In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

spanish america  Engraving  Clara Bargellini In the afternoon [of All Saints’ Day] we distribute to everyone his saint, decided by lot, whom he is to take as his particular patron for the year. Beforehand, in a brief talk all are instructed about the service they are to give him each day, and especially on his feast day; the viceroy and vicereine are present, as is the royal audiencia, and they receive their saint on their knees from the priest distributing them, wearing a surplice and stole. At the same time other priests are distributing them [the saints] in the church, courtyards and corridors, because so many people come all afternoon, that they cannot tend to everyone. —Juan Sánchez Baquero, Fundación de la Compañía de Jesús en la Nueva España, 1571–15801 The “saints” being distributed by the Jesuits at the church of their Collegeof San Pedroy San Pablo in Mexico City around 1600 (according to Juan Sánchez Baquero, S.J.) were surely prints, “holy cards” in modern parlance. They were an extension of the festivities on the arrival in New Spain of an important collection of 214 relics, sent to the Jesuits by Gregory XIII in 1578.The relics had been lavishlycelebrated with eight days of liturgy, processions, and dramatic performances and in ephemeral architecture, sculptures, and paintings throughout the city. The ceremony described by Sánchez Baquero was instituted the following year to recall that first celebration . It took place in front of the main altar, decorated for the occasion with the reliquaries that had since been fashioned for the bones that had arrived from Rome. “Prints in abundance” had arrived along with the relics. An engraved metal sheet for making more prints, whose reverse was used in 1640 by Alonso López de Herrera to paint an Immaculate Conception, is probably also related to the events of 1578 and their sequel.2 It is a smooth European sheet for reproducing fifty-­five images of the Trinity, Christ, the Virgin , and many saints, corresponding in part to the Litanyof the Saints (Fig. 48). This entire Jesuit episode, in which engravings play an important role, brings up several fascinating points. Though art historians have mostly discussed prints as tools for establishing art in the European manner or as sources of iconography and compositions for painters in the New World, Sánchez Baquero is concerned only with theirdevotional use. Furthermore, unlike most of the prints circulating in the Hispanic world, these probably did not come from Flanders. Finally, we learn that in addition to the great quantities of prints sent to New Spain, engraved plates also arrived. All three of these observations help to add nuance to accepted notions about the use of prints that arrived from Europe. In the New World, devotion was rarely separate from the use of prints by artists during the Habsburg period. The focus of the mendicant friars on the evangelization of native groups in the sixteenth century was guided by the conviction that assimilation of the new faith would be easier through the eyes than through the ears, because of language barriers. Prints were authorized sources for the representation of basic tenets of the Christian faith, especially by native artists, as well as for the iconography of the saints. Architectural books, especially those of Sebastiano Serlio, whose volumes are full of engraved illustrations, were equally authoritative for the development of church architecture in Spanish America (although I shall not deal with them here). Even if all of the New World was mission territory to European eyes, there were differences, of course, between the missions among indigenous groups and the Roman Catholic religious practices of Spanish colonists and of the Hispanicized and steadily increasing population of mixed descent. By the early seventeenth century these worlds were coming closer together, and the authority of prints permeated both devotional and artistic use.The sacramental ceremony described by Sánchez Baquero (who specifies that the priest distributing the prints dons a surplice and stole) is particularly telling. Although the “devotional” is often joined to the “popular” in writings about art, here we have an instance in which the authority of prints manifested itself first in an elite gathering then moved out into more inclusive spaces. On the specific origins of prints that crossed the Atlantic , it is right that Antwerp should be most frequently invoked . There is ample evidence, however, certainly among the Jesuits, that many prints came from Italy, the other leading...

Share