16 November 2012

Course

HISPANIC AMERICAN ART IN NAVARRA

Painting in the Viceroyalty of New Spain

Ms. Concepción García Saiz.
Museum of America

The transplantation of Western culture to the American continent was a complex process in which the repertoire of images transmitted mainly through painting played a major role. Mural painting and painting on panel, canvas or copper throughout the three centuries in which a good portion of this continent was part of the Spanish empire, was one of the most used vehicles for the transmission of the religious and political statement of core values in which the new society would settle.

Through thousands of paintings in multiple formats -and even thousands of engravings- the keys to the new relationship between men and the supernatural world and among men themselves were disseminated. The neophytes thus learned the role of the new hierarchies, divine and human, they knew the new models to imitate in order to comply with the heavenly and earthly laws, and, by appropriating these discourses, they elaborated their own version of this new world to which they were willingly or unwillingly led. In parallel, those who, from their condition of holders of the unpublished truths, lived naturally with the representations that were part of their old world, reinforced their beliefs and recognized their place and that of others through the galleries of images with which they covered the walls of churches and convents, the most relevant political institutions and domestic spaces, in which family devotions and those that reinforced before others the importance of the lineages occupied a privileged place.

In this context, the painters who traveled to the viceroyalty of New Spain from different parts of Spain and Europe and those who, already born in American lands, were inclined to internship painting assumed, consciously or unconsciously, the role of transmitters of the concepts on which society was based, regardless of how refined their pictorial technique might be in the opinion of the most orthodox of the art of painting and its link with the movements that were marking modernity. The novo-Hispanic painters were thus configuring their own speech, thematic and stylistic.
 

Annunciation, by Alonso López de Herrera. XVII Century
Museum of America (Madrid)

Casta, attributed to José de Ibarra. XVIII Century
Museum of America (Madrid)