Vistas, 1520-1820: Visual Culture in Spanish America/ Cultura Visual de Hispanoamérica (review)

Vistas is an interactive digital resource for studying the visual culture of colonial Spanish America. Developed by art historians Dana Leibsohn (Smith College) and Barbara E. Mundy (Fordham University), Vistas is a library and teaching resource that addresses a long-standing difficulty of accessing visual materials in Spanish colonial studies. With its annotated collection of images of paintings, sculpture, architecture, maps, and everyday material objects, Vistas provides a much-needed visual archive for students and teachers working in a range of disciplines. In addition, the supplemental material included in the Vistas program offers a dynamic means of illustrating the complex social, political, and artistic dimensions of life in Spanish colonial America in a user-friendly format.

The Vistas program involves two separate components—an interactive DVD and a password-protected website (password provided with purchase). The website is the repository for the digital library, which includes more than three hundred high-resolution images with supporting annotations. This collection encompasses a wide range of media, including paintings and sculptures, as well as images of maps, colonial architecture, and everyday material objects such as cookware, tools, clothing, and religious articles. The diversity of the collection is one of its strong points, providing users with a multidimensional view of Spanish colonial culture that goes beyond aesthetic appreciation to address the complex political and social issues underlying these images, particularly with regard to race, gender, religion, and economics.

While the digital collection is a valuable resource in its own right, the critical strength of the Vistas project lies in its DVD program. Organized into thematic sections such as "Making Sense of the Pre-Columbian," "Reckoning with the Mestizaje," "Patterns of the Everyday," "Mechanics of the Art World," and "Otherwordly Visions," the DVD presents informative essays about key concepts, events, and traditions that shaped Spanish American colonial life. These thematic sections also present comparative discussions of featured images, historical timelines, glossaries, and a library of primary documents that invites students to examine images in the context of personal letters, royal laws and degrees, business records, and travel narratives. A searchable bibliography provides additional resources for more advanced study.

One of the program's most noteworthy aspects is its emphasis on comparative and transnational approaches. Rather than portraying the history of colonial Spanish America in terms of oppositional binaries—colonizers versus colonized, European versus indigenous culture, Christian versus non-Christian, etc.—Vistas encourages students to view Spanish colonial history in terms of complex and varied experiences of interaction and exchange. In doing so, it acknowledges how this history was shaped by racist and exploitive policies and ideologies inherent in Spanish imperialism. While the program encourages colonial critique, however, it also invites students to recognize the integrations that resulted from intercultural encounter. Many of the images featured in the program, for instance, foreground the hybrid or mestizaje dimensions of Spanish colonial culture. In the "Otherwordly Visions" section, a number of images highlight a blending of European and indigenous beliefs and iconography, as in an eighteenth-century pendant featuring the Virgin Coronada whose face exhibits European features, yet whose body and setting are decorated with local materials and indigenous symbols. Another annotated discussion of a "zemi"—a religious figurine used in Caribbean Taíno culture—explores how its material components, which include Caribbean fibers, Venetian glass, and an African rhinoceros horn, illustrate the place of colonial culture within global networks of exchange.

The bilingual format of the Vistas program is also worth noting. The written portions of the program are available in Spanish and English (users select their preferred language on the opening page), and the bilingual emphasis is evident throughout, particularly in the "Primary Document" sections, which reproduce all texts in the original Spanish, accompanied by an English translation. Through this dual-language format, the program is available to a much wider audience. In addition, its bilingual dimensions represent an important step in transforming the monolingual approach that...