Published in Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies; for access, see:

http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/

Painting in New Spain, 1521–1820

Aaron Hyman, Barbara E. Mundy

• LAST REVIEWED: 05 MAY 2017

• LAST MODIFIED: 27 JUNE 2018
• DOI: 10.1093/OBO/9780199766581-0096

Introduction
The modern study of the painting of New Spain, as the region controlled by the viceroy who had his seat in
Mexico City was called, began in the modern nation of Mexico. Here, an appreciation of Mexico’s past
constituted an integral part of its fervent nationalist impulse following the 1910 revolution. The study of art
history was cultivated within state-supported universities and museums, particularly the Instituto de
Investigaciones Estéticas, established within the National University in 1936. Early Mexican art historians,
among them Manuel Toussaint, Justino Fernández, Federico Gómez de Orozco, and Rafael García
Granados, followed precedents set by their European counterparts, assigning works to artists and schools,
sketching out the contours of period styles, and uncovering biographical information about creators. Thus, in
relation to the larger field, the art history of New Spain is newly broken ground. The study of the very earliest
works created in New Spain—that is, the paintings by indigenous artists—was initiated by scholars who saw
these works as vestiges of a lost pre-Columbian past. It was a large cast, as, beginning in the 19th century,
German, French, and American scholars and collectors joined with Mexicans in the study of native
manuscripts. Thus, another important branch of the study of painting in New Spain has international roots,
which are found in the works of Alexander von Humboldt, Eduard Seler, Ernst Förstemann, Paul Schellhas,
Hermann Beyer, J. M. A. Aubin, Eugène Boban, Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, Frederick Starr,
Charles Bowditch, William Gates, Zelia Nuttall, Ernest T. Hamy, and Léon de Rosny, as well as those of
Mexicans, such as José Fernando Ramírez, Alfredo Chavero, Antonio Peñafiel, Francisco del Paso y
Troncoso, Antonio García Cubas, and Manuel Orozco y Berra. A useful annotated bibliography for the early
study of native manuscripts can be found in the Handbook of Middle American Indians (Cline 1975, cited
in Reference Works and Bibliographies). Various bibliographic guides covering painting in New Spain, or
some aspect of it, exist both online and in published form (cited in Reference Works and Bibliographies).
While it includes seminal scholarship about painting published since the 1960s, this article focuses on art-
historical research since the mid-1990s.

General Overviews
Unlike many other art-historical fields in which standard narratives and canons have long existed,
comprehensive surveys devoted solely to painting in New Spain have appeared only in the early 21st
century (Alcalá and Brown 2014). The newness of the field means that research concerning individual
artists, workshop structure, and artistic commissions is limited (see Monographic Works). Thus, survey
authors have needed to establish alternative methodologies to present overarching narratives of the
development of painting in the viceroyalties, which range from Kubler and Soria 1959, which stresses style,
to Toussaint 1965 and Toussaint 1967, which apply European typologies and categories; for example,
Toussaint’s accommodation of Mexican material to a traditional, European art history leads him to seek an
early-17th-century Mexican “Renaissance” that he triumphs over a formal decline into baroque decadence
by the century’s end. The works presented here are of surprisingly divergent scope and format, from books
to online/DVD resources (Leibsohn and Mundy 2010), and they are, therefore, as important for their content
as they are for their methodological approaches. Many surveys, such as Bailey 2005 and Burke 1992, are
notable for their high-quality reproductions; Leibsohn and Mundy 2010 includes 350 works (although not all
are paintings), most with high-resolution images of exceptional quality. By no means exhaustive, this section
includes not only early-21st-century surveys, but also older works of historiographical importance; newer
works feature comprehensive bibliographies.
• Alcalá, Luisa Elena, and Jonathan Brown, eds. Painting in Latin America, 1550–1820: From Conquest
to Independence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The most thorough overview of colonial painting. An introductory essay introduces painting in Latin America,
and essays by contributors work to provide a chronological account of painting in New Spain. The focus on
painting in the Viceroyalty of Peru in the second half of the volume allows for comparison.
Find this resource:
• Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. Art of Colonial Latin America. New York: Phaidon, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is the most accessible survey written for a nonspecialist audience, and it quite successfully integrates
art from throughout Spain’s overseas territories, albeit with a focus on the Viceroyalty of New Spain and, to a
lesser extent, Peru. It is particularly noteworthy for its account of painting across a large temporal span.
Find this resource:
• Burke, Marcus. Pintura y escultura en Nueva España: El barroco. Mexico City: Grupo Azabache,
1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In constituting the continuation of Tovar de Teresa 1992, this book completes a survey of Mexican painting
from soon after the conquest to independence. Less biographically focused than its companion, this volume
includes discussions of female religious commissions, socioeconomic changes and their effect on artistic
production in the 18th century, and the foundation of the Academy of San Carlos in 1785.
Find this resource:
• Kubler, George, and Martin Soria. Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American
Dominions, 1500 to 1800. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1959.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Now of more historiographical than informational interest, this volume was the first to present a broad survey
of Iberian and colonial art and architecture in English. A view of colonial painting as purely derivative and
poorly executed colors the account, which relies on analysis of “style” as a driving methodology and confines
its treatment to scant pages in an otherwise expansive book. The division of painting by region rather than
country, however, was a novel approach at a time when nationalist art histories largely predominated.
Find this resource:
• Leibsohn, Dana, and Barbara E. Mundy. Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520–1820.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The first survey treatment of the region’s visual culture to be published in digital format as a DVD. About 10
percent of the material of the DVD is available online via a small companion website. This work sets painting
in the larger context of visual culture in the Spanish Americas. Instead of a chronological approach, the
authors group works along unifying themes, such as the phenomenon of mestizaje and expressions of
political power, with introductory sections to each theme as well as a selection of primary documents and a
large bibliography.
Find this resource:
• Toussaint, Manuel. La pintura colonial en México. Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1965.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Still a treasured resource more than eighty years after it was written, particularly as a reference work, this
book is highly invested in stylistic periodization, individual artists, workshops, and schools. Toussaint maps
much of the extant art in Mexico and provides stylistic and archival materials to support his narrative and
attributions.
Find this resource:
• Toussaint, Manuel. Colonial Art in Mexico. Edited and translated by Elizabeth W. Wilder. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1967.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This survey discusses the development of the arts in Mexico from conquest to independence. Separating
this broad expanse into medieval, Renaissance, baroque, and neoclassical periods, the book frames the
painting of New Spain within a typology developed for European art, wherein style is understood to be
 expressive of period concerns. For painting alone, Toussaint 1965 is more useful, but this book is the more
readable of the two.
Find this resource:
• Tovar de Teresa, Guillermo. Pintura y escultura en Nueva España, 1557–1640. Mexico City: Grupo
Azabache, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In line with the intellectual legacy of Toussaint, this survey traces the trajectory of Mexican painting through
generations of painters, from indigenous muralists to the artists who planted the seeds for a Mexican
“baroque” in the 17th century. But within his framework, the author incorporates the discoveries of a broadly
surveyed and well-cited secondary literature, which makes this volume a reference resource, a bibliographic
guide, and a source for fantastic reproductions.
Find this resource:

Reference Works and Bibliographies

Reference works such as the Handbook of Latin American Studies (Bailey 1986) and Censo de documentos
pictográficos mesoamericanos are available online with increasing frequency. Cline 1975 is invaluable for
research on native manuscripts as it contains John B. Glass’s A Survey of Native Middle American Pictorial
Manuscripts, and Donald Robertson’s Census, which lists the 434 works known at the time, describes each,
and gives provenance and bibliography. But these find their contemporaneous complement in Censo de
documentos pictográficos mesoamericanos. This exclusively online work, an innovative wiki, began with the
entries in Robertson’s Census, following which its editors solicited the participation of an international body
of scholars. Thus, the known corpus established in the Census has now been updated and expanded.
Encompassing the larger field of painting beyond indigenous manuscripts, Bailey 1986 and Victoria, et al.
1995 are essential, especially for works published before 1990; Victoria, et al. 1995 spans works from 1521
to 1990 and, while its long list of bibliographic entries is not annotated, it is remarkable in its coverage.
Those interested in primary sources should turn to Tovar de Teresa 1988, whose first line describes its
rather narrow aim: “This is a book about books. About Mexican books published in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century that deal with art” (p. 13); in its pages, we glimpse triumphal arches, freshly dedicated
chapels, and cenotaphs (many ephemeral and most no longer extant), which constituted the frames in which
most paintings were viewed in New Spain.

• Bailey, Joyce Waddell, ed. Handbook of Latin American Art / Manual de arte latinoamericano: A
Bibliographic Compilation. Vol. 2, Art of the Colonial Period. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio
Information Services, 1986.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of the first comprehensive bibliographies published in English and still a useful guide to literature
published before mid-1983. Volume 2 is entirely devoted to the colonial period and is primarily, and quite
lucidly, arranged by geography with an index of authors and artists at the end; entries are not annotated, but
it is a major aid for targeted research, containing both primary and secondary sources.
Find this resource:
• Censo de documentos pictográficos mesoamericanos.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this innovative wiki, manuscripts are found in the section called “pictografía” and can be searched by
name or by state of origin; most entries include an image as well as an up-to-date bibliography.
Find this resource:
• Cline, Howard, ed. Handbook of Middle American Indians. Vols. 13–15. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1975.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Part of a sixteen-volume set designed as a comprehensive guide to the archaeology and ethnohistory of
Mesoamerica, these three volumes are essential references for the study of indigenous pictorial
manuscripts. Volume 15 includes an annotated bibliography.
Find this resource:
• Handbook of Latin American Studies.
 Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important bibliographic guide, covering all historical periods (ancient to modern) in Latin America. With
entries by scholars, it is updated weekly. Its emphasis is not art history and, therefore, coverage in this area
has been spotty until recently, but it now offers excellent coverage of works over the first decade of the 21st
century.
Find this resource:
• Tovar de Teresa, Guillermo. Bibliografía novohispana de arte. 2 vols. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Económica, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The work is indispensable for anyone researching the visual culture of the viceregal period because its two-
volume catalogue summarizes and provides long quotations of often-rare works, such as sermons and
published pamphlets, that describe the rich festival culture of New Spain and the many artworks that were
created for it. The first volume deals mostly with events in Mexico City, the capital, but Volume 2 fans out to
include ascendant centers such as Querétaro, Zacatecas, and Puebla.
Find this resource:
• Tovar de Teresa, Guillermo. Repertorio de artistas en México. 3 vols. Mexico City: Grupo Financiero
Bancomer, 1995.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This “reportorio”—a compilation of brief reports, a popular format in the colonial period—consists of six
hundred entries on individual artists in all media working in Mexico through the 20th century. Painters of
New Spain are only a small subset (and the biographical basis precludes discussion of anonymous work),
but this is a useful resource for basic biography and bibliography, and it includes one full-page color
reproduction of a signature work for each known painter.
Find this resource:
• Victoria, José Guadalupe, Pedro Angeles Jiménez, Norma Fernández Quintero, and María Teresa
Velasco de Espinosa. Una bibliografía de arte novohispano. Mexico City: Instituto de
Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1995.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This essential work begins with general works and then divides entries loosely by media: architecture,
painting, sculpture, decorative arts, engraving, theory and criticism, historical patrimony, history of cities and
monuments, maps and plans, catalogues and exhibitions, guides, letters, laudatory works/obituaries,
miscellany, books, and bibliographies. The listing of articles, some of them otherwise hard to identify, is
particularly useful.
Find this resource:

Anthologies
This section includes works by two important scholars. George Kubler was a founder of the field of study of
viceregal Mexico, establishing his commanding voice with his 1948 study, Mexican Architecture of the
Sixteenth Century. While architecture and aesthetic theory were the fields in which he made his most
important contributions (The Shape of Time, 1962), on occasion he did turn to painting, and several seminal
essays are found in Kubler and Reese 1985. Vargas Lugo 1992, a collection of essays written over time,
provides a different type of overview: rather than focusing on artists, their biographies, and specific artworks,
Vargas Lugo interrogates the cultural conditions that surrounded the production of art in the colonies.

