Let's give you some background on two-dimensional art from the colonial period before we dive into oil painting. I think the quote here below is important. The imposition of European aesthetic tradition upon the existing pre-Hispanic culture created for an art peculiar to New Spain.
Far from being a pale imitation of European art, Mexican colonial art is complex and interesting assimilation. and reinterpretation of European, especially Spanish, aesthetics. And the use of the word peculiar, it just means unique, it doesn't mean strange.
Okay? So, one of the things that now you get to enjoy is the fact that we will know the name of the artist. We refer to that as the attribution.
So, when we were talking about pre-Columbian art or talking about architecture, the artist was unknown. Now, often, we will know to whom the work was attributed. Generally, we stick by the last name only, unless we have a family of artists or we have artists with the same last name, and you'll get the drift of how we do this very shortly.
So, we've got all kinds of influences on Mexican colonial painting, beginning with the kind of two-dimensional art that was already being created. Now we will have visual information coming from the old world. We will actually have printed material.
There will be some paintings that come. But generally, early Mexican colonial painters had limited exposure to the famous artists of the Baroque period in Spain. So they're not going to know about Velázquez.
They're not going to know about Zubarrán, okay? And it really isn't until very close to the turn to the 1800s that we've got the foundation of the first formal art academy at San Carlos, which is still active in Mexico to this day. So this is a laundry list, nothing to memorize but just to give you an idea of the kinds of work that you could encounter.
It should come as no surprise that a lot of the artwork from the colonial period is based on religious iconography. And certainly portraits will be important as well. So the church will be the primary commissioner of art. And then as more Spaniards will come to live and work as elites in colonial Mexico, they're going to expect art like they were used to having back at home.
We've got some really unusual things that we will introduce you to like Costa paintings and the use of biombos. And the materials, the technique used, of course, fresco. We've known about that forever, haven't we? You'll now see altar paintings created in tempera paint.
And then finally the introduction of oil paint, which is going to change everything. Be sure to refer to the short videos that show you the processes for creating altar paintings, oil painting, and the sculpture that is there as well. So just very quickly, since the church is that early commissioner, they're going to want altar panels.
So these are panels that can hang on a wall or sit on an altar table. And that is what that short Getty video is about. We'll give you the step-by-step process of how they're made. It's really fascinating. So altar panels are often made from more than one piece, and usually they're joined down the center by a hinge.
So two panels is a diptych, three panels is a triptych, more than three is a polyptych. And these open and close. Depending on the religious season of the year, on a high holy day, they might open up the panels and reveal a special image that would normally be closed the rest of the year. So subject matter can be anything you can imagine. Any Bible story, any member of the Holy Family, scenes from the Old Testament, the Passion of Christ.
But we're going to see some unique interpretations of things like the Jesse Tree. or the creation of small faith images called retablos. These are things that will kind of morph into a very new way here in the New World. And so we're going to take a look here at an image we've been looking at for a while.
And now we're going to show you the time that it was made. So this is after contact and conquest, we're at 1550. And of course, this is the image that shows us the Chichimex in that cave of Aztlan. So this is the actual document that it was taken from and one of the reasons you know is that it has this terrible purple stamp right on the center of it. Right on the center there it will say Bibliothèque Nationale Paris. So this means that this document made its way to Paris and they rubber stamped it as a means of ownership.
That's so offensive. I can hardly I can hardly deal. So this is a manuscript.
This is pigment and ink on a piece of parchment. And you remember the iconography, but this is just showing this to you quickly to relate it to the place in history where it was actually created. The arrival of the Spanish by an unknown taquique artisan was created sometime after 1555, and it is part of the Florentine Codex. Remember, we've got 12 books. So this is one of the images there.
And I particularly enjoy sharing this image with students because it's so crystal clear. It is a little bit naive. It is a little bit folk, folky in its technique.
but it tells a wonderful story and it does so in what we call a circular narrative. This is about 12 inches by 8 inches so it's just a little bit bigger than a sheet of notebook paper and it is ink on paper and the scene here begins over with the ships and you know who those ships belong to right those are the ships of Cortes. Next we see the ships docking and the conquistadors unloading the goods onto the land. In addition to things like weapons and all different kinds of goods in these trunks here, you see the horses that they brought, different kinds of livestock that they brought. And now here's some Western European livestock.
And then here's that little peccary, that little Mexican wild pig that you see. I love our little horses here. Everybody knows horses are hard to draw.
