Articles by Aaron Hyman
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 2025
Open-access preview with link of the introduction to The Dutch Americas: Art Histories of the Atl... more Open-access preview with link of the introduction to The Dutch Americas: Art Histories of the Atlantic World
21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual – Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur, 2024
In The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance. Ed. Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porra... more In The Routledge Companion to the Global Renaissance. Ed. Stephen J. Campbell and Stephanie Porras. New York: Routledge, 2024. pp. 225–32.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, 2023
This essay treats an extraordinary equestrian portrait of the New Spanish viceroy Bernardo de Gál... more This essay treats an extraordinary equestrian portrait of the New Spanish viceroy Bernardo de Gálvez created from little more than a looping, calligraphic line. Unique among viceregal painting, it has eluded definitive scholarly interpretation. A previously unexplored, printed calligraphic model is proposed. At stake, however, is not just source hunting but a reappraisal of the picture's intellectual context within a network of the period's renowned academicians and their thinking about handwriting. Moreover, new technical findings allow a revised dating of the picture in exposing the sitter's shifting identity. What emerges is a political reading of the portrait's original function as an act of deference to the Spanish crown and sign of investment in the renewal of Iberian culture's proper formation of imperial citizens-on both sides of the Atlantic. Ultimately, the essay thus points to the art-historical potential of wrestling with the history of writing, a domain often segregated from other visual arts but one that was critical for early modern artists and their audiences.
Colonial Latin American Review, 2023
The archive has played a crucial role in art historical scholarship in helping to flesh out the i... more The archive has played a crucial role in art historical scholarship in helping to flesh out the identities of colonial artists, scribes, and writers. But the vagaries of history, colonialist violences, and postcolonial regimes mean that the archives undergirding such study are particularly unstable. This essay treats the role of archives (their lacunae as well as their surpluses) in shaping the historical methods and scholarly desires around these actors. Case studies are organized around objects made of ink and paper, the same materials as colonial documentation. These cases span a wide temporal range, a broad geographic frame, and a diverse set of period actors. Set out in reverse chronological order, they capture the longing and lament that colonial archives produce. The essay then turns to archival gaps that have been or might be filled, focalizing a range or methods—from historically sanctioned modes of recovery to patently fraudulent fictions—to explore generative methods of probing archival limits.
Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America, 2023
Ed. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
This volume addresses and expands the r... more Ed. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi and Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries.
Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting.
Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it.
Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
Catálogo de bienes gráficos y documentales (Bogotá: Museo Colonial, 2020)., 2020
21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual – Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte und visuellen Kultur , 2022
This essay works within a transatlantic framework to excavate an early modern sensitivity to form... more This essay works within a transatlantic framework to excavate an early modern sensitivity to form and formal arrangement from practices of compositionally reconfiguring printed compositions. Tracing such operations generates a reappraisal of foundational conceptions of Baroque aesthetics and of the very notion of the Baroque as a style. The essay begins in colonial Latin America, where artists were frequently tasked with using European prints to produce works of art, but it then tacks in the opposite direction to argue that exploring Latin American compositional modes allows better seeing them in Europe as well – both in commonplace vis ual culture and in the highest echelons of artistic production. The Baroque comes to be defined as a compositional mode of artistic practice centered on form and its potential for syntactical recombi nation – a mode conditioned by the medium of print. This essay thus advocates for the ways that working across once-interconnected geographies can (and should) shift key historiographic concepts and aesthetic frameworks: here of Baroque compositional practice, the Baroque as a historiographic construct, and print’s unmined place within both.
West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture , 2021
To be lost and found at sea: What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues... more To be lost and found at sea: What kinds of thinking does the shipwreck prompt? This essay pursues this question by centering fragmented remains—large beeswax blocks and Chinese porcelain ware—from the Santo Cristo de Burgos, a Spanish galleon lost while traveling from Manila to Acapulco at the end of the seventeenth century. By considering how durable commodities were recovered and reimagined, primarily by Indigenous inhabi- tants of the Oregon coast, this essay reflects upon the kinds of histories that can be written around and because of wrecked ships. Tacking between past and present, we use the Santo Cristo de Burgos to draw out the lineaments of a shipwreck’s art history, bringing into focus three interrelated themes, each critical to the material histories of wrecks: the interpretive recalcitrance of cargo, the reframing of value through recovery, and the production of material surplus in the watery depths.