• Kubler, George, and Thomas Reese. Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected
Essays of George Kubler. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume brings together Kubler’s once-scattered articles on topics as varied as a plan for air-conditioned
houses in 18th-century Sierra Leone to Velázquez’s Las Meninas, and it includes important work on 16th-
century Mexican manuscripts (the Tovar Calendar, the Relación Geográfica plan of Cholula).
Find this resource:
• Vargas Lugo, Elisa. Estudios de pintura colonial hispanoamericana. Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, 1992.
 Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Entries range from essays to deeply researched articles, and themes such as race, the specificity of
religious orders and their commissions (particularly Franciscan), saints and cult images (Guadalupe and
Santa Rosa de Lima), and portraiture emerge throughout.
Find this resource:

Journals
Individual articles devoted to painting in New Spain are found most abundantly in the Anales de Instituto de
Investigaciones Estéticas, published continuously since 1937. A flurry of journals appeared in the 1980s and
early 1990s that no longer survive; nonetheless, they should be consulted for articles of interest to
specialists. These journals include Cuadernos de Arte Colonial(Madrid, 1986–1992), Anales del Museo de
América (Madrid, 1993–2005), and Memoria of the Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City (1989–1992);
indexes of the Anales are available from 1998 online and full text from 2004 to 2005, and the others are
primarily available in specialized libraries, as is the Boletín del Museo Nacional del Virreinato. Because of its
interdisciplinary focus, Colonial Latin American Review (CLAR) often tackles conceptual or theoretical
issues of interest within and beyond art history, but illustrations are, until recently, weak. In contrast, Artes
de México is valuable for its high-quality reproductions.

• Anales de Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas. 1937–.

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Founded as an annual in 1937, the now-semiannual journal maintains its historical focus on Mexico; it
includes both analytical articles and primary documents. In the late 2010s, it continues to feature works by
scholars associated with the Instituto and the National University of Mexico, mostly in Spanish. It is
searchable and the full text of articles is available online, with improved-quality illustrations in the most
recent years.
Find this resource:
• Artes de México. 1988–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A glossy magazine launched in 1988; scholars often contribute articles written for a general public, so they
are notable for the accessibility of information. Issues are thematic, and the most useful for the study of the
painting of New Spain are those focusing on museum collections or colonial cities.
Find this resource:
• Boletín del Museo Nacional del Virreinato.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A series of informal publications that began in the early 1990s, which has been superseded by the
collection’s catalogues, which bring together recent research.
Find this resource:
• Colonial Latin American Review. 1992–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Founded in 1992, the interdisciplinary journal includes articles on art history and visual culture of the colonial
period, most of them in English. While searchable online, full-text articles are by subscription only.
Find this resource:

Exhibition Catalogues
Exhibitions have brought the painting of New Spain to the attention of the greater scholarly community and
to a wider public, and their catalogues often include archival information on provenance and condition as
well as high-quality illustrations of artworks.

Blockbusters and Complements

 In the United States, the painting of New Spain made its appearance on the grand stage provided by the
1990 exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (Metropolitan Museum of Art 1990) at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. Here it was set within the frame provided by the nation of Mexico; thus, it fell between pre-
Columbian art and Mexican muralists and alongside sculpture and decorative arts of the period. More-recent
US blockbuster exhibitions have narrowed the temporal frame but vastly widened the geographic one;
in The Arts in Latin America (Rishel and Stratton 2007) and Contested Visions (Katzew and Alcalá 2011),
painting of New Spain is set within the sweep of artistic production (sculpture, furniture, and so on) in all of
Latin America. The broad scope is predicated on the wide appeal to both audiences and sponsors that it
takes to launch a large exhibition in the United States. The expansive and thoughtful (and government-
funded) Spanish exhibition of Los siglos de oro (Brown, et al. 1999) did much the same. Much is to be
gained from seeing painting within the plurality of art production, but the necessary complement to the
broad-frame blockbuster is the focused exhibition. Painting a New World (Pierce, et al. 2004), with fifty-five
entries, is necessary reading and viewing for anyone interested in the painting of New Spain, as are the two
volumes of the Pinceles de la Historia (Museo Nacional de Arte 1999, Museo Nacional de Arte 2000) that
deal with the period 1520–1820. Such exhibitions have also provided correctives to earlier scholarly trends
and biases, such as the greater attention brought to the lesser-studied 18th century by Painted in
Mexico (Katzew 2017). A current trend is to set New Spanish works alongside their Spanish counterparts—
revisiting the program of Kubler and Soria 1959 (cited in General Overviews)—which is represented by the
massive four-volume Haces 2010 and a smaller gem, Kasl 2010, which has only about seventy entries.

• Brown, Jonathan, Joaquín Berchez, and Luis Elena Alcalá, eds. Los siglos de oro en los virreinatos
de América, 1550–1700. Madrid: Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoración de los Centenarios de
Felipe II y Carlos V, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This exhibit at the Museo de América in Madrid included a vast number of graphic, painted, and sculpted
works drawn from European and New World collections; the catalogue includes survey essays by leading
scholars in the field, dealing with themes such as the construction of the past and the role of miracle-working
cult images. It is additionally valuable for the in-depth entries on specific objects written by twenty-three
experts.
Find this resource:
• Haces, Juana Gutiérrez, ed. Pintura de los reinos: Identidades compartidas en el mundo hispánico. 4
vols. Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Written to accompany a major exhibition that considered the relationships between the geographically
disparate artistic centers of the Spanish Empire in the viceregal period, the essays, by leading painting
experts, deftly deploy various methodologies and ranges of objects. The entries include discussions of the
use of printed models and endemic iconographic motifs, propositions for using linguistic models to analyze
the drift of style from center to periphery, and analysis of archival records to chart the movement of paintings
and artistic materials.
Find this resource:
• Kasl, Ronda, ed. Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World. Indianapolis, IN: Indianapolis
Museum of Art, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This catalogue explores the dynamic role of religious images in 17th-century Spain and viceregal America.
The essays cast a similarly wide net by treating methodologically significant themes such as images in
Counter-Reformation devotion, the theoretical and theological implications of indigenous and divine
authorship of cult images, the agency of images, the role of devotional objects in daily life, and the political
dimensions of cult worship.
Find this resource:
• Katzew, Ilona, ed. Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 2017.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This catalogue accompanied an ambitious show (Fomento Cultural Banamex, 2017; Los Angeles County
Museum of Art [LACMA], 2017; Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018) that aimed to reassess the place of 18th-
century painting in histories of New Spanish art, casting a spotlight on a subfield underappreciated in earlier
literature. Excellent and extensive catalogue entries, and essays by major scholars in the field, accompany
high-quality illustrations.
 Find this resource:
• Katzew, Ilona, and Luisa Elena Alcalá, eds. Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World. Los
Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Assembled to accompany the exhibition of the same name (LACMA, 2011–2012; Museo Nacional de
Historia, Mexico City, 2012), these essays treat a variety of themes in relation to the role of indigenous
subjects and their polyvalent identities in the New World viceroyalties. Standing out are Alcalá’s essay on
the construction of indigenous identity in relation to miracle-working images and Thomas Cummins’s
theoretical inquiry into the use and adaptation of European print sources.
Find this resource:
• Museo Nacional de Arte. Los pinceles de la historia: El origen del reino de la Nueva España, 1680–
1750. Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The first of an ongoing series of exhibitions dealing with the construction of Mexico’s national identity. The
substantial essays in this volume treat the construction of the history of the Spanish military and spiritual
conquest as artists and patrons of the 17th century reflected on New Spain’s past.
Find this resource:
• Museo Nacional de Arte. Los pinceles de la historia: De la patria criolla a la nación mexicana, 1750–
1860. Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The second of an ongoing series of exhibitions dealing with the construction of Mexico’s national identity.
The themes of the essays of the second volume are broader than the first, and they encompass chapters on
paintings of martyrs, the Guadalupe cult, and baroque festivals.
Find this resource:
• Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries. New York: Metropolitan Museum
of Art, 1990.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A lavishly illustrated catalogue to a blockbuster exhibition; its organizers were able to bring together a small
but key group of indigenous manuscripts, feather paintings, and mother-of-pearl paintings along with
traditional oil-on-canvas works.
Find this resource:
• Pierce, Donna, Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, and Clara Bargellini, eds. Painting a New World: Mexican Art
and Life, 1521–1821. Denver, CO: Frederick and Jan Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish
Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An important, comprehensive exhibition whose catalogue entries alone could serve as a stand-alone survey
of painting in New Spain as they include everything from indigenous maps (pinturas) to feather paintings
from the 16th century to neoclassical portraits of the late 18th century. Notable among the excellent essays
is Clara Bargellini’s Originality and Invention in the Painting of New Spain, which dismantles the pejorative
view that colonial painting is merely derivative.
Find this resource:
• Rishel, Joseph, and Suzanne Stratton, eds. The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The painting section includes Mexico’s greatest hits of viceregal painting; a gathering of familiar friends,
many of the works appeared in Metropolitan Museum of Art 1990; Brown, et al. 1999; or Pierce, et al. 2004,
but new essays, written mostly by Mexican scholars, offer some new perspectives.
Find this resource:

Topical Exhibition Catalogues

In general, exhibition catalogues play an important role in making accessible works from private collections
or the storerooms of public museums, which is particularly true of topical catalogues that may include lesser-
 known works. With the exception of Retratos (Benson, et al. 2004) and Made in the Americas (Carr 2015),
all of these catalogues were published in Mexico, where government funding and audience interest in the
national past makes exhibitions focused on New Spanish painting more feasible. Arte y mística del
Barroco (Colegio de San Ildefonso 1994) puts the painting of New Spain in the context of the European
baroque, whereas Dones y promesas (Centro Cultural–Arte Contemporáneo and Fundación Cultural
Televisa 1996) framed it in relation to devotional practices in Mexico from the pre-Hispanic to the modern.
Portraiture, a genre that emerged strongly in the 18th century, is a perennially popular
topic; Retratos (Benson, et al. 2004) puts the practice into a sweeping span that includes pre-Columbian
Moche portraits, while Monjas coronadas (Museo Nacional del Virreinato and Instituto Nacional de
Antropología e Historia 2003) zeros in on the often-life-size portraits created of nuns upon the profession of
vows, drawing on the collection of the Museo Nacional del Virreinato, which holds one of the better
collections of the religious art of New Spain outside of churches and the largest single collection of nun
portraits in public hands in Mexico. El retrato novohispano en el siglo XVIII (Museo Poblano de Arte Virreinal
1999) also includes nun portraits but sets them alongside those of other elites. The people depicted
in Imágenes de los Naturales (Vargas Lugo 2005) are sometimes individuals (as indigenous elites also
commissioned their portraits), but also emblematic types, and Juegos de ingenio y agudeza (Museo
Nacional de Arte 1994) turns specifically to look at these emblems.

