Messianic Fulfillments

Hayes Peter Mauro's Millennial Fulfillments explores “the use of imagery executed in a multitude of mediums by various evangelical Christian movements in the spiritual transformation of those deemed culturally or racially ‘subaltern’—especially Native Americans” (p. 1). Covering artworks associated with the New England Puritans, the mid-eighteenth-century Quakers, the early nineteenth-century Mormons, and the Gilded Age Social Gospel (with particular reference to the Indian boarding schools of the period), Mauro seeks to identify how Euro-American artists drew on both “pseudoscience and evangelical Christianity” to produce images of “racial and social Others” that function in the service of an idealized Christian identity (pp. 3, 5). Chapter by chapter, Mauro selects a range of visual works and examines how they buttress ideologies of racial difference and Christian exceptionalism. Yet two features of Mauro's approach weaken his analysis of the selected artworks. On one hand, he seems far more interested in discussing racial pseudoscience as a subject in its own right than in connecting it to salvationist iconography. For example, in the second chapter Mauro offers capsule histories of Samuel George Morton's craniological research, the barnstorming Indian portraitist George Catlin's checkered career, and the overtly racist literature produced by southern apologists such as Josiah C. Nott, George R. Gliddon, and Louis Agassiz. The result of this encyclopedic approach to nineteenth-century polygenetic racial thought is that the discussion of Quaker artworks is nearly lost—which is unfortunate because when Mauro does consider Benjamin West's well-known painting Penn's Treaty with the Indians (1771–1772) in light of the anxious and guilt-ridden relationship of Penn's heirs to the Lenape people, he offers an intriguing context to understand West's idyllic tableau

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