And so I've thrown in another codex image of horses as well. They sort of have kind of a carousel look to them. So as you move around the circulated narrative, you end up with this very interesting little scenario here with three sets of figures. Clearly these are conquistadors because they're wearing armor.
And look at this fella sitting on a rock with some kind of document and a quill, a pen in his hand. You know that if there is one woman in the image and she's dressed in a traditional bupil that's got to be Malinche. And look where she's standing in relationship to the male figures on either side.
These guys are conquistadors. Look at his attire. Do you see his knotted cloak, the tilman that he's wearing?
So this for sure tells us that this is Malinche. And look at her gesture, how she points towards the sea. and then look at the gesture of the indigenous man as he points to the conquistadors. Moving back up to the center then you see an indigenous person giving a huge gesture.
So remember gesture is a hand motion signaling the ships. So now we're back to the center of the narrative. You note that the ink writing from the other side of the same page shows through a little bit and here's our little village down below.
So this very early image here shows us this concept of how the contact and early meetings with Cortes were received by the indigenous population. So as we hinted at, the Padres were really hard on material that they thought was important. idolatrous or part of the devil worship, if you will, from their perception of the indigenous population. Remember the goal of the Padres to convert the Spanish to Christianity in order to obviously grow the church, but also to save the souls of the indigenous. In this image from about 1581, and it's important to stop and talk about this here, C.A.
that means circa c-i-r-c-a abbreviated to c dot or c-a dot it means about so they can't date this precisely but they know that it is from around this time and this is a print that shows two franciscans and you can tell by their attire this very physical and dramatic way that religious practices transformed the new world here. So what you've got going on was a ritual paraphernalia that belonged to the indigenous population was brought together and then burned. And, you know, I'm sure that these things weren't floating in air.
It was probably a big giant pile of material that they made and that they alighted with these torches that you see here. And you can see these sort of mask-like entities and strange composite creatures, this sense of the flames scrolling off to the sides. Imagine what this would have been like to be an indigenous person who perhaps had not converted to Christianity or who was sort of on the fence.
This idea then showing the priest getting rid of these things that were going to be problems. These were things that in the past had been used for both public and private ceremony, now here eliminated in one brief furious fire. Of course, this is the time of our feather workshop images that we have referred to before.
But I just wanted again to remind you that this is the art of the Takiki, right? These are the elite scholars of the day. who have all these special these academic specialties pulled together by Father Jagin to create this most important document.
Frescoes are still important and this is a fresco from the oldest continually occupied house in Puebla. The fresco cycle here is in a home called the Casa del Deán and We're at about 1580. This is a fresco cycle that's in the interior walls of a private house right in the center of the Zócalo in Puebla. This structure was constructed in the 16th century and it was going to be the home of a high elite Spaniard who had a high position in the church as well. The subject matter here is a female form we refer to as the Turbantine Sybil.
Now if you've ever studied Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, you know that around the ceiling there are images referred to as philosophers and sibyls. S-I-B-Y-L. A sibyl is a female philosopher.
And so here you see the sibyl seated on this beautiful white horse. And this horse reminds me of a Disney horse. Look at...
how determined his face is. Do you see how his eyebrows are kind of furled together? Look at how she rides side saddle.
Her name is written in Latin and the banner above her head. She carries an icon of her prophecy on that banner. This resolute horse concentrating almost like he is protecting her.
And what we see here is the beginning of stylistic conventions. Conventions means artistic rules. Things that we will see repeated over and over again, suggesting that indigenous painters who studied European prints and imagery were probably the Taquique artisans who created these murals.
Now look down at the bottom here. So this is about the height of a chair rail, the height of a back of a chair, and we've got alternating centaurs and cherubs. Well, centaurs are nothing that the indigenous had ever seen before.
That is a strictly European icon. Now, little angels, those are things that you could morph into different kinds of spirits that would have been thought about before. So this house was made for a for a Spaniard, but the art inside was made by the hands of the Tequite artisans. Remember that these Spaniards want to have art of the level that they're used to seeing back in old Spain.
And so this is part of a mural cycle, meaning that the walls have sort of a continuous narrative of these figures on horseback around the sides of the room. When you go to Puebla, you can visit this house. You can go in there and take a look.