• Bargellini, Clara, and Michael K. Komanecky, eds. El arte de las misiones del norte de la Nueva
España, 1600–1821. Mexico City: Antigüo Colegio de San Ildefonso, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In New Spain, works produced in the artistic center of Mexico City were often sent northward to the frontier:
Zacatecas, Chihuahua, Arizona, and California; this exhibition focused on such high-style works, thus
tracing relationships of artistic center and periphery; short sections on hide paintings and Chumash baskets
show us how “peripheral” artists responded. Introductory essays treat southwestern mission culture and
architecture more broadly. An English version exists.
Find this resource:
• Benson, Elizabeth, Museum de Barrio, San Antonio Museum of Art, et al. Retratos: 2,000 Years of
Latin American Portraits. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The catalogue of a traveling exhibition (San Antonio Museum of Art, Museo del Barrio, National Portrait
Gallery), the span is sweeping; however, it includes two fine topical essays by Kristen Hammer on portraits
of female nuns in New Spain and by Teodoro Vidal on José Campeche y Jordán, a portrait painter in San
Juan de Puerto Rico. The catalogue itself is particularly rich in works from the late 18th century through the
19th century.
Find this resource:
• Carr, Dennis. Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia. Boston: MFA Publications,
2015.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This exhibition brought together high-quality luxurious objects that were either brought from Asia in the
Manila galleon trade or influenced by the objects that arrived along these Pacific routes. Solid essays by
scholars offer overviews of this cultural transfer or recontextualize objects ranging from biombos to
lacquerwork to casta paintings within this geographic framework, which has only begun to garner due
attention.
Find this resource:
• Centro Cultural–Arte Contemporáneo and Fundación Cultural Televisa. Dones y promesas: 500 años
de arte ofrenda (exvotos mexicanos). Mexico City: Centro Cultural–Arte Contemporáneo: Fundación
Cultural Televisa, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Accompanying an exhibition on the ubiquitous and understudied phenomenon of Mexican ex-votos, this
catalogue offers a broad-sweeping account of devotional offering in Mexico from the caches at the Templo
Mayor to 1990s pilgrimage practices. The ample and well-reproduced examples are accompanied by
transcriptions and translations (of Latin examples) of the texts, integral components of ex-voto paintings,
which often prove difficult to decipher, particularly in reproduction.
Find this resource:
• Colegio de San Ildefonso. Arte y mística del barroco. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura
y las Artes, 1994.
 Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Paintings showing mystical experiences—from Jesus’ vision of God in the garden of Gethsemane to Saint
Francis comforted by angels—were frequent subjects of New Spain’s leading painters. The discussion of
each of the 103 works, accompanied by a full-page reproduction, deals with iconography and sources; short
essays (such as “Cristo en el arte barroco” and “La música y la experiencia mística” by Clara Bargellini) offer
broader context. While most works are from New Spain, judicious loans of European material illustrate
transatlantic similarities.
Find this resource:
• Museo Nacional de Arte. Juegos de ingenio y agudeza: La pintura emblemática de la Nueva España.
Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 1994.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume focuses on the development of emblematic imagery in New Spain (not all exhibition items are
illustrated) in the centuries following the publication of Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum Liber(1531).
Emblems—those hieroglyphic-like symbolic pictures often representing virtues and vices—accompanied by
epigrams were well-known to New Spanish painters, and catalogue essays discuss the direct and indirect
impact of these “mute poems” on the look and idea of the painted work.
Find this resource:
• Museo Nacional del Virreinato and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Monjas coronadas:
Vida conventual femenina en Hispanoamérica. Mexico City: Landucci, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
While lushly illustrated with portraits of nuns, this catalogue discusses very few of them specifically. Alma
Montero offers a discussion of iconography and motives for their creation, and other essays discuss nun
portraits within the context of the larger culture of female monasticism found in urban centers in New Spain,
Colombia, and Spain.
Find this resource:
• Museo Poblano de Arte Virreinal. El retrato novohispano en el siglo XVIII. Puebla, Mexico: Museo
Poblano de Arte Virreinal, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Short essays in Spanish and English, including a particularly interesting one by Jaime Moreno Villarreal on
the pejorative ideologies of the moral character of New Spain’s creole population, set this rich collection of
elite portraits in historical context. Individual works are very briefly described and many are richly illustrated.
Find this resource:
• Vargas Lugo, Elisa. Imágenes de los naturales en el arte de la Nueva España. Mexico City:
Fundación Banamex, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume focuses on paintings that depict indigenous peoples; many are historical paintings of the
conquest era created in the late 17th and 18th centuries, but some are lesser-known works of Indian patrons
and donors, and thus the illustrations are particularly valuable. The essays are largely descriptive.
Find this resource:

Museum Collections
Catalogues of museum collections are often most valuable for reproductions and information about
individual works in a given collection; works such as Treasures of Mexican Colonial Painting (Burke
1998), Converging Cultures (Fane 1996), and Companion to Spanish Colonial Art (Pierce 2011) serve to
make accessible excellent, but small, US museum collections of the painting of New Spain. The Grandeur of
Viceregal Mexico (Museum of Fine Arts and Museo Franz Mayer 2002 does the same for the Museo Franz
Mayer, a private Mexican museum devoted to decorative arts. Although México en el mundo de las
colecciones de arte (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 1994) does not feature a “collection” in any
physical sense, it brings together the masterpieces of viceregal art to be found in collections outside Mexico.
Mexico, befitting its history, has an entire national museum devoted to the art of the viceregal period, most of
it from Mexico; the works of high quality and excellent conservation from its vast collection are featured
in Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán: La vida y la obra en la Nueva España (Museo Nacional del
Virreinato 2003). These works also appear in the volumes of Pintura novohispana: Museo Nacional del
Virreinato, Tepotzotlán (Alarcón Cedillo, et al. 1992–1996), but here they are accompanied by damaged,
 poor-quality works, and to see this entire spectrum is valuable in understanding the implications of
conservation for the scholarly field, which must assimilate ravaged paintings into a corpus where various
degrees of overpainting and restoration are typical. High-quality works (most of them religious paintings)
from Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Arte appear in the valuable Catálogo comentado (Cuadriello, et al. 1999–
2004), part of a longer project to publish the entire collection.

• Alarcón Cedillo, Roberto M., Ma. del Rosario García de Toxqui, and Ana Joaquina Montalvo de
Morales. Pintura novohispana: Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán. 3 vols. Tepotzotlán,
Mexico: Asociación de Amigos del Museo Nacional del Virreinato, 1992–1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Includes Vol. 1, Siglos XVI, XVII y principios del XVIII; Vol. 2, Siglos XVIII, XIX y XX, primera parte; and Vol.
3, Siglos XVII–XX, segunda parte. In this catalogue, short, broad essays by leading scholars introduce the
collection of Mexico’s national museum devoted to the painting of New Spain, established in 1964. Perhaps
most valuable are the copious illustrations, including works in deteriorated state, many with brief discussions
of iconography, that reveal the wide range and quality of painting production; these are also available online.
Find this resource:
• Burke, Marcus. Treasures of Mexican Colonial Painting: The Davenport Museum of Art Collection.
Davenport, IA: Davenport Museum of Art, 1998.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A local collector, C. A. Ficke, traveled in Mexico between 1893 and 1903 and amassed a very fine collection
of Mexican painting, largely from the 18th century. Burke’s erudite catalogue discusses each work in depth,
with emphasis on artist biography and individual style. It is much superior, in text and image, to the section
“Mexican Colonial Collection” on the current website of the museum (now renamed the Figge Art Museum).
Find this resource:
• Cuadriello, Jaime, Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, Nelly Sigaut, et al. Catálogo comentado del acervo del
Museo Nacional de Arte, Nueva España. 2 vols. Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Arte, 1999–2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The first volume includes some of the collection’s renowned works, catalogued by artist, with its sixty entries
written entirely by Cuadriello, who brings a deep knowledge and intelligence to the task. The second volume
is written by a larger team, and it treats many of the same artists, but its fifty-eight entries stop at “L.” Áurea
Ruiz de Gurza traces the collection to the Academia de San Carlos and to the despoilment of religious
establishments under Benito Juárez in the 1860s.
Find this resource:
• Fane, Diana, ed. Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America. New York: Harry N.
Abrams, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The Brooklyn Museum’s collection of colonial art was created largely in the 1930s and 1940s with strengths
in the decorative arts, but it also includes the portrait-rich former collection of the Algara Romero de Terreros
family. This catalogue was important for reintroducing colonial art, typically relegated to museum
storerooms, to a larger public. Essays by US scholars dig deep into a variety of topics (Emily Umberger on
images of Indians in biombos, Diana Fane on collection history), avoiding bland survey coverage.
Find this resource:
• Museo Nacional del Virreinato. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán: La vida y la obra en la
Nueva España. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This catalogue, divided by media and written by specialists, offers short essays on both the former Jesuit
complex at Tepotzotlán, now the present-day museum, and the important national collection housed within.
The book has stunning photographs, but works are often cropped or shot from the dramatic angles of a
coffee-table book.
Find this resource:
• Museum of Fine Arts and Museo Franz Mayer. The Grandeur of Viceregal Mexico: Treasures from the
Museo Franz Mayer / La grandeza del México virreinal: Tesoros del Museo Franz Mayer. Houston:
University of Texas Press, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
 The catalogue discusses the highlights of the Museo Franz Mayer, a private museum in Mexico City that
holds one of the country’s finest collections of decorative arts. This lushly illustrated book includes one of the
few known portraits of an elite indigenous woman. Bilingual entries are written by experts in the field. This
work is the best guide to their collection, almost none of which is reproduced on the museum’s website.
Find this resource:
• Pierce, Donna. Companion to Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum. Denver, CO: Denver
Art Museum, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Denver’s collection, in both pre-Columbian art and Spanish colonial, has been enriched considerably in the
past decades by Fred and Jan Mayer, making it one of the better Spanish colonial collections in the United
States in terms of quality and range. The Companion is a short but abundantly illustrated introduction to the
collection, written by their current curator for a lay audience.
Find this resource:
• Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. México en el mundo de las colecciones de arte: Nueva
España. 2 vols. Mexico City: Grupo Azabache, 1994.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A catalogue featuring masterworks found in collections outside Mexico, mostly in Spain, France, and the
United States. The works are divided by genre, with short survey essays by leading Mexican scholars (Elena
Estrada de Gerlero on featherwork and casta paintings, Jaime Cuadriello on the Virgin of Guadalupe), many
notable for their focused discussion of collection history.
Find this resource:

Online Collections
Increasingly, museums are putting their collection databases online for consultation; those of the Museo
Nacional del Virreinato and the Museo de América are perhaps most valuable for the sheer quantity of the
works to be found, which includes works not on display. In contrast, the US museums with significant
collections of paintings of New Spain—the Brooklyn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and
the Denver Art Museum—feature far more limited samplings, but often with more commentary.

• Brooklyn Museum. Collections.

Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The small but significant group of portraits from the Algara Romero de Terreros collection is visible online,
with descriptive information. Since the collection is housed within “European painting,” and works are
sometimes tagged as “Mexican” or “Mexico,” searching is cumbersome.
Find this resource:
• Denver Art Museum. Spanish Colonial Art.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Only a limited sampling of the collection is visible online, with brief descriptions.
Find this resource:
• Hispa Society of America.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The museum has put excellent images of some of its highlights online at a newly redesigned website; plans
to include many more in the years to come, and the website will feature a collection search tool.
Find this resource:
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Spanish Colonial.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A small sampling of about thirty paintings, mostly from the 17th and 18th centuries, with high-quality
photographs, many with additional details and discussion.
Find this resource:
• Museo de América. Acceso al catálogo.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
 The museum has put more than 70 percent of its collection online; searching “Escuela mexicana” leads one
to most of their painting collection from New Spain. Catalogue information is basic and descriptive; the
images are relatively low resolution, making the viewing of details difficult.
Find this resource:
• Museo Nacional de Arte.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Though only the highlights of the Mexico City collection are online, they have been made accessible as part
of the Google Art Object, meaning that images are available in good quality and at high resolution.
Find this resource:
• Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. Buenos Aires, Argentina. Escuela Mexicana S. XVII.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Though in Argentina, the museum is well known for its strong collection of enconchados featuring scenes of
the conquest of Mexico, which can be consulted in their online collection.
Find this resource:
• Museo Nacional del Virreinato. Pintura en Internet.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The museum has put nearly one thousand paintings from the 16th century through the 20th century online;
over half date to the 18th century. Each image, which allows a limited zoom view, is accompanied by
descriptive text, largely drawn from its published catalogues.
Find this resource:

Symposium Proceedings
Two of the most important publications coming from thematic symposia, to date, are the published
proceedings of the yearly conference, which began in 2001, of the Denver Museum’s Mayer Center for Pre-
Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art (see Pierce 2005, Pierce and Otsuka 2009) and the Coloquio
Internacional de Historia de Arte, organized by the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, begun in 1977 and
held in Mexico. Though the annual themes and resultant papers (often short ones in the case of the
Coloquio volumes) may not comprise works on painting in New Spain, they often do, and they sample new
work; as such, relevant volumes are included here.

• Coloquio Internacional de Historia de Arte. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,
1977–.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Publication of articles based on conference papers has resulted in noteworthy volumes such as Gustavo
Curiel, et al., eds., Arte, historia e identidad en América (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, 1994); Juana Gutiérrez Haces, ed., Los discursos sobre el arte (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México,1995); Elena Estrada de Gerlero, ed., El arte y la vida cotidiana (Mexico City:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México,1995); Gustavo Curiel, ed. Patrocinio, colección y circulación de
las artes (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1997); Cuauhtémoc Medina, ed. La
imagen política (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2006); Gustavo Curiel, Orientes-
occidentes: El arte y la mirada del otro(Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2007); and
Peter Krieger, ed. La imagen sagrada y sacralizada (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de
México, 2011).
Find this resource:
• Pierce, Donna, ed. Exploring New World Imagery: Spanish Colonial Papers from the 2002 Mayer
Center Symposium. Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The Exploring volume is notable for Jeanette Peterson’s essay on the meaning of copying in paintings of the
Virgin of Guadalupe and Juana Gutiérrez Haces’s short essay on the stylistic influences of Cristóbal de
Villalpando.
Find this resource:
• Pierce, Donna, and Ronald Otsuka, eds. Asia & Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural
Exchange, 1500–1850. Papers from the 2006 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum.
Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Part of a new scholarly trend to look at the art of the colonial New World in relation to transpacific currents,
this volume includes new archival research on biombos in Sofía Sanabrais’s carefully documented essay.
Find this resource:

Mural Painting in the 16th Century

Wall murals were a primary forum for painting, particularly in the churches and monasteries that served to
evangelize the native populations in the 16th century. It is here that one finds the great experiments by
native painters exploring the imagery and ideas introduced from Europe. While they were underscored as an
important venue for painting in New Spain by Manuel Toussaint’s work, especially his La pintura colonial of
1965, many of the works were unknown to him, often covered up under layers of whitewash by the end of
the 16th century, and the extent of native participation was underestimated. Reyes Valerio 1989 summarizes
decades of scholarship and argues strongly that the murals were the work of native artists, trained by
mendicant friars. By the writing of Edgerton 2001, the native authorship of the murals was well accepted,
and the author discusses them within a survey of the 16th-century program of church construction that left
New Spain blanketed in religious buildings, from great monasteries to small village chapels.

