From Mexica to Mexican: What Happened to Aztec Art After the Conquest?

Readings

Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and Bullfinch Press, Boston, 1990. See especially the sections on "Imperial Tenochtitlan," "The Progress of Art in New Spain," and "The Mission: Evangelical Utopianism in the New World (1523-1600)."

SUMMARY

This slide presentation will respond to the question: what happened to Aztec (Mexica) art after the conquest? While the Spanish conquest of 1521 spelled the end of the so-called Aztec Empire, it is not often realized that the surviving Nahua people themselves, as well as Spanish civic and religious administrators, played a role in redefining their place within the European-dominated viceregal society and culture imposed upon them.

Skilled and prolific artists, the Aztecs, or Mexica as they called themselves, had encoded their religious and political ideologies in the manifold art works they had produced in the prehispanic period. The post-conquest Nahuas continued to use their vibrant visual forms to recall their past and record their transformed present. Thus, while some types of indigenous art disappeared, others persisted or were coopted or modified by contact with transplanted European practices. Yet other visual forms were engendered as expressions of a new cultural entity and identity, that of colonial Mexico.

This presentation will focus on those visual arts that survived the conquest, as well as on the transformation in native cognition and representation that they embody. Slides illustrating these work will include recarved and reused monumental sculptures, vividly frescoed monastery walls, and especially, the painted books that manifest most dramatically the altered reality of Nahua existence in New Spain.