Pictured Politics
Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections
The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.
Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent's multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.
Engel’s book is a welcome addition to the scholarly dialogue about portraiture, one that brings the complexities of colonial relationships to bear on the discussion of a genre viewed as embodying power. Pictured Politics will appeal to specialists and students of colonial art and portraiture studies. Most of the images she analyzes have never been reproduced in an English language art history text. Their appearance within Engel’s book widens our understanding of portraits produced in the eighteenth century and the ways in which they were employed and displayed in a colonial context. Engel treats this understudied material in richly nuanced ways with compelling discussion.
Pictured Politics provides a model for studying the ways in which local and imperial concerns converged in artistic patronage and serves as a fine example of how interviceregal comparison can be revealing and, at the same time, generate new research questions.
Engel’s work makes important contributions to the understanding of South American colonial art and that of the early nineteenth century...Pictured Politics is the first stand-alone analysis of South American portraiture. As such, Emily Engel’s research offers insights beyond the physical portraits’ stylistic traits and icono-graphic content, helping the reader see what cannot be seen, by examining portraiture as more than just historical artifacts. Her comprehensive analyses of the sociopolitical roots of this genre over time reveal deep material relationships that intricately intertwined portraiture with complex regional and local notions of authority.
Pictured Politics makes an exemplary contribution to one of the least studied aspects of the history of Hispanic viceregal art: portraiture in South America...a nuanced and deep reading of the official—in other words, corporate, and predominantly male—portrait in the primary political and commercial centres of South America.
Pictured Politics offers a new and much-needed reframing of official portrait series that have rested in the background of colonial art history. It offers provocative conclusions and will undoubtedly inspire further research. Moreover, the book will hopefully help secure the preservation of surviving examples of these important records of colonial history.
Pictured Politics constitutes an exceptional study of an important corpus of art in colonial Spanish South America, namely, official portraiture. Dr. Emily Engel delivers an unparalleled analysis of the significance, aesthetics, and historical evolution of paintings that virtually everyone with experience in Latin American art history will have encountered in the literature or the museums.
Pictured Politics is a theoretically informed and historically sensitive examination of official portraiture in Spanish South America, interweaving visual analysis with examinations of crucial period documents, all the while engaging meaningfully with art-historical, ethnographical, and related scholarship. Significantly, it also links Spanish South American official portraiture to European and indigenous artistic traditions and collecting practices. The result is a multifaceted examination that takes into consideration the multiple, complex, and culturally diverse agencies that influenced the tradition of portraiture in early modern/colonial and republican-era Spanish South America.
Introduction: Art and Authority in Late Colonial South American Portraiture
Chapter 1. New Pictorial Practices: Early Official Portraits in Viceregal Peru
Chapter 2. Visualizing Empire’s History: Royal Portraits in the Iberoamerican World
Chapter 3. Picturing Viceregal Authority in the Lima City Council
Chapter 4. Municipal Collecting: Viceregal Portraits in Bogotá and Buenos Aires
Chapter 5. Portrayal in a Time of Transition: Early Nineteenth-Century Portraits
Epilogue: The Afterlife of Official Portraits
Notes
Bibliography
Index
