Introductory Essay. Art and Evangelization: Creating A New Art in 16^th-Century Mexican Missions

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Notes

1. Born Pieter van der Moere, Gante is reputed to have belonged to the Hapsburg family. Mendieta (1971, 2:310–13) gives a brief account of his long and illustrious missionary career in Mexico. The other two friars, however, perished on Cortés's ill-fated journey to Honduras in 1524–1526.

2. In Cortés's letters, the people of Mexico Tenochtitlan identify themselves as Mexica (or Culhua Mexica), but Mexica groups also settled in other cities in the Basin of Mexico after migrating into this area. More precisely, the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan were named Tenochca, a term that relates to their altepetl or community. Especially after the Conquest, they are also called Nahua after the Nahuatl language they spoke. The broader term Aztec or Azteca refers to any of the migrant groups who departed from a legendary homeland called Aztlan.

3. When they first arrived, the twelve spent a short time at a residence on the city's main plaza before selecting a permanent site on the western end of the traza, out of earshot of ongoing construction and near the aqueduct engineered by the Mexica that brought fresh water from Chapultepec. It also situated them closer to the Indian population that lived on the periphery of the city rather than in the central zone of the Spanish elite.

4. Peoples throughout the so-called Aztec empire adopted Nahuatl as a second language, effectively making it a lingua franca in subject areas.

5. Citing the Franciscan missionary Motolinia (one of the twelve), Kubler (1948, 2:474, 299 n. 4) proposed that the original church of San Francisco was built about 1525, becoming the first to be established in Mexico City.

6. San Francisco's first convento structures were weakened by sinking into the spongy soil on which the island city was built. After the first two deteriorated churches were torn down, a third was built in the early eighteenth century and still exists, renovated but truncated, though it too continues to sink. Most convento buildings have been demolished although vestiges of them remain in some nineteenth- and twentieth-century structures built over or around their ruins.

7. See Linne 1948 and León-Portilla and Aguilera 1986 for illustrations and discussion of the map.

8. The Uppsala Map is named after its present-day location in the Uppsala University Library in Sweden. See the more readable detail of Santiago Tlatelolco on the Uppsala Map in Guilliem Arroyo, Figure 3. Its greater definition may be explained by the fact that it was drawn by an artist (or artists) trained at the College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. Early maps are understandably not drawn to scale and abbreviate the features of buildings and the city itself. Mexico City's numerous religious foundations also appear on later colonial biombos (folding screens) that feature the city as their subject.

9. ‘Mission’ and ‘convento’ are used interchangeably in this essay, though ‘convento’ is more widely used in Mexico. ‘Convent’ is avoided because in English it connotes an establishment for female religious, while ‘monastery’ usually refers to a house for cloistered religious rather than active ones like the friars. Mission is useful for it recalls the evangelical work of its residents and is commonly used in the US Southwest and California.

10. The articles in this issue were among others first presented as papers in a symposium organized by the editor on ‘The Indigenous Eye and other Senses: The Art of the Conventos in 16th-Century Mexico,’ at the International Congress of Americanists held in Mexico City on 19–24 July 2009.

11. Conventos were, of course, modeled primarily on religious houses in Spain known to the friars, though architectural and spatial adaptations were accommodated to traditional native practices in some ways.

12. Although the early buildings of San Francisco no longer exist, an idea of what Gante's open-air chapel might have looked like survives in the remarkable Indian chapel, now much elaborated, that adjoins the Franciscan convento of San Gabriel in Cholula, Puebla. Beginning as an open-air structure with a wide arcaded façade like that of San José, the arcade was eventually filled in and the multi-columned interior closed by numerous domes to create the structure visible today. For details on the evolution of its architecture, see Lara 2004, 143. Noting the resemblance between the two, Kubler (1948, 2:332) and others posited their architectural resemblance to a Moorish mosque.

13. Gante's Catecismo de la doctrina chrisiana (1528) demonstrates his method, which used pictures of objects or figures whose Nahuatl pronunciation approximated Spanish words. The first folio of the small manuscript states: ‘este librito es de figuras con que los missionarios enseñaban a los Indios la doctrina a el principio de la conquista de Indias.’

14. The Augustinian Vasco de Quiroga also established a school and workshop in Tirepetio in Michoacan, which became widely known for its exquisite featherwork objects.

15. See Russo et al., in press, for the catalogue of the largest exhibition of feather art ever assembled, ‘El vuelo de las imágenes: Arte plumario en México y Europa.’

16. For an interesting view on the question of hybridity, see Dean and Leibson 2003.

17. See Reyes-Valerio (2000) for an extended discussion of the concept of ‘arte indocristiano.’

18. See Bailey (1999 and 2005) on art made in Jesuit missions in Asian and Spanish America.

19. For example, the catalogue Mexico: Splendor of 30 Centuries (1990), devoted to Mexican art and organized with Mexican participation, gives ‘convent,’ ‘ex-convento,’ or ‘templo,’ for most photographs of conventos and their items, often including the religious order to which the convent referred to belonged. A more recent catalogue, The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 (2006), which accompanied an ambitious array of colonial art throughout Latin America, inconsistently uses ‘church’ rather than convento or ex-convento church, and ‘monastery’ or ‘templo,’ and often omits the name of the religious order that had it built. In some catalogues the origin for early Mexican items shown begins with their first appearance in European collections.

20. On Mexican architecture, see also Baird 1962, McAndrew 1965, Artigas 1992 and 2010; see also Espinosa Spinola 1999 and Reyes Valerio 2000.

21. On specific conventos, see Córdova Tello 1992 on Huejotzingo and Artigas 1996 on Metztitlan. For murals, which have attracted much scholarly attention, see Reyes Valerio 1989 and Gruzinski 1994 for murals in general, Peterson 1993 on Malinalco murals, Albornoz Bueno 1994 on Ixmiquilpan murals, Ballesteros García 1999 on Actopan murals, among several other works.

22. On conventos of specific orders, see Mullen 1975 on Dominican conventos in Oaxaca, Rubial García 1989 on Augustinian conventos, and Montes Bardo 1998 on Franciscan conventos.

23. On convento art of Mexican regions and states, see Ballesteros García 2000 for Hidalgo.

24. On Mexican conventos in Latin American surveys, see Kubler and Soria 1959, Bailey 2005, and Donahue-Wallace 2008, with chapter one entitled ‘Architecture and Sculpture at the Missions’; also Tovar de Teresa 1979.