example of an outdoor Chapel so the priest would stand in the center and the congregation would stand facing him this way and this is a prime example of to Kiki Art this is a structure that is built by the indigenous pesticide and it shares both touches from the indigenous past and a very strong Spanish style between 1530 and 1800 there are a hundred thousand churches built in this part of the world remember that less than 200 friars founded built and staffed 300 monastery churches in 100 years and they sort of developed a set of design plans for church construction in order to quickly get things built and so take a look at this shield that's on the side of the wall and look at that lion this was made by a to Kiki artisan who never saw a lion in their life but look at how beautiful and three-dimensional that is look at this shield this is an absolutely Western European shape but then look at the bear and the eagle and they're very flat and in low beveled relief that is a holdover from takete key art so the Spanish priests are untrained as architects and they take advantage of the expertise both through stonemasons and construction people stone carvers and people who do things like this murals that are painted on the wall so these are teaching tools painted by the two key key artisans and you can see here these are warriors there's a war shield you can see the speech Scrolls it's like a holdover but then you see all of this kind of funny european-style foliage down below sometimes the themes are really shocking warriors in in battle and it's like well how are you gonna how you gonna let that go so this here's a coyote warrior then who's in the middle of decapitating his enemy but again standing in this kind of a Western European foliage imagery so how are the priests gonna let them get away with this well the idea is that the Christians struggle is good over evil alright and so this is evil now look what we've got this has got to be an emperor see his visor and then here's his victim there's that war axe but then see his speech Scrolls and then all of this this foliated imagery and I'm the reminding you of those images from older codices that showed us how these things were done so I think it's sort of a the idea of what he'll are you gonna die on what things will you allow what things will you not allow remember these guys the priests learned the indigenous languages right away but they didn't have a design communication so this is why this is such a unique form of art so what we're going to see sculptures in low-relief things that are symbolic not realistic lots of Renaissance 3-dimensional ideas that are kind of rendered in it in a very unique way and there will often be hidden indigenous symbols and we'll point those out as they come along so when you're talking about colonial architecture this is a laundry list of the different styles that all fall in the colonial period this is the first and this is the last so this is the oldest this is the newest okay and they follow stylistic tendencies in Western Europe but they are significantly behind so by the time we see Renaissance design in Mexico it's already the Baroque period in the old world by the time the Mexican Tech's are using baroque that is over and it's now the time for neoclassicism in the old world so they're always just sort of a half a step back but it really doesn't matter because you know it takes so long for time and information to travel so this is a definition of the first style that we're going to look at that's called plateresque and it's from the word Plata which means silver platter esque the term is a term that is inherited from Spain and it refers to the way that the front facade of the building looks I'm going to point that out to you in just a minute whenever you look at a church no matter where you are in the world across time and region you always look to the doorways you look to the portal first because that's gonna give you the visual information that's gonna help you understand where you are and when you are there and this first church that we're going to look at is a perfect example of two key key arts and architecture and it's at a place called aqwal month the Church of st. Augustine and this is a plateresque style Church now I want you to look at the dates here this church was founded in 1539 so that's right after conquest but the facade or the front of the building so every building has a facade do you see how it's spelled focused facade this wasn't completed until 1560 so as I mentioned the first thing you're gonna do is build the cloister where the monks are gonna live and then you're going to start to work on the church because that takes time and resources this church at uh Coleman is the perfect starting point for a couple of really good reasons and part of it has to do with where it is and will roll on from there as we move through our conversation so the church at uncle Mun is named aku mod because of the creation story of the people from the region and literally in Gnawa that this uh Coleman translates to arm and shoulder and this is what you see on the name so this is another perfect example of takete key art you've got a Western European shield with a very realistic looking human arm look at the musculature in the hands the tendons in the fingers in the end of them in the elbow there but the part where the the arm has been separated and I think you can think back to coil shop Queen and we see the shoulder bone sticking out that's a very cartoonish radiating from that bone then are these alternating shelves and these little disks those little disks would have held some type of semi-precious