Mundy&Hyman-Out of The Shadow of Vasari

Colonial Latin American Review
ISSN: 1060-9164 (Print) 1466-1802 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccla20
Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New

Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America
Barbara E. Mundy & Aaron M. Hyman
To cite this article: Barbara E. Mundy & Aaron M. Hyman (2015) Out of The Shadow of Vasari:
Towards A New Model of The ‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America, Colonial Latin American Review,
24:3, 283-317, DOI: 10.1080/10609164.2015.1086594
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2015.1086594
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COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW, 2015
VOL. 24, NO. 3, 283–317
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2015.1086594
Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The

‘Artist’ in Colonial Latin America
Barbara E. Mundya and Aaron M. Hymanb
a
Fordham University; bUniversity of California, Berkeley
In the mid 1930s, the Cervecería Cuauhtemoc announced its plans to publish a series of
ten pamphlets, called ‘suplementos artísticos,’ highlighting colonial art in Mexico
(Figures 1 and 2). In each edition of the resultant El arte en México: pintura colonial, a
beautifully set frontispiece printed on heavy-gauge paper gives way to a two-page
Downloaded by [50.232.82.48] at 19:37 06 February 2016
spread. The two pages feature a specific artist, who is introduced to the reader with an
elegiac biographic summary and a short, formal description of one of his works, which
the reader finds, reproduced in full color, on the opposite page. This series rode the coat-
tails of the company’s Boletín Mensual Carta Blanca—named after its popular Carta
Blanca beer—which had been released earlier in the decade and featured works by contem-
porary Mexican artists (Capistrán 2011). Given the state of beer commercials today, the
lionizing of colonial art might seem a strange marketing ploy, but the Cervecería’s publi-
cations capitalized on the growing interest among Mexican intellectuals and industrialists
to create a national history after the devastating battles of the 1910 Revolution, a project in
which art, along with its histories, was coming to occupy an important role. Indeed, the
publication of El arte en México was announced in the very year, 1936, that the Instituto
de Investigaciones Estéticas, devoted largely to the study of Mexican art, was founded at
the National University (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México), and many of the
publication’s authors—including Manuel Toussaint, who penned the edition reproduced
here—were among the founders of the Instituto and key figures in the development of art
history as a discipline in Mexico.
Created alongside other nationalist histories, these booklets claimed these painters
from colonial New Spain—that is, a time before the modern, Mexican nation was
dreamed up—as an integral part of Mexico’s history, an unsurprising move to any
student of nationalism (Anderson 2006). Taken as a set, the Cervercería’s booklets inau-
gurated a virtual museum for the nation’s colonial era, a museum that would find phys-
ical realization decades later with the founding of both the Pinacoteca Virreinal de San
Diego and Tepozotlán’s Museo del Virreinato in 1964. It is revealing that this history of
Mexico’s art would be told as a sequence of great works by key painters; the small book-
lets put out by the beer company thereby mirrored the histories of the ‘great’ European
artistic traditions, which had been constructed as sequences of seminal authors and
their master works, which in turn defined an artistic canon. The authors of the Cerve-
cería’s pamphlets therefore made the implicit claim that Mexico’s art history looked—
or, perhaps could look—like a European one. In that vein, Touissant eloquently
CONTACT Barbara E. Mundy mundy@fordham.edu

© 2015 Taylor and Francis on behalf of CLAR
284 B. E. MUNDY AND A. M. HYMAN
Figure 1. Cervecería Cuauhtemoc, El arte en México: Pintura colonial, vol. 3, ca. 1937.
described Baltasar de Echave Orio, one of the painters included in the series, as a ‘son of
the Renaissance’ [Echave es hijo del Renacimiento], and continued to sketch out a great
period of artistic and intellectual flowering in colonial Mexico that was not only com-
parable, but indeed equivalent, to the fertile cultural flowering of classical antiquity’s
rebirth on the Italian peninsula.
Despite their unassuming format and populist approach, the Cervecería’s serial publi-
cations mark an important current of art historical thinking about colonial works of art.
Their approach to telling the history of colonial painting was founded on European
models that served, initially, to animate and legitimize that history. No model was more
powerful, in this respect, than the one provided by Giorgio Vasari (Italy, 1511–1574),
the progenitor of a certain brand of art history. His model, emulated widely in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, was brought to full fruition by nineteenth-century art
historians. These later thinkers reanimated Vasari in the new form of the artistic mono-
graph, which they shepherded to the center of the art history as it was beginning to take
shape as a discipline within the modern academy (Guercio 2008). The Cervecería pamph-
lets cleaved to the Vasarian model by literalizing, across their two-page spreads, the binary
COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 285
Figure 2. Cervecería Cuauhtemoc, El arte en México: Pintura colonial, vol. 3, ca. 1937, f. 1v.
terms that structured such a history of art: the life of the artist and his works. And in
employing a model of art history growing out of Vasari—one that we, following Gabriele
Guercio, call the ‘life-work model’—they implicitly demonstrated that the newly forged art
history of Latin America might mirror the art history of Europe, as it had come to be prac-
ticed by that point. This model has proved an enduring and largely unquestioned one in
the art history of colonial Latin America.
In other colonial fields, in contrast, historiographical models born in the sixteenth

century and developed over the seventeenth are no longer used without critical reflection.
Of the recent scholarly studies of colonial sainthood (some of them appearing in the pages
of CLAR), for instance, none is a hagiography. And reading works in the hagiographic tra-
dition against the grain has led to a richer understanding of social agents at work in the
creation of the saint and the various channels though which their stories have reached
us. Today’s environmental histories posit no causal link to intrinsic ethnic characteristics,
but awareness of this once-accepted logical fallacy allows us to see the important role that
ideas of climate played in the creation of the colonial subjects. And for many colonial scho-
lars, revealing the Eurocentric assumptions embedded in models first developed to accom-
modate European texts and artifacts has reshaped larger epistemological frameworks. One
need think only of how the category of ‘mimesis’ (fundamental to aesthetic naturalism and
the pejorative view of the copy) opened up in the hands of Homi Bhabha (1994) and
Michael Taussig (1993), or how a normative model of historical narrative carried over
from nineteenth-century Germany has been continually challenged—if not entirely dis-
mantled—by ethnohistorians of Latin America.

But within these larger shifts affecting colonial studies in general, the Vasarian legacy of
the life-work model so frequently employed in colonial art history has been left curiously
unexamined, a blind spot with consequences both for art historians and for the larger colo-
nial field. As would be expected, Vasarian methodology developed out of a set of circum-
stances particular to its sixteenth-century European moment, social conditions that
allowed the creation of what we now think of as the ‘artist,’ whose ‘artwork’ was the
inalienable product of a single human mind and hand. But, as we argue, lacking clear evi-
dence that similar social conditions existed in early modern Latin America, particularly in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the default category of ‘artist’ as a neutral and
trans-geographic category cannot be taken for granted. Nor can the autonomous
‘artwork’ that indexes the artist be assumed, largely because of conservation issues,
which, though not particular to Latin America, are important nonetheless. Questioning
these categories has far-reaching consequences. For what we might call the ‘art world’
in colonial Latin America had an expansive presence: commerce in paintings, sculpture
and luxury goods was an important part of transatlantic and transpacific economies;
the commissioning of structures, be they urban mansions or chapels, was a preeminent
way social orders marked their presence in the colonial landscape; and encounters,
often religiously charged, with artworks shaped both corporate and individual identities.
Thus, any reassessment and reconfiguration of fundamental components of this larger art
world—in particular the artist and the work of art—has broad implications for the con-
struction of subjects across social fields.
In this essay, to explain the importance and limits of Vasarian art history, we begin by
surveying the reasons that it was so attractive in the first place. In the main sections, we
argue that in many instances the life-work model that a Vasarian history offers finds
uneasy, if not improper, fit in colonial Latin America, because it imposes a ready-made
(and perhaps chimerical) subjectivity on the figure of the ‘artist.’ We draw on evidence
from the material practices in Latin America to underscore the gaps between crucial
Vasarian notions of the artist and those attested to by the colonial works themselves;
we also highlight how the historical trajectory of Latin America has allowed very few
‘hand of the master’ artworks to reach us today, which makes connoisseurial examination
of works, central to a Vasarian methodology, largely impossible. But in concluding, we

argue that the misfit of Vasari can be an extremely productive one. Scholars who are
moving beyond Vasari—that master-narrative and historiography derived from
Europe—are yielding more situational ideas of the ‘artist’ and holding out the promise
that Latin American art history might help reassess this foundational term not only for
Latin America, but also for the broader discipline of art history. Moreover, by critically
addressing the concepts of ‘artist’ and ‘artwork’ and recasting them in accordance with
social practices and categories as developed within Latin America, we gain new purchase
on how some colonial subjects, in their engagement with their surrounding material
worlds, came to be constructed.
Vasari and Latin American Art History

