'Tesoros' at the Art Museum

Gold of the Conquistadors

ANDREW MANGRAVITE

“Tesoros” is one of those rare exhibitions that recreates a world and sets it before your astonished eyes. “Hear me with your eyes,” as Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, Baroque poet and “patroness” of the exhibition entreats. So what are our eyes listening to? The music of a vanished world—a world that at its height encompassed one quarter of the earth’s surface (and fully a third of what is now the United States)—the world of New Spain.

Spain’s Viceregal empire lasted about 300 years and they were amazing times, as “Tesoros” demonstrates. This exhibition that asks us to “hear with our eyes” contains story upon story. There is the colonial story, in which a handful of Spanish adventurers seeking gold and glory land upon unknown shores to confront a civilization of whose existence they were wholly ignorant . (Though in perfect fairness it must be added that the native civilizations they encountered were equally ignorant of Europeans.) This story is presented in various ways, like plot threads weaving through a novel.

“Plan of the Archbishopric of Mexico,” which belongs to the second plot thread, gives us the administrative side of conquest. Here the alien culture has succeeded in grafting its values upon the conquered. The work itself is an intricately painted map of Mexico City and its environs, showing the exact location of every church, whether diocesan church or monastery, whether its parishioners are Spanish or natives and, if they are natives, what native dialect is spoken there. It’s quite an administrative tool, attractive to look at, but chock full of useful information.

A message to Spanish bureaucrats

“Conquest and ‘Reduccion’ of the Indians of the Paraca and Pantasma Mountains in Guatemala,” an oil-on-canvas by an unknown artist painted between 1680 and 1700, depicts colonization as a continuing affair. It depicts a birds’-eye-view of a mountainous region dotted by tiny humans going about their affairs. Here we see peaceful Christianized Indians at work on the land. There we see missionaries (a “reduccion” was a mission settlement) enthusiastically preaching to assembled but still unconverted natives. Farther off, we see natives who have yet to see a missionary or to hear the word of Christ. These are shown worshipping snakes and indulging in cannibalism.

But even in the settled regions, all is not well. A longboat is coming ashore with a distinctly non-Spanish crew. Are they English freebooters? French pirates? The message was clear for any Spanish bureaucrat to read: Many native tribes have been Christianized (and Westernized) but many more remain in a pagan, and therefore in an anti-European state. Further, enemies of Spain were casting envious eyes on the work already accomplished.

This painting, which once belonged to the King of Spain and is thought to be the first landscape painting executed in the New World, is both reportage and an appeal for financial and military support. The work of colonization must go on.

I might add that reportage is a lesser thread running through the exhibition. These paintings were meant to inform the folks back home about the goings-on in New Spain. Thus, “Fire at the Retreat of Nossa Senhora do Parto,” a pair of paintings done in 1789 by the Brazilian artist Joao Francisco Muzzi, depicts an actual fire at a hospital and a congratulatory depiction of its re-building; and Jose de Arellano’s “Conveyance of the Image and the Inauguration of the Sanctuary of Guadalupe” commemorates a great civic procession in which Saint Juan Diego’s miraculous cloak, bearing an image of Mary, was paraded through the city and enshrined in a newly-built sanctuary.

Humiliation of the weak by the strong

But to return to the Conquest story: “Moctezuma,” another anonymous oil on canvas, painted between 1675 and 1700, depicts the political side of the event. Here we see the last Aztec ruler, deposed, and perhaps assassinated, by the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortez. Our eyes are meant to see a pleasant story in which Moctezuma, recognizing that Spanish weaponry and tactics are superior to his own, willingly (albeit wistfully) sets aside his royal symbols to swear fealty to the new kingfish in far-away Spain. But our minds see a very different story, one of raw power at work and humiliation of the weak by the strong. (A crime of which no one is innocent, as the Aztecs were hardly benign rulers in their own right; andas the exhibition’s lead-in work— a polychromed cedar wood panel depicting “Saint James the Moor-Killer”— reminds us, the Spanish had themselves been a conquered and colonized people twice over, if one includes the Romans of antiquity.)

Following the heroic days of conquest, the exhibition offers a full slate of portraits from the far less exciting period of administration. The best of these are the work of a Colombian artist, Joaquin Gutierrez, who was not surprisingly known as “The Painter of the Viceroys.” But on the whole, these portraits of government and religious officials are, to my mind, the least satisfying portion of the exhibition. They tend toward a certain stiffness and lack the keen psychological insights that I like to see in a portrait. They do succeed, however, as emblematic representations of Spanish power.

The Western world’s most zealous missionaries

The second plot-thread, closely interwoven with the first, is the missionary story. Here “Tesoros” outdoes itself: although it’s not really being marketed this way, this is a major exhibition of Baroque and Rococo religious art. Perhaps no Western people takes its religion as seriously as do the Spanish. They make the English Puritans look lax. You have only to look one of the large painted vellum “nun’s badges” (worn by female members of religious communities as a sort of brooch-cum-breastplate) to see what a serious undertaking the religious life was to these people.

