¿La pintura novohispana como koiné pictórica americana? Avances de una investigación en ciernes

Abstract

One of the fundamental concerns throughout the historiography on the painting of colonial Mexico was to shed light on its relation with that of Spain. Most writing on this subject during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries concluded that from the arrival of European artists, the painting carried out in the territory of New Spain was Spanish. With regard to the early work from the sixteenth century—both murals and codices—it is difficult to determine to what extent indigenous pictorial traditions continued to operate. When this was compared to the previous tradition, it was pronounced to be “Spanish”, and all further discussion was set aside. Nonetheless, seventeenth and eighteenth century painting in the Colony presents a clear identity, when set against contemporary painting in Spain, and this needs an explanation. Despite numerous studies of the interaction of indigenous elements in colonial art, there is a need to revise the criteria used so far for defining the identity of the painting of New Spain in general. As an aid to this task, the author makes use of analytic categories that linguists have employed in the study of Spanish in America. Taking as a starting point the question of whether the Spanish used in the Americas is American Spanish or Spanish in America, we transpose the discussion to the area of painting by asking whether painting in the colonies is the “American Spanish painting” or “Spanish painting in America”. Through the use of terms such as substrate, lexicon, leveling and koinê, we seek explanations for the diversity of colonial painting, arriving at the conclusion that it can be defined as a dialectal variety of Spanish painting, but also reviewing the artistic skills and techniques of the indigenous world, in the attempt to find an explanation, not for the rejection or disappearance of a whole system of representation —as scholars have tended to describe it in the past— but rather for its assimilation and stylistic adjustment to a new pictorial reality. This work addresses only the formal aspects without considering the area of content and iconography.