces of the hands that made them. Because artworks were and are the connective tissue of complex social networks, reconfiguring concepts of "artist" and "artwork" and recasting them in accordance with social practices within Latin America, gains us purchase on how colonial subjects, in their engagement with their material worlds, came to be constructed. Resemblance to European prototypes is an essential historical reality of colonial artworks: much artwork, particularly the painting, of colonial Latin America “looks” like that of early modern Europe and thus has generated a foundational expectation, laid out in purest form by Manuel Toussaint (Mexico, 1890-1955), that Latin American art history might also look like Europe’s. We argue that a mismatch with Europe and its methodologies means that certain, foundational historiographic assumptions about writing art history for Latin America need to be reassessed, in particular the “artist” and “artwork.”
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, vol 2, no. 4, 2020
This collection of essays reconsiders a seminal 1961 article by George Kubler, the most important... more This collection of essays reconsiders a seminal 1961 article by George Kubler, the most important art historian of Latin America of the English-speaking world at the time of its writing. Often greeted with indifference or hostility, Kubler’s central claim of extinction is still a highly contested one. The essays in this section deal with Kubler’s reception in Mexico,the political stakes of his claim in relation to indigeneity, as well as the utility of Kubler’s categories and objects of“extinction” beyond their original framing paradigm. Esta colección de ensayos reconsidera un artículo fundamental de 1961 de George Kubler, quien, al publicarse el volumen, fue el historiador del arte latinoamericano más importante del mundo de habla inglesa. A menudo recibida con indiferencia u hostilidad, la tesis de Kubler sobre la extinción sigue siendo controvertida. Los ensayos de esta sección abordan la recepción de Kubler en México, las implicaciones políticas de su afirmación en relación con la indigeneidad, ası ́como la utilidad de las categoríaas de Kubler y los objetos de “extinción” más alla ́de su paradigma original. Esta coleção de ensaios reconsidera um artigo seminal de 1961 de George Kubler, então o mais importante historiador da arte da América Latina no mundo anglófono. Frequentemente recebido com indiferença ou hostilidade, o argumento central de Kubler para a extinção permanece altamente contestado. Os ensaios nesta seção tratam da recepção de Kubler no México, os riscos políticos do seu argumento em relação á indigeneidade, bem como a utilidade das categorias e objetos de “extinção” de Kubler além de seu paradigma de enquadramento original.
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Articles by Aaron Hyman
This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries.
Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting.
Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it.
Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
Book Reviews by Aaron Hyman
This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries.
Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting.
Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it.
Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
International Conference
Baroque to Neo-Baroque: Curves of an Art Historical Concept
organized by Estelle Lingo and Lorenzo Pericolo with Alessandro Nova and Tristan Weddigen
Florence, 03 – 05 June 2019
One, the “Millionenzimmer,” features sixty découpaged assemblages made by cutting up and recombining 266 Mughal miniatures.
The other is lined with chinoiserie sheets: copies in blue ink on white paper of prints designed by Boucher and Pillement.
The cultural otherness of these images complicates the idea of making as leisure-time activity, revealing fraught stakes of
imperial control and self-formation.
An Art that Resists History: El Señor de Huanca and the Intractability of Idols in the Andes
The history of the image of Nuestro Señor de Huanca, located some 50 kilometers from the city of Cuzco, is difficult to explicate. Although the facture of the miraculous image—painted on the surface of an enormous rock, on a huanca—is extraordinary, art historians have not found sufficient evidence to reconstruct a definitive history of this colonial object. Instead of lamenting the relative absence of information about this pilgrimage site, I propose to analyze this lack as an important feature of colonial art in the Andes. Facing the particular intractability of Andean idols, missionary friars had to invent new strategies of persuasion at the limits of the strictly doctrinal (and, as such, ones they could not describe in official writings). I propose that this phenomenon is now manifest in the various holes in the historical record; features particular to the Andean experience denied the possibility of telling a strictly European history of and in the past. The results of this process now paradoxically offer us the possibility of recuperating, however provisionally, something of the confrontation of European and Andean epistemologies.
This paper explores the various decorative elements at Andahuaylillas, which have never before been brought together under the rubric of translation, in order to argue that colonial images and spaces functioned in systems of translation that had to be carefully ordered so that they could, in turn, impose order on the indigenous bodies that moved amongst and within them. The religious supplicant thus becomes the final pictorial element at Andahuaylillas, a translated body that is subjected to the ordering logic of the frame.
These new feather objects are implicated in this move backwards through time. They acted as New World icons in a revivified era of images in the New World, a retreat from an era of art in Europe that had led to such catastrophic events as the Reformation and iconoclasm. The indigenous craftsmen were heralded for their ability to copy, to produce substitutional pictorial statements that hinged on notions of perfect transcription, true likeness to divine prototypes, and a lack of inventive authorship: in short, their ability to produce icons. Feather images, whose natural materials seemed to deny human intervention, were understood as the most revered form of the icon, the acheiropoeiton, or image produced without the use of human hands.
The Dutch Americas
Historians of Netherlandish Art Sponsored Session
111th CAA Annual Conference
New York, NY, February 15—18, 2023
Organizers: Stephanie Porras (Tulane University) and Aaron M. Hyman (Johns Hopkins University)
Please submit a proposal of no more than 500 words, along with an abridged CV, by 25 October 2016 at:
rarebookschool.org/bibliography-conference-papers
But within the framework of colonial registration, paper intersected with and impinged upon the lives of imperial subjects in profoundly personal ways. Baptismal and marriage registers, receipts of dowry, wills and final inventories of personal goods are all testaments to the ways that paper punctuated lives; at charged moments people turned to pieces of paper--with varying degrees of choice and mediation--in acts of remembrance, obligation, and contestation. Though at times disregarded as banal and formulaic, these widespread encounters traverse the binary that aligns paper with a lettered European world and excludes indigenous and African viceregal subjects from this textual economy.
This panel seeks to explore how these sheets of paper, bound into books, collated into the reams of a notary’s legajo, folded into the pilgrim’s satchel, or tucked away into a locked escritorio, functioned as objects in their own right. The turn towards materiality and objects in colonial studies need not be opposed to text. We invite proposals that foreground the materiality of paper as it mediates the two types of history described above; that treat the symbolic and representational aspects of paper while attending to its material dimensions; that explore how subjects engaged paper as a concrete object and not merely a blank space for the registration of abstracted ideas. We encourage submissions that pay attention to the relationships between paper and the shape of the viceregal archive--its limitations, exclusions, form, structure--and point to diverse ways in which historical subjects did and scholars might now engage it.
Papers would ideally handle both art historically specific cases and the corresponding methodological or historiographical issues. We wish to assemble papers that treat works from geographically diverse areas of Europe and from artists who have been underrepresented in related scholarship.
in Colonial Latin America, University of Florida, Gainesville, October 10-11.
that accrued around a papal bull (the Bula de la Santa Cruzada) that was printed in Madrid in 1578, circulated in the Spanish Americas (Chile), and now is housed in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Esta colección de ensayos reconsidera un artículo fundamental de 1961 de George Kubler, quien, al publicarse el volumen, fue el historiador del arte latinoamericano más importante del mundo de habla inglesa. A menudo recibida con indiferencia u hostilidad, la tesis de Kubler sobre la extinción sigue siendo controvertida. Los ensayos de esta sección abordan la recepción de Kubler en México, las implicaciones políticas de su afirmación en relación con la indigeneidad, ası ́como la utilidad de las categoríaas de Kubler y los objetos de “extinción” más alla ́de su paradigma original.
Esta coleção de ensaios reconsidera um artigo seminal de 1961 de George Kubler, então o mais importante historiador da arte da América Latina no mundo anglófono. Frequentemente recebido com indiferença ou hostilidade, o argumento central de Kubler para a extinção permanece altamente contestado. Os ensaios nesta seção tratam da recepção de Kubler no México, os riscos políticos do seu argumento em relação á indigeneidade, bem como a utilidade das categorias e objetos de “extinção” de Kubler além de seu paradigma de enquadramento original.