Untranslatable Image

A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600

Häftad, Engelska, 2023

649 kr

Beställningsvara. Skickas inom 5-8 vardagar. Fri frakt för medlemmar vid köp för minst 249 kr.

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.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2023-01-10
Mått152 x 229 x 30 mm
Vikt680 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor376
FörlagUniversity of Texas Press
ISBN9780292754140
ÖversättareSusan Emanuel

Tillhör följande kategorier

Konsthistoria inom Kultur
Amerikas historia inom Historia och arkeologi

Alessandra Russo is an art historian studying and teaching the early modern worlds in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University in New York City. She is the author of El Realismo Circular: Tierras, espacios y paisajes de la cartografÍa novohispana and the coeditor of Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe. She has participated in the curatorship of the international exhibitions El vuelo de las imÁgenes and PlanÈte MÉtisse and has been the recipient of several international grants, including the Getty Collaborative Research Grant and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin’s fellowship.

Note on TranslationsAcknowledgmentsPrologue: From One Triptych to AnotherIntroduction: At the Frontiers of Art HistoriesPart One: A Triptych from New SpainChapter 1. TreasuresChapter 2. FiguresChapter 3. MaliciasPart Two: Images between WordsChapter 4. MosaicsChapter 5. LandscapeChapter 6. ScratchingPart Three: The Creation of Unexpected LanguagesChapter 7. Relics of IxiptlaChapter 8. Circular RealismChapter 9. Figurative CondensationConclusion: Untranslatable Images?NotesBibliographyPhotographic CreditsIndex

Learned, insightful, and challenging, The Untranslatable Image has much to offer not only to Latin American colonial studies but also to the fields of Iberian, Renaissance, and early modern art, culture, and history, as well as to those who are more broadly intrigued by untranslatable images and words, culture contact, and global encounters. (CAA.reviews) A work whose signal achievement is to show how an art history of the New World can free itself from limiting metaphors, like "syncretic," and categorically based methodologies, such as the dutiful parsing of an artwork's "indigenous" or "European" elements. Russo's work in opening pathways of interpretation into cultural agents during a period of dramatic cultural change offers a model to fields beyond art history. (The Americas) The beauty of this book is that it deals with images in a qualitative manner that quantitative shcolars would think of an n-dimensional space. Literally and figuratively imaginative. (SMRC Revista)