Contrary to modern interpretations, the missionaries believed they were engaged in a sacred struggle to save souls. Those snake-worshipping, cannibal tribes weren’t just refusing to acknowledge the kingship of Charles V. They were denying God Himself, and living as slaves of Satan. It was the missionaries’ sacred job to break the chains and free the enslaved souls.

Such notions are so contrary to modern thinking that the religious tread running through “Tesoros” will clearly prove the most demanding. The oil paintings of martyred missionaries, brandishing their ghastly death-wounds; the polychrome statues of “Christ at the Pillar,” in which a somewhat bloodied front gives way to a ghastly back in which the flesh has been flayed to the bone, were meant to excite pity and fear in the best dramatic traditions of the ancients, and to move their viewers to an active state of repentance for their own sins. (They incidentally demonstrate that Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ wasn’t as wacky, in its obsessive dwelling upon brutality and pain, as some of its detractors thought it to be.)

The Indians could have done worse

I should add that not all of the polychromed statuary is grisly in nature. An 18th Century, almost life-sized “Saint Jerome” is a marvelous piece of sculpture. The chief protagonists in the missionary story are the members of the Order of Friars Minor, more popularly known as Franciscans. These followers of Francis of Assisi, with their joint commitment to poverty and humility, were probably the best choice to run the Indian missions. No one is saying that they did their job flawlessly; but I suspect that, left to the tender mercies of those stiff, doll-like, unsmiling Viceroys, the Indians would have fared much worse.

Since the missions were, by and large, a Franciscan undertaking (although other orders, notably the Jesuits and the Dominicans also took a hand, and contributed their own iconography to the works on display), “Tesoros” offers an abundance of Franciscan iconography. These Franciscan-inspired paintings far outnumber the others, and, as you might expect, the works themselves vary in terms of artistic quality. Certainly, “Saint Francis of Assisi, Receiving the Stigmata”— a small oil-on-copper painted in 1639 by Alonso Lopez de Herrera— is a very fine painting that need make no apologies for its inclusion in any collection of fine art. Others, like Cristobal de Villalpando’s “Vision of Saint Francis,” a large oil probably painted around 1695 for a monastery in Guatemala, are a bit rough around the edges but pull through because of their sincerity and fervor.

“ "Tesoros" also reveals the colonies as places of refuge for men and women given to thinking "dangerous ideas." The large oil painting "Abbot Joachim of Fiore Delivering the Anticipated Portraits of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic," painted around 1680 by the Colombian artist Gregorio Vasquez de Arce y Ceballos, could not have been hung in an Italian chapter house without raising a few eyebrows, as Joachim's work had been declared heretical by the Church and had contributed to the forced suppression of the Spiritual wing of the Franciscan Order. But in New Spain— tucked away in a monastery, a religious school or perhaps even a private residence—it could go safely unnoticed. Likewise, "Three-Faced Trinity," an anonymous oil painting from Peru and dating from 1750-1770, depicts a concept of the Trinity that had long ago been declared heretical by the Church.

The strange influences of Asia and Africa

A third and final thread running through "Tesoros" concerns intermingling of the races and cross-pollination of ideas. No conquest can be absolute. The conquered will always have their say, albeit in roundabout and circumspect ways. And no empire as far-flung as Spain's could possibly hope to preserve any semblance of "ethnic purity." Thus it should come as no surprise to discover Asian influences (mainly out of Japan, filtered through the Philippines) and African influences hard at work, together with indigenous influences, transforming the European culture brought by Cortez and various other "conquerors" into something wholly new.

It manifests itself in the decorative arts and in textiles created by Christianized native workmen. It turns up in some of the art works as well. "Asiel Timor Dei," one of the signature images of the exhibition, shows the angel Asiel, armed with a European rifle, but wearing clothing that has a distinctly Asiatic look to it. The whole notion of an angel armed with a rifle is a curious one, as any European artist would have favored a sword or a spear. But it perhaps pays mute tribute to the awe with which the Indians viewed the new rulers' arsenals (although the artist apparently got his direct inspiration from a contemporary Manual of Arms.)

Similarly, in "Don Francisco de la Robe and His Sons Pedro and Domingo," painted in 1599 by an Ecuadorian artist, Andres Sanchez Gallque, the sitters are shown wearing a variety of fashions, European, African, Asian, which is as it should be. When worlds and cultures collide, mélanges must inevitably result.

"Tesoros" and its various stories comes to a fitting close with the Ecuadorian artist Antonio Salas's 1829 portrait of the Liberator Simon Bolivar. Spain had wrested away an empire from various Native American rulers; now the children of that empire were rising up to wrest their homelands from the grip of Spain. The Age of Romanticism and Nationalism was dawning, and the old order was passing away. The world of "Tesoros" was becoming history.