Search Results (4)

This essay examines the visual culture of what might be termed “the ecology of silver” between 1492 and 1710 in relation to colonialism on both sides of the Atlantic, with particular attention to both its shiny allure and the blind spots that that shininess produces. It focuses on three inter-related areas: depictions of Potosí, the great silver mountain in viceregal Peru; silver’s shine in European elite material culture; and the deployment of silver in celebrating the Spanish monarchy in viceregal Sicily, part of its empire within Europe. Current scholarship on early modern silver bifurcates between historical, political, and anthropological studies of silver’s extraction in the Americas and colonialism on one hand and a celebratory art historical scholarship focused on high-end European silver goods on the other. Scholars have energetically examined its extraction, the global trade in bullion, the rise of capitalism that it fed, and the wars that it fomented and paid for, but they stop short of inquiring into the ends to which silver was deployed within Europe and Asia beyond the naming of the principal ports. Meanwhile, studies of silver in Europe are overwhelmingly tightly drawn and connoisseurial, often with no reference to where the silver came from, let alone the circumstances of its extraction, transport, or even its effects. This split is due partly to a prevalent notion that silver’s value is inherent, objective, and caused by “rarity”; and it is partly due to art history’s unswerving identification with the rich and powerful. Such approaches overlook silver’s remarkable material and alchemical qualities and ignore its capacity to turn grubby profit into charismatic sparkle, which simultaneously drove the ecological and environmental damage and exonerated its profiteers. Early modern silver linked environmental destruction, colonialism, genocide, and coloniality to high culture, making it a particularly relevant topic for art historical analysis in this context. But more than that silver entwined them in complex, convulsive, and transformative ways, turning imperialism, violence and exploitation into beauty, shimmer and cultural sophistication. Hence, this essay insists on the centrality of imperial issues in the Old World as in the New, underscoring colonial dynamics within metropolitan culture while critically examining the work of seduction of art. The paradoxical quality of shine is the lens through which is seen the relation between violent coloniality and the allure and ecology of early modern silver. Full article

This essay explores the Descripción del Virreinato del Perú (c.1620), an anonymously authored account of viceregal Peru attributed to Pedro de León Portocarrero (c.1576–c.1620)—a Spanish New Christian merchant likely of Portuguese background. The analysis reveals that Portocarrero’s text undermines Spanish colonial authority not just by supplying secret commercial and military intelligence to Dutch officials but also by subtly critiquing Spain’s colonial enterprise on a symbolic discursive level. Consequently, the work offers an alternative, non-triumphalist, and dissident perspective on the Spanish colonization of Peru. Full article

This study analyzes the techniques and decorative motifs of several works made using barniz de Pasto, highlighting their characteristics in order to establish comparisons with artistic phenomena of Asia and Europe. A possible link can be observed between barniz de Pasto and the Namban and Pictorial style Japanese export lacquer works of the 17th and 18th centuries. A search for similarity is justified by the documentary and material evidence of Japanese works created in these styles being transported from Japan to the Viceroyalty of New Spain by Manila galleons via the trade route between Acapulco and Callao. Additionally, traces of the Spanish culture have been recognized in barniz de Pasto. For example, printed images that circulated in the Viceroyalty of Peru have been observed on a coffer. This appropriation, also observed in the mural painting of a Central Andean church, and the presence of the image of Amaru, a Quechua deity, on the same coffer, marks the Central Andes as one of the possible places where the practice of barniz de Pasto could have been established. All of this points to Central and South America’s great ability to appropriate foreign cultures and fuse them with their own during the viceregal period, as manifested in the art of barniz de Pasto. Full article

Landscape painting in Peru typically does not receive much attention from critical dis-course, even though the adoption of the Flemish landscape by Andean viceregal painters became a distinctive feature of Peruvian painting of the second half of the 17th century. Considered a consequence of a change in the artistic taste of viceregal society, the landscape was perceived as a secondary element of the composition. In this article, we will analyze the inclusion of the Flemish landscape in Andean religious painting from another critical perspective that takes into account different spiritual processes that colonial religiosity goes through. We analyze how the influence of the Franciscan and Jesuit mysticism created a fertile ground where landscape painting could develop in Peru. The Andean viceregal painters found in the landscape an effective way to visualize suprasensible spiritual experiences and an important device for the development in Peru of a painting with visionary characteristics. Full article