Many have argued that art history was born with the publication of Vasari’s Le Vite de’ più
eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (commonly known in English as Lives of the Artists)
in 1550 (with a second, amplified edition in 1568). As with any discipline, an art history
built on the Vasarian model has come to have, over time, its own particular structure, con-
tours, internal hierarchies, dead ends and blind corridors. It easily houses some objects,
and leaves others, works whose presence might challenge its form and structure,
outside its door. At its inception, the central focus for Vasari’s art history was, and
would continue to be, the individual artist—and the artist as individual—established reso-
lutely in his Lives of the Artists. In chronicling the lives of both his Renaissance contem-
poraries and artists of the recent past—from the gossipy bits about Leonardo’s work
habits, to Pontormo’s deathly fear of crowds, to the innate skills Giotto demonstrated
as a young boy—Vasari revealed a conception of the artist that was conterminously emer-
ging in sixteenth-century Italy; indeed, he shows us both how this larger society was
coming to view artists, and how artists were learning to see themselves and manipulate
their own reception. When Vasari established art history as a fundamentally biographical
enterprise, chronicling the life of a particular artist, he did so by treating works as the
outcome of that individual life, the consequence of specific actions and agency of its
creator (Guercio 2008). Indices of their creators, artworks helped Vasari to structure
and to punctuate the life stories he told; the artist and his artwork became the two polestars
that oriented his history of art. And artists began to be understood as possessing inalien-
able individual styles (or ‘hands’), an idea that set the stage for the development of con-
noisseurial and stylistic analysis in the nineteenth century that supported the Vasarian
tradition as it blossomed to produce the first artist monographs.
Vasari also insisted upon a documentary dimension to undergird his story telling.
Crisscrossing the Italian peninsula to see works and collect documents—written, oral,
and perhaps imagined—Vasari detailed his journeys in narratives that brought the great
artists, out of which he was creating an Italian tradition, back to life for his readers.
The powerful grip of his model is seen in the number of followers and imitators; from
Karel van Mander’s 1604 Het Schilder-boeck in the Netherlands, to Vicente Carducho’s
1633 Diálogos sobre la pintura and Francisco Pacheco’s 1649 Arte de la pintura in
Spain, and Joachim von Sandrart’s 1675 Teutsche Academie, published in Germany
between 1675 and 1680. These first art histories, told through artists and their works,
quickly came to define how early modern Europeans thought about the material history
that surrounded them, as well as the people they knew as its creators; and artists, as part of
this dialectic, were quick to seize upon and advance the social roles and claims to status
that Vasari had sketched out for them. Nineteenth-century scholars, in turn, built upon
these earlier foundations in developing the artist monograph, which bundled together a
creator’s biography and body of work under the rubric of the ‘artist’ who functioned as
the monograph’s organizing principle.
The Vasarian-derived monograph found a congenial reception in Latin America in the
early twentieth century. Certainly a key factor was how closely so much of Latin American
art (particularly paintings) resembled European prototypes, and indeed, how many of its
artists were products of a European tradition. Returning to the artists first championed in
the Cervecería pamphlets, we find that not a single painter in this series produced to herald
colonial art was actually born on Mexican (or New Spanish) soil. Rather, the pamphlets
spotlight artists, such as Echave Orio, who were born and trained in Europe before cross-
ing the Atlantic to find work overseas. If, as Toussaint wrote, ‘Echave is a son of the
Renaissance,’ it was a Renaissance that belonged to a European mother who shipped
her progeny to the colonies. Even after the voyage was done, her apron strings stretched
across the ocean; constant reminders of her presence arrived in the paintings and engrav-
ings that were tucked into the trunks of politicians, priests, and intellectuals and in mer-
chants’ cargo throughout the viceregal period (Alcalá 1998; Bargellini 2008; De Marchi
and Van Miegroet 2008; Michaud and Torres della Pina 2009; Stratton-Pruitt 2012). As
Latin American art historians well know, paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries offer abundant evidence of this trade and its effects, given the myriad canvases
copied after, or based upon, printed images that made their way across the Atlantic and
into the workshops of colonial artists (von Kügelgen 2008; Bargellini 2008; Michaud
and Torres della Pina 2009). It is fitting, then, that the Cervecería chose to entitle its
series El arte en México, for the European lens through which its authors framed colonial
painting implied that art was something that arrived from afar in Mexico, rather than
arguing that the great art of the past was an arte de México, or simply an arte mexicano.
The authors of the Cervecería’s suplementos had co-opted European historiographic strat-
egies and Europe’s artists at once.
A robust tradition of scholarship on Latin American art that marshals the format of the
art historical monograph, fundamentally based upon the life-work model, has since flour-
ished. Art historians of Latin America have produced beautifully illustrated and carefully
researched volumes on painters such as Cristóbal de Villalpando, José Juárez, Juan Correa
and Miguel Cabrera, to name but a few. In particular, the approach has dominated the
study of painting, as the methods of workshop production for sculpture and the often cen-
turies-long gestations of major buildings have made for more tenuous connections
between sculptors or architects and a clearly defined body of work. In Guillermo Tovar
de Teresa’s Repertorio de artistas en México of 1995, which constructs the country’s art
history as a series of biographical entries, we see an ongoing faith in the biographic
(and ultimately Vasarian) impulse. A historiography centered on artists’ biography
extends well beyond Mexican works. A 2009 state-of-the-field review offered a list of
South American names that have not received monographic studies, and Latin
America, more broadly defined, was heralded as a realm of unfulfilled opportunity in con-
trast to the field of European art history, where very little space for ‘new’ monographic
research exists (Bailey, Phillips, and Voigt 2009, 3).
The monographic approach to Latin American art is clearly not the only one, and it has
blossomed alongside a very different methodological trajectory, largely centered in North
America. As U.S. and European scholars began to (belatedly) turn their attention to the rich-
ness of colonial Latin American art, they initially gravitated towards objects that did not cor-
respond to traditional, Western categories of art making and aesthetics, such as maps,
featherwork mosaics, and botanical illustrations (Mundy 1996; Russo 2002; Boone 2007;
Bleichmar 2012). These studies, produced during the field’s turn towards visual culture,
defied more traditional art historical inquiry, which had focused on painting, sculpture and
architecture. At the time that one of us wrote one such work, it seemed thrillingly unmoored
from the expectations of a Euro-centric art history; like other studies of its kind, it reveled in
the freedom from such terms, or categories, that were central to the Vasarian approach, such
as artists, their biographies and their artworks. In addition, by largely focusing on works from
the sixteenth century, these studies seemed to be liberated from certain nationalist teleologies
that laid claim to works created in the eighteenth century, closer in time to Independence
movements. The charge at that moment, however, was not to actively undermine Western
terminology, categories and narratives, so much as to simply sidestep them altogether.

