READINGS:

Richard Helgerson, "The Land Speaks: Cartography, Chorography, and Subversion in Renaissance England," Representations 16 (1986): 50-85

Richard L. Kagan, "Philip II and the Art of the Cityscape," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1986):115-135.

Barbara Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

SUMMARY

Just as today's picture postcard typically offers a rosy image of the city or region it depicts, European atlases and travel narratives of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offered a skewed picture of the world. This was particularly true of the many views representing towns and cities that Spaniards established in the New World. Rather than invest in images that accurately portrayed these towns, European publishers provided readers with city views that showed America as fantastical, marvelous, paradisiacal and exotic.

Focusing on images of Mexico City and Potos¡, this presentation explores various representations of the urban form in the colonial era and the various meanings, both secular and spiritual, that these city views conveyed. The lecture is thus about "seeing", offering a comparative view of the way Europeans "saw" America's cities as opposed to the way in which these cities saw themselves.

Of particular concern is the comparison between European images of these cities, as published in atlases and travel books, and the images produced by local creole or mestizo artists in the New World. As the presentation will demonstrate, European images of these cities, fastened on to the idea of the city as an architectural entity, or urbs, generally in an effort to demonstrate that America was becoming a civilized in the sense of urbanized space. Yet since the majority of these images were the work of Protestant publishers hostile to Spain, these images served also as instruments of political and religious propaganda. They therefore highlighted the weaknesses of the Spanish empire together with backwardness of the cities Spaniards had founded in the New World.

In comparison with these Europeanized images of Spain's American cities, those executed by New World artists had different emphases. Concerned less with the description of the city as urbs than as civitas, or human community, these views endeavored to pinbpoint the particular virtues that made every city unique. Accordingly, these "local" images tended to exaggerate a city's grandeur and importance, yet only rarely did they provide an overall view (or "description") of the city itself. More selective in scope, they focused on particular monuments plazas, cathedrals, individual churches which served as icons of the city as a whole. These iconic structures were generally those emblematic of civitas and generally carried with them messages, both political and religious, essential to the community's definition and vision of itself. In this respect, these images offer clues for understanding the ways in which urban identities -- and creole identities -- were constructed in the New World.

I should that this lecture, illustrated by slides, forms part of a larger, collaborative study. My collaborator is Dr. Fernando Mar¡as, Professor of Art History at the Autonomous University of Madrid, and (with luck) our book, Urbs and Civitas: Urban Images in the Hispanic World, 1500-1750, will be completed later this year.