Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521-1821 (review)

Instructors of courses on colonial Latin American art, as well as those seeking an introduction to the topic, will welcome Kelly Donahue-Wallace's thoughtful contribution. Until now only one other textbook has been available, Gauvin Alexander Bailey's Art of Colonial Latin America (Phaidon, 2005). Bailey's book is ambitious in its scope, considering the arts of both Spanish and Portuguese America and providing examples of both pre-Columbian and post-colonial artistic traditions in these areas. The result, however, is that each artwork receives only a few sentences of consideration. Donahue-Wallace smartly reduces the scope to only Spanish America, and does not consider pre-Columbian traditions, European sources, or postcolonial developments in any depth. She covers a limited number of works so that each carefully-selected example gets up to two paragraphs of discussion. Except for a few occasions in which significant artworks are neglected, this approach is more fruitful than that used in traditional art historical survey texts, which tend to sacrifice quality of discussion for quantity of artworks.

Donahue-Wallace's approach is contextual and is bolstered by ample "sidebars" that provide excerpts from primary sources, often translated into English by the author. The author also focuses on artistic style, not for formalist reasons but because "style signified . . . in the colonial context" (p. xxii). She illustrates this proposal especially well in the early chapters, where the European or indigenous stylistic features of works are shown to have meant different things to different audiences. She presents style as the result of a conscious choice on the part of artists and patrons, both European and indigenous. Overall, though, Donahue-Wallace avoids the polemic that has developed in the field of colonial Latin American art regarding its European and/or indigenous origins. She chooses not to overly parse individual works based on these features. Rather, she calmly presents different possible meanings, asserting repeatedly that multiple readings of a single work were possible. Addressing the question as to which work of art is more truly "colonial," one from the Cuzco School that is highly influenced by indigenous traditions or one from criollo New Spain, she asserts that both are. These works and the others she covers are for her the products of a process of negotiation whose multiple factors were deeply rooted in the colonial environment.

The model of negotiation that Donahue-Wallace espouses is up-to-date with the state of scholarship on colonial Latin American art and is comfortably dialectical in that it presents the ultimate synthesis of the European/indigenous debate. Though she is clearly aware of this debate, and uses terms drawn from it such as "hybrid," "syncretic," and "inculturation," the author tends to downplay scholarly disagreement. This is appropriate due to the introductory nature of the text, but a brief historiographical summary of some of the larger interpretive paradigms in the field, as well as clearer definitions of terms such as those above, would be helpful.

In order to most easily follow the progression of styles through time, Donahue Wallace focuses on objects defined as "fine art" in the European tradition: architecture, sculpture, painting, and prints. This approach is suitable except in the case of the short shrift given to Andean textiles. Here a European art historical bias is revealed, considering the fact that textiles were the most highly valued portable object in the pre-Columbian Andes and continued to be highly valuable in the colonial setting. The only Andean textile that is illustrated (Plate 7) is not tapestry-woven, as the finest Andean textiles were, but is a tunic embellished with embroidered motifs, some of which may have been added after the colonial period. Despite the lack of treatment of an Andean tapestry, when discussing architectural facades evidencing the Andean "mestizo baroque" style, the author repeats the understanding that such works owed their style to these tapestries.

After a short introduction, the...