Moving beyond the dominant model of syncretism, this extensively
illustrated volume proposes a completely different approach to the
field known as Latin American "colonial art," positioning it as a
constitutive part of Renaissance and early modern art history. From
the first contacts between European conquerors and the peoples of
the Americas, objects were exchanged and treasures pillaged, as if
each side were seeking to appropriate tangible fragments of the
"world" of the other. Soon, too, the collision between the arts of
Renaissance Europe and pre-Hispanic America produced new objects
and new images with the most diverse usages and forms. Scholars
have used terms such as syncretism, fusion, juxtaposition, and
hybridity in describing these new works of art, but none of them,
asserts Alessandra Russo, adequately conveys the impact that the
European artistic world had on the Mesoamerican artistic world or
treats the ways in which pre-Hispanic traditions, expertise, and
techniques-as well as the creation of post-Conquest
images-transformed the course of Western art. This innovative study
focuses on three sets of paradigmatic images created in New Spain
between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-feather mosaics,
geographical maps, and graffiti-to propose that the singularity of
these creations arises not from a syncretic impulse, but rather
from a complex process of "untranslatability." Foregrounding the
distances and differences between incomparable theories and
practices of images, Russo demonstrates how the constant effort to
understand, translate, adapt, decode, transform, actualize, and
condense Mesoamerican and European aesthetics, traditions,
knowledge, techniques, and concepts constituted an exceptional
engine of unprecedented visual and verbal creativity in the early
modern transatlantic world.
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