Untranslatable Image

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)