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Through years of fieldwork in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, art historian and archaeologist Alessia Frassani formulated a compelling question: How did Mesoamerican society maintain its distinctive cultural heritage despite colonization by the Spanish? In Building Yanhuitlan, she focuses on an imposing structure—a sixteenth-century Dominican monastery complex in the village of Yanhuitlan. For centuries, the buildings have served a central role in the village landscape and the lives of its people. Ostensibly, there is nothing indigenous about the complex or the artwork inside. So how does such a place fit within the Mixteca, where Frassani acknowledges a continuity of indigenous culture in th...
In Tongues of Fire, Nancy Farriss investigates the role of language and translation in the creation of Mexican Christianity during the first centuries of colonial rule. Spanish missionaries collaborated with indigenous intellectuals to communicate the gospel in dozens of unfamiliar local languages that had previously lacked grammars, dictionaries, or alphabetic script. The major challenge to translators, more serious than the absence of written aids or the great diversity of languages and their phonetic and syntactical complexity, was the vast cultural difference between the two worlds. The lexical gaps that frustrated the search for equivalence in conveying fundamental Christian doctrines d...
Unprecedented in its range - extending from Venice to the New World and from the Holy Roman Empire to the Ottoman Empire - this collection probes the place that the Ottoman Turks occupied in the Western imaginaire, and the ways in which this occupation expressed itself in the visual arts. Individual essays in this volume examine specific images or groups of images, problematizing the 'truths' they present and analyzing the contexts that shape the presentation of Ottoman or Islamic subject matter in European art. The contributors trace the transmission of early modern images and representations across national boundaries and across centuries to show how, through processes of translation that often involved multiple stages, the figure of the Turk (and by extension that of the Muslim) underwent a multiplicity of interpretations that reflect and reveal Western needs, anxieties and agendas. The essays reveal how anachronisms and inaccuracies mingled with careful detail to produce a "Turk," a figure which became a presence to reckon with in painting, sculpture, tapestry and printmaking.
In four chapters, a foreword, preface, and two appendices accompanied by detailed, full-color illustrations, scholars Arni Brownstone, Nicholas Johnson, Bas van Doesburg, Eckehard Dolinski, Michael Swanton, and Elizabeth Hill Boone describe what a lienzo is and how it was made. They also explain the particular origin, format, and content of the Lienzo of Tlapiltepec—as well as its place within the larger world of Mexican painted history. The contributors furthermore explore the artistry and visual experience of the work. A final essay documents past illustrations of the lienzo including the one rendered for this book, which employed innovative processes to recover long faded colors.
Euro-Americans see the Spanish conquest as the main event in the five-century history of Mesoamerica, but the people who lived there before contact never gave up their own cultures. Both before and after conquest, indigenous scribes recorded their communities’ histories and belief systems, as well as the events of conquest and its effects and aftermath. Today, the descendants of those native historians in modern-day Mexico and Guatemala still remember their ancestors’ stories. In Mesoamerican Memory, volume editors Amos Megged and Stephanie Wood have gathered the latest scholarship from contributors around the world to compare these various memories and explore how they were preserved an...
An exhibition catalogue that examines the cultural role of the Church in the seventeenth-century religious art of Spain and Spanish America, illustrated with numerous color and black-and-white reproductions of paintings, sculptures, metalwork, and books.
El Arte de Retorno se define como la retroalimentación artística entre América Latina, las Islas Canarias y España durante el periodo colonial y el siglo XIX. El archipiélago canario, punto estratégico en las políticas expansionistas del imperio español, gozará de una efervescencia comercial y artística que durará más de 300 años. Pone nombre a un proceso cultural en el cual, el trasiego de obras, artistas, tipologías iconográficas y modelos estéticos será incesante e ininterrumpido. Este libro aborda tanto el objeto artístico, como el contexto social, político y cultural que dio lugar a su creación. En él, el Arte de Retorno cobra significado a través del estudio inter...