Introductory Essay. Art and Evangelization: Creating A New Art in 16^th-Century Mexican Missions

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Born Pieter van der Moere, Gante is reputed to have belonged to the Hapsburg family. Mendieta (1971 Mendieta , Gerónimo de , fray . 1971 . Historia eclesiástica indiana: Obra escrita a fines del siglo XVI , 2nd ed . Mexico City : Editorial Porrúa . [Google Scholar], 2:310–13) gives a brief account of his long and illustrious missionary career in Mexico. The other two friars, however, perished on Cortés's ill-fated journey to Honduras in 1524–1526. 2. In Cortés's letters, the people of Mexico Tenochtitlan identify themselves as Mexica (or Culhua Mexica), but Mexica groups also settled in other cities in the Basin of Mexico after migrating into this area. More precisely, the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan were named Tenochca, a term that relates to their altepetl or community. Especially after the Conquest, they are also called Nahua after the Nahuatl language they spoke. The broader term Aztec or Azteca refers to any of the migrant groups who departed from a legendary homeland called Aztlan. 3. When they first arrived, the twelve spent a short time at a residence on the city's main plaza before selecting a permanent site on the western end of the traza, out of earshot of ongoing construction and near the aqueduct engineered by the Mexica that brought fresh water from Chapultepec. It also situated them closer to the Indian population that lived on the periphery of the city rather than in the central zone of the Spanish elite. 4. Peoples throughout the so-called Aztec empire adopted Nahuatl as a second language, effectively making it a lingua franca in subject areas. 5. Citing the Franciscan missionary Motolinia (one of the twelve), Kubler (1948, 2:474, 299 n. 4) proposed that the original church of San Francisco was built about 1525, becoming the first to be established in Mexico City. 6. San Francisco's first convento structures were weakened by sinking into the spongy soil on which the island city was built. After the first two deteriorated churches were torn down, a third was built in the early eighteenth century and still exists, renovated but truncated, though it too continues to sink. Most convento buildings have been demolished although vestiges of them remain in some nineteenth- and twentieth-century structures built over or around their ruins. 7. See Linne 1948 Linné , Sigvald . 1948 . El valle y la ciudad de Mexico en 1550 . Stockholm : The Ethnological Museum of Sweden . [Google Scholar] and León-Portilla and Aguilera 1986 León-Portilla , Miguel , and Carmen Aguilera . 1986 . Mapa de México–Tenochtitlan y sus contornos hacia 1555 . Mexico City : Celanesa Mexicana . [Google Scholar] for illustrations and discussion of the map. 8. The Uppsala Map is named after its present-day location in the Uppsala University Library in Sweden. See the more readable detail of Santiago Tlatelolco on the Uppsala Map in Guilliem Arroyo, Figure 3. Its greater definition may be explained by the fact that it was drawn by an artist (or artists) trained at the College of Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco. Early maps are understandably not drawn to scale and abbreviate the features of buildings and the city itself. Mexico City's numerous religious foundations also appear on later colonial biombos (folding screens) that feature the city as their subject. 9. ‘Mission’ and ‘convento’ are used interchangeably in this essay, though ‘convento’ is more widely used in Mexico. ‘Convent’ is avoided because in English it connotes an establishment for female religious, while ‘monastery’ usually refers to a house for cloistered religious rather than active ones like the friars. Mission is useful for it recalls the evangelical work of its residents and is commonly used in the US Southwest and California. 10. The articles in this issue were among others first presented as papers in a symposium organized by the editor on ‘The Indigenous Eye and other Senses: The Art of the Conventos in 16th-Century Mexico,’ at the International Congress of Americanists held in Mexico City on 19–24 July 2009. 11. Conventos were, of course, modeled primarily on religious houses in Spain known to the friars, though architectural and spatial adaptations were accommodated to traditional native practices in some ways. 12. Although the early buildings of San Francisco no longer exist, an idea of what Gante's open-air chapel might have looked like survives in the remarkable Indian chapel, now much elaborated, that adjoins the Franciscan convento of San Gabriel in Cholula, Puebla. Beginning as an open-air structure with a wide arcaded façade like that of San José, the arcade was eventually filled in and the multi-columned interior closed by numerous domes to create the structure visible today. For details on the evolution of its architecture, see Lara 2004 Lara , Jaime . 