Treasured arts from Latin America

A PAN-NATIONAL EXHIBITION of some 250 works of art created in the Spanish viceroyalties of New Spain (which today comprises Mexico and the countries of Central America) and Peru (now the nations of Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru), and in the Portuguese colony of Brazil has been drawn from public and private collections throughout the Americas and in Europe. "Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820" spans the arrival of explorer Christopher Columbus to the emergence of national independence movements, and includes spectacular examples of painting, sculpture, feather work, shell-inlaid furniture, objects in gold and silver, ceramics, and textiles.

Columbus' world-changing voyage initiated what would be a vast network joining the trade routes among Asia, Europe, and Africa to the complex systems of trade and interaction already in place throughout the Americas. Africans (both free and enslaved) accompanied even the earliest Spanish and Portuguese expeditions and, before the end of the 16th century, trade with Japan and China via the Manila galleons was well established. Indigenous skills such as feather painting and weaving continued, while European artists traveled to the Americas to ply their trade and to train indigenous craftsmen.

The Spanish and Portuguese monarchs, with the blessing of the papacy, undertook the conversion of native peoples to Christianity. The movement of missionaries, their establishment of thousands of churches, religious houses, and missions in which the indigenous people were educated--although many already were skilled in arts and crafts--was a major factor in the dissemination of art throughout Latin America.

Every church, from magnificent urban cathedrals to modest country chapels, required ritual objects such as silver chalices, candlesticks, and censers, as well as elaborately wrought altarpieces, gilded and embellished with paintings and sculptures depicting divinity, the Virgin Mary, and saints. In addition, secular art--furnishings, luxury goods, portraits, ephemeral decorations--was created for the viceroys and other crown officials who supported civic projects and public pageantry, and for the merchant class who moved all of these examples of material culture around Latin America.

The panorama presented by this exhibition is thematic and chronological, beginning with Columbus' first encounter with the people of the Caribbean and concluding with the final moments of the Colonial Era, a period marked not only by the independence movements and formation of national states, but by the rise of academic art. The richly diverse art forms subsequently produced throughout this vast region reflect the seismic changes that took place during the Colonial Era, and were central to the development of new identities.

The exhibition presents magnificent, sometimes startling, and largely unknown works of art in all mediums, including manuscripts and maps that illustrate how the earliest contact between Europeans and indigenous populations created a crisis in identity and self-representation, eventually leading to a new culture born of a mix of creative energies confidently expressed in the arts in novel mediums and styles. Also on view are superb examples of craftsmanship--elaborate vestments decorated with colored feathers; exquisite furniture inlaid with tortoise shell, mother-of-pearl, and ivory; and lacquered screens and chests--that reflect the interchange among diverse Asian, African, European, and Latin American cultures. Although many of the objects were created by indigenous, mestizo, and European artists and craftsmen whose names long have been forgotten, visitors will become familiar with artists whose oeuvres are well known in their native lands--Cristobal de Villalpando in Mexico, Diego Quispe Tito in Peru, Jose Campeche in Puerto Rico, and Antonio Francisco Aleijandinho Lisboa in Brazil among them--but who will be new to the majority of exhibition patrons.

After starting its tour late last year at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. "Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820" is on view through May 6 at Mexico City's Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso. It then visits the Los Angeles (Calif.) County Museum of Art (June 10-Sept. 3).

RELATED ARTICLE: It's a new world after all.

THE COLLISION of European and indigenous American cultures that began at the end of the 15th century is one of the most momentous events in world history. Add to this epic encounter the forced transport of Africans across the Atlantic Ocean in the following decades and the opening of complex new trade routes across the Pacific Ocean to Asia, and the result is the true globalization of people, goods, and ideas that introduces the "modern world."

The ways in which visual culture developed over the next 300 years in the vast Spanish and Portuguese dominions that spanned from Tierra del Fuego to Seattle, and which lasted until the emergence of sovereign nations in the early 19th century, is the story of "Tesoros/Treasuresd/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820." One of the intents of the exhibition is to question perceived notions such as Old and New World, high and low culture, and European and indigenous art.

From the very beginning--practically within months of the arrival of the Spanish to the New World in 1492--irrefutable patterns of assimilation, imitation, adaptation and, above all, innovation took place in the making of uniquely Latin American works of art. In remarkably short order, the convergence of European and native traditions introduced onto the world stage artistic creations whose independence and authority only can be explained by their intrinsic merits.

Conquest and innovation. In Brussels in 1520, the Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer, upon viewing the first treasures of conquest (gifts from the Aztecs) sent by Hernan Cortes to Emperor Charles, wrote in his diary, "For I have seen therein wonders of art and have marveled at the subtle ingenia of people in far-off lands. And I know not how to express what I have experienced thereby."

