Jerónimo Antonio Gil and the Idea of the Spanish Enlightenment

Kelly Donahue-Wallace offers an illuminating perspective on the Enlightenment through the biography of an expert medal caster, Jerónimo Antonio Gil, whose career took him from provincial Zamora to Madrid and ultimately Mexico, where he founded the first royal academy of the arts in the New World. Had Gil lived in the seventeenth century, he would have become a painter, churning out religious canvases in his native Zamora. Had Gil moved to Madrid, he would have become a criado (servant) for a stonecutter or other craftsperson, never an artisan letrado (intellectual). When Gil left Zamora in the 1740s, however, he got a stipend to attend the new Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, where he learned skills for commemorative medal making, typesetting, and engraving. He was also trained to master a literary and historical national canon in the vernacular. Gil got an education to copy the great masters but also to produce his own original designs in neoclassical style. In short, Gil was educated to become a civil servant, one of many officials in the Bourbon dynasty charged with creating a new specialized national print culture and regalist media. Donahue-Wallace explores the many medals, engravings, drawings, and typographic samples that Gil produced in a career spanning more than 50 years, 20 of which in Mexico.Donahue-Wallace uses Gil's career to make several larger arguments. First, she demonstrates the newfound importance of print culture in mid-eighteenth-century Spain. An ancien régime that had long been centered on literacy and the pushing of paperwork suddenly realized that modernization, renewal, and geopolitical survival demanded a turn to print as reason of state. The Bourbons invested heavily in training artisans (either at home or overseas) to eliminate Spain's secular dependency on typographers and engravers from France and the Low Countries. The new culture of print pushed a national and regalist project via the promotion of historical, religious, scientific, and literary texts. Gil, for example, carved and designed many copperplates to illustrate collections of national architectural monuments, antiquities, and coins as well as books of anatomy, engineering, religion, and literature, in addition to dozens of commemorative medals and coins to celebrate the lives of monarchs and the myriad institutions that these monarchs had created.Second, Donahue-Wallace shows that in the second half of the eighteenth century poor provincials could accumulate wealth, honor, and political power as artisans. Donahue-Wallace offers the biography of a metal caster, cutter, and engraver whose status did not come from originality and genius. This poor Zamorano punch cutter nevertheless became prestigious enough to direct a national art academy and wealthy enough to amass one of the largest private collections of paintings, books, scientific apparatuses, and curiosities in late eighteenth-century New Spain.Third, Donahue-Wallace suggests that there was greater room for pedagogical innovation in Mexico than in Madrid. Donahue-Wallace follows Gil both as a student of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and as founder and director of the Real Academia de las Tres Nobles Artes de San Carlos in Mexico. Both academies were named after the monarchs who had decreed their creation. San Fernando, which Gil attended in the evening, operated both as a public school to train painters, sculptors, architects, and engravers and as the space for professors to recruit apprentices. During the day for almost a decade, however, Gil worked as the criado of Tomás Francisco Prieto, one of the teachers of San Fernando and its leading printer and medal caster. To declare independence from Prieto, Gil had to create an alternate network of patrons. When Gil went to Mexico to lead the San Carlos academy, he deliberately eliminated the master-criado traditions of San Fernando. Going against the authority of the professors of architecture, painting, sculpture, and engraving, Gil created in Mexico an academy in which masters could not recruit students as apprentices. Gil engaged in a 20-year-long battle, until his death, with second-tier Spanish artists who thought themselves entitled to use the academy to get pliant, skilled labor. Gil created an academy in which teachers received large enough salaries to be expected to be full-time professors, not freelance agents in search of apprentices and commissions.Fourth, Donahue-Wallace shows that Enlightenment modernity emerged organically out of the institutions of the ancien régime. The idea of a public sphere of circulating prints, for example, was a Bourbon strategic initiative. Artisans relied on the goodwill of patrons for employment, commissions, and success, not bourgeois anonymous market forces. Finally, those struggling to liberate youth from the clutches of master-apprentice guilds behaved like old-fashioned patriarchs themselves. Donahue-Wallace demonstrates that for all the novelty of his pedagogy, Gil remained embedded in the patriarchal values of the ancien régime. Gil arrived in Mexico with blueprints to build a mint school next to the stables of the viceregal palace. He also arrived with four students, two of whom were his own kids. San Carlos went up as a two-story elongated rectangular building; the upper quarter was Gil's residency, while the lower quarter held the school's workshops, tool rooms, and four tiny rooms for criados. Gil kept his sons and assistants tied to his patriarchal control for some 20 years. As Gil's criados, they were not allowed to set up their own households.Donahue-Wallace has written an important text on the relationship between artisans and the Spanish Enlightenment on both shores of the Atlantic. The book follows Gil and his artifacts in painstaking detail and offers a wide panorama of an ancien régime struggling to catch up while unwittingly devouring itself

Art · Art history · Biography · Civil servant · Enlightenment · Humanities · Literature · Medal · Painting · Political science · Politics · Salon · Servant · Style (visual arts) · Theology · Vernacular · Visual arts · Classics · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy