Review of Visual culture and indigenous agency in the Early Americas by Anthony Meyer

The visual arts carried out a wide array of crucial cultural work across the vast and shifting network of territories encompassed by the Spanish empire between the beginning of the conquest in 1492 and the death of Philip IV in 1665. This course will consider some of the practical, theoretical, esthetic, spiritual, and political functions that works of art performed in a selection of locales from this enormous empire, ranging from Madrid, Granada, and Lisbon, to Naples, Antwerp, Tenochtitlan, and Cuzco. What were the prerogatives and powers of images in and across these different venues? How did these prerogatives change when the images in question underwent the physical and cultural displacements of colonialism and global commerce? What did the producers and consumers of images think of themselves as producing and consuming in these cultural settings? We will explore a wide variety of art historical approaches, from traditional and canonical texts to recent interventions.

21: Inquiries Into Art, History, and the Visual, 2023

Brill, 2021

This volume explores how visual arts functioned in the indigenous pre- and post-conquest New World as vehicles of social, religious, and political identity. Twelve scholars in the field of visual arts examine indigenous artistic expressions in the American continent from the pre-Hispanic age to the present. The contributions offer new interpretations of materials, objects, and techniques based on a critical analysis of historical and iconographic sources and argue that indigenous agency in the continent has been primarily conceived and expressed in visual forms in spite of the textual epistemology imposed since the conquest.

This lecture will not discuss the art of non-Iberian colonial holdings that began late in the 16th century and culminated in the 18th. 1. The Christian era dawned over the New World in 1492. 1.1. The arrival of the Spanish Catholic Church in the New World ended ritualistic torture, polytheism, human sacrifice, intertribal warfare, and cannibalism. Shocked Spaniards destroyed idols and temples as manifestations of the devil. 1.2. The Church introduced a different moral code, baptism, the Mass, new concepts of good and evil, the idea of Heaven and Hell, the Virgin and Saints, a new constitution of the family and the concept of redemption from a crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. 2. Christian concepts suffused native art, snd the indigenous peoples became servants of the Spanish king and members of the Church's "flock." 2.1. It is important that students recognize that the history of the Catholic Church in Latin America was not merely an adjunct to the conquest, instead that the history of the Church, art, and culture are completely intertwined. 3. The art that evolved in the Spanish viceroyalties were, from their beginnings, very different from those of the much younger Anglo-North American colonies. 3.1. Unlike the iconoclastic culture of the Protestant settlers of Anglo-North America, derived from England and Northern Europe, the Iberian culture transferred to the Americas was one in which both image making and the decorative arts were deeply intertwined with the Roman Catholicism. 4. The art of devotion in colonial Mexico, Central America, and South America-called the "viceregal" period, from the division of the colonies into viceroyalties from 1521 to 1821-arose

This article is a reflection on the Hispanic imperial visual archive, that is, the thousands of images produced in the Spanish American viceroyalties in order to document, communicate, and transport claims about the New World in pictorial form. It examines the role of images as evidence, arguing for the continued importance of visual epistemology as a technique for producing and circulating knowledge from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The essay focuses on visual epistemology and mobility, addressing the capacity of images to embody information and objects and to transport them from one place to another. Its goals are thus: (1) to highlight the active generation of scientific knowledge in the Hispanic world, often connected to imperial and administrative practices; (2) to present transregional channels of circulation, demonstrating the connected histories of the viceroyalties and the Iberian Peninsula and the multidirectional trajectories in which information and knowledge moved; and (3) to point out the deep connections between the earlier and later colonial periods, which often remain disconnected in the historiography. This article also explores the potential of images as historical sources, suggesting that the high status of images in the early modern Hispanic world resulted in an enormous pictorial archive that historians have failed to consider with the attention and rigor they have lavished on the textual archive.

The Influence of the Catholic Church on Art in Latin America, 2023

Lecture/Workshop 13-20, July, 2023 Guatemala, Antigua Dr. Juan R. Céspedes, Ph.D. Professor’s Notes Prepared as a courtesy and gift to the students at the Universidad Rafael Landivar Dirección de Internacionalización y Cooperación Académica Guatemala City 01016, Guatemala Synopsis: This lecture will not discuss the art of non-Iberian colonial holdings that began late in the 16th century and culminated in the 18th. The Christian era dawned over the New World in 1492. The arrival of the Spanish Catholic Church in the New World ended ritualistic torture, polytheism, human sacrifice, intertribal warfare, and cannibalism. Shocked Spaniards destroyed idols and temples as manifestations of the devil. The Church introduced a different moral code, baptism, the Mass, new concepts of good and evil, the idea of heaven and hell, the Virgin and Saints, a new constitution of the family and the concept of redemption from a crucified and resurrected Jesus Christ. Christian concepts suffused native art, and the indigenous peoples became servants of the Spanish king and members of the Church’s “flock.” It is important that students recognize that the history of the Catholic Church in Latin America was not merely an adjunct to the conquest, instead that the history of the Church, art, and culture are completely intertwined. The art that evolved in the Spanish viceroyalties were, from their beginnings, very different from those of the much younger Anglo-North American colonies. The conquistadores brought a variety of styles of religious painting that mixed together with the established pre-Colombian style. This fusion has created a rich artistic heritage that is still seen in many churches and museums throughout Latin America. The artworks that were produced often reflected a mix of European styles and indigenous elements, as Spanish artists portrayed saints and religious subjects according to European models, while Creole artists began to incorporate elements of indigenous cultures, and in certain regions of African heritage as well.

2012

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Itinerario, 2007