• Edgerton, Samuel Y. Theaters of Conversion: Religious Architecture and Indian Artisans in Colonial
Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
While much of the book is devoted to architecture, some sections cover the painting cycles within. Edgerton
writes sympathetically about the indigenous mastery of European styles; the photographs, by Jorge Pérez
de Lara, are exquisite.
Find this resource:
• Reyes Valerio, Constantino. El pintor de los conventos: Los murales del siglo XVI en la Nueva
España. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1989.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Following his important study of “Indo-Christian” sculpture, published in 1978, this leading Mexican art
historian argues that a similar collaboration took place between native painters and mendicant friars to cover
more than 200,000 square meters of wall space with didactic murals, aimed at evangelizing. Illustrations are
poor, but his data tabulations about individual convents and iconographic programs set a broad and precise
context.
Find this resource:

Monographic Works
Taken together, monographic treatment of mural cycles show the range of ways that indigenous artists
responded to imported European imagery; the twenty-eight paintings of biblical scenes in the sotocoro of the
Tecamachalco church so closely hew to their European printed sources (discussed in Niedermeier 2002)
that Manuel Toussaint, who first saw these murals in 1932, thought that these were the work of an immigrant
Flemish painter who trained in Italy before completing this work in the 1560s. The
groundbreaking Arredondo, et al. 1964 showed otherwise. The murals of Ixmiquilpan, where jaguar warriors
seem threatened by acanthus vines, in contrast, boast of such singular imagery that no one source has ever
been pinpointed; indeed, Wake 2000 points to the importance of nonvisible models. Webster 1997 looks to
ritual performances as the source of mural imagery. Many of these books and articles are also valuable for
preserving and enhancing the appearance of fragile and changeable murals: Peterson 1993 is a study of the
murals of Malinalco after they were revealed by a restoration project of 1974–1975; in the late 2010s the
author’s work preserves a more authentic appearance of murals that a visitor to the monastery can see only
in a heavily overpainted (and thus compromised) state. García Ballesteros 1999 offers line drawings of the
enigmatic fresco cycles at Actopan that are particularly useful resources in making the heavily damaged
frescoes more easily legible (the author’s largely iconographic treatment of the frescos that decorated
 Actopan’s public spaces can be contrasted to the discussion of Actopan’s latrine graffiti in Russo 2006).
While the illustrations of the Casa del Deán monograph in Arellano 1996 are of middling quality, they do
include valuable pre-conservation photographs taken in the 1930s.

• Arellano, Alfonso. La Casa del Deán: Un ejemplo de pintura mural civil del siglo XVI en Puebla.
Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A short monograph on an extraordinary mural painting with a secular theme, the only one of its kind to
survive from the 16th century. Restored in the late 1950s, the paintings of c. 1580–1590 once decorated the
town house of the deán of the Puebla Cathedral. This study traces their sources—one room is dominated by
Sibyls on horseback, the second by women in chariots to illustrate Petrarch’s poem “The Triumphs”—to
European printed sources and discusses the indigenous imagery that the native painters incorporated.
Find this resource:
• Arredondo, Rosa Camelo, Jorge Gurría Lacroix, and Constantino Valerio-Reyes. Juan Gerson,
tlacuilo de Tecamachalco. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1964.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This publication revealed the painter of biblical scenes in Tecamachalco to be a tlacuilo, or indigenous
painter, named Juan Gerson, and it opened up a broader conversation about the roles and agency of native
painters. Although the assignment of the name “Juan Gerson” to the Tecamachalco painter has since been
contested by Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo, the interest in “hybrid” indigenous painting has not waned.
Find this resource:
• García Ballesteros, Víctor Manuel. La pintura mural del ÿiradaÿ de Actopan. Mexico City: Universidad
Autónoma del Estado de Hidalgo, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This efficient bilingual overview of the mural decoration at the Augustinian convent of Actopan gives
particular attention to the famous outdoor chapel, which the author argues, using comparative material from
the similar cycle at Santa María Xoxoteco, represents the various articles of the Credo. He also suggests
that the iconography of a now-missing retable would have completed this catechetical cycle.
Find this resource:
• Niedermeier, Monika. “Finalidad y función de modelos gráficos europeos: El ejemplo del ciclo de
Juan Gerson en el Convento franciscano de Tecamachalco, Puebla.” In Herencias indígenas,
tradiciones europeas y la ÿirada europea. Edited by Helga von Kügelgen, 95–121. Madrid:
Iberoamericana, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In writing a 1999 master’s thesis on the cycle, Niedermeier identified many of the woodcut images in
European printed Bibles that the artist of Tecamachalco used as sources; previous literature on the topic is
included in the bibliography of this work.
Find this resource:
• Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in
Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Malinalco’s murals depict an edenic garden in the lower cloister of the Augustinian convent, in a town that
was once an Aztec garrison. This careful study of the paintings and their visual sources, style, and
iconography emphasizes the innovation of the indigenous painters who created these hybrid works by
drawing on a range of European and indigenous Nahua sources, from mille-fleurtapestries to native
pharmacopeias.
Find this resource:
• Russo, Alessandra. “A Tale of Two Bodies: On Aesthetic Condensation in the Mexican Colonial
Graffiti of Actopan, 1629.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 49.50 (Spring–Autumn 2006): 59–79.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article examines the strange and overlooked graffiti in the latrine of the Augustinian monastery at
Actopan. Russo argues that the graffiti murals were created by Juan Durán, a friar charged with sexual
solicitation by the Inquisition and exiled from Mexico City. Russo makes the provocative, theoretical
argument that we might also read the graffiti as a self-portrait of the friar’s two bodies: one civic and lustful
and the other ecclesiastical and committed to missionary work.
 Find this resource:
• Wake, Eleanor. “Sacred Books and Sacred Songs from Former Days: Sourcing the Mural Paintings
at San Miguel Arcángel Ixmiquilpan.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 31 (2000): 106–140.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An extraordinary mural cycle of battling warriors decorates the nave of the Augustinian monastery church of
Ixmiquilpan. Painted by indigenous artists c. 1569–1972, the sources and meaning of its bellicose imagery
have long puzzled scholars. This article recaps earlier literature and proposes that the imagery can be best
related to newly invented cantares, Nahuatl song-poems with roots in earlier pre-Hispanic warrior songs,
which were developed to express new Christian ideas. Illustrations are limited.
Find this resource:
• Webster, Susan Verdi. “Art, Ritual, and Confraternities in Sixteenth Century New Spain: Penitential
Imagery at the Monastery of San Miguel, Huejotzingo.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones
Estéticas 19.70 (1997): 5–44.
DOI: 10.22201/iie.18703062e.1997.70.1785Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Webster relates a series of murals featuring penitential processions to the Corpus Christi festivities of the
Vera Cruz confraternity, and she uses archival documents to date them between 1571 and 1592, which
makes them the oldest representation of a penitential procession in New Spain. Discussions of early
evangelization strategies, including the use of portable paintings, and the rise of indigenous confraternities
bolster the account, which is accompanied by extensive historical bibliography.
Find this resource:

Indigenous Manuscripts
When New Spain was established in the wake of the Spanish conquest, it did not lack an indigenous
painting tradition. Native tlacuiloque (as painter-scribes were known in Nahuatl, the dominant central Mexico
language) drew on a deep pre-Hispanic tradition of mural and manuscript painting; the practices of
the tlacuilo continued in the 16th century, often under the patronage of the mendicant orders who were
responsible for evangelizing indigenous populations. The absorption of European styles and iconography
into the indigenous painting tradition has been of great scholarly interest, yet no single, dominant theoretical
methodology has emerged to understand these processes. The plurality of descriptors used in the
literature—“Indo-Christian,” “syncretic,” “mestizo,” “hybrid”—for the innovative native works of the 16th
century is indicative of the broad range of interpretive frameworks.

Surveys
The most-comprehensive surveys of indigenous manuscripts are undoubtedly Boone 2000 and Boone 2007;
taken together, these two volumes offer a comprehensive overview of historical and religious manuscripts
and a thoughtful discussion of the kind of writing they contain. Just as in Escalante Gonzalbo 2010, Boone’s
approach grows out of the formalism of Robertson 1994; an analysis that draws heavily on modern
ethnography can be found in Jansen and Pérez Jiménez 2007, which focuses on a smaller corpus of
codices created by Mixtec speakers; Maarten Jansen has also collaborated in the publication of a number of
pre-Hispanic Mixtec codices. An enthusiastic introduction to the postconquest manuscripts of central Mexico
is to be found in Gruzinski 1992. John Pohl’s Mesoamerica site focuses more broadly on the art and
architecture of the (mostly) pre-Hispanic period, and he offers an accessible and lucid introduction to
Mesoamerican books; another online work, Mesolore, offers theoretically nuanced discussions of indigenous
books.

• Boone, Elizabeth Hill. Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs. Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Influenced by the crisp organization and comprehensive impulse of Robertson 1994, Boone’s book tackles
160 indigenous manuscripts in which the author shows her effortless command of a huge body of material;
analyses are offered in a lucid, almost conversational style of writing. Well illustrated and accompanied by
an extensive bibliography.
Find this resource:
• Boone, Elizabeth Hill. Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate. Austin: University
of Texas Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book treats the body of religious manuscripts, some pre-Hispanic, that were used by indigenous priests
as ritual guides and aids in divination. Other studies of the corpus, or parts of it, have been encumbered by
the meaning of the immensely complicated (and still poorly understood) imagery. Boone analyzes the
organizational structure of the manuscripts—reading order and graphic structure of pages and parts, such
as the embedded almanacs—as the first step in understanding these works and how they were used.
Extensive bibliography.
Find this resource:
• Escalante Gonzalbo, Pablo. Los códices mesoamericanos antes y después de la conquista
española. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Using an approach derived from Donald Robertson’s 1959 study (Robertson 1994), this work uses Mixtec
works to establish a pre-Hispanic style that is the root of the imagery used in central Mexican manuscripts.
The author is attentive to the graphic models and modes of instruction that were brought from Europe, often
by mendicant friars. The illustrations are tiny and poorly reproduced, many of them drawings, so this book
functions as a guide for specialists.
Find this resource:
• Gruzinski, Serge. Painting the Conquest: The Mexican Indians and the European Renaissance.
Translated by Deke Dusinberre. Paris: Flammarion, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In this lushly illustrated book, Gruzinski argues that indigenous painters, whose world was dramatically
reshaped by the conquest, engaged in “cultural cross-fertilization” in their creative responses to European
art.
Find this resource:
• Jansen, Maarten, and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez. Encounter with the Plumed Serpent: Drama and
Power in the Heart of Mesoamerica. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book offers a reading of a group of Mixtec screenfold codices, most of them created in the 16th century,
and traces their overlapping narratives. The authors draw on the knowledge of contemporary Mixtec
intellectuals to elucidate these ancient books in an act of “ethnographic upstreaming.”
Find this resource:
• Mesolore.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An online resource about Mesoamerica, the pre-Hispanic region largely coterminous with New Spain, that
includes thoughtful essays dealing with book culture along with high-resolution images and interpretations of
four indigenous books that were painted after the conquest and are thus part of New Spain’s painting
heritage: the Matrícula de Tributos, the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, the Codex Nuttall, and the Codex Selden. In
video clips, contemporary scholars, including indigenous intellectuals, speak about their work.
Find this resource:
• Pohl, John. John Pohl’s Mesoamerica: Ancient Books.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Part of the Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies Institute website, Pohl offers an
overview of the Mixtec codices as well a page-by-page reading of the Codex Bodley and the Codex Selden.
His interest is in re-creating the historical narratives of these books and connecting them to existing
archaeological sites.
Find this resource:
• Robertson, Donald. Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period: The Metropolitan
Schools. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume, first published in 1959, established the contours of formalist manuscript study, and its stylistic
categories are still used by scholars in the early 21st century. Robertson saw native colonial manuscripts as
 “hybrids” and carefully parsed elements of native and European style: types of line, use of color, and the
rendering of space. While its formalism is less in vogue today, this book is a classic.
Find this resource:

Monographic Works
The works included here do not, by any means, form an exhaustive list, but they have been chosen to
illustrate some of the scholarly approaches currently in use in the investigation of native
manuscripts. Berdan and Anawalt 1992; Carrasco and Sessions 2007; and Wolf, et al. 2012 take
multifaceted interdisciplinary approaches; these volumes bring together scholars from different fields who
contribute essays on the codicological, art-historical, historical, and anthropological aspects of single works.
A common thread among Douglas 2010, Leibsohn 2009, Diel 2009, Asselbergs 2005, and Hermann
Lejarazu 2003 is the interest they evince in native historiographies, with Douglas 2010and Leibsohn 2009, in
particular, questioning the profound effects that the conditions of the tumultuous postconquest period had on
the ways that indigenous elites wrote their own past.

