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  • The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain
  • Susan Deans-Smith
The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain. By Michael Schreffler. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv, 191. Illustrations. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $75.00 cloth.

In this illuminating study, Michael Schreffler seeks to construct what he terms “the art of allegiance” in seventeenth-century New Spain. His objective is to analyze how visual representation in secular painting participated in the exercise of Spanish imperial power and governance by a monarchy that never set foot in its American possessions. Schreffler situates and analyzes a corpus of objects, images, and texts produced in and around Mexico City “within the social and discursive space of the Spanish Habsburgs’ early modern, transatlantic empire” (p. 3). He contends that such works represent concepts of the Spanish king’s presence and authority, obedience and allegiance to the monarchy, as well as ambivalence. The objects and images scrutinized include portraits of kings and viceroys, as well as painted depictions of palaces, cities, continents, and themes of conquest. He acknowledges the importance of religious imagery in the shaping of discourse on the Spanish monarchy’s presence and authority, but restricts his focus to secular painting.

In the first three chapters, Schreffler explores the importance of the Royal Palace as an architectural and social space, and on how several interrelated discourses on imperial power converged in one of the Royal Palace’s most important governmental chambers, the Hall of Royal Accord. He examines representations of the now-destroyed Royal Palace painted on biombos or multi-paneled folding screens and suggests that they “effected a mode of ideal imperial personhood through the conceit of ‘seeing through the King’s eyes’” (p. 4). Also nicely fleshed out in chapters two and three is his careful reconstruction and analysis of the pictorial program of the Hall of Royal Accord. In this chamber hung portraits of the king—including a copy of Titian’s sumptuous equestrian portrait of Charles V at Mühlberg—and all of the viceroys appointed to New Spain from the mid-seventeenth century. Significant here for constructions of history, memory, and a genealogy of power is the inclusion also of Cortés as Captain General and the king’s representative in the New World. Schreffler suggests that while particular elements of form and composition of those portraits promoted an orthodox vision of the ideology upon which the crown’s governance was based, others posed subtle challenges to it. He provides a finely grained reading of Cristóbal Villalpando’s much reproduced painting of Mexico City’s Main Plaza that depicts the Royal Palace in ruins. Juxtaposed to a panoramic cityscape on a folding screen he sees the representations as “the artifacts of two distinct conceptualizations of the source and nature of political powers” (p. 35). As such, they raise questions about the viceroy’s position as the king’s representative and the meanings of such representation.

Chapters four and five shift focus to explore how visual imagery functioned to position New Spain and the king’s subjects in relation to imperial historiography, cartography, and economics. Schreffler emphasizes the importance of the narrative of the [End Page 110] conquest of Mexico to a discourse on imperial power. He agrees with recent interpretations of these images that emphasize the importance of the idea of succession and of the translatio imperii by which Moctezuma voluntarily relinquished his empire to Charles V via Cortés as the king’s representative. He posits, however, that these images may also be read as glorification of the Spanish monarchy’s authority rather than as expressions of local or proto-national history. Finally, in chapter five, the author examines constructions of Spain’s “Universal Monarchy” through an analysis of a group of cartographic and allegorical representations of the world produced in New Spain. Such imagery, he argues, points to the development and circulation of different conceptualizations of global space in seventeenth-century New Spain.

This is an ambitious, engaging, and illuminating study. Aside from subtle analyses of the varied images and their physical and discursive contexts, Schreffler is sensitive to...

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