stones and above it a very Western European style little canopy and so this low relief is right here and there's a matching one right here on the front facade of the building and so this is what we call the named glyph at aqwal month even though we're much farther along and this is a historic culture we do not have the names of these artisans but we know that they are to keep the artisans because the Spanish priests do not have this skill set it's fun to look at the comparisons that you see with the the wavy lines and shells that we saw used it that they walk on and I think this will all fall into place for you very very quickly here so this is a long two-story colonnaded structure with kind of a rough stone facing on the facade and it is to the south of the convent though so right here this is plan view right this is the cloister the first thing built this is the old cloister this is the new cloister over here so the first thing that's built is over here and this is where they're going to have that outdoor Chapel all right and this is that outdoor Chapel this is the cloister where the monks live the facade I just showed you and the outdoor Chapel so this one is elevated the priest can stand up very high and project out to those who are listening to him five are which is here which are significant to the structure the second floor is kind of sandwiched in here but this outdoor site is is very important and you can see the preaching space the outdoor Chapel goes way back and I think it's very interesting to look at where there's no plaster and you can see the rough volcanic stone that was used to construct the church and then it was smooth over by finishing stone with plaster on top of that that's kind of neat to get a peek at it look like what it looked like previously so this the main sanctuary was not built until much much later so this comes first all right this comes first outdoor chapel and then this the church which is more like what you're used to seeing about 250 feet long 56 feet wide about 70 feet high but that's got to come later it's gonna take time to do this and I take time to convert enough people to get everybody together to build this and so here is a close-up then of that outdoor Chapel and you can see that there is a beautiful fresco in the background that is still the original work sitting there you get a sense of how thick the stone walls are and one of the most interesting moments in the Mesoamerican colonial history is the one I'm about to show you so pretend that you are the priest standing out there giving mass and I'm going to show you where the congregation stands and that is right here all right so the congregation stands here and looks towards the priest there look what's in the background that is the Pyramid of the Sun that is that they walk on it's that close and this is why I love to start with this early church at a coal mine well what are we what are we going to build this with where are we gonna find building materials oh I don't know once you start taking apart that off that old pyramid over there right so they had endless amounts of building materials for the site here at ah Coleman as we continue our conversations about architecture you want to make sure that you know in your mind the difference between these three different presentations for architectural renderings we've talked about the plan view and the section view when we were looking at ancient buildings right the plan or bird's eye view flying over the top the section view like a cross-section like taking the center piece of bread out of a loaf we want to introduce a new term now at the elevation an elevation shows you one wall of a structure from the floor to the ceiling and it's very helpful when you're trying to understand how a church is constructed so here's a close-up of the front facade this is the portal the main doorway all right just one doorway churches soon will be bigger and have more all right choir window that's gonna let in air and I'm going to show you where that is we go inside and there are two flanking sculptures on either side of the doorway st. Peter and st. Paul and as dr. Aguilar tells us the form is European the technique and the ornamentation are Indian so let's see what he says all right when we look at st. Peter do you see how his knee pokes out there that's what we call contrapposto weight-shift and that is a big deal in Western European art it's something that the ancient Greeks figure out it's something that gets forgotten during the medieval period and reintroduced during the Renaissance and so contrapposto weight shift the way people really stand to show that to know that this was done by a takechi artisan who never went to Europe who never saw a European sculpture but was able to understand what the priests were communicating in making of this image so there's st. Peter on his little perch suspended by an angel but then look at what happens to these columns no columns you know that's very typical for Grohmann of greco-roman two structures but you see how they're wrapped they look like they're wrapped in cloth and you remember the knot on the Tilghman on the cloak of the indigenous that's what those knots look like this angel right there mmm that's not just a regular old Christian angel that angel has lots of other meaning to it and so these buildings are packed with iconography that is unique to the takete key in the center of the outdoor Chapel is a structure called the atrial cross now many colonial churches had outdoor chapels with hgl crosses so we refer to this one as the atrial cross a taco mom this is a stone sculpture and it's in the shape of the