City, Temple, Stage: Eschatological Architecture and Liturgical Theatrics in New Spain (review)

In spite of the power asymmetries that characterized the colonial Americas, recent interdisciplinary studies have confirmed the strength and persistence of the indigenous contribution. Lara's erudite and amply illustrated book on sixteenth-century conventual architecture in New Spain (Mexico) both analyzes the powerful European and Judeo-Christian heritage (artistic, conceptual, and theological) introduced by the Spaniards and locates the corresponding indigenous cosmological concepts that reinforced and transformed this Old World legacy. The book is organized around the three interlocking root metaphors reflected in its title, City, Temple, and Stage, as facets of the historical and celestial Jerusalem that were transplanted to the Americas to inform the ambitious building program of the mendicant orders.

The overarching, driving metaphor is that of the "Last Things," such eschatological events as the imminent second coming of Christ and Last Judgment, which held an intense grip on the European visual and spiritual imagination. Apocalyptic concerns around 1500 justified the acquisition of new territory to capture more souls for Christianity in anticipation of the final establishment of the city of God or the New Jerusalem. In a hefty exegesis of both Judaic and early Christian texts, the author explores the varied threads of eschatological thought as mandates for global conversion, in particular stressing the writings of the twelfth-century Joachim of Fiore, whose utopic views included that of the "monastery city as a new promised land" (54).

Lara gives a clear and detailed exposition of the reticulated colonial city plan and the standard monastic complex, including the single-nave church as well as the multifunctional walled patio (corral), with its open-air chapel, four corner stational chapels (posas), and stone cross. He convincingly tracks all of these architectural components to classical or Christian prototypes, specifically to the Muslim and temple structures on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, ironically conflated in their New World counterparts. The author painstakingly reconstructs possible modes for transporting these influences overseas, including Nicholas de Lyra's "blueprints" of the Temple of Solomon.

Given the global reach of this study and the diversity of his sources, Lara's interdisciplinarity is nonetheless driven primarily by his prodigious expertise in Judeo-Christian religious history. Although he displays an acute eye for iconography, Lara's confidence is invested in the conceptual templates that manifested themselves in stone and paint. That is to say, written words, rather than images, are the primary carriers of meaning, indicating a methodology that is necessarily weighted to Euro-Christian interpretations. Although characterized as a partnership, neither the dynamics of friar-native interaction nor the factors that motivated native Americans to cooperate are fully explored.

In his final chapters, Lara partially corrects this imbalance, demonstrating how long-standing Amerindian traditions and cosmologies had a demonstrable influence over the shape and function of these monastic complexes. Lara convincingly interprets the atrial crosses placed at the center of the four-square patios as Mesoamerican World Trees as well as "icons of the soon-to-appear Messiah" (162), with their elaborately carved arma Christi (symbols of the Passion). As does Edgerton's recent publication, Lara develops the theme of convent as liturgical stage for Christian narratives activated in "rituals of conversion."¹ Within the intersecting political and spiritual goals of colonialism, Amerindians, as neophyte Christians, are inserted into a "trajectory of salvation history together with the myth of the Last World Emperor in the person of Charles V" (180).