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, 2020
Early American Literature, 2020
The Art Bulletin, 2019
Indeed, the walls of the Porzellanzimmer, directly adjacent to the Millionenzimmer, are lined wit... more Indeed, the walls of the Porzellanzimmer, directly adjacent to the Millionenzimmer, are lined with equally remarkable and securely attributed imperial creations: chinoiserie compositions by the Emperor Franz Joseph, the Archduchess Maria Christine, her husband Albert of Sachsen-Teschen, and Isabella of Parma, wife of Archduke Joseph . Blue gouache on white Dutch paper emulates the visual effects of porcelain, from which the room takes its name. The 212 sheets were framed and mounted into vertical columns separated by chinoiserie plaster garlands. The result is a witty conceit simulating an imperial porcelain cabinet despite the absence of a single piece of actual porcelain.
Colonial Latin American Review, 2018
“Patterns of Colonial Transfer: An Album of Prints in Mexico City,” Print Quarterly 34.4 (2017): ... more “Patterns of Colonial Transfer: An Album of Prints in Mexico City,” Print Quarterly 34.4 (2017): 393–99.
brown-reds, and others of an eerie bluish cream, Cornelis van Haarlem's enormous Fall of Lucifer ... more brown-reds, and others of an eerie bluish cream, Cornelis van Haarlem's enormous Fall of Lucifer pulses warm and cool at once, creating an energy more appropriate to a bacchanal than to a scene of damnation ( ). The canvas's surface is filled with naked men: a bare butt turns out to us in the foreground, knotty flesh is seen through gently parted thighs, scrotums punctuate splayed legs, and penises respond to the forces of gravity. Insects, traditional iconographic elements of northern European depictions of falls from grace, are here used to conceal genitals. 1 Yet, ironically, the insects instead serve to fix our attention on male groins. The man standing at the left side of the canvas renders sexual innuendo explicit, as his outstretched hand leads the viewer's eye toward two men in an overtly sexual position. Across the canvas, the strange foreshortening creates the illusion that the reclining nude in the foreground stares directly at the anus of the man who straddles his face. A penis and testicles appear to hang just inches from this reclining man's nose.
Oxford Bibliographies in Latin American Studies. Ed. Ben Vinson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018
Book Reviews by Aaron Hyman
Historians of Netherlandish Art Reviews, 2024
e life and career of Peter Paul Rubens were de ned by his foreign travels, both artistic and dipl... more e life and career of Peter Paul Rubens were de ned by his foreign travels, both artistic and diplomatic. In a near-constant to and fro across Europe, two seemingly essential journeys and exchanges with other artists amount to something of black boxes to which historians of art have little access. One is his famous stay at the Spanish court in Madrid from 1628 to 1629, during which he clearly spent a signi cant, if wholly mysterious, amount of time with Diego Velázquez studying the collection of Phillip IV. We can only imagine the two of them jointly inspecting the many paintings by Titian that Rubens copied during his sojourn or what sorts of workshop aid Velázquez's assistants may have o ered-and what tricks they may have picked up in the process. ough we know little about the speci cs, the meeting
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Articles by Aaron Hyman
This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries.
Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting.
Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it.
Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
Book Reviews by Aaron Hyman
This volume addresses and expands the role of the artist in colonial Latin American society, featuring essays by specialists in the field that consider the ways society conceived of artists and the ways artists defined themselves. Broadening the range of ways that creativity can be understood, contributors show that artists functioned as political figures, activists, agents in commerce, definers of a canon, and revolutionaries.
Chapters provide studies of artists in Peru, Mexico, and Cuba between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Instead of adopting the paradigm of individuals working alone to chart new artistic paths, contributors focus on human relationships, collaborations, and exchanges. The volume offers new perspectives on colonial artworks, some well known and others previously overlooked, including discussions of manuscript painting, featherwork, oil painting, sculpture, and mural painting.
Most notably, the volume examines attitudes and policies related to race and ethnicity, exploring various ethnoracial dynamics of artists within their social contexts. Through a decolonial lens not often used in the art history of the era and region, Collective Creativity and Artistic Agency in Colonial Latin America examines artists’ engagement in society and their impact within it.
