Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780-1910

5: A Taste for Art in Late Colonial New Spain

93 Chapter Five A Taste for Art in Late Colonial New Spain Kelly Donahue-Wallace The description of the festivities surrounding the December 1796 installation of a new equestrian portrait of Charles IV, as chronicled in the Gazeta de México, Mexico City’s biweekly newspaper, concluded with the following notice: “At the order of the Most Excellent Viceroy, Joseph Joaquín Fabregat, Director of Engraving at the Royal Academy of San Carlos, Professor of recognized merit, is engraving a grand copper plate that will represent the Plaza Mayor with all of its new adornment.”1 The March 22, 1797, issue of the Gazeta added more information, explaining that the viceroy decided “to have engraved at his own expense a copperplate of the beautiful view of the . . . Plaza and Statue, which he has dedicated to the Royal couple, our Sovereigns. [H]e has also determined that in order that the People do not lack the satisfaction of having examples of the print, which will be very appreciable for both the esteemed object they represent as for the delicacy and perfection of the engraving, they will be available at the moderate price of four pesos each, and the profits will be distributed as dowries for poor girls.”2 The first advertisement offering the print for sale to the public (figure 5.1) appeared in the Gazeta on February 2, 1798: “The Royal Academy of San Carlos now offers for sale the beautiful Prints that represent the view of the principal Plaza of this capital in which has been placed the Royal Equestrian Statue of the King our Lord.”3 Fabregat’s large engraving, 94 Chapter five designed by academy painting director Rafael Ximeno y Planes, was now available for purchase by print collectors, patriots, and those wishing to help poor girls afford to enter a convent. What interests me about these notices is not the object itself, the print, but how it was characterized in the newspaper: beautiful, appreciable, perfect , desirable, and although not stated explicitly, tasteful. Analysis of this and other stories and advertisements in the Gazeta de México reveals a persistent appeal to readers’ good taste and the desirability of beautiful objects to embody it. The following essay presents examples of these newspaper notices and draws preliminary conclusions regarding what they reveal about their authors and readers. I argue that the newspaper, more than a listing of current events and items for sale, was a uniquely efficacious site to which colonists turned to shape their taste. It likewise reified the important social and political differences between those with good taste and those without. The Gazeta’s use of the rhetoric of taste furthermore crafted a notion of tastefulness unique to the viceregal context. It is essential, therefore, before entering into the discussion of the newspaper stories and advertisements to define what is meant here by good taste and why it was important to the newspaper’s readers. As employed in the present essay, taste is the notion of aesthetic judgment as articulated with increasing Figure 5.1. José Joaquín Fabregat. View of the Plaza Mayor. 1796–1797. Engraving. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin. 95 Kelly Donahue-Wallace specificity by the mid-eighteenth century and summarized most effectively in the writings of the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke as “that faculty, or those faculties of the mind which are affected with, or which form a judgment of the works of imagination and the elegant arts.”4 In other words, good taste was discrimination of good from bad, beautiful from ugly, and current from outdated . It resided in the person, not the object—in the case examined here, the viewer possessed good taste, not the print—although the object revealed qualities that appealed to those viewers possessing good taste. As Vernon Hyde Minor has demonstrated, this good taste was a slippery thing; its definition shifted constantly and those able to define the term exercised it for “persuasion and control.”5 Retooling the parameters of good taste, and doing so convincingly , caused others to follow suit or risk social ridicule. It is clear from this definition that good taste was intimately bound up with social distinction. The connection between good taste and class distinction has been amply studied by Pierre Bourdieu, of course, who determined that taste functions as a marker of class.6 As John Brewer has argued for the European, and...