Recently, these two well-developed strands have begun to make room for new
approaches and the field’s methodological parameters have expanded. Scholars are now
positioning colonial artworks within networks of global circulation to challenge
entrenched center-periphery models (Hamann 2010; Leibsohn and Peterson 2013;
Pierce and Otsuka 2012), and looking to artworks once sidelined as ‘peripheral’ in relation
to more thoroughly researched urban centers (Bargellini and Komanecky 2009; Cuadriello
2013; Cummins and Rappaport 2012; Stanfield-Mazzi 2013). Others have shifted the spot-
light off the artists and onto the creative forces exerted by patrons, richly exploring patron-
age microenvironments (Dean 1999; Cuadriello 2011), or the roles of specific religious
orders (Alcalá 1998; Bailey 1999; Cruz-González 2013). Most of these studies include
works in ‘traditional’ media (painting, sculpture and architecture), while at the same
time attending to the broader range of visual culture into which such works were born.
Indeed, the multiple approaches that art historians and historians have available to
them could be taken to show that the field has transcended the Vasarian life-work model.
But the Vasarian approach still commands a central role in Latin American art history,
as a recent bibliographic survey we carried out on one of the best-developed subfields,
painting in New Spain, revealed (Hyman and Mundy 2013). Moreover, the model con-
tinues to animate collecting and display practices. Major museums—the primary venue
in which a larger international public comes in contact with colonial Latin American
art—have begun to frequently display colonial Latin American art alongside European
analogs with a stress on the identity of the ‘artist’ (most recently at the Louvre). For
many scholars and curators, the ongoing utility of the Vasarian life-work model is inargu-
able, given the number of artworks, particularly paintings, that do seem to match up well
with European analogs for which such a model was developed. The deployment of this
model seems to need only tinkering to account for the ways Latin America artworks
were inflected by their locales, with their blends of European-born, creole and indigenous
producers and audiences. Indeed, the modulations of European forms found in Latin
America have led many art historians to marshal such infelicitous terms as ‘mestizo’ or
‘hybrid,’ and inspired others to take issue with the latent ideological implications of
such labels (Kubler 1985; Dean and Leibsohn 2003).
A key difficulty of disentangling from Vasari emerges from the very beginning of the
viceregal period: adherence to European prototypes was often engineered by, indeed the
very goal of, many colonial makers, as early as the sixteenth century. Take, for example,
the cristos de caña, life-size and life-like sculptures of the crucified Christ, many made
in the sixteenth century, found today decorating altars on both sides of the Atlantic.
Despite their remarkable material composition—some include indigenous manuscripts
written on native amate paper along with European prints mixed into and covered by
an agglutinate of cornstalk paste—their final facture resulted from European-style
molds and careful polychromy that made them look much like any European sculpture
carved of wood (Amador Marrero 2002). These hollow, lightweight objects reveal their
difference only when touched or lifted. Creating ‘objects of dissimulation,’ as Sara Ryu
has recently called them, their makers intentionally hid the traces of the indigenous
materials and technologies from which the cristos are formed beneath a licked-smooth
patina that served as both surface and mask (Ryu 2012, 121).
Oil paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cling even more insistently
to their European-ness. They are unlike the maize-paste statue of the Cristo de Mexicalt-
zingo, which in 1946 fell from its niche and split in two to reveal the dense strata of colo-
nial documents behind its polychromed veneer (Carrillo y Gariel 1949). Instead, the large
paintings that covered (and often still cover) the church walls of Latin America hide very
little. Material analysis might reveal the specific origins of pigments and supports; careful
formal and contextual analysis might suggest indigenous inflections in ornament and ico-
nographic choices; but, like the cristos, the majority of these paintings were meant to ‘read’
as stylistically European and didactically Catholic, even dogmatically Catholic (however
that might have been construed on a local level), in their composition, central iconogra-
phy, overall message and effect.
Either as a workshop shortcut or at the specific behest of a patron, thousands of Latin
American oil paintings were directly copied from prints, creating dense galaxies of repli-
cation, swirling out from source-compositions in Europe (Ojeda 2009–). Richly documen-
ted for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting, such patterns were well established
by the mid-sixteenth century. For instance, of the twenty-eight mural paintings that dec-
orate the sotocoro of the church of Nuestra Señora de la Asunción in Tecamachalco (in the
modern state of Puebla, Mexico) twenty draw directly from, and hew closely to, woodcuts
used to illustrate bibles published in Lyon between 1559 and 1561, which are, themselves,
adaptations of woodcuts originally designed by the German artist Albrecht Dürer
(Figures 3 and 4; Niedermeier 2008; Camelo Arredondo, Gurría Lacroix, and Valerio-
Reyes 1964, 55–59). Figure 3 is a general view of the choir’s underside, separated into irre-
gularly sized compartments by raised ribs. Small paintings, such as the image of Noah’s arc
buoyed by blue floodwaters (upper right of Figure 3), were produced, following the Lyon
Bible examples (Figure 4), on native amate, or fig bark paper, before being pasted into each
compartment.
By the seventeenth century, working from printed compositions created in Europe was
a common practice of Latin American painters. Peter Paul Rubens, the consummate
Catholic propagandist and court painter to Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella
in the Spanish Netherlands, was a perennial favorite of both patrons and artists in Latin
America. When in Cuzco, the seat of the former Inka capital and the cultural capital of
the Andean cordillera, one enters the Iglesia del Triunfo, the first church to be founded
Figure 3. Unknown artist (Mexico), Lower choir (sotocoro) ceiling. Tecamachalco, Mexico, ca. 1562.
Figure 4. Unknown artist, Noah’s arc, from Genesis 7, Biblia Sacra, ex postremis doctorum omnium vigiliis
(Lyon: Jacob de Millis, 1561), 318. Courtesy of the Christoph Keller, Jr. Library, General Theological
Seminary, New York.
Figure 5. Unknown artist, Raising of the Cross, Iglesia del Triunfo, Cuzco, seventeenth century.
following the Spanish ‘triumph’ over the native population and now part of the sprawling
cathedral complex, to find compositions that conform to Rubens’s Raising of the Cross—
the now-iconic triptych of 1610–1611, housed in Antwerp’s Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathe-
draal—and his Way to Calvary. Figure 5 shows one of the paintings in the Triunfo,
and its indebtedness to its ultimate source (Figure 6) is clear in the arrangement of
the figures, a helix of muscled bodies cutting the work on the diagonal, and in their
center the pale body of Christ nailed to his cross. Not a triptych like the Rubens painting,
the Cuzco work brings the figural grouping in the wings of the Rubens version onto
the central (and only) canvas. This work is hardly singular, as it today keeps company
with over a dozen Rubens renditions in the churches that surround Cuzco’s Plaza de
Armas.
These choice examples—the Cristos de caña, the Tecamachalco paintings, and Rubens-
derived paintings—underscore a critical point: just how Europeanate so much of Latin
American art was meant to appear, derived as it so often was from European models
that made their way across the Atlantic. But while resemblance to European prototypes
is an essential historical reality, it need and should not be a historiographic one. Simply
put, because much of the art of colonial Latin America ‘looks’ so much like art from
early modern Europe, it has generated the foundational expectation that its art history
might look like that of Europe as well, and in particular an art history centered on an
artist and (usually) his oeuvre. Today, however, we are all the more aware of how
imbricated the category of the ‘artist’ was with a particular social milieu of artistic pro-
duction, and how different that European milieu was from those in the colonies. Thus,
we are more likely to understand the ‘artist’ not as an autonomous (and self-evident)
figure, but rather one section of a mutually constituting field composed of an artist, an
audience, and a Vasari (or another chronicler like him). It is to the first of these terms
that we now turn.
Figure 6. Peter Paul Rubens, The Raising of the Cross, 1610–1611, Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekathedraal,
Antwerp.
The Artist
Confronting a body of Europeanate artworks, it seems logical that the writers of the first
Latin American art histories, created in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
turned to the time-honored and well-charted Vasarian model, to the idea that an art
history should be based on artists and their works (Couto 1872; Groot 1859). In this
fulsome enterprise, no book looms larger than Manuel Toussaint’s Pintura colonial en
México, written in 1934—around the time he authored the Cervecería pamphlet—
though not published until 1965 when it was posthumously shepherded into print by
Xavier Moyssén (Toussaint 1965). In it, Toussaint appropriated models that had been
developed for Europe’s art. As such, nearly the entire volume is divided into a consider-
ation of individual artists, some of the earliest trained in Europe, with subsequent gener-
ations trained by their acolytes in New Spain. The biographical emphasis, with a heavy
insistence on familial and workshop genealogies, is easily seen in his chapter headings;
a not-untypical one, for example, reads ‘Los discípulos de Sebastián López de Arteaga:
José Juárez y Pedro Ramírez, Baltasar de Echave y Rioja’ (Toussaint 1965, 104). These indi-
vidual biographical units, in turn, were gathered into a two-part trajectory that followed a
historical arc, as artists of ‘el apogeo’ were followed by those of ‘la decadencia.’ The foun-
dation of this model can be traced, through the centuries of art historical writing in
Europe, back to Vasari, who first set the art of the Italian Renaissance on a similar trajec-
tory. His Lives is divided into an arc of three sections, its highpoint marked by Michelan-
gelo, before it quickly devolves into a ‘mannerist’ period of lesser artistic achievement.
And, if we consider Toussaint’s surprising treatment of sixteenth-century material, dis-
cussed below, we might also understand his book’s structure to be likewise tripartite.
The faith in the possibility of writing a history around the artist—whether his biogra-
phy, or his name—animates Toussaint’s Pintura colonial. Toussaint, despite several
lacunae of documentary evidence that he recognized, was determined to hang onto the
‘artist’ as the key feature of his history. His determination is most notable in the
opening section of his book, before he arrives at the oil paintings of the seventeenth
century that he held, with full European bias, in highest esteem. For one of the exceptional
features of Toussaint’s Pintura colonial is that it begins with sections devoted not only to
early and anonymously authored paintings, but also to codices and feather-work mosaics
created by indigenous craftsmen. These were works whose creators were then unknown,
whose construction was associated with the names of the great friars who had overseen
their completion, rather than with the hands that actually gave them shape. In considering
the grand cycles of painting that cover the walls of the earliest monasteries and churches,
he wrote movingly of the ‘infinidad de indios pintores’ whose names were lost to time
(Toussaint 1965, 25). And yet Toussaint’s remedy to this blind spot was to extend the
existing methodology: to recover, as best he could, the names of indigenous painters
from the available historical sources. Thus, the early sections of Pintura colonial mark
an attempt to graft the methodology used in the later parts of the book onto the earlier
material record. To this end, there is a revealing paragraph in Toussaint’s account in
which he reproduced the signature found on one late sixteenth-century portrait that he
suspected to have been created by an indigenous artist (Figure 7). He read the name as
‘J. Aquino.’ We reproduce part of the page here to show how the signature was set, occu-
pying a largely blank space and breaking the otherwise even typeface of the pages. The dis-
covery of this name, so the logic goes, was the kernel of hope around which, with time and
care, a full biography and corpus of works could be fostered.
Such a way of setting the name hints at another reason for the enduring hold of Vasari,
a hold that extends well beyond Latin America and continues to the present, notably in the
recent interest of major museums to begin collecting colonial art. That is the art market.
The setting of Aquino’s name in Pintura echoed the appearance of the artist signatures
reproduced in the influential Bénézit dictionaries, the industry standard for the identifi-
cation of artists and the proper attribution of works through signatures. First published
in three volumes between 1911 and 1923, which have grown to 14 volumes in the 2006
English-language edition, Bénézit was more necessary for the dealer and auction house
Figure 7. Manuel Toussaint, Pintura colonial en México, p. 24.

than for the scholar, as the creation of a tightly delimited corpus with secure attributions
was crucial for the value of the artwork as a commodity of limited supply (Bénézit 2006).
But Toussaint reproduced mostly works in national collections and thus kept the question
of the market and its logic largely out of his frame (and we still know very little about the
early market for colonial works, even though the contemporary market for colonial works
plays no small role in the present-day endurance of the Vasarian paradigm). Instead, the
enlarged signature of ‘J. Aquino’ held a methodological place in his text, a physical break at
the end of the page, which marked a conceptual open space, a space where his lack of
knowledge about indigenous painters would eventually be rectified by future empirical
discoveries.
We can thus better understand both the rationale and the pitfalls of Toussaint’s desire
to publish, in Pintura, names of otherwise unknown artists, indigenous or not, and to
extend them into biographical sketches when possible. For instance, in 1932 when he
first saw the murals of Tecamachalco, he posited, based on the mention of an artist’s
name in a locally written history, that they were the work of a certain Juan Gerson
(Toussaint 1932). He went on to amplify Gerson’s biography by arguing, on the basis

