Foundational Arts

The English translation of Michael Schuessler's 2009 Spanish text only partially achieves the goals of a valuable synthetic study. As a survey of sixteenth-century mendicant visual culture in New Spain, it effectively compiles and reworks much that is known without, however, providing any startling new insights or taking advantage of more recent scholarship (by, for example, Samuel Edgerton, Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo, Jaime Lara, Viviana Díaz Balsera, or Eleanor Wake). The author broadly addresses the impact of all the arts (theater, song, and images) marshaled by the mendicant orders—Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians—in order to forcefully communicate the Christian doctrine to an indigenous constituency. As a cultural historian, Schuessler brings his knowledge of the literary arts to bear on his interpretation of the meaning and function of the built environment and its painted and sculpted decoration. The result is an introductory text for the general reader with interest in Latin American history, religious studies, or the cross-cultural interchange that takes place within a colonial context.The first three chapters provide a background for the book's central tenet: that the mural programs and relief sculptures so ubiquitous in New Spanish monasteries were inspired by engraved images, literary discourses, and theatrical plays, to produce what Schuessler calls “bookish architecture.” The author readily traces missionary theater to European precedents but has more difficulty defining what might have constituted preconquest drama. The term “spiritual performance” is deployed, although the rich civic-religious ceremonies that punctuated the Aztec ritual calendar are not taken into account. Nonetheless, a dual heritage for the missionary theater is recognized as one of the ideological and theological tools to propagate the evangelistic message.The bicultural inheritance of artistic works and the collaboration between skilled indigenous artists and their friar supervisors eventuated in unique cultural expressions that Schuessler characterizes as “Indo-Christian,” a term first proposed by Constantino Reyes-Valerio. Although the hyphenated Indo-Christian term may speak for itself, Schuessler attempts to further define the complex, entangled process of colonial interaction and its products. He invokes multiple, sometimes contradictory concepts, from mestizaje and syncretic to “palimpsest” (p. 100), the last suggesting a discrete, rather than interpenetrating, layering of forms and motifs. To his credit, he recognizes that in the end a “new aesthetic and ideological consciousness” is produced, yet he insists that the pre-Hispanic representations remain trapped within a “paradigmatic—and controlling—European structure” (p. 27). Just as for Schuessler the European framework remains dominant in these metaphors, so too the author consistently relies on Robert Ricard's 1933 concept of the “spiritual conquest” to describe the success of the missionary enterprise in the New World.More tangible evidence for indigenous agency is offered in the case studies that focus on two well-known Augustinian monasteries in Hidalgo: Itzmiquilpan (chapter 3) and Actopan (chapter 4). The famed Itzmiquilpan battle scene, with its depiction of warriors with quetzal feathers and speech scrolls, is one of the most intriguing examples of overt preconquest iconography in colonial wall paintings. Unfortunately, the poor quality and small scale of the book's 30 black-and-white illustrations prohibit good legibility of these details. Of Itzmiquilpan, the author rightly concludes that, while allegorizing a battle scene as a psychomachia between the forces of good and evil, the artists were also depicting a recurrent historical event, from the Spanish conquest to the frontier wars that pitted the Christianized Otomi against the hostile, pagan Chichimecs. Moreover, the painted scene mirrored the mock battles that were a frequent component of colonial festivals, including one that was staged in the Plaza Mayor of Mexico City in 1539 and documented by Bernal Díaz del Castillo.In the book's strongest section, on the Actopan murals, Schuessler most explicitly argues for the propagandistic congruence of the dramatic and plastic arts. Here we appreciate the author's critical voice, although his analysis continues to be heavily reliant on secondary literature (such as studies by Fernando Horcasitas and Elena Estrada de Gerlero). In keeping with a strain of eschatological fervor that permeated New Spanish culture, Actopan prominently enacted an end-of-time theme. The author links the pictorial representation of the Last Judgment in the open chapel murals at Actopan with a play in Nahuatl on the same topic by Andrés de Olmos (Auto del juicio final), usefully transcribed in the appendix. Schuessler's most tantalizing corollary singles out the “woman of the snake” represented three times in the Actopan murals and compares her to the damned “Lucía” (a feminized Lucifer?) in the Olmos narrative who is similarly described as wearing serpents (pp. 155, 173). It is in the double reading of this curious snake woman, as evocative of an Aztec earth goddess as she is of Eve, the Christian femme fatale, that the author's argument for the Indo-Christian nature of the evangelistic program carries the most weight

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