• Asselbergs, Florine. Conquered Conquistadors: The Lienzo of Quauhquechollan; A Nahua Vision of

the Conquest of Guatemala. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A careful analysis of the pictorial narrative of this 16th-century painted cloth, or lienzo, which tells of how an
indigenous army from the modern state of Puebla headed south to conquer Guatemala in the wake of the
Spanish conquest. While Spanish narratives of these same events underscore their own leading roles,
Spaniards appear as marginal figures in this history told by indigenous conquistadors.
Find this resource:
• Berdan, Frances F., and Patricia Rieff Anawalt, eds. The Codex Mendoza. 4 vols. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Along with the Florentine Codex, the Codex Mendoza of c. 1542 is one of the most important manuscripts
for understanding the Aztec and early colonial periods in central Mexico. This four-volume study offers a
facsimile and a set of line drawings and transcriptions as well as illuminating essays.
Find this resource:
• Carrasco, David, and Scott Sessions, eds. Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest: An Interpretive Journey
through the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Through its fifteen chapters by eighteen authors, the book allows the reader to understand this 16th-century
indigenous map from the modern state of Puebla within its local historical, temporal, and ethnic context as
well as within broader parameters established by the indigenous cosmology of central Mexico and the ritual
practices of Amerindians. A lush photographic record celebrates the recently conserved map’s new
appearance.
Find this resource:
• Diel, Lori Boornazian. The Tira de Tepechpan: Negotiating Place under Aztec and Spanish Rule.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A study of a native annals history, which presents parallel chronicles, namely that of powerful Mexico-
Tenochtitlan told from the perspective of peripheral Tepechpan.
Find this resource:
• Douglas, Eduard de Jesús. In the Palace of Nezahualcoyotl: Painting Manuscripts, Writing the Pre-
Hispanic Past in Early Colonial Period Tetzcoco, Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A theoretically nuanced study of a group of related manuscripts (the Codex Xolotl, the Mapa de Quinatzin,
and the Mapa de Tlotzin) that treat the history of the ruling family of Tetzcoco, a city close to Aztec
Tenochtitlan.
Find this resource:
• Hermann Lejarazu, Manuel. Códice Muro: Un documento mixteco colonial. Oaxaca, Mexico:
Gobierno del Estado de Oaxaca, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A fascinating study of a Mixtec manuscript, created in the late 16th century, but used and added to
continually into the 18th century. Hermann’s careful attention to sorting out the different phases of its
construction, which appear a jumble of overlapping images and texts on the manuscript page, allows him to
show how one community continued to create an indigenous history over centuries.
Find this resource:
• Leibsohn, Dana. Script and Glyph: Pre-Hispanic History, Colonial Bookmaking, and the Historia
Tolteca-Chichimeca. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A sensitive interpretation of a visually complicated manuscript book, written in the mid-16th century in the
city of Cuauhtinchan at the behest of a native patron. Leibsohn treats the interweaving narrative strands that
appear on its pages not as a flawed and fragmentary tale but as “a sum of disparate parts” that were
constitutive of indigenous history. Appendix 1 offers a straightforward discussion of important pages of the
work.
Find this resource:
• Wolf, Gerhard, Joseph Connors, and Louis A. Waldman, eds. Colors between Two Worlds: The
Florentine Codex of Bernardino de Sahagún. Florence: Villa I Tatti, 2012.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Essays by leading scholars that investigate the Florentine Codex as a work of art. Particularly important is
Diana Magaloni’s essay on the use of pigments, which draws on scientific analysis of the 16th-century
palette.
Find this resource:

Facsimile Editions
Since the 1970s, the number of available facsimiles of indigenous manuscripts painted in New Spain has
increased exponentially and many are accompanied by excellent scholarly commentary. A leading German
publisher (Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt) has focused on the pre-Columbian corpus and made many
of its facsimiles (without commentary) available online at the Foundation for the Advancement of
Mesoamerican Studies Institute website. Included here is a selection of facsimiles of manuscripts created
after the Spanish conquest (and thus within New Spain). Quiñones Keber 1995, Graulich 1995, Sahagún
1997, Nowotny and Durand-Forest 1974, and Cortés Alonso 1973 offer careful, page-by-page commentaries
and transcriptions and translations of texts when appropriate, while Sahagún 1980 includes almost none at
all.

• Cortés Alonso, Vicenta, ed. and trans. Pintura del gobernador, alcaldes y regidores de México:
Códice Osuna. Madrid: Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, 1973.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A very broad introduction summarizes the contents of the manuscript, but it does little to situate it in its
specific historical and art-historical context. Nonetheless, this compilation of native complaints about the
Spanish government, written in Nahuatl and Spanish by indigenous scribes using both alphabetic and
pictographic scripts, is essential for understanding mid-16th-century New Spain. Transcriptions of the texts
and translations of the Nahuatl are included.
Find this resource:
• Graulich, Michel, ed. Codex Azcatitlan. Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Société des
Américanistes, 1995.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Originally published with a lucid commentary by Robert Barlow in 1949, this new facsimile includes Barlow’s
commentary set alongside a more recent one by the capable Michel Graulich. The three-part manuscript
describes the Mexicas’ peregrination from Aztlán and the reigns of the Mexica rulers. The third part is a still
enigmatic pictorial narrative of the early colonial period.
Find this resource:
• Nowotny, Karl Anton, and Jacqueline de Durand-Forest, eds. Codex Borbonicus: Bibliothèque de
l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris (Y120). Codices Selecti Phototypice Impressi 44. Graz, Austria:
Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1974.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A beautiful photographic reproduction of a religious tonalmatl produced shortly after the conquest in the
Valley of Mexico. The scenes of the veintena (monthly) festivals may be the first example of a native artist
grappling with a European conception of narrative painting.
Find this resource:
• Quiñones Keber, Eloise. Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial
Aztec Manuscript. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A careful study, transcription, and facsimile of a ritual manuscript created in central Mexico in the mid-16th
century. The manuscript contains abundant glosses, written in the 16th century to explain the images, that in
the early 21st century offer a window not only into what the images meant, but also how Spanish observers
understood native religion.
Find this resource:
• Sahagún, Bernardino de. El códice Florentino de Fray Bernardino de Sahagun: Que conserva la
Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana de Florencia, Italia. Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación, 1980.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A stunning, three-volume facsimile of the book compiled by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún, which
he titled Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, but which is commonly called the Florentine
Codex. This is the most important book on the Aztec and early colonial culture of central Mexico.
Find this resource:
• Sahagún, Bernardino de. Primeros memoriales. Translated by Thelma Sullivan. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An early version of the Florentine Codex, this manuscript is now divided between two repositories, but it is
brought together in this high-quality facsimile. A second volume translates the Nahuatl texts, with extensive
commentary by this renowned scholar of Nahuatl.
Find this resource:

Cartography and Natural History

The study of 16th-century maps produced in New Spain began as a subcategory to the study of manuscripts
but is now a vibrant branch of its own. Many indigenous maps have survived because of their use in legal
cases, and the large corpus has not only yielded reflection on the development of an indigenous painting
tradition but also enabled exploration of indigenous spatial concepts, as seen in Mundy 1996 and Russo
2005. These and other maps created outside the indigenous sphere, especially those forming part of the
urban mapping tradition that came to flower in New Spain in the 18th century, have also proved rich sources
for understanding real landscapes; Kagan 2000underscores the ideologies about spaces—be they cities or
swamps—that are embedded in cartographic representations. In a similar vein, works falling outside the
strictly drawn canon of art (such as botanical illustrations) throw light on larger cultural shifts, such
as Bleichmar 2012, a study of imperial Spanish botanical expeditions; Katzew’s introduction to Basarás
2006 discusses how preoccupations of Enlightenment intellectuals gave rise to new types of genre paintings
and illustrations.

• Basarás, Joaquín Antonio de. Una visión del México del Siglo de las Luces: La codificación de
Joaquín Antonio de Basarás; Origen, costumbres y estado presente de mexicanos y filipino. Mexico
City: Landucci, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A facsimile edition of a manuscript written by a Spanish merchant who lived and traveled in New Spain in
the 1760s; his laconic commentaries are typical of writers creating relaciones, or official reports; his
accompanying illustrations offer full-page portraits of “types” from regions in New Spain as well as versions
of the well-known casta groupings, along with images of tropical fruits and different militias, reflecting one
individual’s assimilation of late-18th-century preoccupations and typologies.
 Find this resource:
• Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions & Visual Culture in the Hispanic
Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226058559.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Botanists traversed Latin America in the late 18th century, and these missions promoted “economic botany,”
revealing potential revenue sources after mines had been exhausted. They also made the findings visible to
the larger Spanish Empire and to an international community of botanists, creating what Bleichmar
describes as a “visual epistemology.” The book is, therefore, also influential in its examination of the
intersection of Enlightenment scientific interests and notions of empire.
Find this resource:
• Kagan, Richard. Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Spaniards entering the New World held the city to be a key locus for the creation of civic society;
representations of cities in Spanish America, Kagan argues, were inflected by, and contributed to, the
deeply held ideologies about the urban realm. In his studies of Mexico City, Lima, Cuzco, and Potosí, Kagan
moves beyond using maps and paintings of urban spaces as straightforward documents; instead, he reveals
their animating ideologies.
Find this resource:
• Mundy, Barbara E. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of
theRelaciones Geográficas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book centers on a corpus of maps that were created in response to a wide-ranging royal questionnaire
of c. 1578 sent to Spain’s oversees possessions. That many of the responses (some seventy maps) were
created by indigenous painters allows the author to use them to examine the development of indigenous
cartography from the pre-Hispanic period into the later 16th century.
Find this resource:
• Russo, Alessandra. El realismo circular: Tierras, espacios y paisajes de la cartografía. Mexico City:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2005.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A provocative treatment of the collection of indigenous maps held by the Archivo General de la Nación in
Mexico City; Russo argues that their artists were forging innovative solutions to pictorial problems that they
faced, both artistic and political, drawing on both the traditions of indigenous and European art with which
they were familiar and transforming both in the process.
Find this resource:

Feather Paintings and Paintings on Mother of Pearl

With their mystifying facture and brilliant, shimmering hues, feather paintings have produced endless
fascination among art historians. The accommodation of Christian imagery, often from printed sources, to
the indigenous technique of featherwork is equally rich with theoretical ramifications. Numerous symposia
have been devoted to this medium alone. Castello Yturbide 1993 offers the first corpus of featherwork
imagery (much of it unpublished until then), on which more-recent scholars have been able to build; its
legacy can be seen in the massive undertaking of El vuelo de las imágenes, a 2011 exhibition at Mexico
City’s Museo Nacional de Arte, which assembled feather paintings from collections worldwide and which
provided the impetus for the most important catalogue of essays to date (Russo, et al. 2015). One of the
exhibition’s organizers, Alessandra Russo, has already produced the most theoretically sophisticated
studies of featherwork images (Russo 2002, Russo 2009). Enconchados, paintings on panels embedded
with pieces of mother of pearl, index an even more complicated cultural exchange; European compositional
strategies meet traditional Asian pictorial techniques, both of which were adapted to the tastes of Mexican
and Iberian patrons as artists availed themselves of local Mexican materials. Dujovne 1984 is a foundational
study and an important catalogue of the scattered enconchados in Argentina, Mexico, Spain, and the United
States, many in private collections; it, in turn, built upon the careful cataloguing and descriptive analysis of
the important collection of the Museo de América in Madrid (García Saiz 1980). More-nuanced consideration
of the cross-cultural implications of these works was occasioned by INAH’s restoration of an important series
 of enconchados (depicting the conquest of Mexico and now housed in the Museo Nacional del Virreinato,
Tepotzotlán), which revealed the use of traditional Chinese materials and techniques (Avila Hernández
1997). Ocaña Ruiz 2008 suggests the potential additional influence of Japanese inlay, and treats frames
inlaid with mother of pearl, which had been largely overlooked by previous literature.

• Avila Hernández, Julieta. El influjo de la pintura china en los enconchados de Nueva España. Mexico
City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Restorers’ material analysis is used to make large claims about the Chinese provenance of material and
pictorial techniques used to craft enconchados in the viceregal period. Discovery of the use of distemper
(temple a la cola) and Chinese ink (tinta china) bolsters claims that the Asian elements of
the enconchados extend beyond the use of shells embedded in the wood supports, and may support the
author’s speculation that a group of Chinese artists worked in 17th-century Mexico. Compositional analyses
and visual comparisons to Asian material should, however, be more skeptically considered.
Find this resource:
• Castello Yturbide, Teresa, ed. The Art of Featherwork in Mexico. Mexico City: Fomento Cultural
Banamex, 1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This richly illustrated volume presents an overview of Mexican featherwork from preconquest to the 1990s.
Given that the essays are written by different scholars, the depth of coverage is highly variable, but this book
functions as a nice reference source nonetheless; essays on 16th-century featherwork images with Christian
iconography are particularly strong.
Find this resource:
• Dujovne, Marta. Las pinturas con incrustaciones de nácar. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1984.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The author organizes the works into categories of single religious images, works in religious series, historical
cycles, and works with various techniques in addition to shell. A short discussion of production and the
visual effects of the multimedia facture precedes the descriptions of the pieces, frustratingly limited to
iconographic observations, and joined by black-and-white reproductions of uneven quality; however, all of
the text legends, notoriously hard to read even in person, are transcribed.
Find this resource:
• García Saiz, María Concepción. La pintura colonial en el Museo de América. Vol. 2, los enconchados.
Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, 1980.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This volume catalogues the most important collection of enconchados at the Museo de América in Madrid,
providing provenance, transcriptions of the inscriptions, and bibliography (now not current) for each piece.
The largely descriptive analysis is quite useful for the museum’s two famous series of the conquest of
Mexico, the iconography of which is hard to parse, and it is accompanied by the passages from Bernal Díaz
del Castillo’s account of the conquest, widely presumed to be the textual source of the images. A critical
historiographical overview of the reception of enconchados since the 19th century acts as an introduction.
Find this resource:
• Ocaña Ruiz, Sonia I. “Marcos ‘enconchados’: Autonomía y apropriación de formas japonesas en la
pintura novohispana.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 92 (2008): 107–153.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Though more evidence would be necessary to shore up the author’s suggestion that frames inlaid with
mother of pearl were directly influenced by Japanese examples, this study explores these understudied
frames, marginalized by earlier studies. Additionally useful for its extensive, up-to-date bibliography and
historiographical overview.
Find this resource:
• Russo, Alessandra. “Plumes of Sacrifice: Transformation in Sixteenth-Century Mexican Feather
Art.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 42 (Autumn 2002): 226–250.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Russo investigates the significance of the materiality of feathers and the visual effects of their shimmering
facture. She argues that the feathers themselves could act as a metonymic signifier of the Holy Spirit and, at
 times, of Christ’s body, suggesting that sacredness was intrinsic to the material of feather mosaics.
Exploiting the resonances of these ideas with preconquest uses of feathers to decorate divine forms, the
author proposes ways that native image making could inflect European iconography.
Find this resource:
• Russo, Alessandra. “Image-plume, temps reliquaire? Tangibilités d’une histoire esthétique.”
In Traditions et temporalités des images. Edited by Giovanni Careri, François Lissarague, Jean-
Claude Schmitt, and Carlo Severi, 153–164. Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales,
2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article attempts to answer the deceptively simple question of why feathers became the material par
excellence of sacred images in 16th-century New Spain. Russo suggests that feathers were related to
preconquest conceptions of divinity and to ideas about the relation of the Old and New Worlds, given a
diffusionist logic that posited the natives as ancestors of lost Jewish tribes. Russo examines a controversial
translation of the Old Testament passage that described the tabernacle covered by drapes of feathers, in
turn arguing that feathers came to signify the past for both Europeans and indigenous subjects alike.
Find this resource:
• Russo, Alessandra, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane, eds. Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico
and Europe, 1400–1700. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A collection of thirty-one essays by scholars in the field, this volume presents the most up-to-date efforts to
offer historical data and methodological paradigms for exploring feather painting. Richly illustrated with
pieces from all over the world, the volume also contains the invaluable resource of an inventory of all known
extant featherwork pieces from Mesoamerica and New Spain.
Find this resource:

Biombos and Painted Furniture

Japanese painted screens were imported to New Spain as early as the beginning of the 17th century; artists
in New Spain quickly adapted the form, which allowed them wide horizontal fields to fill with secular
imagery. Biombos have consistently received mention in histories of Mexican painting, but since Castelló
Yturbide and Martínez del Río de Redo 1970, the foundational study, the scholarly field has turned more
systematic attention to, and explored the cross-cultural implications of, these forms. Such interest is well
represented by the Viento detenido (Museo Soumaya 1999), the catalogue that accompanied that
museum’s 1999 exhibition; the essays in this volume position each of the museum’s thirteen biombos as a
node in a global, early modern visual culture and, in doing so, explore the circulation of forms from Asia to
the Americas and through Europe, the dissemination of iconography in printed sources and paintings from
Europe, and the implications of thinking about movement from social and economic perspectives.
Furthermore, biombos, and other items of painted furniture, attest to the importance of painting in elite
environments beyond the framed canvas. Painted furniture, however, has received cursory
investigation. Gómez de Orozco 1983 is an example of one of the few general treatments. Though less a
book about painted objects than one about objects in paintings, Curiel, et al. 2002 offers some insight in
offering an examination of paintings of colonial interiors and their objects; this work also complements a
growing body of literature about secular painting and so-called genre painting—namely, scenes of everyday
life—in Mexico.

• Castelló Yturbide, Teresa, and Marita Martínez del Río de Redo. Biombos mexicanos. Mexico City:
Edición de Jorge Gurría Lacroix, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1970.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A foundational study that catalogues a large portion of the extant biombos, this book has served as the basis
for subsequent studies.
Find this resource:
• Curiel, Gustavo, et al. Pintura y vida cotidiana en México: Siglos XVII–XX. Mexico City: Fundación
Cultural Banamex, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This catalogue to a 1999 Mexico City show provides an overview of civic and domestic colonial spaces and
the objects and architecture that shaped them. Some readers may object to the treatment of paintings as
 illustrations for discussions of period spaces and material culture, but the rich historical account provides the
tools to further interrogate the nicely reproduced paintings, biombos, and ex-votos.
Find this resource:
• Gómez de Orozco, Frederico. El mobiliario y la decoración en la Nueva España en el siglo XVI.
Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A brief overview of 16th-century furniture and interior decoration, this book provides a general introduction to
domestic space and civic architectural decoration at the beginning of the viceregal period. As much of this
material is no longer extant, the book relies heavily upon inventories as evidence and details from
postconquest codices as illustrations.
Find this resource:
• Museo Soumaya. Viento detenido: Mitologías e historias en el arte del biombo; Colección de
biombos de los siglos XVII al XIX de Museo Soumaya. Mexico City: Museo Soumaya, 1999.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Highlighting the museum’s unique collection of screens (from four continents), the entries to this catalogue—
remarkably consistent despite their many authors—explore the circulation of form and iconography. A fine
introductory essay by Gustavo Curiel on the use and display of biombos in colonial homes, supplemented by
a useful list of all references to biombos in notarial documents from 1617 to 1796, and color foldout
reproductions of the museum’s screens aid the reader in considering both historical and artistic details.
Find this resource:

Artist and Church Monographs

Considered a traditional research tool in European fields, the artist’s monograph represents a new
development in the art history of New Spain, receiving significant scholarly dedication only since the 1980s
and almost entirely from scholars based in Mexico. In some cases, entire subfields of scholarly inquiry have
been inspired by monographic projects; this is particularly true in the cases of Juan Correa, Cristóbal
Villalpando, and Miguel Cabrera, for whom a substantial bibliography now exists (Gutiérrez Haces, et al.
1997; Tovar de Teresa 1995; Vargas Lugo, et al. 1985–1994). Even when not fully illustrated, catalogues
raisonnés are particularly helpful in bringing together works that are seldom reproduced as well as for
tracing the movement and commissions of artists and enumerating copies from both workshops and
followers, which were central to artistic production in the viceroyalty (Rodríguez-Miaja, 2001, Ruiz Gomar
1987, Tovar de Teresa 1988). As is often the case with such studies, monographs on Mexican artists are
particularly useful in compiling and analyzing archival documentation related to an artist’s life and pictorial
output; several monographs listed in this article mobilize such information to useful ends and have yielded
artistic personalities and insights into training practices and patronage networks in ways that had not
previously been considered (Gutiérrez Haces, et al. 1997; Tovar de Teresa 1995; Vargas Lugo, et al. 1985–
1994). Even more so than in other fields, attributions should be carefully considered—skeptically when
relying on black-and-white photographs—as Mexican works have a much-longer and less reliably
documented history of circulation, overpainting, and restoration. Monographs of single churches and their
decorative cycles are also included here, which give a sense of the original contexts and history of paintings
as well as the central role churches played as patrons for artists and their workshops; given that these
studies include diagrams, floor plans, and reconstructions of lost retables and church structures, they can
often serve as a reference resource for discussions of paintings in other, more general or thematic,
publications (Secretaría de Desarrollo Urbano y Ecología 1986; Merlo Juárez, et al. 1991) and also artist-
monograph (Gutiérrez Haces, et al. 1997).