2004 . City, temple, stage: Eschatological architecture and liturgical theatrics in New Spain . Notre Dame , IN : University of Notre Dame . [Google Scholar], 143. Noting the resemblance between the two, Kubler (1948, 2:332) and others posited their architectural resemblance to a Moorish mosque. 13. Gante's Catecismo de la doctrina chrisiana (1528 Gante , Pedro de . 1528 . Catecismo de la doctrina cristiana con jeroglíficos para la enseñaza de los indios de México . Archivo Histórico Nacional, Códice 1257B, Madrid [source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_de_Gante] . [Google Scholar]) demonstrates his method, which used pictures of objects or figures whose Nahuatl pronunciation approximated Spanish words. The first folio of the small manuscript states: ‘este librito es de figuras con que los missionarios enseñaban a los Indios la doctrina a el principio de la conquista de Indias.’ 14. The Augustinian Vasco de Quiroga also established a school and workshop in Tirepetio in Michoacan, which became widely known for its exquisite featherwork objects. 15. See Russo et al., in press Russo , Alessandra , Gerhard Wolf , and Diana Fane . In press . El vuelo de las imágenes: Arte plumario en México y Europa . Mexico City : Museo Nacional de Arte . [Google Scholar], for the catalogue of the largest exhibition of feather art ever assembled, ‘El vuelo de las imágenes: Arte plumario en México y Europa.’ 16. For an interesting view on the question of hybridity, see Dean and Leibson 2003 Dean , Carolyn , and Dana Leibson . 2003 . Hybridity and its discontents: Considering visual culture in colonial Spanish America . Colonial Latin American Review 12 ( 1 ): 5 – 35 . doi: 10.1080/10609160302341 [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar]. 17. See Reyes-Valerio (2000 Reyes Valerio , Constantino . 2000 . Arte indo-cristiano . Mexico City : Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia . [Google Scholar]) for an extended discussion of the concept of ‘arte indocristiano.’ 18. See Bailey (1999 Bailey , Gauvin Alexander . 1999 . Art on the Jesuit missions in Asia and Spanish America, 1542–1773 . Toronto : University of Toronto Press . [Google Scholar] and 2005 Bailey , Gauvin Alexander . 2005 . Art of colonial Latin America. 2005 . New York : Phaidon Press . [Google Scholar]) on art made in Jesuit missions in Asian and Spanish America. 19. For example, the catalogue Mexico: Splendor of 30 Centuries (1990 Metropolitan Museum of Art . 1990 . Mexico: Splendors of 30 centuries . New York : The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bulfinch Press . [Google Scholar]), devoted to Mexican art and organized with Mexican participation, gives ‘convent,’ ‘ex-convento,’ or ‘templo,’ for most photographs of conventos and their items, often including the religious order to which the convent referred to belonged. A more recent catalogue, The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 (2006 Rishel , Joseph J. , with Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt . 2006 . The arts in Latin America, 1492–1820 . Philadelphia : Philadelphia Museum of Art . [Google Scholar]), which accompanied an ambitious array of colonial art throughout Latin America, inconsistently uses ‘church’ rather than convento or ex-convento church, and ‘monastery’ or ‘templo,’ and often omits the name of the religious order that had it built. In some catalogues the origin for early Mexican items shown begins with their first appearance in European collections. 20. On Mexican architecture, see also Baird 1962 Baird , Joseph A. 1962 . The churches of Mexico, 1530–1810 . Berkeley : University of California Press . [Google Scholar], McAndrew 1965 McAndrew , John . 1965 . The open air churches of sixteenth-century Mexico . Cambridge , MA : Harvard University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar], Artigas 1992 Artigas , Juan B. 1992 . 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Pachuca : Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo . [Google Scholar] on Ixmiquilpan murals, Ballesteros García 1999 Ballesteros García , Víctor Manuel . 1999 . La pintura mural del Convento de Actopán . Pachuca : Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo . [Google Scholar] on Actopan murals, among several other works. 22. On conventos of specific orders, see Mullen 1975 Mullen , Robert J. 1975 . Dominican architecture in 16th-century Oaxaca . Phoenix : University of Arizona Press . [Google Scholar] on Dominican conventos in Oaxaca, Rubial García 1989 Rubial García, Antonio. 1989. El convento agustino y la sociedad colonial, Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. [Google Scholar] on Augustinian conventos, and Montes Bardo 1998 Montes Bardo , Joaquín . 1998 . Arte y espiritualidad franciscana en la Nueva España, siglo XVI . Jaén : Universidad de Jaén . [Google Scholar] on Franciscan conventos. 23. 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