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The First History of Latin-American Art: The Second Volume
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 December 2015
Extract
In the Issue of January, 1946, the editor of THE AMERICAS published in the form of an article an extended review of mine of a book that had appeared the year before. This was the first volume of the Historia del arte hispanoamericano, written by Diego Angulo Iniguez and Enrique Marco Dorta. Now, five years later, I have been invited to review for the same journal the second volume of this monumental work. It is not often that such a privilege is accorded and I am duly grateful for this opportunity to continue the consideration of a major work of Spanish and Spanish American scholarship, which in its gradual development is bound to be increasingly a subject of prime interest and usefulness to all who are concerned with the culture of Latin America.
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- Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1952
References
1 Robert C. Smith, “The First History of Latin American Art,” THE AMERICAS, II (1946), 357–368.
2 Iñiguez, Diego Angulo and Dorta, Enrique Marco, Historia del arte hispanoamericano, vol. I (Barcelona and Buenos Aires: Salvat editores, 1945, 714 pp., 836 illus., 5 in color).Google Scholar
3 Wilder, Elizabeth (ed.), Studies in Latin American Art; Proceedings of a Conference Held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 28–31 May, 1945 (Washington: American Council of Learned Societies, 1949).Google Scholar
4 Kubler, George, Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948).Google Scholar
5 Wethey, Harold E., Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949).Google Scholar
6 Weismann, Elizabeth Wilder, Mexico in Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
7 Toussaint, Manuel, Arte mudejar en América (Mexico: Porrua, 1946); Arte colonial en México (Mexico: Imprenta Universitaria, 1948).Google Scholar
8 Ribera, Adolfo Luis and Schenone, Héctor, El arte de la imaginería en el Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas, 1948).Google Scholar
9 Giuria, Juan, La arquitectura en el Paraguay (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas, 1950 [?]).Google Scholar
10 Kelemen, pál, Baroque and Rococo in Latin America (New York: Macmillan, 1951).Google Scholar
11 Smith, Robert C. and Wilder, Elizabeth, Guide to the Art of Latin America (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1948).Google Scholar
12 Iñiguez, Diego Angulo, Dorta, Enrique Marco and Buschiazzo, Mario J., Historia del arte hispanoamericano, vol. II (Barcelona: Salvat editores, 1950, 930 pp., 851 illus.).Google Scholar
13 “Francisco Hurtado and His School,” Art Bulletin, XXXII (March, 1950), 25–61.
14 See my “The Portuguese Woodcarved Retable, 1600–1750,” Belas Artes (Lisbon), Série 2, no. 2 (1950), note 57.
15 This was by no means an invention of the architects of the Audiencia of Guatemala. The same type of façade had already appeared in full three-story form at the Dominican church of Yanhuitlán in southern Mexico (1550-ca. 1575), whence it may have entered Central America, and was to be given its grandest statement at the church of La Soledad (1689) and the cathedral of Oaxaca (1703–1728), another southern center close to Guatemala. John Bury has recently suggested the derivation of a number of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century examples of this kind of façade in Brussels, Lisbon, Goa, Macau and Salvador, Brazil, from Vignola’s project for the church of the Gesù in Rome of 1568 (“Jesuit Architecture in Brazil,” The Month, IV [Dec, 1950], 385–408). Since the retable portals of Spain and Mexico are products of the Mannerist architecture of Italy, to which the Gesù belongs, it is proper to ascribe the same origin to the Guatemalan façades.
16 In writing of the original plan of the Jesuit church in Munich and that at Douai in Belgium (1583), Paul Parent calls them a “‘contaminatio’ du Gesù Romain” (L’architecture des pays-bas méridionaux [Paris and Bruxelles: Van Oest, 1926], p. 206).
17 The latter warrants comparison with two façades by Martino Longhi the Younger for the Roman churches of SS. Vincenzo e Anastasio (1650) and S. Antonio dei Portoghesi (before 1656), as well as with that of the new cathedral of Brescia by G. B. Lantana and L. Cagnola, begun in 1603 but not completed until the nineteenth century.
18 Neither Spain, nor Italy either, can furnish precedent for this remarkable style. Its origins cannot as yet be explained in relation to any previous performance elsewhere. Only in Belgium were there any seventeenth-century church façades resembling those of the Cuzco-Lima category and these are contemporary with the Peruvian examples. In Brussels, for example, the churches of St. Jean-Baptiste au Béguinage (1657–1676), that of the nuns of St. Brigit (1662) and Notre-Dame de Bonsecours (1664–1676) all show a façade arrangement that recalls the door, niche and window progression of the Cuzco and Lima churches, yet the ornament employed is quite different. It may be significant that the only Spanish façade which recalls the Peruvian exterior retables is that of the early eighteenth-century cathedral of Murcia, which was designed by the Dutch architect Jan Bort.
19 “Eighteenth-Century Church Fronts in Mexico City,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Louisville, V (1945–1946), 27–32.
20 These include the façades of the Soledad of Oaxaca (1689), which probably influenced that of the eighteenth-century Franciscan church of Almalonga near Antigua, Guatemala, San Francisco Acatepec and San Francisco, Puebla (1743–1767), and those of San Juan de Dios, Mexico City (1729), Sanctuary of Ocotlán, Tlaxcala (mid-eighteenth-century), San Cristóbal, Mérida (1755–1799) and La Salud, San Miguel Allende (late eighteenth-century). The churches of the latter group have in common the fact that they are crowned by a segmental spherical form, generally decorated with radiating lines, of which there is a Spanish example at the cathedral of Murcia. This recalls the “projecting barrel vault” segment used as a frame for many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century church façades in South America and especially southern Peru and Bolivia, where, however, there is no concavity in plan. In Spain this motif appears in the front of the cathedral of Granada, begun in 1639 on designs by Alonso Cano.
21 Tiles were also used on the exterior of the domes which are a striking feature of almost every Mexican colonial church.
22 See my “Jesuit Buildings in Brazil,” Art Bulletin, XXX (Sept., 1948), 187–213 and the excellent, well-illustrated article by John Bury mentioned in note 15, supra.
23 For new information on this architect, one of the few outstanding personalities of the whole colonial period in Brazil, see Leite, Serafim S.J., “Francisco Dias, Jesuita Português,” Brotéria, Lisboa, LI (Oct., 1950), 257–265.Google Scholar
24 In a paper entitled “L’architecture religieuse du Portugal et du Brésil à l’époque baroque” (Rapports et communications du XVI Congrès International d’Histoire de l’Art, Lisbonne, 1949, I, 67–94), Germain Bazin suggests the late fifteenth-century church of São Francisco at Evora as the origin of the plan. From there it passed to the Jesuit churches of Evora, Braga and Lisbon, all of which date from around 1667.
25 Op. cit., pp. 137–140. The image is here explained as a combination of the Immaculate Conception and the Woman of the Apocalypse.
26 One of the few outstanding disagreements between this book and the writing of other specialists is the matter of the dating of the zodiac relief of the vault of the chapel of the Campuzanos Palancos in the church of Santo Domingo at Ciudad Trujillo, in the Dominican Republic. This remarkable example of Renaissance style is assigned to the seventeenth-century by our authors. However, Professor Erwin Walter Palm, an acknowledged authority on the early art of the Dominican Republic, has recently argued convincingly that the work cannot date from before 1746 (“A Vault with Cosmo-theological Representations at the ‘Imperial Monastery’ of the Dominicans on the Island of Hispaniola,” Art Bulletin, XXXII [Sept., 1950], 219–223). He had already made this claim, though without citing reasons, in his “Estilo y época en el arte colonial,” Anales del Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas, II (1949), 15.