Picturing Prints in Early Modern New Spain

In an anonymous circa 1754 portrait (Figure 1), fray Francisco de Santa Ana stands in a flowered crown and the brown and white habit of the Carmelite first order. The image commemorates the occasion of his final vows as a mendicant friar, and he is a rare if not unique example of a monk within the genre of the so-called crowned nuns. With eyes cast down, fray Francisco appears next to a table bearing an hourglass, skull, and book, symbols of his devotion and of his meditation on his own mortality. Painted as if tacked to the wall beside him is a print of the Virgin Mary, representing the Carmelite order’s fervent Marian devotion. While she seems to gaze down at her follower, fray Francisco humbly looks away.

Painted one decade later, Miguel Cabrera’s image, one of the casta paintings that pictured New Spain’s ethnic diversity, features a Castizo husband, Mestiza wife, and their Chamizo child (Figure 2). The family group occupies a humble space. While the father rolls cigarettes with the child’s help, the mother rests her head in her hands. All wear clothing that is worn and damaged. On the wall behind the figures is an engraved genre scene painted as if tacked to the wall. The print, which may be a painted depiction of an engraving after Dutch artist Adriaen Brouwer, features a figure urinating on the ground.

Printed images of secular and sacred themes are depicted in a number of New Spanish paintings and engravings. Although prints made occasional appearances in religious works, they existed with the greatest regularity, as these examples illustrate, in eighteenth-century clerical portraits and casta paintings.¹ The simulated prints in these works are distinguished by their black and white images, frayed margins, curling edges, illusionistic plate marks, and, as in the two examples presented here, tacked corners. This emphatic presentation of the ephemeral and inexpensive paper material has rightfully led scholars to conclude that the presence of the print in a painting or engraving spoke of the subject’s poverty.² References in period literature from Spain and the Americas affirm the print’s role as a marker of low social station, thanks either to avowed poverty, involuntary circumstances of birth, or reversals of fortune.

Figure 1.

Anonymous, Fray Francisco de Santa Ana. 1754. Oil on Canvas. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico.

This article argues however that the visualization of poverty was but one reason for the representation of prints in New Spanish paintings and engravings. Painters and printmakers included prints in their images to reference a broad range of inherent and associated characteristics viewers attributed to the paper imprints. The article proposes that underlying all of these was a widely held notion of printed indelibility, and prints represented in paintings

Figure 2.

Miguel Cabrera, De Castiso y Mestisa, Chamizo. 1763. Oil on canvas. Museo de América, Madrid, Spain.

and engravings signified to viewers the permanence of, for example, social or economic status, devotion, or corporate identity. The discussion applies Charles Talbot’s assertion that viewers approached prints with certain notions about the relative value of printedness, as the material and the inherent abstraction of rendering forms according to a graphic linear syntax on paper caused the audience to understand prints differently than paintings, and not just as lesser substitutes.³ As Talbot notes, “If it is true that cheapness, insubstantiality, and a consequent ephemerality contributed to the low status of prints relative to other categories of art, there were also associations with the printed image that are certain to have worked to its advantage.”⁴ The present study examines these associations in the context of colonial New Spain with evidence from Inquisition documents and other primary textual and visual sources to determine what prints signified within the casta paintings and portraits. Only with this more nuanced understanding is a full appreciation of the presence of prints in painted and engraved secular images possible. Beyond this narrow purpose...