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  • Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment by Kelly Donahue-Wallace
  • Elsa Costa
Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment. By Kelly Donahue-Wallace. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017, 398 p., $65.00.

In the final chapters of Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment, Kelly Donahue-Wallace’s sedulously researched new monograph on a Spanish (later Mexican) engraver and pedagogue of the period, the idea of the Spanish Enlightenment begins to come into focus. The project was, at least as Gil saw it, about remedying “backwardness […], the broader need to improve the levels of taste and quality in local manufacturing; and third, Mexican ignorance of academic culture and the relationships between citizen and monarch, through service, sacrifice, and economic development” (300). Correction of ignorance was particularly important to the Enlightenment endeavor, but “academic culture” in Donahue-Wallace’s definition had not long existed even in Spain. The word “academic” does not refer to higher education in general but to the academy—for Donahue-Wallace, a particularly royalist model developed in contrast to the earlier technical schools. Education had existed under the Habsburgs, but it had not been “for the good of the state ahead of all other interests” (262–263). Academies trained professionals in the vocabulary of regalism as much as in their trade. Where some historians, their perceptions retroactively colored by the French Revolution, still identify the Enlightenment as an anti-establishment project, Donahue-Wallace emphasizes the movement’s consubstantiality with Bourbon regalism. This narrative foregrounds the innovative foundational principles of the San Carlos academy in Mexico which emerged under Gil’s continued oversight out of his school for engravers. By manipulating a preexisting rhetoric of “utility to Mexican trades and industry” (217), Gil successfully sought funding from a network of regalist patrons, simultaneously developing a model of active pedagogy unprecedented by the loose advisory role held by teachers at Gil’s own alma mater, the San Fernando academy in Madrid. Far from a missionary for mass culture, however, Gil was strongly personalistic, leading by example as “man of taste” (208) with a “library emphasizing painting treatises, ancient and Renaissance architecture, numismatics, anatomy, and religious texts” (264). While the new model did not improve pedagogical outcomes and Spaniards continued to be imported as teachers until after Mexican independence, Donahue- Wallace’s attribution of the ideal of active pedagogy to the Enlightenment is persuasive, as is her demonstration of the emergence of an “academic culture” with uniquely Enlightened characteristics.

Disappointingly, this argument emerges only in the last fifty pages of a book more than three hundred pages long. Little reference to it can be found in Donahue-Wallace’s introduction, which states modestly that the biography was written because “first, we do not have one” (a biography [End Page 256] of Gil), and, second, because it provides us with “a particularly rich opportunity to study an artist in his full environment” (28). The environment is full to the point of superabundance. Donahue-Wallace’s earlier chapters are overwhelmingly dedicated to the minutiae of Gil’s life and training. References to larger cultural and intellectual trends are sparse. This is true even in potentially fertile periods of Gil’s early career, like his commission by the renowned statesman Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes to create engravings of the Royal Academy of History’s numismatic collection.

Not until the later chapters, set in Mexico City after Gil’s 1778 appointment at its Royal Mint, does Donahue-Wallace work up her obsessive documentation of Gil’s life into an account of the greater Ibero-American Enlightenment. Few observations from Gil’s apprentice days make it into the narrative of academic formation which finally develops, partly because such observations are few and bogged down in redundancy. In the early chapters Donahue-Wallace frequently overexplains the engraving process: “Gil was quite adept at drawing what he saw by using a standardized system of contour lines, hatches, and cross-hatches, techniques he had undoubtedly learned over time” (42). He “managed to coax the illusion of tonal variation from the plate by varying the depth and density of the hatches...

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