of the style of the sotocoro paintings, that this name belonged to an immigrant Flemish
painter who had trained in Italy before heading across the Atlantic to complete the
work at Tecamachalco in the 1560s, an opinion reinscribed by George Kubler, who con-
cluded that ‘European masters, towards the last quarter of the century, dominated the
artists production in many Indian towns’ (Toussaint 1932; Kubler 1948, 2:368; Toussaint
1965, 40–41). But given that Toussaint, who died in 1955, was deeply concerned with a
Mexican art history that included indigenous production, he would have been the first
to applaud the scholars who argued against his own idea of the artist’s European
origins, assigning instead the paintings to an indigenous artist (Pérez Salazar 1963;
Camelo Arredondo et al. 1964). Arredondo et al. hypothesized that this Indian noble
was trained in the convent and belonged to a family of tlacuiloque, or painter-scribes
(1964, 28). But as if to add a cautionary note to the quest for a painter to link to an
oeuvre, Pablo Escalante has even more recently argued that Juan Gerson may have
been an indigenous scribe, but not the painter of the murals, perhaps unwittingly revealing
just how much a Vasarian, and in turn a Toussaintian, art history make us desire to have
an artist (Escalante Gonzalbo 2006).
The case of Juan Gerson indicates just how reliant ‘artists’ are upon art historians
(beginning with Vasari) to extract their existence from the historical record. And, in
some sense, Toussaint would become the Vasari that Mexico never had. In the accounts
of his working methods, one even senses a type of deliberate self-fashioning along Vasar-
ian lines; in her introduction to the translation of Toussaint’s Colonial Art in Mexico,
Elizabeth Wilder Weismann, for example, tells of Toussaint’s travels on horseback
across the Mexican countryside to chronicle works and hunt down names, just as
Vasari had done some four centuries prior (Weismann 1967, vii). But a central
problem arises in claiming Toussaint as a kind of belated Vasari for Mexico and in creating
a new set of candidates from other parts of the viceroyalties. And this is a problem that
current scholarship seems resistant to address head on. Vasari wrote largely about his con-
temporaries; and when he reached back to artists of previous generations, he had access to
others’ memories of them as well as to living lore and comparatively intact written records.
In contrast, Toussaint—along with other early Mexican art historians—wrote about very
distant artists, their lives separated by chronological, epistemological and archival chasms.
The biographical model inherited from Vasari might be a tempting framework on which
to hang the list of names we glean from colonial canvases, walls, and contracts, but it
depends upon a rich archival record and period accounts to adequately build it out.
So in recognizing the dependence of the artist on a Vasari-figure to chronicle his
achievements, as well as on an audience to receive and recognize his creations as such,
we must also recognize how dependent our reconstructions of these tripartite components
(artist-artwork-chronicler) are on the archive itself. While, of course, every archive offers
only a partial and highly constructed record, those of Latin America, reshaped by the shift-
ing agendas of Habsburg and then Bourbon colonial regimes and torn to tatters by wars
for independence and revolution, are more chimerical than those found across Europe.1
While the biographically centered monograph may be (and has been) one way to approach
writing an art history of colonial Latin America, we cannot ignore the silences that haunt
these biographies and, particularly in the seventeenth century, the near total silence about
the contemporary reception of colonial artists by the audiences who saw and lived among
their works. It is not for lack of looking that art historians have found few records detailing
reception, a crucial meter in assessing the social roles of artists. The valuable archival cat-
alogs and compilations of period accounts are not to be overlooked, but they tell us much
less than we would need to know to construct a parallel Vasarian universe in Latin
America (Ramírez Montes et al. 1990–2011; Tovar de Teresa 1988). Our understanding
of these artists is further hamstrung because the artists’ own words seem to have been
rarely set down, which denies us understanding of their training, their workshop struc-
tures and methods, and their self-conceptions. Or perhaps these once existed in letters
and personal materials, though these appear not to have been saved, which may well be
just as significant. These absences leave art historians without an adequate paper trail
on which the monograph, as a genre, necessarily depends. If the archive refuses to yield
pictures of flesh-and-bone ‘artists’ in fully realized social environments, is the category
worth reconsidering?
The problems attached to emphasizing the artist as the central and necessary feature of
a history of art is perhaps most acute when it comes to the art of the sixteenth century.
Despite Toussaint’s optimism about the future of ‘Aquino,’ no such corrective body of
individual indigenous artists has emerged from the shadows of the archive or the store-
houses of the museum. The scarcity of indigenous archives—and research in them—in
central areas of production, like Mexico City, surely plays a part, with some notable excep-
tions (Webster 2009; Cummins and Rappaport 2012). But the lack of individual creators is
also attributable, certainly in Mexico in the sixteenth century, to the structure of indigen-
ous production itself. It is relatively clear that the artists of the Florentine Codex, for
example, were not considering their work as something inalienable from a single artistic
self that had brought it into being. These artists seemed to have been assigned to work on
the book’s folios at random, meaning that the final binding of the manuscript left their
work and, one might even argue, their identities interleaved. So while Diana Magaloni
might assign pieces of the codex to twenty-two artists amongst whom she believes the
labor was divided, this was not an outcome sought by the artists themselves, who left
their works unsigned and unmarked (Magaloni 2012, 52–55). The parsing up of manu-
scripts into individual hands is a product of our methodological leanings and desires; in
the Florentine, as on other sixteenth-century works like Yale’s Beinecke map, another
work clearly undertaken by a team of artists, a seamless unity was valued above individ-
ual contribution (Miller and Mundy 2012). On the front page of the Codex Mendoza, to
cite another canonical example, the signature of the French Franciscan and sixteenth-
century bibliophile André Thevet, who we assume was the book’s first owner, stands
in stark contrast to the absence of self-identifying marks by the manuscript’s actual
makers.
These power dynamics, and related survival of historical documentation, mean that
European names are the ones that are inscribed and that survive for us in the present.
There was no Vasari, no van Mander, no Pacheco, and no von Sandrart to crisscross
the cities of New Spain in the sixteenth century and document indigenous artists and
their ateliers at work—most surely because these were not considered artists (in the Vasar-
ian sense of the word) whose art was the inalienable product of a single human mind and
hand, nor even that this was an art that was worthy of its own history. Compounding this
ambivalence was the attitude of indigenous artists themselves. It is not that indigenous
artists were unfamiliar with the idea of the signed work; in their long exposure to Euro-
pean prints, for example, the artists of the Florentine Codex would have encountered
artists’ names, indices to their creators. Many of the European prints that circulated in
New Spain from the 1530s and beyond bore the initials or monograms of their artists.
However, while the native artists saw traces of individually named artists in the European
prints they used as models, they did not mark their own works—none of the Florentine
pages bears the signature or mark of ‘AV’ for Antonio Valeriano, the trilingual Nahua
intellectual and scion of the Aztec royal family, who we know to have been involved in
the manuscript project. Nor did any of the other tlacuiloque, or scribe-painters, choose
to make himself (or herself) present through signature or initials. Thus we must consider
that anonymity may have been a choice of the tlacuiloque class in New Spain. Given that
manuscripts, like other works of art, were collective enterprises, the individual hand may
have been a disruptive presence in the desired visual harmony and uniformity of the work,
and our search for one must be understood as a historiographically conditioned quest, not
something called for by the works themselves.
So in the case of the sixteenth century, Vasarian art history’s primary and essential
methodology, that of the artist biography visually manifest in a distinctive individual
style, and the method first seized upon by Toussaint to remedy his own ignorance of indi-
genous creators, may have been foiled by these indigenous actors themselves. Recognition
of this may call on us to ask other, even more productive, questions of indigenous works.
Perhaps more to the point, about indigenous makers: if the sixteenth-century Nahua tla-
cuiloque, for instance, did not see themselves in Vasarian terms, how did they view their
own production? Is the default term ‘craftsman’ as equal a misfit as ‘artist’? And how
might we rethink conditions of ‘subjectivity,’ so central to the notion of artistic self-fash-
ioning, if we let go of the category ‘artist’ altogether?
The Seventeenth-Century ‘Artist’

The Vasarian emphasis on the artist is not just problematic for the study of indigenous
artists in the sixteenth century, however. It is also mismatched to the period in which
its application seems more secure: the painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-
ries. This art was the byproduct of an early seventeenth-century stream of mostly Spanish
immigrants that brought with it painters trained—and objects made—in Europe. These
painters clustered in urban areas, where they were favored by an increasingly wealthy
patron class, including officials of the Catholic Church. We do not know these artists
by any Vasarian treatise, as already noted. Instead, we have constellations of works,
some with secure provenance, from which artistic biographies have been extracted and
bolstered by sparse supporting documents from the archive. Modeling their business prac-
tices on European guilds, these artists signed contracts with patrons, some of which are
preserved in notarial archives; others, particularly architects, were appointed to official
positions as they oversaw the colony’s infrastructure; and many signed their works directly
(Barrio Lorenzot 1920; Bargellini 2006; Mues Orts 2008). Because, by the seventeenth
century, New Spanish material has European analogs (artists’ names, bodies of identifiable
works, archival documents confirming economic activities), it comes as no surprise that
here Toussaint was best able to draw on Europe’s model of art history; in approaching
this material, Toussaint’s art history comes into its own, identifying named artists, families
Figure 8. Cristóbal de Villalpando, Adoration of the Magi, Fordham University Collection.

