Imaging the Spanish Empire: The Visual Construction of Imperial Authority in Habsburg New Spain

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Nancy Farriss and Antonio Feros for giving me the opportunity to present a preliminary version of this article at the interdisciplinary symposium on The Power of Images: Images of Power in Colonial Latin America (Philadelphia, 9–11 November 2006). Another version of this article was presented in the History Department Research Seminar at Durham University (Durham, United Kingdom, 5 December 2007) and I would like to thank the seminar participants for their comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the two anonymous readers of this journal for their useful criticisms.

Notes

1. As shall be shown, the idea of royal officials as images of the king was shaped, to a large extent, by religious understandings. In that sense, I use the term ‘transfigured’ consciously, because of its strong theological connotations, i.e., the transfiguration of Jesus in front of his disciples Peter, James, and John on Mount Thabor, when ‘His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light’ (St. Matthew 17, 1–9). This dazzling brightness which emanated from Christ's body was produced by the light of his divinity shining from within him. I discuss below the strong relationship that existed between divinity, kingship, and solar imagery in the imaging of the Spanish empire.

2. On the privilege of the audiencias to issue decrees bearing the king's name and his seal, see Recopilación, lib. II, tít. XV, ley cxvi. On the royal order prohibiting viceroys from issuing reales provisiones on their own with the king's name and seal, see Recopilación, lib. III, tít. III, ley xxxxii. This order, however, refers only to judicial cases. In Solórzano's opinion, it was customary for viceroys to issue decrees bearing the king's name and seal in matters of great importance and when granting offices, benefices and encomiendas (lib. V, cap. XII, núm. 54).

3. See, for example, AGI, Mexico 77, no. 38c, consulta of the bishop of Puebla to the audiencia, 4 June 1664.

4. As political writer and Carthusian monk Juan de Madariaga argued, for a Senate to be legitimately constituted, it was essential and indispensable that the senators met ‘as one.’ As he explained, ‘Just as the human body when it is dismembered and divided into many parts loses the shape that it had and ceases to be an organic physical body, being stripped of those ties that united and tied together its parts, so the Senate loses its shape as a mystical body when it is stripped of that tie that unites all its parts, which said tie is the desire to deliberate among themselves by common consent in a common place’ (Madariaga 1617, 96, 102).

5. A majority, if not all, of the viceroys appointed in the seventeenth century were gentiles hombres de la cámara del rey (gentlemen of the king's chamber). This meant that they were the only ones allowed to enter the king's rooms without knocking, because they were in possession of the key that granted them access to the retrete, the king's most private room. For a description of the offices and etiquette of the royal palace, see BPR, mss. II/2642, ‘Etiquetas generales que han de observar los criados de la casa de Su Majestad en el uso y ejercicio de sus oficios.’

6. Evidently, the opposite can also be argued, that it is God who is construed in the monarch's image and likeness. For contemporaries, it was clear that God ruled from Heaven as the king did from his palace: He was the monarch of the universe and was surrounded by the queen of Heaven and a celestial court inhabited by angels and saints, who enjoyed the singular privilege of their closeness to the divinity. Martín de Roa, for example, refers to the angels as ‘these courtiers of Heaven’ and as ‘the servants of God's household’ (Roa 1632, 9r, 14v). For his part, Jerónimo de Saona contended that God created the angels to serve as ‘pages of His household’ (Saona 1603, 27). Needless to say, the idea that the structure of the Heavens could be a reflection of the human world would have been unthinkable for the theorists of the Spanish empire.

7. The Spanish word simulacro was defined in the seventeenth century as: ‘Imagen hecha a semejanza de alguna cosa venerable, o venerada’ (Diccionario de Autoridades 1990). This is the sense in which the word is used in this essay.

8. For a discussion of the ‘straightforward deification of temporal rulers’ in early modern Europe, see Clark (1997, 619–33). However, this assimilation of the Spanish monarch to the divine should not be mistaken with the theory known as the Divine Right of Kings. For a discussion of the differences between Spanish monarchical theory and the theory of the Divine Right of Kings, see Cañeque (2004, 53–65).

9. In the early seventeenth century, Sebastián de Covarrubias still defined the word imagen in his dictionary of the Spanish language by closely following Aquinas's ideas. See Covarrubias (1979).

10. Given the learned nature of Palafox, it is very likely that he was familiar with some of the treatises on sacred images that appeared at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Such treatises developed the principles that had so concisely been expounded by the Council of Trent on its XXV session. Some of the most influential were Johannes Molanus's De picturis et imaginibus sacris (1570); Gabriele Paleotti's Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582); and Federico Borromeo's Della pittura sacra (1617).

11. For a study of Palafox's ideas regarding viceregal power, see Alvarez de Toledo (2004, especially chap. 4).

12. Fernández de Castro (1659, ff. 7–9); Real mausoleo y funeral pompa (1647, 2r–3v); Martín de Guijo (1952, 1:249; 2:13, 90–94, 110–11, 147, 181).

