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

New Jerusalems, or "American Zions," populate Jaime Lara's impressive new book on the mission architecture of sixteenth-century New Spain (Mexico) and the liturgical celebrations and educational activities that took place inside it. This perennially interesting period, recently also treated in Samuel Y. Edgerton'sTheaters of Conversion (2001), witnessed an encounter between one of the world's great civilizations (the Aztec/Nahua) and some of the most enlightened missionaries in the history of Catholicism. Lara's book draws upon an impressive range of biblical, early Christian, and medieval sources to demonstrate the powerful influence of Near Eastern eschatology, or the "science of last things" (41), on the friars' program of evangelization, and the ways in which it coincided with indigenous beliefs.

Lara's book treads familiar ground — George Kubler and John McAndrew are just two of the dozens of scholars who have written on this subject — and at first glance the reader might think that it is a mere rehashing of old material: the early colonial mission complex with its unique open chapels, posa chapels, and atrium crosses, not to mention the Latin American grid-plan city. But in fact this book is quite revolutionary. For while Lara is not the first scholar to trace many of the prototypes he cites for these forms, he is the first to insist so consistently and convincingly on their scriptural and medieval origins — a long-awaited foil for the secularist and Renaissance-based interpretations that have dominated the literature thus far.

This primarily iconographical study is enriched throughout by Lara's extensive knowledge of pre-Renaissance sacred literature. He is at ease with a wide spectrum of sources — from the Psychomachia of Prudentius to Abbot Joachim of Fiore — that he traces through printed editions to the Americas. The book has two leitmotifs. One is the importance of the messianic symbolism of the New Jerusalem on the built environment and liturgical life of the missions. The second is the extraordinary ease with which missionary Catholicism was able to connect with the indigenous religious beliefs (themselves strongly eschatological) of the Nahua people of the former Aztec state. Lara gives a very nuanced overview of the ways in which the Nahua and Catholic worldviews were able to interact, and he gives credit to the Nahuas themselves for making the partnership with the friars work.

In tracing the origins of the architectural forms of the mission complex, Lara introduces intriguing new models. He links the open chapel to the tramezzo screens in the naves of medieval Italian churches and to the design of the original S. Croce in Gerusalemme in Rome (fourth century), open on the sides so that catechumens could worship along with baptized Christians. As a prototype for the posa chapel Lara proposes the qubba, an Islamic domed building which appears most notably on the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem as a place for rest during pilgrimages to the Dome of the Rock, and he cites the nearby al-Aqsa Mosque (popularly thought to have been the Palace of Solomon) as the model for the Capilla Real in Cholula. More important is the notion of the atrium as a corral, a contemporary term that referred metaphorically to an enclosure for the flock of Christ, and also to a theater pit. This "corral" was the setting for the missions' sacred plays and liturgical celebrations, which united aspects of the Catholic and Nahua faiths, both of them rife with eschatological expectation.

Lara's interpretation of the origin of the grid-plan city is especially original. He makes a very convincing case for the influence of a prototypical Christian city and symbolic New Jerusalem by the messianic Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis (1340-1409) — although I would not be as quick to dismiss the Vitruvian or Renaissance models that scholars have cited in the past. I agree that these utopian city plans...