crucifix and it is a perfect example of two key key art and of syncretism of the blending of the two religions right away you notice that at the crossing point you see the face of Christ and we all have an idea in our head of say what did what did Jesus look like okay tall skinny guy long dark hair beard mustache big sad brown eyes well how did that idea get transferred to the artisan here look at how dimensional and lifelike that face is and yet look at the opposite sides of the cross do you see those flowers they're very flat they're very beveled they're not very realistic above Christ's head his monogram then in Latin INRI Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews and as you move down the base of the cross there are different images that are part of the Passion of Christ part of the things that led up to his death so there's a ladder that's how he was hung on the cross there's a pair of plyers that's how the nails were removed from his hands and his feet those images are all up and down the surface of the cross and when you get to the very bottom you see this fascinating image this is interpreted as the Virgin of Sorrows now Mary is presented in a lot of different ways Mary Queen of Heaven Virgin of Guadalupe here we've got the Virgin of Sorrows right because Mary knows that her son is going to die but this doesn't look at all like this does it you see how naturalistic that is and look at this this looks a whole lot more like kliklak way than it does a live human being right which is what is trying to be represented here and you notice the skull and the bones that comes from the the hill that Christ was crucified on so Christ was crucified on a hill called Golgotha and Golgotha means the place of the skull and so there she is down there with that skeletal imagery and this contrast is just something that just fascinating there's nothing like it in the rest of our history I don't think and another thing I wanted to point out before we move on is that you see all this flower imagery remember the Florentine codex as you read along in the text there's different bundles of flowers that show up in between passages of text and for the uninformed said oh isn't that pretty no it's not pretty it means something very specific it means it is alerting the reader to sacred speech okay some of you might have seen a Bible where the words of Christ are in red ink it's the similar idea so it's like the next thing you're going to read is sacred speech and so it's very easy to apply that idea to the floral imagery that you see here there were murals added later so we're not going to spend a lot of time talking about the murals on the inside you can see we've got the pulpit here where the priest would give the homily and so here the photographer stands in the nave faces the altar and here the photographer stands in the nave and faces the choir so that's the loft up there where that little window was that I showed you this is the interior of the cloister so every cloister is going to have a well they might have the priests might have kept some some chickens there I had a little vegetable garden this was a place where they could theoretically be safe in case there is any kind of hostilities and as you look around the structure remember this is made by the hands of the mist of the Mestas eye this is to keep key artisans alright there's another monogram of Christ so where did they get this idea well one thing we know for sure is that the priests brought books with them and those religious texts were filled with printed images so here from 1569 from Western Europe is this image with the monogram of Christ did you see how there's ribbons that suspend it looks like a shield and then here it is carved into the front of the koi stirrer here so they were able to look at these images in a book and said oh is that what you want sure I can do that no problem inside the interior cloister is a series of frescoes that are really fascinating and so very very old so this is true wet fresco a mural cycle so one mural is a mural a series of murals that go together we call a mural cycle this is showing us images from the Last Judgement and this is going to become of course an Augustinian Church and the theme of the Last Judgement is a favorite among the Augustinian friars this is supposed to impact the viewer not just the priest it's supposed to impact the neophytes that are there as well and so as we talk about this I want you to think about why do we see the construction in black and white so here we've got an image of the crucified Christ in the center here and we've got Mary - Mary's and a Martha and then look at what got back here a Sun and a moon so remember how close we are to the pyramid of the sun and the pyramid of the moon look at the text the script written across the top here and all this beautiful detail it's all in black and white okay you guess why yep it's because they were looking at a Western European book so if the book had been in color this image would have been in color but the text was in black and white and that's how it gets carried through now some of these are not in very great shape anymore this is at the scene of the Last Judgement and then this is a similar text so we've got Christ seated and he's going to judge the quick and the dead he's got a sword in one hand and flowers and the other and then these are all the souls who did not make the cut they did not get into heaven so here in the print you see these little souls kind of arising through trapdoors sort of floating up to receive their verdict so this is the Western European print this is a Coleman fresco depicting the same story