A fascinating moment in the history of early colonial art. occurs with this concept from the Old Testament called the Tree of Jesse. Now this comes from an Old Testament story from the Bible, and there's a quote down below, And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots, and the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him. So basically what's going on here in this image, this is not a Mexican image, this is an image from Western Europe and it's about 1498. And what this does is the whole image is called a Jesse tree and it's trying to show Christ's relationship back through the house of King David back to Jesse, the Old Testament figure. So there's old sleeping Jesse with the tree trunk coming from his chest. And then these are his descendants, one of which is King David, and then related then is Christ through the Virgin Mary.
So this is an image that was typical in Western European biblical texts, and it's an idea that came across the ocean and was transformed in the most fascinating ways. So let's take a look at this very early example. of a transition of a Jesse tree from being a strictly Western European form to being a form that fit the new colonial world. Look at the title, the family tree of the Unakaze.
All right and the date, wow, 1539, super early. This is a charcoal ink and color on European paper, again quite small, eight inches by five inches. And let's see what's going on here.
We've got the tree right down the center. And now, instead of Jesse or Christ, we've got the figure of an indigenous person. Two things you need to remember. Recall how important it was to keep the genealogical tree of the emperors, the Aztec emperors.
Okay, that was very important. The other thing to recall is that in the Aztec world, where you went when you died depended on how you died. And so as you go up the tree of...
the Unikaze family, you'll see these little scrolls. Remember speech scrolls? Now they've turned into paper scrolls. And on these little scrolls, it has the names of the individuals. But look at this guy.
Do you see how he's got an arrow pierced right through his chest? So that is how he died. Then as you move up higher, you notice the first generation that is baptized. They are now clothed.
They're not naked from the waist up. They've got that little chopped off, bobbed haircut. That's another sign of seeing someone is a neophyte or someone who is recently baptized. They're sitting in these funny little cup-like chairs.
And everybody is tied together with this red line. Red? Could it be a bloodline?
I think it absolutely could. So this is an interpretation. Somebody.
in the recently conquered Tenochtitlan saw this image in a book that a priest had and applied it to their own family tree. One of the things that you're going to notice is that the indigenous elites who survived the conquest are very stressed about making sure everyone knows they are elite. So they're always trying to prove their bloodline back to their elite past. Now here is a completely different interpretation of the same idea. This is a bishop's hat worn in a religious ceremony.
It's called a mitre. It folds up flat, kind of like those hats that the guys in In-N-Out wear. And it's like an envelope. You push it forward, you pop it on your head.
But this time it's made with feathers. And the iconography is the Jesse tree. And I'm...
absolutely know that the amanteca, the feather worker who was using this, had to be looking at that because it's the same iconography. There's Jesse, there's Mary in Christ, there's King David. All these little bumps would have been little individual feathers that popped up and of course they have disintegrated over time. Here's a Jesse tree. that substitutes a tree for a nopal.
And when you go down to the base of the nopal, you see it's flanked by Aztec shields on either side, and then the double-headed Habsburg eagle. Now remember the Habsburgs are the ruling family of Spain, and their symbol is the double-headed eagle. You know the significance of the eagle to the indigenous populations, especially of Tenochtitlan. So think about how easy it is to adopt and adapt that iconography.
As late as the 18th century, individuals with indigenous roots are using these documents. This is an important one showing the royal line of Texcoco. We're at 1750 and this is an ink and watercolor on parchment.
And here now, this document is used in a court of law because Doña Juana, who unfortunately you can't see, she's just... off the top here because I had to show, I can't get a picture to show you the whole thing. So I needed to show you the base here. So Don Juana is just off the top here and she was trying to get back her land.
She is suing the Jesuits for building a hacienda on her ancestral homeland. And so she sits on top of nine generations of indigenous people and she's even able to name them. her ancestors and here they are at the base of the tree.
The base of the tree then also shows a kind of a westernized concept of the glyph that refers to the place that they were from. That bow and arrow and arm indicating the Texcoco ethnic group. In fact she won.
So this document was acceptable. in a court of law. So as we move farther and farther along through the colonial period, you see that this Jesse tree turns into something very unique.
We've got Adam and Eve and these sort of Leonardo da Vinci kind of trees down here and all the folks who are from the house of Jesse. But now instead of hearing Mary and Christ, we have replaced that image with the Virgin of Guadalupe, an important part of the story that we will get to shortly. But I think that this was a great place for us to get started before we jump into conversations about our art stars.