Contributors: Derek S. Burdette | Ananda Cohen-Aponte | Emily C. Floyd | Aaron M. Hyman | Barbara E. Mundy | Linda Marie Rodriguez | Jennifer R. Saracino | Maya Stanfield-Mazzi | Margarita Vargas-Betancourt
An Art that Resists History: El Señor de Huanca and the Intractability of Idols in the Andes
The history of the image of Nuestro Señor de Huanca, located some 50 kilometers from the city of Cuzco, is difficult to explicate. Although the facture of the miraculous image—painted on the surface of an enormous rock, on a huanca—is extraordinary, art historians have not found sufficient evidence to reconstruct a definitive history of this colonial object. Instead of lamenting the relative absence of information about this pilgrimage site, I propose to analyze this lack as an important feature of colonial art in the Andes. Facing the particular intractability of Andean idols, missionary friars had to invent new strategies of persuasion at the limits of the strictly doctrinal (and, as such, ones they could not describe in official writings). I propose that this phenomenon is now manifest in the various holes in the historical record; features particular to the Andean experience denied the possibility of telling a strictly European history of and in the past. The results of this process now paradoxically offer us the possibility of recuperating, however provisionally, something of the confrontation of European and Andean epistemologies.
This paper explores the various decorative elements at Andahuaylillas, which have never before been brought together under the rubric of translation, in order to argue that colonial images and spaces functioned in systems of translation that had to be carefully ordered so that they could, in turn, impose order on the indigenous bodies that moved amongst and within them. The religious supplicant thus becomes the final pictorial element at Andahuaylillas, a translated body that is subjected to the ordering logic of the frame.
These new feather objects are implicated in this move backwards through time. They acted as New World icons in a revivified era of images in the New World, a retreat from an era of art in Europe that had led to such catastrophic events as the Reformation and iconoclasm. The indigenous craftsmen were heralded for their ability to copy, to produce substitutional pictorial statements that hinged on notions of perfect transcription, true likeness to divine prototypes, and a lack of inventive authorship: in short, their ability to produce icons. Feather images, whose natural materials seemed to deny human intervention, were understood as the most revered form of the icon, the acheiropoeiton, or image produced without the use of human hands.
The Dutch Americas
Historians of Netherlandish Art Sponsored Session
111th CAA Annual Conference
New York, NY, February 15—18, 2023
Organizers: Stephanie Porras (Tulane University) and Aaron M. Hyman (Johns Hopkins University)
But within the framework of colonial registration, paper intersected with and impinged upon the lives of imperial subjects in profoundly personal ways. Baptismal and marriage registers, receipts of dowry, wills and final inventories of personal goods are all testaments to the ways that paper punctuated lives; at charged moments people turned to pieces of paper--with varying degrees of choice and mediation--in acts of remembrance, obligation, and contestation. Though at times disregarded as banal and formulaic, these widespread encounters traverse the binary that aligns paper with a lettered European world and excludes indigenous and African viceregal subjects from this textual economy.
This panel seeks to explore how these sheets of paper, bound into books, collated into the reams of a notary’s legajo, folded into the pilgrim’s satchel, or tucked away into a locked escritorio, functioned as objects in their own right. The turn towards materiality and objects in colonial studies need not be opposed to text. We invite proposals that foreground the materiality of paper as it mediates the two types of history described above; that treat the symbolic and representational aspects of paper while attending to its material dimensions; that explore how subjects engaged paper as a concrete object and not merely a blank space for the registration of abstracted ideas. We encourage submissions that pay attention to the relationships between paper and the shape of the viceregal archive--its limitations, exclusions, form, structure--and point to diverse ways in which historical subjects did and scholars might now engage it.
Papers would ideally handle both art historically specific cases and the corresponding methodological or historiographical issues. We wish to assemble papers that treat works from geographically diverse areas of Europe and from artists who have been underrepresented in related scholarship.
that accrued around a papal bull (the Bula de la Santa Cruzada) that was printed in Madrid in 1578, circulated in the Spanish Americas (Chile), and now is housed in the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Esta colección de ensayos reconsidera un artículo fundamental de 1961 de George Kubler, quien, al publicarse el volumen, fue el historiador del arte latinoamericano más importante del mundo de habla inglesa. A menudo recibida con indiferencia u hostilidad, la tesis de Kubler sobre la extinción sigue siendo controvertida. Los ensayos de esta sección abordan la recepción de Kubler en México, las implicaciones políticas de su afirmación en relación con la indigeneidad, ası ́como la utilidad de las categoríaas de Kubler y los objetos de “extinción” más alla ́de su paradigma original.
Esta coleção de ensaios reconsidera um artigo seminal de 1961 de George Kubler, então o mais importante historiador da arte da América Latina no mundo anglófono. Frequentemente recebido com indiferença ou hostilidade, o argumento central de Kubler para a extinção permanece altamente contestado. Os ensaios nesta seção tratam da recepção de Kubler no México, os riscos políticos do seu argumento em relação á indigeneidade, bem como a utilidade das categorias e objetos de “extinção” de Kubler além de seu paradigma de enquadramento original.