Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America

Abstract

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, 1511–1574), 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.’

Keywords:

• Historiography
• colonial artist
• viceregal art
• Toussaint
• Vasari

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Dana Leibsohn, Kris Lane and the two anonymous reviewers at CLAR for their helpful and incisive comments on this essay. Many thanks as well to the members of Fordham's art history Work-in-Progress reading group, especially Kathryn Heleniak, Susanna McFadden, Nina Rowe, and Maria Ruvoldt.

Notes on contributors

Barbara E. Mundy is Professor of Art History at Fordham University; she received her PhD. in the History of Art at Yale University. She studies the art and visual culture produced in Spain’s colonies, and her scholarship spans both digital and traditional formats. She is the author of The Mapping of New Spain (1996) and, with Dana Leibsohn, creator of Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520–1820, now online. Her most recent book is The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan, the Life of Mexico City (2015); and with Mary Miller, she has edited and contributed to Painting a Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing and Native Rule (2012).

Aaron M. Hyman is a PhD. candidate in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley, and currently the Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (2015–2017). His dissertation explores the reception of the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) in Latin America in order to reassess notions of originality and copying in the early modern world. He has also received support from the Social Science Research Council, the Belgian American Education Foundation, and the Jacob K. Javits fellowship.

Notes

1. Take, for example, the notoriously incomplete notarial archives of the Archivo Regional del Cusco, which seem to have been looted—razor-bladed out page by page—after early attempts to create guides to the artistic contracts they once housed (Cornejo Bouroncle 1960).

2. A notable exception is found in the Flemish artist Frans Floris, who often signed his paintings ‘inventor,’ though this is likely—to further the point presented here—because of his strong affiliation with the print industry that led him to define his work and status in an unusual way. For this, as well as an exhaustive study of early modern signing practices, see Burg 2007, 424.

3. In devising his signature, Villalpando may have also looked to an imported painting by Maarten de Vos, which is signed ‘inventor et fecit’ and now hangs in the small parish church in Cuautitlán. This painting is in many ways anomalous in the history of European painting and a full exploration cannot be offered here. What is important is that this singular object did not disabuse Villalpando of the notion that European artists signed their paintings in such a way, but he knew this convention better from prints; distance and difference from Europe—and its painted corpus and authors—are thereby equally important to consider when approaching this example. See Hyman 2014.

4. While this article was in press, Telefónica published online a book on the Cathedral of Cuzco. It celebrates the completion of various restoration projects, including that of the Christ of the Temblores in 2005, carried out with great sensitivity to public sentiment given that the sculpture is as much an object of cult as a work of art. The conservation work done on the Cathedral's paintings is summarily described, as is appropriate for a book directed to the general public. Some painting restoration is described, though of the paintings we discuss here, the hefty catalog only notes, ‘Además de estos cuadros de gran formato, se intervinieron en total 86 lienzos de la Iglesia del Triunfo y 37 lienzos de la Iglesia de la Sagrada Familia.’ A full discussion of the conservation of these 123 paintings still awaits.

5. Two such examples are worth highlighting: the recent restoration of the parish church of San Pedro in Andahuaylillas, Peru, by the World Monuments Fund has greatly enriched our understanding of this important site, and the complete findings will be published as a forthcoming volume by Elizabeth Arce Kuon. A team of conservators is restoring the Life of Saint Augustine, painted by Miguel de Santiago for the Convento de San Agustín in Quito, which still houses them; their assiduous material investigation and documentation of their findings promises to be a resource of equal value, should the project continue to receive funding, which has been continually threatened by changes within Ecuador's ministry of culture. Finally, the ongoing and long-term efforts of the Laboratorio de Diagnóstico de Obras de Arte del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at Mexico's UNAM is a model for a sustained dialog between the research agendas of their conservators and the Instituto's art historians.