Figure 9. Cristóbal de Villalpando, detail of Adoration of the Magi, Fordham University Collection.
of artists with dynasty-like lineages, and artworks to graft onto a European teleology from
a (belated) seventeenth-century High Renaissance [el apogeo] to ‘Baroque’ decadencia.
If then, as we have noted, the signature in Toussaint’s text of ‘Aquino’ marks a rend, a
desire for the yet-to-be-fully discovered artist, the signature of Villalpando offers a suture
(Figures 8 and 9). Born in New Spain around 1649, Cristóbal de Villalpando would
become one of Mexico City’s leading painters; we know almost nothing about his training,
nor about his working methods and workshop organization, but the web of god-parent
relations registered in the baptismal records of his children reveals his circle to have
included other leading painters in the city and in Puebla (Gutiérrez Haces et al. 1997,
31–47). Toussaint’s text offers praise for one of his most important commissions, the
cycle of paintings he created for the sacristy of the cathedral in Mexico City. In identifying
his corpus, including those in the impressive catalogue raisonné of his works published in
1997, art historians have been helped immensely by Villalpando’s habit of signing his can-
vases, motivated in large part, it should be noted, by the economic (and not necessarily
status-oriented) considerations of the recently reformed painters’ guild (Bargellini 2006).
One work, unknown to the authors of the 1997 catalog, but easily identifiable by Vil-
lalpando’s prominent signature, is his Adoration of the Magi, one of the many religious
compositions that this prolific painter created. In it, the hand of the kneeling magi,
Caspar, rests at a column base in the lower right corner. His long elegant fingers, like
the hand of the painter himself, point to a line of text (Figure 9): ‘Villalpando invento i
pinto año de 83,’ followed by a small flourish, akin to those at the end of scribal signatures,
a confident slash of pure paint that makes no attempt at dissemblance. His use of ‘invento’
in this and other canvases was unusual among his peers and, as some of the only words of
the artist that survive for us, is particularly significant (Bargellini 2012). With such a bold
claim to self-identification, facture and invention, Villalpando would seem not only to be
aware of, but also to cast himself in the mold of the Vasarian idea of an individual artist,
and an artist as individual. Firmly documented in the historical record, with a secure body
of known works, many signed, he was an artist, along with the rest of his generation, that
could stand on firm footing in Toussaint’s construction of Pintura colonial; the life-work
model, which had so unsettlingly evaded application to sixteenth-century Mexican
material, could be much more confidently implemented.
Yet Villalpando’s signature, in fact, indexes exactly how far he was from Europe and
just how inappropriate the wholesale adoption of a Vasarian life-work model for the
artist really is. Despite indefatigable work of art historians in the archive, the apparent
esteem of this artist in the period (given his important commissions), and the many scho-
larly publications about his work, we know very little of his life, his training, and the ways
in which he understood his own artistic practice. Moreover, considering the mutually con-
stitutive nature of artist, audience and a ‘Vasari,’ we have little existing evidence for the
social conditions of and reception for a New Spanish painter of the late seventeenth
century. If the ‘artist’ is seen as a stand-alone autonomous entity, rather than, as we
suggest, a category contingent upon an audience, one may never come to confront the
effect of the wildly divergent social milieu of artistic production within the colonies,
nor the presence of patrons and interpretive communities who were often ethnically
and culturally distinct from their European counterparts. Thus it is premature, if nigh
impossible, to assume that the contours of the ‘artist’ in seventeenth-century Latin
America were equivalent to his European counterparts.
One measure of the distance between these two conceptions—largely overlooked until
the present—is suggested by the fact that almost no painter in Europe would have signed a
canvas with the distinction ‘invento.’ The term was redundant in painterly practice, but
instead was a product of the burgeoning early-modern trade in prints that replicated
extant paintings or drawings. On these prints, the artist who created the ‘original’ compo-
sition was named as inventor or his action was marked invenit to distinguish him from the
craftsman who carried out the manual fabrication of the printed plate itself, often signaled
sculpsit, and the publisher of the work. In other words, ‘invenit’—the term that Villapando
adopted—was widely used in Europe on prints, but not on paintings, to designate the orig-
inator of a given composition.2
In the same years that Villalpando signed his Adoration, he was beginning a cycle of
paintings for the sacristy of Mexico City’s cathedral. The final canvas he would complete
for the commission in ca. 1686 was of the Triumphant Archangel Michael. And here too,
Villalpando signaled his invention, signing ‘Xptoval [Cristóbal] de Villalpando Ynventor
Pintó por su mano’ [painted by his hand]. Villalpando’s appropriation of the terms of
printed production reveals that the canon he knew was a paper one, that the works and
signatures to which he looked to define his own acts of creation were those that he encoun-
tered on printed copies of a Europe he largely knew in black and white. Indeed, in Villal-
pando’s most famous composition for the sacristy, The Triumph of the Church, he
combined three European print sources, two by Rubens and one by the famed Fleming’s
forerunner Maarten de Vos (Hollstein 1949, nos. 141 and 1257). In Figure 10, we repro-
duce just one of those works, an etching done after a Rubens composition by Theodoor
van Thulden, known as the Laurea Calloana, that served as a one of Villalpando’s
sources; Figure 11 is a detail of its lower right corner, which reads ‘P.P. Rub. Inuent.’
(The de Vos source, not reproduced here, similarly reads ‘Martin de Vos inven.’) In the
end, rather than similarity, Villalpando’s adoption of the terms he found on his paper
sources pointed to the resolute gap—the distance of the print’s journey, in fact—
between him and his European counterparts. Rather than highlighting the way he
Figure 10. Theodoor van Thulden, Laurea Calloana, Flemish, after Peter Paul Rubens, print, Flemish.
Used by permission of the Office of the President and University Art Collections, Fordham University.
seamlessly fits into European paradigms of authorship, his use of European terms points to
the fact that his engagement with Europe was modulated by a paper trail across the
Atlantic.3
While some might argue that even though Villapando’s use of ‘invenit’ was perhaps
naive, his appropriation of the term, in the end, served the same goals of self-aggrandize-
ment and self-fashioning as those of his European contemporaries. In other words, no
matter how he chose to express it, Villalpando was still staking a claim for himself and
for his cohort of painters in late seventeenth-century New Spain to be inventors on the
level of a Rubens or a de Vos. But in the absence of a rich archive, like the one existing
for European painters that has allowed us to understand such leading figures as being
fashioned and fashioning themselves as singular and self-aware creators, we urge
caution in assuming that Latin American painters—even ones well known in their day
—thought about themselves, and their production, in the same terms as these European
cynosures.
What can be said for certain is that this claim of ‘invenit’ was evanescent because Villa-
pando had no Vasari, no chronicler to extend that brief line of text ‘Villalpando invento i
pinto año de 83,’ into an entire treatise that would advocate and define the painter’s claims.
Figure 11. Detail of Figure 10.
In other words, a Vasarian figure is essential to the categories of ‘artist’ and ‘audience’
because he articulates contemporary concepts of ‘artist’ as well as ventriloquizes, to
some extent, the expectations of the receptive public. Yet we know of no early modern
art histories written in colonial Latin America. Rather, the extant evidence suggests that
Villalpando faced a society that valued artists differently—one is tempted to say less—
and that whatever seeds he might (or might not) have sown to devise the terms of this
engagement, to craft his own reception along with his artworks, fell on fallow ground.
To give some sense of how this differed from the conditions inhabited by some of
Europe’s leading artists, we offer here a very brief reception history and historiographic
overview for Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640). We choose Rubens here for two main
reasons: on the one hand because he in many ways epitomizes the author/artist category
as it has come to be understood in the history of Europe’s art; and, on the other, because
Villalpando, as we have already shown, engaged directly with the compositions and terms
of authorship that were created and used by Rubens, an artist to whom Villalpando is often
compared both on the grounds of his style and his eminence in the historiography of colo-
nial painting. To be very clear, such a comparison is meant neither to make a straw man
out of European historiography, which has its own complex trajectories, nor is it to offer a
meter-stick to which a colonial history would need to measure up in order to merit being
told. Rather, it is to suggest that the wildly divergent source bases preclude an easy trans-
ference of the category of the ‘artist,’ as it came to be understood from Europe’s sources, to
Latin America.
With Rubens, we could start with his own words—his expansive correspondence with
patrons, collaborators, diplomats and friends—that have been compiled and translated
into many languages (Magurn 1955). We might then consider his collection of art, the
objects with which he surrounded himself, to say nothing of the objects we know
(through the paper trails they have left) to have circulated through his house and
studio (Muller 1989). We could consult his fragmentary writings about art and artistic
theory, which have been the topics of study in their own right (Muller 1982). Though
far too extensive to list here, we could then scrutinize the words that his contemporaries
and other seventeenth-century followers of a fully blossomed Vasarian tradition penned
about his life and his art; these include many of the names we have already listed—Car-
ducho, Pacheco, von Sandrart—but also extend to such landmark art theorists as
Bellori, Descamps, De Piles, and Palomino, among others. Beyond words, we could
inspect the visage of the artist himself in the many printed portraits, produced by other
artists, that circulated Rubens’s likeness around and beyond the European continent
(Depauw and Van de Velde 2004). To bypass the nineteenth century’s monographic cel-
ebration of the artist entirely, we might look to the pinnacle of Rubens historiography that
avails itself of this massive source base: the 29-volume (and ongoing) Corpus Rubenianum
Ludwig Burchard, which aims to catalog every work (including all preparatory drawings,
painted sketches, and reproductive prints) produced under Rubens’s supervision and
compile them with provenance, primary source writings and scholarly bibliography.
For Villalpando and his contemporaries we have much, much less. A monograph on
Villalpando, however rigorous in execution and however much it may aid further research,
will always and necessarily be slim in comparison. As noted, we know next to nothing of
his training—or of training in this period more generally—we have no letters, we have
sparse archival documents, few contracts, and almost no reception history. In turn,
the brief mentions of painters that we glean from descriptions of Mexico City’s many
triumphal entries, references we find packaged within (by the seventeenth century)
tired tropes of classical antiquity, feel fleeting.
This inequality of source bases offers the art historian some choices. First, one might
choose to fill in these gaps with the expectation that what happened in Europe probably hap-
pened in Latin America, a proposition that likely strikes most as obviously problematic.
Second, one could continue to tell a history of the Latin American ‘artist’ on Europe’s
terms without filling in the gaps; such a tack, however, would mean that viceregal histories
would always be comparatively impoverished to those of Europe (Chakrabarty 2000). Or
one can choose to ask how, or perhaps whether, the categories really serve us at all.
Given the symbiotic nature of artist/audience/Vasari in the historiography of the life-
work model, our understanding of the first of these categories in Latin America is imper-
iled by the lack of the last two. As we have noted, the largest silence on the part of the
receptive public is the complete lack of theoretical treatises (such as Vasari’s Lives)
written in Latin America during the entire viceregal period. As such, studies that have
addressed the ‘self-fashioning’ and self-definition of artists have not had recourse to sus-
tained period language, pulling instead from fragmentary guild ordinances (Mues Orts
2008; Deans-Smith 2009), partial translations of European treatises (Mues Orts 2006),
and the scant words of signatures (Bargellini 2006, 2012). While invaluable for the ways
they have stitched together fragments from extant documents, these studies do lead one
to wonder whether the thread they use to do so is not of European origin; that is to say
that the very notion of the artistic ‘self,’ and indeed a self that needs fashioning, is a pre-
sumption we bring with us to Latin America from a Europeanate history of art.
Despite the thinness of the archive and the printed primary sources, most scholars have
taken their cue from Vasari and Toussaint in pursuing the notion of the ‘self,’ the artistic life,
as the core of larger case studies. A face that gazes out to us from Villalpando’s final canvas
for the sacristy of Mexico City’s cathedral, one that scholars have supposed to be a self-por-
trait of the artist himself and thus one of the first artist portraits known from New Spain,
beckons us on this interpretive path (Maza 1964). But let us recognize that the assignment
of the face as an artistic self-portrait is based on European precedent, where ‘important’
artists began to insert themselves into their crowded scenes in the fifteenth century. Can
the assumed portrait—like the signature—be confidently taken as index of an emergent
artistic self, when we have almost no reception history of the piece, and no portraits of
Villalpando by his contemporaries against which to compare? Instead, the unmoored iden-
tity of the painted figure invites us to think more carefully about the complicated subject
positions that viceregal artists could occupy and the particular epistemologies of making
to which they could respond.
The ‘Artwork’ in Colonial Latin America

