Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas

It is difficult to imagine that an art history of ancient America was nascent in the middle of the last century. Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Andrew Finegold and Ellen Hoobler, celebrates and honors, upon her retirement, the teaching, collaboration, and scholarship of Esther Pasztory, professor emerita of art history at Columbia University and one of the founding scholars of pre-Columbian art history in the United States. The excellent essays collected here were sparked by Pasztory in various ways. Contributors are colleagues and former students from the United States, Latin America, and Europe at all career stages, trained in archaeology, anthropology, and art history and coming from academia, independent research, and natural history and art museums. Individually, the chapters contribute to the study of ancient American art and exemplify the field's breadth and transformation. Collectively, the essays project the florescence of pre-Columbian art history, 50 years in.The volume opens with Cecelia F. Klein's “Esther and Columbia in 1966: The Early Years of Pre-Columbian Art History in US Academe.” Klein, emerita professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Pasztory's doctoral colleague at Columbia, examines the field encountered and engaged by these two pioneering scholars, providing a scaffolding for the 14 following chapters. This fascinating essay would make excellent reading in graduate and undergraduate methodology courses. The integration of historiography seems particularly apt and refreshing in a Festschrift; Pasztory's pendant afterword reflects her dynamic thinking for future directions in the field.With the three titular phrases “visual culture,” “ancient Americas,” and “contemporary perspectives,” the editors nimbly orient their project. Visual culture's ample purview treats traditional art historical types—architecture, sculpture, and painting—but embraces utilitarian objects, metalwork, manuscripts, and representations of the past, fitting for a discipline with roots in anthropology and archaeology. The same amplitude is suggested with the book's geographic scope. Though Pasztory is most readily associated with the arts of central Mexico—particularly Teotihuacan and Aztec sites—she taught and encouraged research throughout Mesoamerica, the Andes, and beyond, writing texts to fill gaps, including Pre-Columbian Art (1998), which reflects the breadth of ancient America covered in this volume.Geography orders the chapters, but a range of approaches representing contemporary perspectives creates cross-references throughout the volume. For example, the Andes are the departure point for Gary Urton's “Aesthetics of a Line, Entangled in a Network: A Tribute to Esther Pasztory's Vision of Andean Art,” Georgia de Havenon's “Humboldt and the Inca Ruin of Cañar,” and Joanne Pillsbury's “From a Republic of Letters to an Empire of Images: Archaeological Illustration and the Andes, 1850–1890.” These authors examine meanings of ancient cultural production from this region at different points in time and with different orientations. Urton takes the ubiquitous and seemingly simple component, the line, and draws compelling connections between a range of cultural objects and spaces. De Havenon's and Pillsbury's interdisciplinary studies situate ancient art within the history of natural science, archaeology, and representation, suggesting how artists, archaeologists, and explorers filtered the past.Two general categories emerge in the volume: a broadly embedded study of objects in history and the afterlife of objects—their representation, dissemination, and display. In the historical studies, whether starting with manuscripts (Susan Milbrath's “Seasonal Images in the Ancient Art of Central Mexico,” Janice Lynn Robertson's “Decolonizing Aztec Picture-Writing,” Lois Martin's “The Axochiatl Pattern: Aztec Science, Legitimacy, and Cross-Dressing”), metalwork (Timothy B. King's “The Goldsmith Emerges: Aztec Gold Ornaments in the Provinces”), ceramics (Cynthia Conides's “Figures in Action: Contextualizing the Butterfly Personage at Teotihuacan, Mexico”), textiles (Urton's essay), functional objects (Andrew Finegold's “Atlatls and the Metaphysics of Violence in Central Mexico”), or the built environment (Jeff Karl Kowalski's “Myth, Ritual, History, and the Built Environment: Maya Radial Temples and Ballcourts from the Preclassic to Postclassic Periods”), the authors employ art historical and anthropological tools to answer questions about beliefs, use, and practices. Aesthetic organizational principles, iconography, symbols, and style are combined with natural phenomena to explore meanings of cultural objects over time.Picking up the afterlife of objects, Leonardo López Luján's biography of monuments in “Life after Death in Teotihuacan: The Moon Plaza's Monoliths in Colonial and Modern Mexico” and Ellen Hoobler's “An ‘Artistic Discovery’ of Antiquity: Alfonso Caso, the Archaeologist as Curator at the New York World's Fair and MoMA's Twenty Centuries of Mexican Art, 1939–1940” argue for meaning and understanding within national and international display. These essays, along with Kathleen Berrin's chapter on the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco exhibition Teotihuacan: City of the Gods, indicate the political stakes in negotiations over display throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Over half the volume's contributors work in or with museums; their essays underscore the impact of curatorial work in bringing to the wider public the visual thrall and intellectual arguments of ancient art. In a related chapter, Jennifer von Schwerin and Franziska Fecher offer an art historical vision for Honduras beyond Copán, highlighting the role of monuments and unexpected smaller objects in national identity while making clear that more foundational work awaits understudied regions of ancient America.As is nearly always the case with art history and visual culture books, one wishes for more color reproductions of the works discussed. However, ample black-and-white images supplement the 24 color plates, and introductory maps plot the covered terrain.This volume will be of great interest to scholars, students, and the general public. It is a good read. Both content and the methodological and historiographic threads that run throughout the essays make them ideal for a range of graduate and undergraduate courses, from museum studies to ancient and modern Latin American art and methodology. Visual Culture of the Ancient Americas presents a testament to the expansive thought and generous spirit of this respected colleague and mentor; clearly, Pasztory's ideas have prompted scholars to think broadly and have proven important touchstones throughout her five decades in the field

Archaeology · Art history · Historiography · History of art · Political science · Reading (process · Scholarship · Sociology · Anthropology · Architecture · Classics · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

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