Territories of the Visual in Spain and Spanish America by Jo Evans Julia Biggane Nuria Triana-Toribio

Author:Jo Evans, Julia Biggane, Nuria Triana-Toribio [Jo Evans, Julia Biggane, Nuria Triana-Toribio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138947535
Goodreads: 26408409
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Long View

As is well known, the arrival of the Spaniards in the so-called New World brought with it an onslaught of iconoclasm as the conquerors sought to eradicate indigenous idols and to replace them with Christian images. In the words of Lois Parkinson Zamora, ‘[e]very soldier and missionary was, by definition, an iconoclast’.40 None more so than Hernán Cortés himself, who according to Gruzinksi ‘deployed an amazing energy toward destroying the “images” of the natives, whether or not he had first conquered them or had to imperil his life and the lives of his men’.41 What is striking about Gruzinski’s formulation is the fact that amidst the violence of the contact period, the matter of images is potentially a matter of life and death. Fervently attached to their images, the Spaniards, ‘seem to have landed in Mexico with an entire cargo of graven, painted, and sculpted images, since they distributed them generously to the natives as they went’.42 And soon they were even granted permission by Moctezuma himself to place a Virgin and a Saint Christopher on the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlán.

And yet the iconoclastic zeal of the Spaniards was highly ambiguous and not without its ironies. On the one hand, of course, the Spaniards were waging a war against indigenous sacred images they defined as idols in the name of a Catholic Church, itself accused of idolatry by the iconoclastic Protestant reformers in Europe. On the other hand, in the words of Gruzinski: ‘the operation was more a mutilation than an annihilation. It did not succeed in confirming the inexistence of the autochthonous divinity; instead it allowed an ambiguity to persist, it allowed a margin of belief that would undeniably weigh upon the future’.43 And as Claudio Lomnitz has argued in the context of a sociological and culturalist interpretation of ritual, rumour and corruption in the formation of Mexican polities: ‘once the Spaniards abandoned all serious attempts truly to convince and assimilate Indians into their society, certain aesthetic forms were developed (the colonial versions of “baroque sensibility”), and these became values that permeated society deeply’.44

In the actions of the first generations of conquerors—and indeed in those of the Protestant reformers back in Europe—we find an impulse to establish and define the limits of orthodoxy for images and the concepts and practices that surrounded them. And yet, as colonial historians have shown, amidst the unprecedented ethnic and social diversity of New Spain, a place in which images were ‘the very stuff through which social relations came into being, and were maintained and transformed’, the baroque imaginary that emerged time and again transgressed the neat distinctions that would be imposed upon it.45 As a range of examples demonstrate, baroque visual and material culture was nothing if not malleable and flexible, capable of speaking to different constituencies in the newly forming colonial polity.

The classic example of a transcultural baroque image is that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, who in 1531 is said to have appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in

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