In our tripartite construction of artist/audience/Vasari, we have set aside one key element:
the oeuvre. If the ‘artist’ is a necessarily incomplete category due to the weakness of its
other parts, then might not the extant ‘artwork’ fill in the pieces of an artistic whole under-
stood to emerge from a dialectic between an artist’s life and his oeuvre? The life-work
model, as it became elaborated by the European monographers of the nineteenth
century, rested on the belief that an artist’s life and his work are mutually constituting
elements. The life of an artist emerged through an engagement with the work; as Gabriele
Guercio describes it, the resultant monograph offers the ‘vision of the artist as a “subject”
born within the practice of artistic creation and engaged with the very dynamic of being
and becoming’ (Guercio 2008, 12). For as the artist took on new commissions, found his
own solutions to certain pictorial problems, he added to his repertoire and forged new
pathways of style and iconography; he remade himself in the process of making his works.
The art historians who wrote monographs in the nineteenth century and developed the
life-work model into a usable art historical tool faced some of the same problems that
Toussaint would. For they too stood at the precipice of a rupture between a past (and
its artists) that they wished to know and a historical present they inhabited along with
the artworks that survived. These works were the historical residue of the lives that had
brought them into being. And so connoisseurship, as an art historical practice, was
born to reattach these works to the artists—the lives—who had created them. In these
final sections, we turn towards ‘connoisseurship’ because it has been, and remains, an
essential methodology, albeit a problematic one (Melius 2011), of the art historical mono-
graph. Moreover, connoisseurship might be understood by some to offer hope for the
Latin American monograph in promising to define an oeuvre based on style, which is
to say without necessary recourse to reception history or archival documents. However,
we suggest that such an approach would be impossible given the conservation history
of Latin American artworks.
The enterprise of ‘attributing’ works to the artists of the past was developed fully by
Giovanni Morelli and his followers precisely as an outgrowth of the Vasarian model
(Morelli 1880). They argued that artworks could be ‘attributed’ to the artists who had
created them based on style alone; if features of pictorial style are the inalienable
product of an individual—an assumption in its own right—the logic goes that we might
learn to recognize features of particular styles with a fair degree of certainty. Faced with
skeletal sketches of artists provided by period chroniclers, such as Vasari, Morellian con-
noisseurs used attribution as a way to pair artworks with artists and thus spin larger cor-
puses worthy of longer, monographic treatments. And they even identified artists, for
whom no textual record remained, by identifying particular stylistic unity amongst group-
ings of surviving works.
If brief mentions in Latin American sources and surviving documents sketch out bits
and pieces of an artist’s life, could it be augmented by the works themselves? Might, in
other words, the bare framework of the biographically driven monograph be filled in by
the work of a connoisseurial gaze, which could identify and catalog the artist’s work?
For if we agree that the documentary trail refuses to reveal an acceptably ‘complete’
artist along European (Vasarian or Toussaintian) lines, some might argue that a fine-
grained analysis of a given painter’s oeuvre could surely aid the art historian.
To look at the potential for, or place of, connoisseurship in the art history of colonial
works, we take a journey to the south. In the Andes, the earthquakes that have shaken the
region as violently as wars for independence and the guerilla warfare that raged in the late
twentieth century have left the archive an even less hospitable venue for the art historian.
The traces of known artists are fainter in Cuzco, or Puno, or La Paz than they are in
Mexico City or Puebla, certainly because of the state of the archives and the degree of
research in them, but also because painters seem to have occupied different social and pro-
fessional statuses in different regions. But as if to compensate, the late eighteenth- and
early nineteenth-century zeal for neoclassical interiors (not to mention the Reform acts
of Benito Juárez), which left many Mexican baroque churches stripped clean of their
gilded retablos and embedded sculpture and painting, had far less purchase in the
southern viceroyalty. What better place, then, to turn to the works themselves, which
are often to be found in their original contexts, in order to find the presence of their
creators within strokes of paint and deep-carved grooves of wood?
A cluster of unsigned canvases in Cuzco quickly complicates such an endeavor. In
Cuzco’s Iglesia del Triunfo, we find a dramatic scene of Christ being raised on the cross
(Figure 5). Though derived from a print by Rubens, as we have mentioned, the work
should still, hypothetically, promise to reveal a distinct artistic personality, or style,
beyond the generalities of Rubens’s composition (Figure 5). Unlikely to have seen the
original painting in Southern Netherlands, the Cuzqueño painter almost certainly
copied a print that made its way across the Atlantic and connected the now-anonymous
Peruvian painter to the European master. Yet this source was only a sheet of paper, a
morass of lines, drained substitute for a painting. It was the artist’s task to reanimate it,
to translate it back into paint, taking up brush and palette to reinterpret Rubens. Thus
the Triunfo painting should be marked with an artist’s own inalienable style, a product
of a distinct hand and mind. And the same should be true of other versions of the
same composition: no more than a hundred steps away in the Capilla del Señor de los
Temblores within the distinct, but connected, edifice of the cathedral, hangs another
canvas copied from the very same Rubens composition. Across Cuzco’s Plaza de
Armas, the Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús houses yet another rendition of Rubens’s dra-
matic composition above the impressive portal to the adjacent Capilla de Nuestra Señora
de Loreto (Figure 12). Despite the lunette-shaped frame in which he worked, the painter
has still accommodated all the essential features and figures of Rubens’s complicated scene
to the canvas.
Figure 12. Unknown artist, The Raising of the Cross, Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús, Cuzco, above the
portal to the adjacent Capilla de Nuestra Señora de Loreto.
The presence of three major canvases drawn from the same Rubens print in three build-
ings around Cuzco’s main square testifies to the important presence of Rubens in Cuzco
and the New World, more generally. But what of our Cuzqueño painter, or painters? If the
three canvases are the product of the same hand, if patrons were returning to the same
painter to demand exact replicas from Rubens’s prints, the connoisseurial approach
would establish one painter for these canvases, a single artist famed as a Rubens replicator.
With canvases like these, our quarry—the life’s work to be discerned by the connoisseurial
eye—seems within reach; with them, we might reconstruct or reimagine one or more
distinct individuals who brought these works to life as part of their own lives, their own
artistic practices.
Sadly, the state of the Triunfo painting denies access to such an artistic personality.
Comparing it to its printed prototype reveals that the painting has been moved—at
least once—and cut down slightly on both sides, slicing through the figures at its edges,
in order to exactly fit the narrow wall-space to the side of the church’s main retable
where it now hangs. And yet nothing changed this canvas as much as the massive restor-
ation effort that was conducted in the cathedral complex. The painted surface reveals little
about the first brush to touch it, those first strokes that were laid down by a hand, or a set
of hands, by an artist and his workshop. The canvas might now be considered the collabora-
tive product of a colonial artist, later colonial-era church decorators who may have initially
cut it down, and a modern team of restorers. In comparing this canvas to its twin in La Com-
pañía, one gets a sense of the extent of this restoration (Figures 5 and 12). Untouched by
restorers, the Compañía version stares back at us in a no-less lamentable condition; as the
canvas sags on its stretchers, paint cracks, fractures and, in many spots, seems to flake away
before the viewer’s very eyes. And yet both this relic of colonial fallout and the cathedral’s
monuments to post-colonial reparation are at odds with the aims of the historian of style,
challenging the connoisseur’s gaze. With the Compañía painting, how could one ever
discern something as subtle as an artist’s hand from its current, ravaged state? And in the
Triunfo painting, whose hands, whose styles, are we even looking at?
Instead, this painted triad in Cuzco does reveal a great deal about the social roles of
these creators, showing us that the ‘artist’ was as different between Antwerp and
Mexico City as between Mexico City and Cuzco. The Cuzqueño painters approached
their source quite differently from, let us say, a Villalpando in Mexico, who often
mined Rubens’s printed compositions, stripping them to their constitutive parts—a
figure here, a structure there—for reuse and reassemblage. Instead, as the comparisons
show, the Cuzqueño painters created more faithful copies, ones conforming more
closely to their printed prototype. What might their eagerness to cleave to—or inability
to stray from—the source tell us about their social capital? Notarial archives reveal some-
thing of the social interactions from which these works emerged: frequently, a patron
would commission a painter to paint a specific iconography, a specific composition, by
presenting the artist with a print and contractually obligating him to follow it as a
model in producing a painting (Cornejo Bouroncle 1960; Ojeda 2009). The contract
and the print stripped agency from the artist. Compare these practices to their European
counterparts during the same period: in Europe, for an expensive commissioned work, a
painter would much more likely present the patron with a bozzetto, a mockup of his own
devising. It would be the artist’s own sketch that would serve as a similar type of contract,
or guarantee, of what the final composition would look like. Earlier in this essay, we
described the symbiotic nature of the categorical figure we call the ‘artist’ with other
social actors; the commissioning practices in Cuzco, which reversed the flow of agency
from patron to painter, reveal very different boundaries of that category in seventeenth-
century South America than elsewhere. And as we have only begun to suggest, the
current state of the works these artists produced disallows the art historian to interrogate
this category from within the practices unspecified in the contract, which is to say from the
works themselves.
The double-edged sword of conservation

Poorly conserved works, aging with time or poorly restored, are hardly unique to Latin
America. Indeed, the idea of a carefully conserved oeuvre passed down through the eras
(mostly in royal collections) is the exception rather than the norm. Nor are conservation
efforts that unfold over time and are the product of various hands and agendas, efforts that
make it difficult to establish a stable oeuvre for most artists, a purely Latin American
phenomenon. The goals of the conservator and those of the art historian are often in oppo-
sition, and have been decried by connoisseurs from the beginning (Berenson 1903, 74).
Nonetheless, it is valuable to consider connoisseurship in Latin America both because it
may—erroneously, we would suggest—appear to be a viable way to bolster the life-work
model, and because the history of conservation in Latin America along with the benefits
and complications it entails for art historians has received too little scholarly attention.
At their core, projects like the one in Cuzco’s cathedral are about the preservation of
national cultural patrimony. Much as Toussaint’s art history was written for his nation,
these objects have been preserved for theirs: for the churches who control them as cultural
capital, for tourists who come to see them, for the throngs of churchgoers who find solace
and inspiration in them. These works, then, are resolutely not preserved for the museum
or the academy, with their distinctly historical and empiricist aims; and this also means
that records are rarely produced along with this restoration, records to reverse engineer
a process potentially gone awry, records to document what was left and what was
added, records that might help us locate a viceregal artist through the work itself. At
the same time, they have been heroic endeavors, particularly in Peru and Bolivia where
viceregal cultural heritage has survived. Restoration has also often gone hand in hand
with extensive registration of cultural patrimony, the prohibition of sales on the open
market, the retrieval of looted goods, and the prosecution of thieves. All of these efforts
mean that these essential objects from the viceregal period do survive and often in their
original contexts; and such preserved contexts open up other rich fields of possibility
beyond the Vasarian paradigm.

While restoration and protection of national patrimony is a global phenomenon, in
Latin America it is colored by colonialism’s unique legacy. Consider Cuzco, a highland
city in cash-strapped Peru. Here, the cultural wing of the Spanish media conglomerate,
Telefónica, has funded a large part of the restoration efforts of the city’s artistic heritage.
Part of a Spanish ‘second conquest’ of Latin America that began in the 1990s in the econ-
omic sphere and has spilled over into the cultural one, this strange post-colonial dynamic
complicates an art historical account of these objects even further (Ruesga and Casilda
Béjar 2008). Motivated, in part, by the tax breaks that such projects offer, Telefónica
now funds restoration efforts in many countries that were once Spanish dominions
through its Fundación Telefónica; the restoration efforts in the Cuzco cathedral
complex alone cost the company 1.2 million dollars (Fundación Telefónica 2013b). But
along with their European funds comes a distinctly European set of expectations about
what a work of art should look like and what the restoration of cultural heritage really
means. Accordingly, all of Telefónica’s projects, whether in Spain, Latin America or
Morocco, proceed in line with the guidelines established by Europa Nostra, a non-profit
that ‘campaigns against the many threats to Europe’s cultural heritage’ (emphasis
added; Europa Nostra 2013; Fundación Telefónica 2013a). And, yet, the company’s com-
mitments—at least according to their press releases—are rather misleading, given that they
simply provided the funding for a project that had already been blueprinted by Cuzco’s
archbishopric and that was completed entirely by local, Peruvian conservators (personal
communication, Elizabeth Arce Kuon, 2011; personal communication, Roxana Kuon
2014). Whose ‘norms’ of restoration are we really to imagine for this project? Did Telefó-
nica assume that Peruvian restoration was being carried out according to European
standards?
Whatever the merits of this brand of Euro-centrism—the kind that comes along with
tax write-offs—it is particularly insidious for the art historian. For in Telefónica’s firm
conviction that they might restore the art of Peru along European guidelines to look
just like—just as beautiful and pristine as—Europe’s, they also ensure that it will never
actually have a history to match. In the restoration, and particularly in restoration
without extensive documentation, these objects and their capacity to be investigated art
historically actually becomes much more partial, so fractured that they fail to tolerate art
historical scrutiny. Whether a connoisseurial gaze really could resurrect a life-work model
for the art of colonial Latin America, the analytic potential of this avenue of art historical
inquiry has largely been cut off at the pass in places like Cuzco. Ironically, but also poign-
antly, the ‘More Information’ tab on Telefónica’s now cached web page about the restor-
ation of Cuzco’s cathedral leads the visitor to a 404 Server Error message: ‘File or Directory
Not Found.’4
To be fair, we have picked a relatively extreme example to animate the dangers of con-
servation. Several recent restoration efforts have shown the great promise of well-docu-
mented campaigns undertaken with as an equal eye towards investigation, as towards
conservation to restoration.5 But the case of Cuzco’s cathedral is also by no means excep-
tional. Conservation and restoration efforts across Latin America have produced ‘colonial’
works of art that are materially and, in turn, historically fictitious. And yet, at the same
time, we have also tried to stress that these fictions are often the best case scenarios in
countries that have preserved their heritage of colonial artworks.
Tracing the art historical paths laid out by Vasari leads us to dead ends: indigenous
artists who efface their own individuality; painters who exist in fragments or as works
alone, with little social or historical context; and artworks so carefully worked upon as
to deny ever finding the trace of the hand or hands that made them. Despite it all, to
claim a mismatch with Europe’s art history and the methodologies that serve as its arma-
ture is not to de facto foreclose upon an equally rich art history for Latin America. But it
does mean that certain foundational historiographic assumptions—whether in their
implementation or their avoidance—about writing art history need to be reassessed.
Beyond Vasari
Rather than discard Vasari altogether, we have pointed in this essay to places where
thinking along Vasarian lines can bear fruit, particularly in marking the distance
between a European conception of the ‘artist’ and its presumed cognate in sixteenth-
century New Spain, and in late seventeenth-century Cuzco. This distance seems to
close beginning in eighteenth-century New Spain, a time and place where self-fashioned
artists are often assumed to have fully emerged, and many of the requisite terms of the
life-work model seem on the surface to be fulfilled. But we see an even more productive
gap. In the following conclusion, we suggest that it is precisely the apparent similarity of
this eighteenth-century artistic environment with Europe’s that makes locating differ-
ence so crucial. Though a full explication of the category of the ‘artist’ in eighteenth-
century New Spain is beyond the scope of this essay, we draw here on recent art historical
scholarship that provides potent models for helping the field move forward in such an
endeavor.
In 1756 the New Spanish painter Miguel Cabrera published his Maravilla americana, a
treatise that outlined both the miracles performed by the Virgin of Guadalupe and the the
inspection of the tilma, the miraculously produced image of the Virgin, that Cabrera had
carried out with six other painters, in 1751 (Cabrera 1756). Published with statements of
support penned by his colleagues, Cabrera’s treatise represents an unusually self-reflexive
evaluation of the status of painters, parsed in terms that clearly betray knowledge of Euro-
pean artistic treatises. In the opening endorsement, José Gonzáles del Pinal, a canon of the
Real Colegiata de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, even mentions Antonio Palomino’s

three-volume Museo pictórico (1715–1724) specifically and the five artists who offer
their closing reflections are referred to as ‘Professors of this noble art of painting in the
City of Mexico’ [Professores de esta nobilissima arte de la pintura, de la Ciudad de
Mexico]. Translated into Italian and disseminated throughout Europe, the Maravilla
americana brought the group, particularly Cabrera, a fame unparalleled by other New
Spanish artists (Gutiérrez Haces 2011); when Pope Benedict XIV received Cabrera’s
copy of the icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe, he famously, and perhaps apocryphally,
exclaimed ‘Non fecit taliter omni nationi’ [God has done nothing like it for any other
nation] (Cuadriello 2001).
Towards the end of the colonial period, then, New Spanish painters seem to have been
setting themselves on equal footing as their European counterparts. Clustered around
Guadalupe’s inspection and mentioned in Cabrera’s treatise are figures recognizable as
early modern artists in the European sense. The art historian sees more than mere
hints of these men in the archives, can track their signed artworks, and can even
glimpse a reception history. By the end of the eighteenth century, at least in small
patches of the viceroyalties, European modes of art history, like the Vasarian life-work
model, appear to have found their requisite terms, albeit fleetingly given the short run-
up to waves of insurgency and wars for independence. In this process, the inspection of
the tilma was a formative event in the Europeanizing self-definition of New Spanish
artists; in its wake, painters would even lobby for the foundation of an artistic academy
to rival Madrid’s Academia de San Fernando (Mues Orts 2001, 2008).
But such an interpretive path is a treacherous one. For to understand these artists as
finally becoming equal to Europeans is to both underestimate the devastating mechanisms
of colonialism and to reproduce its ideological violence. One of colonialism’s effects is to
produce subjects who earnestly approximate the customs and habits of the mother
country, but who can never actually replicate them (Bhabha 1994). Dictating the terms
of cultural production, the colonizer commands the dominant position, and the colonial
subject is forever dependent on him, waiting to be educated—socially, politically, reli-
giously, and might we argue artistically?—to make up the difference between mimicry
and true replication. To insist, now, upon similarity is to paper over historical difference.
Moreover, following such a line risks casting a model emergent from the eighteenth
century backwards onto works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this
essay, we have moved in the opposite direction by attending to the rise of complex sub-
jectivities and divergent epistemologies of making in (primarily) the first two decades
after Spanish conquest. We propose working forward through the eighteenth century to
account for a longue durée of changing epistemes with both crucial inheritances from
Europe (and pre-conquest Latin America) and equally marked differences.
In the last ten years of innovative research on the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe,
what has become so clear is that while its history contains many of the same elements
as a history of Europe’s art, two important strains appear entirely reconfigured. The
first is that of the icon—the devotional work representing a holy figure that was meant
to give the viewer access to the divine. The earliest icons were those painted from the
holy personage itself—Saint Luke’s rendition of the Virgin, for example—or those
direct indexes of divine countenance, such as the seemingly miraculous imprint of
Christ’s visage on Veronica’s veil, whose creation did not even rely upon human hands.
Throughout the centuries, copies of these foundational icons were made and, adhering to
their prototypes, were thought to give the viewer the same unmediated access back to the
divine itself as the original. And so it would continue, with copies being made of the copies,
so that great strings of paintings stitched time together through replication. And yet, this
model of painting has been understood to have met its limits in the early modern period;
Hans Belting has famously argued that by this era, paintings came to be valued less as
faithful reproductions with direct devotional efficacy than for originating in the mind
and coming from the hand of an individual, named artist. This was an epochal break,
he argues, between an ‘era of the image’ and the ‘era of art’ (Belting 1994). His identifi-
cation of this second strain with the emergence of the artist, as a category, has been ela-
borated by Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, who see, over the course of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the playing out of a dialectic conflict between ‘substitu-
tional’ (the icon and its prototype) and ‘performative’ (the individual author) modes of art
making (Nagel and Wood 2010). In their understanding of the arc of art history, the
named, authorial painter steps out of the shadows of an icon and a painting tradition
that valued the replication of forms more than the hand that produced them; artistic indi-
vidualism with the iconic image that had required a mere copyist.
But the art history of New Spain complicates this master narrative about the artist. We
need look no further than Cabrera, who, in large part, garnered his fame and his position
in history through his involvement with the Mexican icon and, specifically, his ability to
paint a ‘faithful copy’ of the prototype. Part of two different eras in Europe, the icon (Gua-
dalupe) and the author (Cabrera) inhabit the same timeframe on New Spanish soil: the
icon supplied Cabrera with his status as author. But icon production was but an extension
of a much longer New World history, which points to a longer irreconcilability between
the terms of artistic production in Latin America and these Europeanist narratives that
might be applied to them. Signed copies of the Guadalupe icon by Echave Orio, with
whom we started this essay, or by late seventeenth-century artists such as Juan Correa,
suggest that the exacting, non-inventive copying of Guadalupe’s image paradoxically—
or so a European narrative would tell us—opened a space for claims to authorial status
in the New World, as Clara Bargellini has compellingly suggested (2004). Bargellini’s
essay was complemented by Jeanette Peterson in the following year. As Peterson elabor-
ates, anxiety over the correct, adequate, and appropriate reproduction of the Guadalupe
icon was responsible for creating a forum in which artists and their practices could be
assessed and an environment in which making a perfect copy could serve as the foun-
dations for an artist’s reputation (Peterson 2005a, 2005b). These essays on the Virgin of
Guadalupe destabilize the very categories offered by a Europeanate art history by attending
to a differential that is produced between European notions—both historical and histor-
iographic—of the artist and the ways they were reconfigured within artistic practice in the
viceroyalties.
The differences that emerge become an avenue not only to offer a more faithful account
of an art history of colonial works with the resources that are available, but also impor-
tantly to decentralize certain Eurocentric assumptions about how to tell both this
history and a history of early modern art more generally. This is to say that if we can
look at Europeanate models of art making in the viceroyalties and attend to the differences
produced by the colonial scenario, we might, as these studies on Guadalupe have done,
find new paradigms that complicate or entirely displace the models produced for
European art. The Virgin of Guadalupe—the icon that the New World needed to link it to
the great Catholic traditions of Europe—is but one fine example of a kind of colonial repli-
cation, or reception, that deforms and reforms the very terms of engagement.
This article has attended to the inapplicability of the life-work model of a Vasarian art
history to the art history of colonial works precisely because it has played such central his-
toriographic and methodological roles for European art and, therefore, art history as a dis-
cipline. Finding a way around it, displacing the centrality of the categories of ‘artist’ and
‘artwork’ altogether, is ultimately what is at stake here; but this entails choosing to look at
them askance, which is to say from the colonies. As Francisco Stastny poignantly phrased
it, ‘he who observes the panorama [of art in the colonies] from a European perspective will
have the impression of seeing Western art in a mirror that distorts it’ (Stastny 1994, 3:939).
Distortion, it seems to us, is an admirable goal for and, indeed, one of the true promises of
studying viceregal art.
And yet the full, radical potential of an art history of colonial works can only be realized
when art historians take the time to attend to both difference and similarity, to look from
both European and viceregal perspectives. This essay has mostly stressed ‘difference’ in
highlighting the impossibility of a full adoption of a life-work model for the art history
of colonial works, whose recalcitrant or chimerical creators and unstable surfaces deny
much of the nuance it offers to European analogs. But in closing, we also want to stress
that to find quotients of difference, one must also attend to sameness; the kinds of meth-
odological and historiographic displacements we are advocating can only happen when art
historians do take the time to look at objects and histories that seem, at first glance, to be
particularly Europeanate. In the past several decades, the field of colonial art history in the
United States has skewed emphatically towards objects, iconographies and materials that
are singular to the colonies. These studies have charted fertile interdisciplinary territory
and provided us a rich sense of the full range of material production in the viceregal Amer-
icas. But this has come at a cost in leaving once central swaths of art—like large-scale reli-
gious painting—under-explored and under-theorized. The entry of these paintings into
the halls of major museums as flattering accompaniments to earlier and therefore pioneer-
ing European analogs—as at the Philadelphia Museum, and under way at the Louvre—
does not promise much change. Because it means that art history, as a discipline, can
look on with amusement, admiration, even interest, but without much urgency. That
feels like a missed opportunity.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to thank Dana Leibsohn, Kris Lane and the two anonymous reviewers at CLAR
for their helpful and incisive comments on this essay. Many thanks as well to the members of Ford-
ham’s art history Work-in-Progress reading group, especially Kathryn Heleniak, Susanna McFad-
den, Nina Rowe, and Maria Ruvoldt.
Notes on contributors
Barbara E. Mundy is Professor of Art History at Fordham University; she received her PhD. in
the History of Art at Yale University. She studies the art and visual culture produced in Spain’s
colonies, and her scholarship spans both digital and traditional formats. She is the author of
The Mapping of New Spain (1996) and, with Dana Leibsohn, creator of Vistas: Visual Culture in
Spanish America, 1520–1820, now online. Her most recent book is The Death of Aztec Tenochtitlan,
the Life of Mexico City (2015); and with Mary Miller, she has edited and contributed to Painting a
Map of Sixteenth-Century Mexico City: Land, Writing and Native Rule (2012).
Aaron M. Hyman is a PhD. candidate in the Department of History of Art at the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, and currently the Andrew W. Mellon fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in
the Visual Arts (2015–2017). His dissertation explores the reception of the Flemish artist Peter Paul
Rubens (1577–1640) in Latin America in order to reassess notions of originality and copying in the
early modern world. He has also received support from the Social Science Research Council, the
Belgian American Education Foundation, and the Jacob K. Javits fellowship.
Notes
1. Take, for example, the notoriously incomplete notarial archives of the Archivo Regional del
Cusco, which seem to have been looted—razor-bladed out page by page—after early attempts
to create guides to the artistic contracts they once housed (Cornejo Bouroncle 1960).
2. A notable exception is found in the Flemish artist Frans Floris, who often signed his paintings
‘inventor,’ though this is likely—to further the point presented here—because of his strong affilia-
tion with the print industry that led him to define his work and status in an unusual way. For this,
as well as an exhaustive study of early modern signing practices, see Burg 2007, 424.
3. In devising his signature, Villalpando may have also looked to an imported painting by Maarten
de Vos, which is signed ‘inventor et fecit’ and now hangs in the small parish church in Cuau-
titlán. This painting is in many ways anomalous in the history of European painting and a full
exploration cannot be offered here. What is important is that this singular object did not dis-
abuse Villalpando of the notion that European artists signed their paintings in such a way,
but he knew this convention better from prints; distance and difference from Europe—and
its painted corpus and authors—are thereby equally important to consider when approaching
this example. See Hyman 2014.
4. While this article was in press, Telefónica published online a book on the Cathedral of Cuzco. It
celebrates the completion of various restoration projects, including that of the Christ of the
Temblores in 2005, carried out with great sensitivity to public sentiment given that the sculpture
is as much an object of cult as a work of art. The conservation work done on the Cathedral’s
paintings is summarily described, as is appropriate for a book directed to the general public.
Some painting restoration is described, though of the paintings we discuss here, the hefty
catalog only notes, ‘Además de estos cuadros de gran formato, se intervinieron en total 86
lienzos de la Iglesia del Triunfo y 37 lienzos de la Iglesia de la Sagrada Familia.’ A full discussion
of the conservation of these 123 paintings still awaits.
5. Two such examples are worth highlighting: the recent restoration of the parish church of San
Pedro in Andahuaylillas, Peru, by the World Monuments Fund has greatly enriched our under-
standing of this important site, and the complete findings will be published as a forthcoming
volume by Elizabeth Arce Kuon. A team of conservators is restoring the Life of Saint Augustine,
painted by Miguel de Santiago for the Convento de San Agustín in Quito, which still houses
them; their assiduous material investigation and documentation of their findings promises to
be a resource of equal value, should the project continue to receive funding, which has been con-
tinually threatened by changes within Ecuador’s ministry of culture. Finally, the ongoing and
long-term efforts of the Laboratorio de Diagnóstico de Obras de Arte del Instituto de Investiga-
ciones Estéticas at Mexico’s UNAM is a model for a sustained dialog between the research
agendas of their conservators and the Instituto’s art historians.
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Colonial Latin American Review

ISSN: 1060-9164 (Print) 1466-1802 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccla20

Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New

Barbara E. Mundy & Aaron M. Hyman

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Download by: [50.232.82.48] Date: 06 February 2016, At: 19:37

Out of The Shadow of Vasari: Towards A New Model of The

CONTACT Barbara E. Mundy mundy@fordham.edu

In other colonial ﬁelds, in contrast, historiographical models born in the sixteenth

mantled—by ethnohistorians of Latin America.

of works, central to a Vasarian methodology, largely impossible. But in concluding, we

Vasari and Latin American Art History

terminology, categories and narratives, so much as to simply sidestep them altogether.

Figure 7. Manuel Toussaint, Pintura colonial en México, p. 24.

(Toussaint 1932). He went on to amplify Gerson’s biography by arguing, on the basis

The Seventeenth-Century ‘Artist’

Figure 8. Cristóbal de Villalpando, Adoration of the Magi, Fordham University Collection.

Figure 11. Detail of Figure 10.

The ‘Artwork’ in Colonial Latin America

The double-edged sword of conservation

beyond the Vasarian paradigm.

Real Colegiata de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, even mentions Antonio Palomino’s

in colonial Spanish America. Colonial Latin American Review 12 (1): 5–35.

fuente del arte virreinal. Lima: Impulso Empresa de Servicios SAC.

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Mundy&Hyman-Out of The Shadow of Vasari

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