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

Introduction

xiii Introduction Paul B. Niell in 1813 the professor of mathematics don Pedro Abad Villareal, of the college and seminary of San Carlos in Havana, Cuba, wrote, “Architecture as a liberal art, and one of the fine arts, has deserved a very distinguished place among cultured nations . . . for which in modern times many academies of fine arts have been erected in order to revive good taste, which until now, has been buried among the ruins of the Roman Empire. To Your Excellency we owe the good results of these institutions in the domains of the Spanish monarchy , especially in the happy reign of Charles III, their patron and restorer.”1 This passage from the Cuban professor echoed late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourses in the Spanish world regarding the reform of artistic aesthetics, the propagation of scientific knowledge, the promotion of classicism in the visual arts, and the need to “revive” buen gusto (good taste). With the ascension of the French Bourbon dynasty to the Spanish throne in 1700, the visual landscape of Spain and its American colonies experienced a gradual and uneven transformation. The Bourbons aimed to expand the empire’s population, promote agriculture and industry, found new towns, and centralize the governance of the Spanish state. In eighteenth-century Spain numerous visual styles coexisted, including what has been considered baroque , rococo, and neoclassical. The founding of Spain’s Royal Academy of San Fernando in Madrid in 1752, followed by the Academy of San Carlos in Valencia in 1768 and the Academy of San Luis in Zaragoza in 1793 promoted drawing as the basis for training in las tres bellas artes (the three fine arts) of painting, sculpture, and architecture. The academy advanced the copying of antique models and the rule of “nature” as a principle underlying the fines arts yet possessed no univocal approach to a “modern” translation of GrecoRoman classicism. The courtly arts of King Charles III (r. 1758–1788) and his xiv introduction son and successor, Charles IV (r. 1788–1808), rulers of Spain in the latter half of the eighteenth century, reveal much eighteenth-century rococo style with a gradual implementation of a more sober neoclassicism.2 In the Latin American colonies the visual scene was likewise complex, with baroque and rococo forms coexisting with the emergence of a late eighteenth-century neoclassicism promoted by reform-minded administrators and colonial elites in the Latin American viceroyalties. The present collection of essays examines different dimensions of neoclassical visual culture in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin America from divergent perspectives. The chapters consider how classicism was imposed, promoted, adapted, negotiated, and contested in myriad social, political, economic, cultural, and temporal situations. Through a set of case studies, visual classicisms in late colonial and early national Latin America appear as multivalent and multivocal phenomena driven by desires to impose imperial authority, to fashion the nationalist self, and to form and maintain new social and cultural ideologies. The adaptation of classicism in the Americas was further shaped by local factors, including the realities of place and the influence of established visual and material traditions. This volume thus provides new insights into the complexities of neoclassicism as a cultural, not just visual, phenomenon in the late colonial and early national periods and promotes new approaches to the study of a marginalized area of Latin American art history and visual culture. Classicisms in the Spanish Colonial Landscape Spanish and Portuguese uses of Greco-Roman-inspired classicism in the Americas dates to the sixteenth-century conquest. The Iberian colonial powers imported and reconfigured classicizing forms from Italy to implement and authorize new colonial projects overseas. Spanish missionaries utilized European architectural treatises, such as Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria (1485), Vitruvius’s De architectura (first printed edition, 1486), and Sebastian Serlio’s Regole generali di architettura (1537) to design mendicant complexes.3 Such classical quotations as the Roman triumphal arch appeared on church façades, in nave crossings, and in ephemeral public viceregal arts. These expressions became metaphors for the victory of Christian civilization over the barbarism of indigenous America, not unlike militaristic associations of Catholicism seen in the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from Islamic polities in the late fifteenth century. In sixteenth-century New Spain xv paul b. niell mendicants taught Renaissance pictorial arts to native artists through prints, resulting in the appearance of spatial illusionism, linear perspective, naturalism , and figural representation in devotional sculpture...