Foundational Arts: Mural Painting and Missionary Theater in New Spain

Introduction. Texts and Contexts: "Bookish Architecture," Mural Painting, and Theatricality in Colonial Mexico

3 Introduction Texts and Contexts “Bookish Architecture,” Mural Painting, and Theatricality in Colonial Mexico I made a vaulted church in the monastery of Santiago Tlatelolco . . . and an altarpiece, one of the best in the Indies, without having Masters . . . but on my own, and in order to succeed, I had to study Architecture in depth, which the Lord taught me, without having studied or known about it, or having learned from the Masters, who usually teach it, but through Books on the subject. —Fray Juan de Torquemada, General and First Prologue of the Indian Monarchy A detailed look at the development of a unique early Indo-Christian literary expression reveals a close relationship between the dramatic and plastic arts, a cultural and generic syncretism that began in the second decade of the sixteenth century.1 As a result of the unexpected encounter between two cultures and the gradual synthesis of two representative and ideological traditions, the genesis of what might be considered “Indo-Christian literature” is to be found in a hybrid discourse that makes its debut in a number of dramatic works that, despite their theatrical nature, have not been considered “literary” in the canonical sense. Such works represent a mode of expression that, although having emerged during the process of Mexico’s conquest and subsequent colonization, is based on the Indian ideographical tradition combined with the phonological system employed by most European languages, including the Spanish brought by the Conquistadors . In order to enhance our understanding of this hybrid discourse, which is to be found in the first texts produced during the colonization of Mexico, and to thus generate a more detailed understanding of a fundamental aspect of the evolution of what I have chosen to call Indo-Christian literature, it is helpful to deploy a comprehensive analytical instrument 4 · Introduction such as the notion of “colonial semiosis” originally proposed by Walter Mignolo.2 Given that this discursive hybridity, or mestizaje, builds a visible bridge between two systems of cultural representation, one of the objectives of my research has been the systematic analysis of this process in order to create an adequate vocabulary and methodology to describe it.3 From this perspective, the literature of New Spain, as the hybrid expression it embodies, and despite what is commonly assumed, did not begin with Hernán Cortés’s Letters from Mexico but with the extraordinary, although ephemeral, artistic and dramatic products born from the encounter between the Nahuas and Spaniards, within the framework of what Robert Ricard, reviving an expression coined in the early sixteenth century by Fray Toribio de Benavente, also known as Motolinia, has called the “spiritual conquest” of Mexico.4 In The Nahuas after the Conquest : A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries, James Lockhart qualifies this concept while pointing out that during the first phase of the conquest, there was relatively little contact between different ethnic groups outside a strictly evangelistic context. From this one may gather that the iconographic production of the so-called spiritual conquest arose from the joint efforts of European friars and Indian artists during the construction and ornamentation of religious spaces designed and built in New Spain on the heels of the conquest, under the direction of friars belonging to various monastic orders, particularly Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians. This phenomenon finds a parallel expression in the iconographic programs painted on the walls of the vast majority of monasteries built during this period. Until now, only a limited number of the illustrated books that the friars used to guide their Indian catechumens have been identified, and this (albeit limited) information has provided a better understanding of the way in which the Indian artist—or tlacuilo, in Nahuatl—reinterpreted these iconographical contexts.5 Of course, most of the texts and their corresponding illustrations, which provided the thematic and structural basis for the genesis of mural painting in New Spain and occasionally for the monasteries’ architectural design, were those that the monks found most appropriate (and available) in order to carry out their enormous evangelistic undertaking. Consequently, the models that the tlacuilos copied, elaborated on, and inevitably reinterpreted in order to encourage the dissemination of a new faith among the natives were primarily religious in scope and included illustrated Bibles, catechisms, books of hours, and so on. However, Texts and Contexts · 5 it should be acknowledged that the friars, in their zeal to indoctrinate...