• Gutiérrez Haces, Juana, Pedro Ángeles, Clara Bargellini, and Rogelio Ruiz Gomar. Cristóbal de
Villalpando, ca. 1649–1714. Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex, Instituto de Investigaciones
Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1997.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The most ambitious monograph on any New Spanish artist to date. Heralding the work of the native-born
painter, the authors take a strong and explicit stance on the inventive, rather than derivative, nature of
painting in New Spain. The catalogue raisonné is not fully illustrated, but it compensates with lush
reproductions of the painter’s most impressive work, including almost thirty paintings that were restored
specifically for this book. Entries by leading scholars, including Juana Gutiérrez Haces, Pedro Ángeles,
Clara Bargellini, and Rogelio Ruiz Gomar.
 Find this resource:
• Merlo Juárez, Eduardo, Miguel Pavón Rivero, and José Antonio Quintana Fernández. La Basílica
Catedral de la Puebla de los Ángeles. Puebla, Mexico: Litografía Alai, 1991.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
In describing painting as but one element of the sumptuous construction and decoration of this cathedral,
the authors decenter the role of painting in the late 17th and 18th centuries and offer insight into the
patronage and execution of painting in context. Many images are not to be found in other sources, but the
reader should be wary that the authors do not always indicate when only part of a cycle or series has been
reproduced. The absence of footnotes proves frustrating to research-oriented readers.
Find this resource:
• Rodríguez-Miaja, Fernando E. Diego de Borgraf: Un destello en la noche de los tiempos, “obra
pictórica.” Puebla, Mexico: Puebla Patronato Editorial para la Cultura, Arte e Historia de Puebla,
Universidad Iberoamericana Golfo Centro, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Flemish art exerted an influence on Mexican viceregal painting not only through the circulation of prints, but
also through the immigration of artists from the southern Netherlands. Diego de Borgraf, an Antwerp-born
artist, crossed the Atlantic as part of Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza’s retinue and spent his career in
Puebla. This reference resource compiles biographical information, documents, an annotated bibliography,
and contextual histories of both Antwerp and Puebla. The entries to the complete catalogue of Borgraf’s
work are largely descriptive.
Find this resource:
• Ruiz Gomar, Rogelio. El pintor Luis Juárez: Su vida y su obra. Mexico City: Instituto de
Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1987.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This monograph compiles the work and the scant available biographical information of a painter whose
output, in the first third of the 17th century, was crucial in shaping the development of painting in Mexico.
General contextualization and a lengthy discussion about Juárez’s nationality and training, which had been
much debated in previous literature, bolster the catalogue, which is unfortunately illustrated with dark black-
and-white reproductions.
Find this resource:
• Secretaría de Desarrollo Urbano y Ecología. Catedral de México: Patrimonio, artístico y cultural.
Mexico City: Secretaría de Desarollo Urbano y Ecología, 1986.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A monumental undertaking to catalogue all of the paintings and sculptures produced between the 16th and
the 20th centuries in the Cathedral of Mexico City, this book is divided into sections that mirror the
architectural partitions of the space (chapels, altars, etc.). Though the entries, each written by a different
scholar, are inconsistent in quality, all make use of archival records to discuss the commission of works,
when known, and the placement of works, both in the current and in the previous cathedral buildings. The
catalogue of items in the sagrario and anexo is a helpful resource, compiling little-studied objects, often not
possible to view while visiting.
Find this resource:
• Tovar de Teresa, Guillermo. Un rescate de la fantasía: El arte de los Lagarto, iluminadores
novohispanos de los siglos XVI y XVII. Mexico City: El Equilibrista, 1988.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This well-illustrated book treats the life and output of Luis de Lagarto, a polymath working in Mexico City and
Puebla, now best known for his miniature and large-scale choir book illustrations. Use of archival documents
and an inventory of the artist’s library provide insights into his working process and interests, rarely known
for an artist of the period. The book concludes with a brief gloss of works by three of the artist’s sons, also
illuminators.
Find this resource:
• Tovar de Teresa, Guillermo. Miguel Cabrera: Pintor de cámara de la reina celestial. Mexico City:
InverMéxico, 1995.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This stunningly illustrated volume treats one of the most important painters in 18th-century Mexico, Miguel
Cabrera, whose varied output included small-scale devotional paintings, civic portraits, and designs for
 massive funeral biers and architectural retablos. The book includes treatment of the artist’s biography and
training, examination of his religious commissions, analysis of the artist’s engagement with the Virgin of
Guadalupe (with synopsis of his 1756 book Maravilla Americana), reflections on a rare inventory of the
artist’s estate (transcribed, with other archival documents, in appendix), examination of prints that offer
insight into Cabrera’s designs of funeral biers, and a full catalogue raisonné. A very rare English edition of
the book (only 700 copies printed) is in circulation.
Find this resource:
• Vargas Lugo, Elisa, José Guadalupe Victoria, and Gustavo Curiel. Juan Correa, su vida, su obra. 5
vols. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1985–1994.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
These volumes present an overview of Correa’s pictorial output. Tomo (Volume) 2 (two parts) groups the
painter’s work according to subject matter and provides factual information and iconographic treatment,
Tomo 3 compiles transcriptions of all discovered documentation related to the artist with summaries, and
Tomo 4 (two parts) contains thematic essays with important paintings treated in a broader context (New
World comparanda, European print sources). These volumes, sadly, contain only small, dark, black-and-
white reproductions. Tomo 1, intended to include a biography of the artist and technical analysis of the
paintings, has not been completed.
Find this resource:

Guadalupe and Other Local Cults

The growth of local religious cults in Mexico went hand in hand with the production of huge bodies of
devotional painting and prints to publicize them. Often formulaic in composition and sometimes of low artistic
quality, these fascinating and quintessentially Latin American works have only in the early 21st century
begun to receive the art-historical attention they deserve. The majority of scholarship on these cults and
their images has been the product of anthropological and historical research (Brading 2001, Poole
2004, Taylor 2010); Ruben Vargas Ugarte’s two-volume Historia del culto de María en Ibero-américa y de
sus imágenes y santuarios más celebrados (Lima, Imprenta “La Providencia,” 1931) is a classic reference
resource. Art historians have produced shorter studies related to specific cults and the artistic, political, and
cultural ramifications of their worship (Katzew 1998, Martínez Baracs 2000). Many dissertations currently in
progress on cult images throughout the Hispanic world illustrate a rapidly rising interest among art
historians. The Virgin of Guadalupe, the most famous cult image in Mexico and throughout Latin America, is
one notable exception, and the art-historical literature on her cult and image is immense. Beyond the
inexhaustible production of copies, the tilma image, believed to have been imprinted by the miraculous roses
that accompanied the Virgin’s apparition to Juan Diego, was integral to raising the status of painters in
Mexico, who were called upon three times—in 1666, 1751, and 1787—as experts to inspect and confirm the
miraculous nature of the image’s facture, covered in Cuadriello 2002 and Poole 2004. Careful analysis of
this well-known cult has had implications for considering both the role of images in the development of cults,
as discussed in Peterson 2005a, and the theoretical implications of copying in New World devotion, as seen
in Peterson 2005b; these attempts led to a subsequent synthetic treatment of Guadalupe’s cult across the
three centuries of colonialism in New Spain and a comparison to her Spanish counterpart and early attempts
to implement worship to her cult in South America (Peterson 2014).

• Brading, D. A. Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An erudite study of the Virgin of Guadalupe, with particular focus on the ways that writers, be they 17th-
century priests or 20th-century historians, shaped the understanding of this miraculous image and its cult.
Find this resource:
• Cuadriello, Jaime. El divino pintor: La creación de María de Guadalupe en el taller celestial. Mexico
City: Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe–Museo de Historia Mexicana de Monterrey, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An investigation of the iconographic invention (late 17th and 18th centuries) of the divine painter’s workshop,
showing God the Father painting the Guadalupe image. Cuadriello treats the theological notions of God as
the creator of the Virgin, theories of divine and saintly creativity (including iconographies of St. Luke), and
medieval conceptions of translatio, the movement of divine bodies, images, and relics. Paula Mues Orts’s
 introductory essay addresses the implications for the status of artists, who were called to examine the prized
image.
Find this resource:
• Katzew, Ilona. “La Virgen de la Macana: Emblema de una conyuntura franciscana.” Anales del
Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 72 (1998): 39–72.
DOI: 10.22201/iie.18703062e.1998.72.1802Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article gives a brief historical overview of the Virgin of Macana’s cult, born in the aftermath of the
Pueblo revolt in New Mexico when the statue of a Virgin bled after being hit in the head with a macana.
Later taken to Mexico City, the Virgin’s growing popularity, Katzew argues, bolstered the status of
Franciscan missionary work as it came under attack by the Bourbon monarchy.
Find this resource:
• Martínez Baracs, Rodrigo. La secuencia tlaxcalteca: Origenes del culto a Nuestra Señora de Ocotlán.
Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. 2000.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The statue of the Virgin of Ocotlán reputedly appeared to the native Juan Diego Bernardino amid a burning
pine tree in 1541; in this book, historical analysis of the cult wins out over treatment of the cult’s images,
reproduced in poor quality. However, other important Tlaxcalan images—the Lienzo de Tlaxcala, one of
Cortés’s standards, images of the conversion of the Tlaxcalan lords—are discussed, as are competing cults,
the politics of cult worship, and Franciscan fears about idolatry.
Find this resource:
• Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. “Creating the Virgin of Guadalupe: The Cloth, the Artist, and Sources in
Sixteenth-Century New Spain.” The Americas 61.4 (2005a): 571–610.
DOI: 10.1353/tam.2005.0091Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
As a counterpart to Peterson’s more theoretical article of the same year (Peterson 2005b), this essay
masterfully weeds through suggestions about the origins of the Guadalupe image, discrediting many lines of
thinking and proposing new and convincing source material. Peterson’s article serves equally well as an
introduction to the tilma image and a reference resource for a specialist audience. Available online for
purchase or by subscription.
Find this resource:
• Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. “The Reproducibility of the Sacred: Simulacra of the Virgin of
Guadalupe.” In Exploring New World Imagery: Spanish Colonial Paper from the 2002 Mayer Center
Symposium. Edited by Donna Pierce, 41–77. Denver, CO: Denver Art Museum, 2005b.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Under the rubric of simulacra, Peterson discusses the copies of the Virgin of Guadalupe: a New World icon,
specifically an acheiropoieton, an image made without the use of human hands. Peterson uses documents
and the images themselves to explain the specific conditions in which a copy could stand for its original: it
shared the exact measurements as the original, it had touched the original, and (paradoxically) it was made
by a well-esteemed artist, who often signed the perfect copy.
Find this resource:
• Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Though notable for its magisterial synthetic treatment of Guadalupe in New Spain, this book also deeply
contextualizes the New Spanish cult in relation to earlier precedents. The book thus allows comparison
between New Spain’s patroness and both her Extramaduran precedent and early attempts to seed devotion
to Guadalupe in South America.
Find this resource:
• Poole, Stafford. Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol,
1531–1797. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This comprehensive historical overview of the reception of Guadalupe throughout the viceregal period is a
helpful reference resource when considering the role of this Virgin in the development of Mexican painting.
Pithy discussions of the 1615 Stradanus engraving (the first extant printed reproduction of Guadalupe),
Cabrera’s 1756 Maravilla Mexicana, and the various inspections of the tilma image by painters in Mexico are
particularly helpful.
 Find this resource:
• Taylor, William B. Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book provides a much-needed critical approach to the complicated histories of Mexican devotion to
paintings and statues of Christ and the Virgin from a historical and anthropological viewpoint. The book
reprints earlier essays (on the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Cristo de Ixmiquilpan) and includes new studies,
with emphasis on the expansion of these cults across the viceroyalty in the late 17th and 18th centuries.
Several obscure prints are included.
Find this resource:

Guilds, Techniques, and Academies

Unlike in Europe, where union-like organizations (called guilds) controlled the production of art, the activities
of artists, and the conventions of patronage throughout the Early Modern period, the guilds of Mexico were
less stable entities despite being modeled on these European counterparts. The painter’s guild was first
founded in the 16th century before somewhat mysteriously dissolving, and then it was reformed and
refounded in the 17th century using, in part, the ordinances of the previous century. Finally, it was
incorporated into and replaced by Mexico City’s Academy of San Carlos in 1785. The enigmatic
documentation related to the foundation of guilds has resulted in several studies that analyze the nature of
these institutions and attempt to paint a cogent picture of the protections and prestige they offered painters
(Barrio Lorenzot 1920, Mues Orts 2008). As Deans-Smith 2009 argues, the self-positioning of these artists
in the guild could have a racial dimension. The rich archival holdings of the Academy of San Carlos have
allowed for more systematic study, and they have facilitated a clearer picture of the institution’s foundations,
organization, and training of artists (Brown 1976, Charlot 1962). Furthermore, these archives have been
carefully catalogued and described so as to facilitate future research (Báez Macías 1972–1993). Scholars
are increasingly probing the nature of artistic collaboration and training outside these larger institutions, a
task aided greatly by guides to notarial archives, catalogued in Ramírez Montes, et al. 1990–2011, which
generally hold artistic contracts. Finally, studies that treat the more informal organization of artists in related
areas of production, such as printmaking, are beginning to appear (Donahue-Wallace 2001).

