Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections

The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.

Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent's multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.

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Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections

The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.

Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent's multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.

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Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections

Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections

by Emily Engel
Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections

Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections

by Emily Engel

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Overview

The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.

Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent's multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781477320617
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Publication date: 03/23/2020
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 173
File size: 164 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Emily Engel is an independent scholar based in Southern California who has published widely on visual culture in early modern South America. She is a coeditor of Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches and A Companion to Early Modern Lima, as well as the founding associate editor of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
 
Introduction: Art and Authority in Late Colonial South American Portraiture
Chapter 1. New Pictorial Practices: Early Official Portraits in Viceregal Peru
Chapter 2. Visualizing Empire’s History: Royal Portraits in the Iberoamerican World
Chapter 3. Picturing Viceregal Authority in the Lima City Council
Chapter 4. Municipal Collecting: Viceregal Portraits in Bogotá and Buenos Aires
Chapter 5. Portrayal in a Time of Transition: Early Nineteenth-Century Portraits
Epilogue: The Afterlife of Official Portraits
 
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

James M. Córdova

"Pictured Politics is a theoretically informed and historically sensitive examination of official portraiture in Spanish South America, interweaving visual analysis with examinations of crucial period documents, all the while engaging meaningfully with art-historical, ethnographical, and related scholarship. Significantly, it also links Spanish South American official portraiture to European and indigenous artistic traditions and collecting practices. The result is a multifaceted examination that takes into consideration the multiple, complex, and culturally diverse agencies that influenced the tradition of portraiture in early modern/colonial and republican-era Spanish South America."

Jeffrey Schrader

Pictured Politics constitutes an exceptional study of an important corpus of art in colonial Spanish South America, namely, official portraiture. Dr. Emily Engel delivers an unparalleled analysis of the significance, aesthetics, and historical evolution of paintings that virtually everyone with experience in Latin American art history will have encountered in the literature or the museums.

James M. Córdova

"Pictured Politics is a theoretically informed and historically sensitive examination of official portraiture in Spanish South America, interweaving visual analysis with examinations of crucial period documents, all the while engaging meaningfully with art-historical, ethnographical, and related scholarship. Significantly, it also links Spanish South American official portraiture to European and indigenous artistic traditions and collecting practices. The result is a multifaceted examination that takes into consideration the multiple, complex, and culturally diverse agencies that influenced the tradition of portraiture in early modern/colonial and republican-era Spanish South America."

James M. Córdova

Pictured Politics is a theoretically informed and historically sensitive examination of official portraiture in Spanish South America, interweaving visual analysis with examinations of crucial period documents, all the while engaging meaningfully with art-historical, ethnographical, and related scholarship. Significantly, it also links Spanish South American official portraiture to European and indigenous artistic traditions and collecting practices. The result is a multifaceted examination that takes into consideration the multiple, complex, and culturally diverse agencies that influenced the tradition of portraiture in early modern/colonial and republican-era Spanish South America.

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