13. It should be noted that the use of the palio was not specific to the Spanish monarchy. French kings, for instance, also paraded under a canopy. For examples of European rulers who used the palio, see Strong (1988, 33); Bertelli (1995, 99–102). For a discussion of the use of the canopy by French provincial governors, see Harding (1978, 11–17). For the medieval origins of the use of the palio in Spain, see Nieto Soria (1993, 195).

14. This painting forms part of a series of eight paintings describing the conquest of Mexico, known as the Kislak series. Painted in Mexico during the second half of the seventeenth century, the series is thought to be the earliest of the three complete cycles of paintings of the conquest that still exist. They seem to have been painted with a Spanish audience in mind, perhaps as a present for the Spanish king himself. As the discussion on Moctezuma's palio has shown, the Kislak paintings tell the history of the conquest by closely following the Spanish accounts. In that regard, the paintings present an imperial view of the conquest, a view in which the Spanish crown plays the crucial and decisive role. For a study of the Kislak paintings, see the essays by Matthew Restall, Michael J. Schreffler, and Rebecca P. Briennen and Margaret A. Jackson in Briennen and Jackson (2008).

15. One of the few viceroys who died in Mexico was Archbishop García Guerra, who died in 1612 while serving as acting viceroy. Interestingly, we have two detailed descriptions of his obsequies. One is from the great picaresque writer Mateo Alemán (1911, 38–48). The other one is from Domingo de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Cuauhtlehuanitzin (2006, 199–211), which, to my knowledge, is the only such account ever written in Nahuatl.

16. Compare, for example, BNM, ms. 11260 (17), ‘Ceremonial que suele guardarse en el recibimiento del rey cuando entra en las ciudades,’ (n.d.), with RAH, Colección Salazar y Castro, F-20, ‘Relación de la entrada que hizo en la ciudad de México … el Sr. Arzobispo Don Fray García Guerra, de la orden de predicadores, a tomar la posesión del oficio de virrey y capitán general de aquel reino por Su Majestad …, año 1610,’ ff. 113–16.

17. In relation to this, the right to sit under a canopy or baldachin (dosel) in the main chapel of any church when attending services was another privilege of kings that was also reserved to viceroys. See Solórzano (1972, lib. V, cap. XII, nos. 49–50); Recopilación (lib. III, tít. XV, leyes i, x); AGI, Mexico 21, no. 49f , ‘Las ceremonias que se hacen con el rey Nro. Sr., así en su capilla como fuera de ella por sus capellanes y prelados,’ 14 March 1588.

18. See AHCM, Historia, vol. 2282, exp. 1, ‘Certificación de lo que se hizo en la jura del Sr. D. Felipe Tercero’ (1599); Arias de Villalobos (1975, 283–312).

19. In the eighteenth century, however, it seems that the king's portrait came to play a more significant role in Mexico, at least in Fernando VI's proclamation in 1747. See Mínguez (1998). This might have to do with an increased significance of the proclamation and the decreased relevance of the viceregal entry. For a study of these changes, see Curcio-Nagy (2004, chap. 4).

20. Schreffler sees a subtle change in the way viceroys were portrayed in the late seventeenth century, as they appear to be transgressing the spatial boundary of the parapet. This would be a sign that the viceroys were asserting themselves as individuals in a way that was absent in the earlier portraits. See Schreffler (2007, 73).

21. There are very few visual depictions of viceregal processions, although written descriptions are quite abundant. One of these few is the 1716 painting by the Peruvian artist Melchor Pérez de Holguín, ‘The Entry of Archbishop-Viceroy Morcillo in Potosí,’ which is now in the Museo de América in Madrid.

22. As one chronicler would exclaim, the procession manifested a ‘wonderful harmony.’ See Real mausoleo y funeral pompa (25r). Because the procession was a reenactment of the constitutional order of the community, any change in the processional order was considered a grave matter and created continuous confrontations among the different institutions of colonial rule. See Cañeque (2004, chap. 4).

23. Although an analysis of the architectural features of Mexico City, or any other city in the viceroyalty, is beyond the scope of this essay, it is necessary to mention here that two of the most impressive and permanent images of power in the capital were the viceregal (or ‘royal’ as it was called) palace and the cathedral, both located in the city's main square. For a study of the viceregal palace, see Schreffler (2007, chap. 1).

24. For a study of the funeral rhetoric of the catafalques erected in Spain, see Varela (1990, chap. IV).

25. It should be noted here that those authors who insisted on the mystery of human majesty generally made these assertions to uphold their vision of an ‘absolute’ monarch, in opposition to those who sustained a more ‘constitutionalist’ approach to the figure of the king. For a discussion of the different positions regarding this matter in the seventeenth century, see Fernández Albaladejo (1992, 241–47, 282–83); Jago (1995).

26. For a study of the images in Charles II's catafalque, see Checa (1995, 276–80); Mínguez (2001, chap. 14).

27. See AGN, Reales Cédulas Originales, vol. 1, exp. 13, fos. 35–37, the king to the marquis of Cerralvo, 21 March 1626. See also Recopilación, lib. I, tít. I, leyes xxii and xxvi. For the cult of the Holy Sacrament as imperial cult, see Chocano Mena (2000, 292–96).

28. For a more elaborate discussion and critique of statist approaches to colonial history, see the introduction in Cañeque (2004).