The Word Made Image: Religion, Art, and Architecture in Spain and Spanish America, 1500-1600 (review)

The Word Made Image: Religion, Art, and Architecture in Spain and Spanish America, 1500-1600. By Jonathan Brown Et Al. Foreword by Anne Hawley. Fenway Court, vol. 28. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1998. Photographs. Illustrations. Notes. 126 pp. Paper, $24.95.

The six interdisciplinary essays in this slender volume offer a multifaceted view of Catholic art and architecture in sixteenth-century Spain and its colonies. In his introduction, Jonathan Brown frames the anthology, an outgrowth of a 1996 conference held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, within the culture of the Counter Reformation as it reaffirmed the efficacy of images and acted as a catalyst for an outpouring of religious art. While underscoring the predominance and orthodoxy of sacred themes in Spain, Brown notes the challenge to that orthodoxy in both the remaking and reading of images when transplanted to the Americas. He also reminds us that image making can be fully understood only at the nexus of competing religious, economic, and political interests.

At the outset we are cautioned to heed the peculiarly refracted history of Spain. Only in recent decades have revisionist studies begun to reposition Spanish art and history as more innovative and internationally informed than was previously allowed. Richard L. Kagan critically reassesses the lasting imprint of the nineteenth-century scholar William Prescott and his views of early modern Spain as isolationist and decadent. Kagan unveils "Prescott's paradigm," a pervasive bias that evaluated Spain's "twin evils" of Absolutism and Catholicism against the superior, progressive ideals of the United States.

The tradition of devotional images to touch the mind, heart, and spirit of the believing viewer was firmly embedded in Spain before Trent made it official policy. Lynette Bosch convincingly demonstrates how liturgical and mystical texts were given visual form and in concert were intended to promote spiritual enlightenment. Bosch also traces the stylistic changes that occurred in the sixteenth century from an austere "aesthetic of pain" to a more sensuous "aesthetic of beauty," attributing this shift, somewhat exclusively, to Italianate influences and a new praxis of spiritual exercises advocated by the Roman church.

On a grander scale, all the arts could be scripted to commemorate a family's heritage. Richard G. Mann examines the Chapel of St. Joseph in Toledo to unravel the prolonged negotiations by the Martín Ramírez heirs in order to insure that their name would occupy a prominent place in Toledan history and their souls a perpetual place in glory. The iconographic program of El Greco's innovative paintings (1597-99) visually and conceptually cross reference both the chapel's (St. Joseph) and patron's (St. Martin) namesakes, glorifying the family's good works and elevating their mercantile roots. Catherine Wilkinson Zerner documents Philip II's obsession with creating a splendid royal chapel and mausoleum in the Basilica of the Escorial. Using the human body as an integrative metaphor, Zerner analyzes how bodies, symbolic (the Host) and living, in fragments (relics) and intact, seen and unseen, functioned as an ensemble to create an appropriately magnificent repository for the Hapsburg dynasty.

The immense Spanish enterprise abroad was abetted by images that transcended language barriers and acted as didactic tools to implant European values. However, both Clara Bargellini and Sabine MacCormack are attentive to the ability of collaborative cultural projects to tell an alternative story and reveal the complex, often contradictory, issues surrounding early colonial interchange. Bargellini's historiographical essay pursues the growing appreciation of the native contribution in sixteenth-century monasteries in Mexico. While all the monastic arts were creative adaptations of their Renaissance and Christian models, Bargellini advocates closer attention to the broader cultural and spatial alignments forged with indigenous communities. MacCormack's scrutiny of the church murals in Andahuaylillas, Peru, reveals that while compliant with theological and liturgical requirements, their resonance with Andean cosmologies served to...