• Báez Macías, Eduardo. Guía del Archivo de la antigua Academia de San Carlos. 4 vols. Mexico City:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1972–1993.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A four-volume set that catalogues and briefly describes the entries in the vast archival holdings of the
Academia de San Carlos. Primarily useful as an aid for advanced archival research.
Find this resource:
• Barrio Lorenzot, Francisco de. Ordenanzas de Gremios de la Nueva España. Edited by G. Estrada.
Mexico City: Secretaría de Gobernación, Dirección de Talleres Gráficos, 1920.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Still a rich resource, this book offers transcriptions of the various ordinances that regulated the guilds—
among them, those of painters, gilders, and retable makers—and thereby gives insight into the relationships
among artists, patrons, and the state.
Find this resource:
• Brown, Thomas A. La Academia de San Carlos de la Nueva España. Mexico City: Secretaría de
Educación Pública, 1976.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A translation of Brown’s 1970 doctoral dissertation, these short two volumes build on the work of Jean
Charlot through archival research. The author is more interested in institutional history (foundation,
regulations, curricula, directorship), however, and the book makes scant use of the large extant body of
visual material produced in the academy.
Find this resource:
• Charlot, Jean. Mexican Art and the Academy of San Carlos, 1785–1915. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1962.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
 This early overview of the founding and development of the Academy of San Carlos is still a valued resource
for its sensitive treatment of the institution’s training of artists during turbulent periods of social and political
reorganization. The text is a rich source of archival quotations and document excerpts, and it is illustrated
with many understudied drawings (some of the only extant viceregal drawings), most of which served as
student qualification and competition pieces.
Find this resource:
• Deans-Smith, Susan. “‘Dishonor in the Hands of Indians, Spaniards, and Blacks’: The (Racial)
Politics of Painting in Early Modern Mexico.” In Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican
America. Edited by Ilona Katzew and Susan Deans-Smith, 43–72. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article offers a concise overview of the several phases of the guild, focusing on the transition from the
latest iterations of the guild to the academy. The author argues that artists, seeking to elevate the status of
painting, became increasingly concerned with non-Spaniards and specifically mixed-race painters, though
the way that their statements affected actual practice remains unclear.
Find this resource:
• Donahue-Wallace, Kelly. “Printmakers in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City: Francisco Sylverio, José
Mariano Navarro, José Benito Ortuño, and Manuel Galicia de Villavicencio.” Anales del Instituto de
Investigaciones Estéticas 78 (2001): 221–234.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Scholars have long recognized the seminal role that prints played for painters in Mexico, but few studies
treat the substantial printing industry that developed in New Spain. By analyzing rich archival
documentation, Donahue-Wallace explores the training, censorship, and patronage of printmakers in 18th-
century New Spain and encourages future studies to flesh out a picture of this crucial, but understudied,
aspect of Mexican art.
Find this resource:
• Mues Orts, Paula. La libertad del pincel: Los discursos sobre la nobleza de la pintura en Nueva
España. Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2008.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book traces the multiple organizations of the painter’s guild and the foundation of the Academy of San
Carlos, focusing specifically on the effects on the status of artists. Mues Orts makes use of archival
evidence to formulate claims about the self-positioning of different groups of painters in relation to other
artists, indigenous craftsmen, and both church and state officials. The reader should be cautious of
European parallels drawn by the author as these often rest upon contested or outdated literature.
Find this resource:
• Ramírez Montes, Guillermina, Guillermo Luckie, Silvia Bravo Sandov, Raquel Pineda Mendoza, and
Edén Mario Zárate Sánchez. Archivo de Notarias de la ciudad de México: Protocolos. 5 vols. Mexico
City: Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Autonoma de México, 1990–2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An ongoing series of publications (the most recent appearing in 2011); offers indexes to the files of the
notarial archive of Mexico City that deal with art production. Since notary records were kept by individual
notaries (not in any centralized repository) and documented many of the transactions carried out between
patrons and guild artisans, these guides lay the groundwork for a close-grained study of patron networks
and guild practices in New Spain.
Find this resource:

Race, Gender, and Hybridity

The development of the field of Mexican art history in the United States coincided with the interest in race
and gender that swept through the humanities. Thus, an ample literature now exists on these themes in
relation to art and painting in New Spain. These topics have been particularly useful in assessing secular art
such as casta painting and portraiture, minor art forms compared to the massive quantity of religious art
produced in the viceroyalty. These had been previously relegated to anthropological and historical inquiry
that probed such paintings for their ethnographic and “documentary” details. María Concepción García
Saiz’s early work on casta paintings revolutionized the study of these images by constructing a coherent
 corpus (García Saiz 1989). Other art historians have subsequently focused on the ways that such works
actively participated in the construction of racial and gendered identity (Carrera 2003, Katzew 2004), an
approach that corresponds to a broader trend in scholarship concerned with identity and institutional politics
(Córdova 2011, Villaseñor Black 2006). The idea of hybridity has proved a more hotly contested issue in the
field. Nationalist rhetoric within Mexico in the 1920s and 1930s lionized the ethnic mestizo (a person of
Spanish and indigenous descent), for such a figure offered a way to reclaim a lost indigenous heritage at the
same time that the idea of mestizaje came to herald a distinctly Mexican identity. But the notion of mestizaje,
when applied to the work of art, was challenged in the mid-20th century, most ardently by George Kubler, for
its inherent racial connotations. Could a term used to describe racial mixing have anything to do with art?
The term “hybrid” became more widely used in the field, notably championed in Gruzinski 2002. But in turn,
“hybrid” has also been challenged on the basis of a presupposition of two impossibly pure and distinct
categories and the ideological assumptions that such a stance entails; Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn’s
influential article (Dean and Leibsohn 2003) takes the most recent methodological position and is also the
most often cited.

• Carrera, Magali M. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in
Portraiture and Casta Painting. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Focusing on three sets of casta paintings, Carrera interrogates the construction of “race” as social practice
in 18th-century Mexico in order to chart the evolution of this genre. In the most theoretical book
about casta painting to date, the author posits that calidad (quality) was the essential marker of identity,
created by a system of signs related to the body and its trappings, including dress, material culture, and the
professions and spaces that individuals inhabited.
Find this resource:
• Córdova, James M. “Clad in Flowers: Indigenous Arts and Knowledge in Colonial Mexican
Convents.” Art Bulletin 93 (2011): 449–467.
DOI: 10.1080/00043079.2011.10786018Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Centering this article on profession portraits of indigenous women who entered cloistered orders, the author
argues for the continued influence of preconquest traditions of flower and feather work into the late 18th
century. It is part of a trend to destabilize assumptions about what constitutes European and indigenous
features of life and art. The reader should be wary of Córdova’s dismissiveness of European strands of
iconography since floral-crowned portraits of nuns developed in Spain and the southern Netherlands.
Find this resource:
• Dean, Carolyn, and Dana Leibsohn. “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in
Colonial Spanish America.” Colonial Latin American Review 12.1 (2003): 5–35.
DOI: 10.1080/10609160302341Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article takes issue with the term “hybridity” as used to describe visual culture. Using a few poignant
examples, the authors illustrate the impossibility of maintaining the two distinct categories (Spanish and
indigenous) that make up the hybrid in the colonial landscape. They propose that attempting to do so leads
to the invisibility and erasure of contributions by either culture (though usually indigenous) and constitutes a
type of ideological violence. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
Find this resource:
• García Saiz, María Concepción. Las castas mexicanas: Un género pictórico americano. Milan:
Olivetti, 1989.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The first monograph devoted to casta painting, this book opened avenues of inquiry for other art historians
by compiling fifty-nine casta paintings, reconstructing original (now fractured), series, establishing
chronology, discussing attributions, and reproducing the works in large, high-quality images. This dual-
language text—albeit with awkward English moments—argues for the inclusion of casta paintings in the art-
historical canon by suggesting their role in larger discourses of race and by describing them as the Mexican
form of genre painting.
Find this resource:
• Gruzinski, Serge. The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization.
Translated by Deke Dusinberre. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
 Less art-historical than historical and anthropological, this book, nevertheless, mobilizes visual materials to
theorize the admixture of indigenous and Spanish cultures as an altogether new form. Gruzinski uses this
framework to offer particularly puzzling images, such as the murals of Ixmiquilpan, a new coherence.
Find this resource:
• Katzew, Ilona. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2004.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
The most comprehensive overview of casta paintings produced in Mexico. The author dispels the claim that
such paintings functioned mostly as export goods or as souvenirs of time spent in the colonies. The book
centers on the change of visual rhetoric around 1760, when the social interactions between the figures
become fraught and the spaces become highly regularized and tied to professions, which Katzew claims
indexes growing anxiety about racial mixtures becoming unmoored from the class distinctions.
Find this resource:
• Villaseñor Black, Charlene. Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
One of few art-historical studies on masculinity in the Early Modern period, this book explores the privileged
position of St. Joseph in the Spanish territories, particularly in Mexico, where he acted as sole patron saint
from 1679 to 1746. This book explores iconographic motifs (Joseph the ideal bridegroom, the model father,
the diligent worker, the humble recipient of a noble and holy death) with heavy reliance upon theological and
artistic treatises of the period; in doing so, the author provides a framework for exploring the body of
Josephine imagery produced in the wake of the Council of Trent, whose insistence on the Holy Family
created a cult for the saint after millennia of indifference.
Find this resource:

Regional and Patron-Based Approaches

Bolstered by the groundwork of scholars who have fleshed out larger narratives of painting in New Spain,
several studies in the past decade have demonstrated the sophisticated analysis and fresh conclusions that
can be achieved by focusing on artistic production specific to region, religious order, or political institution.
Regional studies have greatly enriched the field’s understanding of the political, economic, and material
ramifications of art produced outside the Valley of Mexico (Cuadriello 2011, Farago and Pierce
2006). Farago and Pierce 2006, however, goes some lengths further, proposing an in-depth study of an area
in the viceroyalty of New Spain that had received scarce scholarly attention; the work paves the way for new
scholarly investigations, and its deeply self-reflexive commentary indicates the methodological ramifications
of studying overlooked regions. This work builds upon Gavin 1994—more museologically oriented—which
highlights the New Mexican collection of the Museum of International Folk Art’s (Santa Fe, New Mexico)
Hispanic Heritage Wing, the first gallery of an American museum that was permanently dedicated to
exhibiting traditional Hispanic arts, both viceregal and contemporary. Investigations of religious orders and
secular institutions have yielded reflection on the ways art in New Spain was used to consolidate or create
group identity (Alcalá 2002, Cruz González 2008) and legitimate imperial power (Schreffler 2006); moreover,
all of these studies index the subtle political, social, and theological complexities that artists were navigating
in crafting work for specific patrons.

• Alcalá, Luisa Elena. ed. Fundaciones jesuíticas en Iberoamérica. Madrid: Ediciones el Viso, 2002.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Each short essay of this volume treats a single Jesuit complex, spanning the Americas from Brazil to Baja
California. The book is a helpful introduction to understanding Jesuit patronage, architectural programs, and
painting cycles within these institutions and provides high-quality illustrations. The absence of footnotes may
prove frustrating.
Find this resource:
• Cruz González, Cristina. “The Circulation of Flemish Iconography in Mexican Missions and the
Creation of a New Visual Narrative, 1630–1830.” Boletín: The Journal of the California Mission
Studies Association 25.1 (2008): 5–34.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
 A precursor to the author’s book (in progress) about Franciscan imagery in New Spain, this article treats a
particular Franciscan iconography, authored by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, that circulated in print
form throughout the viceregal period; the author’s treatment of this motif is important both for its
consideration of the ways the order created a consistent ideology of images and for its engagement with
Hans Belting’s “era of art” thesis.
Find this resource:
• Cuadriello, Jaime. The Glories of the Republic of Tlaxcala: Art and Life in Viceregal Mexico.
Translated by Christopher L. Follett. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This case study paints a portrait of Don Ignacio Faustino Mazihcatzin and his family, native Tlaxcaltecans
who legitimized their position in New Spain by commissioning works that pointed to the role of Tlaxcalans
(allies with Cortés) in the conquest of Mexico and to the miracles that occurred in Tlaxcala as a sign of holy
favor. Documentation is particularly rich and includes newly discovered, colored drawings that acted as a
legitimizing contract for Mazihcatzin against threats of the Inquisition.
Find this resource:
• Farago, Claire, and Donna Pierce, eds. Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos in-between
Worlds. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
Essays include general introductions to the region and its artworks; treatments of inventories and material
culture; discussions of artists’ ethnicities and the nationalities of patrons; analyses of the artistic relationships
among Europe, Mexico, and New Mexico; several accounts of hide paintings; and explorations of
postcolonial New Mexico. Heavy emphasis is placed on the multiple systems of visuality and multiplicity of
semiotic meanings in New Mexican artifacts. A historiographical overview is included, as is a section on the
methodological implications of studying New Mexican art.
Find this resource:
• Gavin, Robin F. Traditional Arts of Spanish New Mexico: The Hispanic Heritage Wing at the Museum
of International Folk Art. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico, 1994.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This book highlights the objects, mostly religious, from the heyday of the craft movements in New Mexico.
After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, New Mexico developed a burgeoning industry of small, often portable,
religious imagery, which was sold throughout New Spain until transport along the Santa Fe Trail made
handmade goods obsolete. This is a well-illustrated overview of this material culture, particularly the work
of santeros, master craftsmen of devotional images. A timeline of important historical events in New Mexico
is included.
Find this resource:
• Schreffler, Michael. The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006.
Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This study focuses on how visual representations constructed imperial power in New Spain (late 16th and
17th centuries), with particular attention paid to the architecture of and objects in the Royal Palace in Mexico
City. Schreffler’s treatment of viceregal portraiture takes into consideration the viceroy as a living stand-in for
the king of Spain; his analysis of biombos displaying the conquest of Tenochtitlan are of particular note. His
comparison of viceregal and Spanish analogues exposes the particularities of identity and representation in
the New World.
Find this resource: