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

This is a good and useful overview of the art and architecture of the Spanish viceroyalties of what we now call Latin America. The task is not a simple one. The geography of the area is immense and its history complex,and we are still far from having a corpus of works that is close to complete and available for study, except for a few localized instances. Kelly Donahue-Wallace manages to include much information into her text, however, and presents it within a structure guided basically by chronology, medium, and genre, illustrated by relatively few well-chosen examples. The book is written for U.S. university level students with little previous knowledge of the topic, and it can also serve a more general audience.

Although Donahue-Wallace says little about historiography, she is well versed in it. Only very few truly major authors are missing from her bibliography. She also includes excerpts from primary sources in sidebars throughout the text, and her notes are admirable for their range, including one archival gem (p. 153), which is rare in books of this nature. Some mistakes, however, are evident. For example, "miserere" chapels (p. 28) also occur in Mexico, and Xoxoteco is not an open chapel (p. 41).

Presumably because of the book's intended audience, Donahue-Wallace stays with her choice of examples, which is sensible, and limits the topics of her discussion, which is more problematic. Although her text is full of detailed descriptions, she omits any general treatment of forms and styles from her discussion. Aside from the understandable yet "uneasy relationship with period labels" (p. xvi), as she puts it, her decision to concentrate on iconography in dealing with painting, for example, is more limiting than liberating. Predictably, she cannot avoid dealing with form and often does it very well. However, the specter of the European canon is honored in its negation, rather than exorcised in a refashioning to suit not only viceregal material but also art history in general. Indeed, period labels have never been fixed entities. Witness the term mannerism, which appears in this text without qualifications.

Other problems are less extensive but should be mentioned. The editing could have been more careful in its checking of constructions and vocabulary: for example,"pearlescent" (p. 155) is not English, "albañileros" (p. 102) is not Spanish, and "Sevilla" appears throughout rather than "Seville." Also, the author's knowledge of Catholic culture seems a bit thin at times. For example, the Jesuits are not a monastic order; they do not live in "conventos," and their fourth vow is to undertake any work that the pope enjoins on them, not to perform mission work. Finally, although the color plates are good, even excellent in some cases, the black-and-white illustrations are disappointing.