Art & Art History ETDs

Publication Date

4-10-2000

Abstract

Although woodcuts and engravings documented viceregal life and reflected Mexican artistic achievement, they are generally absent from colonial art historiography. This lacuna is the result of persistent biases affecting print scholarship worldwide against art tainted by multiplicity, mechanical interference, labor divisions, and popular audiences. The near total lack of published information concerning the artists and their efforts has also discouraged research on Mexican prints. This dissertation is, therefore, a documentary study of the printmaking profession in the viceregal capital between 1600 and 1800. Its goal is to examine how colonial block-cutters and engravers trained, worked, and understood their art.

Documentary evidence, including marriage records, censuses, government documents, and Inquisition trials, demonstrates that printmakers worked for typographic printing firms, the Royal Factory of Playing Cards, the Royal Mint, and the Royal Academy of San Carlos. Engravers also established print publishing shops where they produced and distributed single-leaf images and book illustrations. Lacking a guild, print publishers exploited marketing strategies ranging from promotional inscriptions on devotional prints to newspaper advertisements. This behavior blurred the distinction between art and commodity, making printmakers simultaneously fine artists and artisanal merchants.

Mexican prints themselves also reflected the colonial printmakers' ambiguous status. In general, block-cutters and engravers participated in the formal trends of contemporary Mexican painting and sculpture. At the same time, printmakers were supple in their responses to market pressures. When official tastes abandoned the Mexican Rococo style for Neoclassicism, for example, print publishers were slow to follow. Instead, these businessmen maintained the ornamentalism favored by their customers, only altering their approach when academic forms became more widely admired.

Ambiguity and divergent perceptions also pervaded the documentary record of inquisitorial print censorship. Inquisition investigations of printmakers, prints, and patrons reveal that Church authorities understood these imags as powerful vehicles of information. In cases addressing thematic orthodoxy, inquisitors articulated the threat faulty prints posed to viceregal spirituality, citing the widespread belief in the inherent truth of all printed materials. Their efforts to prohibit unorthodox images, however, were unsuccessful. The print's innate potential for multiplicity, rapid dissemination, and anonymous production and consumption virtually guaranteed all attempts would fail.

Language

English

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Art History

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

UNM Department of Art and Art History

First Committee Member (Chair)

Charlene Villaseñor Black

Second Committee Member

O. Joseph Rothrock

Third Committee Member

Linda Hall

Fourth Committee Member

Donna Pierce

Fifth Committee Member

Christiane Joost-Gaugier

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