This special issue of Colonial Latin American Review has the collective title of The Power of Images: Visual Representation in New Spain and Peru. It offers original visual display and analysis of key semantic codes underpinning political, religious, and societal symbolisms and realities in two Spanish American viceroyalties. The four articles and one forum piece in this volume grow from, and are inspired by, an itinerant exhibit of colonial art, ‘The Arts of Latin America, 1492–1820,’ and a companion international symposium held in Philadelphia in November 2006. ‘The Power of Images’ symposium, under the expert coordination of CLAR's editorial board member Nancy Farriss, and proudly co-sponsored by this journal, stirred an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and novel insights reflected in part in the present volume.
In her introduction to this special issue Professor Farriss highlights the central role played at multiple political, social, and cultural levels by images in colonial Spanish America. She ponders the recent advances in the interdisciplinary and comparative study of colonial images, in particular the study of their hierarchical social implications, multiplicity of meanings, and memory manipulation. In so doing, Farriss evaluates the contributions to this academic conversation offered by the essays published here. The introduction also relates the genealogy and character of the original symposium and related exhibits in its notes and appendix.
‘Imaging the Spanish Empire: The Visual Construction of Imperial Authority in Habsburg New Spain’ by Alejandro Cañeque is an exhaustive study of representations and ceremonials of royal power in seventeenth-century New Spain. Cañeque uncovers arcane mechanisms for exercising and legitimizing hierarchical dominance, and generating obedience and submission without exclusive resource to violence. The physical embodiment of the distant Spanish monarch in the person of the viceroy—or, in his absence, in bodies of municipal or judicial authorities—, and imperial justice and sobriety representing in turn those of God on earth, had roots in Catholic theological understanding of the role of images in religious worship as well as in political fidelity. Cañeque endeavors to show, through multiple images of the king in important artistic expressions, engravings, and paintings, the embedded order and particular conventions explaining the visual construction of regal power in a viceregal setting.
Jaime Cuadriello's ‘La Virgen como territorio: los títulos primordiales de Santa María Nueva España’ combines methods of art history, de-codification of religious symbolism, and interpretation of socio-political meanings of primordial titles of communal land. He traces the powerful local and regional appeals of identity of a little-known cult of Santa María Nueva España in eighteenth-century Tlaxcala. The momentous restoration of rare paintings—depicting the 1672 apparition of the Virgin before indigenous visionaries and her miracles to favor and protect Indians—kept in the remote sanctuary of Españita (formerly San Andrés Atzatzacuala), and the felicitous recovery of manuscript documents contextualizing the origin and elaboration of this Marian cult, allows the author to reconstruct what he sees as the ambitious, viceroyalty-wide claims to sacred and communal territory of devotional following. Cuadriello accompanies this analysis with professional photographic renderings of rare visual representations centering on an eighteenth-century oil painting, recently restored, and containing 36 images in the form of ex-votos recounting the story and miracles of the Virgin of Loreto in her Nueva España setting.
In ‘Los tejidos y la sociedad colonial andina,’ Gabriela Ramos sets out from the recognized expressive quality of pre-Hispanic and colonial Andean textiles to explore the linkages between visual patterns and political, religious, and social hierarchies. Centering on changed colonial uses and transactions involving Andean textiles, mostly from the city and region of Cuzco, she aims at detecting the extent to which these precious designs reflected significant social changes and served as vehicles of identity and historical memory, social prestige, and power. Ramos incorporates archival information from late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century testaments, mainly but not exclusively by owners of prestigious cumbi textiles, as well as following the changes in use of caxana patterns as seen in depictions by Guaman Poma.
Juan Carlos Estenssoro focuses on early Spanish visual representations in his ‘Autorretrato del conquistador como vencido o la invención del Perú: la aparición del inca y de sus atributos políticos en las representaciones plásticas, 1526–1548.’ Estenssoro elaborates on a post-conquest reference to the making of a supposed portrait of Atahualpa, to focus on early visual models culled from archival documents of heraldic symbolic representations of the claims and ambitions of Francisco Pizarro and other conquistadors. Focusing on these early images at the root of a tradition or legend of identity and collective memory, Estenssoro argues that they represented signs of a ‘hybridization’ or ‘indianization’ of the conquistador, based on a sophisticated analysis of pre-conquest symbols and their meanings in the first local coats of arms.
Finally, in ‘Of Treasures and Revelations: Mobility and the Multiple Lives of the Exhibition “The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820.” A Conversation with the Curators,’ Susan Deans-Smith has organized, formulated questions, and transcribed the debate of a forum of specialists and curators of three interrelated yet separate public exhibits on colonial art featured successively in Philadelphia, Mexico City, and Los Angeles. This forum piece provides valuable insights into the way exhibits of colonial art subjects are conceptualized, publicized, and adapted to different exhibition spaces and publics.
One distinctive feature of this volume is the display of high-quality colour images central to the analysis and references by the five authors.
This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Anne d'Harnoncourt, a stalwart supporter and promoter of the arts and cultures of Latin America.
Alfonso W. Quiroz
Special Issues Editor