For all the violence of conquest and domination of the New World--the destruction of "pagan" idols and melting down of magically wrought metals--native artists survived the transition, adapting their traditions and techniques to those of European masters. Indigenous forms and methods not only survived with remarkably sophisticated evolutions, but were transformed into nimble innovations to meet new requirements.

Places. The Spanish found huge cities in the Americas--particularly at Tenochtitlan (capital of the Aztec empire and the future Mexico City) and Cuzco (in what now is Peru)--on a scale, splendor, and order well beyond their own European experience. The Spanish were quick to build still more ambitious urban centers along purely formal Renaissance patterns, ornamented by spaces and structures as great as anything in Europe.

People. Colonial societies in Latin America developed with a fluidity and an energy quite different from those of the North American colonies of the English, Dutch, and French. Initially, members of Spanish and Portuguese aristocracy were imported to rule native peoples, but thereafter a generic evolution of remarkable diversity quickly took over. Loosely defined as mestizaje, this mingling of race and social status became arguably the major defining character of much of Latin American life.

16th century. The remarkable swiftness with which the new European regimes established themselves in the Americas carried with it huge demands for artistic creations, especially with the founding of massive religious institutions. Hundreds of artists, painters, and sculptors emigrated not only from Iberia, but from Italy and Flanders as well. At their best, they were highly accomplished, gifted artists who found capital and thrived in the New World, forming dynamic workshops and extended family operations, some lasting several generations. Native and imported forms soon merged to create original and independent ideas, and what had begun as a purely European visual style and narrative took on a fresh look.

17th century. Much of the Latin American art of this period is positioned somewhere between a looking back to European sources and styles and an absorption of the much denser cultural mergers of native influences. Artists born on American soil began to dominate and, as their local patrons established ideas of their own desires and requirements, the artists became progressively more distant from the Old World. Out of this emerged painters, sculptors, and craftsmen of truly international stature--Melchor Perez Holguin in the Viceroyalty of Peru and Cristobal de Villalpando in Mexico, among others--who were sought after and supported on a grand level.

Passions. The Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas occurred just at the moment when Europe was suffering a massive crisis of faith. Cortes first entered Mexico in 1519, only two years after Martin Luther posted his 95 theses in Wittenberg, Germany, igniting the Protestant Reformation, an event that would divide Europe forever and considerably limit the powers of the Roman Catholic Church. In response, Rome enacted its own Counter Reformation by the middle of the century, with particularly strong implications for the arts. Newly simplified and accessible imagery henceforth would be used to picture the essential narratives of Christ's life, including the Passion (his final days on Earth), as well as the lives of the saints throughout Catholic Europe and America. In Latin America, a taste for intense drama and the sometimes particularly vivid and jarring elements of religious narrative provoked many of the works of art on display in the exhibition.

The Madonna. The Virgin Mary was venerated throughout Catholic Europe from early Christian times, and devotion to her has continued unabated in Latin America. In colonial art, she often appears in narrative paintings about her life and the life and Passion of her son, Jesus Christ. However, she also is shown in paintings and sculptures as intercessor and co-redemptress--that is, as an avenue through which prayers might more efficaciously reach God, and as playing an active role in the promised redemption of the souls of the faithful. Paintings of the Virgin Mary sometimes represent Catholic dogma, showing her as the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, but many actually are paintings of statues. Special devotions to the Blessed Virgin often are bound to a specific place. For instance, Spaniards in the Americas wanted paintings of revered sculptures at Vlavanera or in the Cathedral of Toledo back home. In the Americas, new devotions arose, such as the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico and the Virgin of Copacabana in South America, and paintings of those cult images became desired around the globe. The depictions of these special sculptures often show the Virgin Mary--even if the wood sculpture itself actually is fully complete, polychromed, and gilded--as "dressed statues," wearing elaborate dresses and jewels provided by her devotees.

18th century. Many urban centers in the Americas had reached a level of sophistication and wealth that, in many ways, substantially was ahead of the economic and social well-being of the Iberian Peninsula and much of Europe. Spain particularly depended on the mining resources in Mexico and at Potosi in the Viceroyalty of Peru (in modern Bolivia), while Portugal relied heavily on the discovery of gold in Brazil that made King John V the richest man in the world. The natural wealth of Latin America had become the foundation of the world economy. The "Creoles"--a class of newly empowered bourgeoisie in the European sense but with more social mobility--came into their own as patrons and supporters of the arts, often of a newly secular type and manner. As in the English colonies in North America, this new middle-class affluence eventually would lead to anti-European resolutions and desires for self-rule. The evidence of this "enlightened" culture reverberated throughout all of Latin America.

COPYRIGHT 2007 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning