The untranslatable image : a mestizo history of the arts in New Spain, 1500-1600 / by Alessandra Russo ; translated from the French by Susan Emanuel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Russo, Alessandra, 1972- author.

Contributor:

Emanuel, Susan, translator.

Series:

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Art, Latin American.

Art, Colonial--Latin America.

Art, Colonial.

Indian art--Latin America.

Indian art.

Cultural fusion and the arts--Latin America.

Cultural fusion and the arts.

Latin America.

Physical Description:

xiv, 357 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm.

Edition:

First English-language edition.

Place of Publication:

Austin : University of Texas Press, 2014.

Summary:

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, nor 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, amd graffiti-to propose that the singularity of these creations does not arise from a syneretic impulse, but rather from a complex process of "untranslatability" Foregrounding the sistances 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 aesthertics, traditions, knowledge, techniques, and concepts constituted an expectional engine of unprecedented visual and verbal creativity in the early modern transatlantic world. Book jacket.

Contents:

Prologue: from one triptych to another

Introduction: at the frontiers of art histories

A triptych from New Spain

Treasures

Figures

Malicias

Images between words

Mosaics

Landscape

Scratching

The creation of unexpected languages

Relics of ixiptla

Circular realism

Figurative condensation

Conclusion: untranslatable images?

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780292754133

0292754132

9780292754140

0292754140

OCLC:

862399391