A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City

A Companion to Viceregal Mexico City, 1519–1821 Edited by John F. López leiden | boston For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents List of Figures and Tables xi Archival and Image Repositories Notes on Contributors xv Acknowledgements xix xiv Intoduction: Viceregal Mexico City, Colonial Cosmopolitanism, and the Hispanic World 1 John F. López PART 1 History and Society 1 Fear, Wonder, and Absence Our Distorted View of Moctezuma´s Tenochtitlan 29 Matthew Restall 2 The Weirdest of All? Indigenous Peoples and Polities of Colonial Mexico City 51 Luis Fernando Granados 3 Blackness and Blurred Boundaries in Mexico City Joan C. Bristol 4 Of Pleasures and Proscriptions Or How Residents of Mexico City Negotiated Gender and Family Norms 95 Sonya Lipsett-Rivera 5 War, Legitimacy, and Ceremony in 18th-Century Mexico City The Annual Funerary Honors for Fallen Soldiers 114 Frances L. Ramos 76 PART 2 Religious Life 6 City of Friars, City of Archbishops The Church in Mexico City in the Age of the Hapsburgs 137 Antonio Rubial García For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV viii Contents 7 The Cabildo of Mexico City, Patron Saints, and the Making of Local and Imperial Identities 163 Alejandro Cañeque 8 Visualizing Corporate Piety The Art of Religious Brotherhoods Cristina Cruz González 181 PART 3 Institutions 9 Permanence and Change in Mexico City’s Viceregal Court, 1535–1821 215 Iván Escamilla González 10 Finance and Credit in Viceregal Mexico City María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano 11 Uneven Chances Education in Colonial Mexico City 257 Enrique González González 12 Medicine and Municipal Rights in Viceregal Mexico City Paula S. De Vos 237 282 PART 4 Special Themes 13 The Urban Plans of Mexico City, 1520–1810 Barbara E. Mundy 303 14 The Desagüe´s Watermark Cartography and Environmental Crisis at Viceregal Mexico City John F. López 15 Urban Science in 18th-Century Mexico City Miruna Achim 353 For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 328 ix Contents PART 5 The Arts 16 A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City Kelly Donahue-Wallace 377 17 Novohispanic Baroque Poetry A Lyric Chronicle of Mexico City 402 Martha Lilia Tenorio 18 Music and Literature in New Spain The Politics of Buen Gusto in 18th-Century Mexico City 424 Jesús A. Ramos-Kittrell 19 The Royal Academy of San Carlos, 1781–1800 440 Amy C. Hamman and Stacie G. Widdifield Index 467 For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV CHAPTER 16 A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City Kelly Donahue-Wallace Printed texts and images were as ubiquitous in viceregal Mexico City as they were in early modern cities throughout the Atlantic world. Typographic books, woodcuts, and engravings were seen and owned by New Spain’s elite colonists and indigenous laborers alike. They were hung on walls and shelved in libraries, carried in pockets and worn under clothing, displayed and hidden, disseminated for official and unofficial purposes, promoted for orthodoxy and censored for heterodoxy. As print permeated daily life, residents of New Spain spoke about it, and pictured it in works of art. Collectors wrote with pride about scooping their peers with particularly elusive purchases. Viceregal authorities, recognizing the impact of print, simultaneously voiced concerns over its persuasive powers and championed its ability to reach a wide audience. Artists, too, pictured books in portraits and printed images in offices and homes. This broad discourse reveals that print’s worth rested in what Adrian Johns calls the “cognate attributes associated with printing”, or what I am calling the idea of printed-ness.1 While the images or words stamped on the paper were undeniably significant and meaningful, the object itself and the power of the qualities of printed-ness that resulted from practices, experiences, and rhetoric gave the works meaning. These included cheapness, ephemerality, multiplicity, authority, truthfulness, and cognitive efficacy. And yet the notion of printed-ness differed for Mexico City’s diverse populations, a fact that made print both a tool and a threat to viceregal society and its institutions. The present essay examines how people in viceregal Mexico City perceived imprints. In doing so, it shifts attention away from the well-known colonizing role of logographic writing. Although the printed book shares writing’s responsibility and blame for colonization, as richly and productively studied by Walter Mignolo, my focus specifically on imprints considers the very object itself: the print and the book. Following a brief summary of local print history, the essay offers a new way of studying printed images and texts that were made in or travelled to the viceroyalty by examining the era’s perceptions of print’s intrinsic and associated characteristics. It does so through visual 1 Johns, The Nature of the Book, p. 2. © koninklijke brill nv, leideN, 2021 | DOI: 10.1163/9789004335578_018 For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 378 Donahue-Wallace representations—pictures of printed materials—bolstered by archival records and period texts. An underlying assumption in this essay holds that visual and textual representations of printed books and images were laden with meaning; they communicated widely and not-so-widely shared beliefs about printed materials. By reading these signs, we may learn about a culture of print in colonial Mexico City. Printed texts and images arrived in Mexico City with the conquistadors and the mendicant clergy who followed them into the Mexica capital. In his conquest chronicle, Bernal Díaz del Castillo explains that as Hernán Cortés made his way to Tenochtitlan in 1519, he replaced native temple sculptures with woodcut prints of the Virgin Mary.2 Soon thereafter, friars brought printed bibles, catechisms, and prayer books to support their evangelical efforts. They used these texts, printed in Europe in Latin and Spanish, to minister to the local population, eventually assembling large libraries at urban monasteries and outlying mission complexes. Local printing got underway soon thereafter. The need for books published in Nahuatl and other indigenous languages spurred Bishop Fray Juan de Zumárraga and Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza to establish a printing press in the viceregal capital. In 1538, a shop owned by Seville printer Juan Cromberger and run by Juan Pablos opened in Mexico City. Operating under a royal monopoly for the next 20 years, the new press’ earliest surviving book was a 1539 doctrinal manual published for missionaries in Spanish and Nahuatl.3 Subsequent imprints included a baptismal manual and a tract on religious processions for the same audience. Other early imprints were intended for native readers. These included the 1546 Doctrina christiana breve traduzida en lengua Mexicana by Fray Alonso de Molina, written for “the children and youths of the indigenous of this New Spain” to learn for their salvation.4 When Pablos’ monopoly ended, more printers established themselves in Mexico City, with a handful of firms competing for business by the end of the 16th century. Religious tracts and images remained most common among their offerings, but government documents, secular texts, playing cards, and heraldry also occupied Mexican presses. Printing in Mexico City soon expanded, as more than a dozen shops operated throughout the 17th century. The breadth of their typographic efforts increased, as amply illustrated festival books, biographies of exemplary clergy, religious tracts by local theologians, and academic treatises produced by 2 Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, p. 62. 3 García Icazbalceta, Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI, p. 1. 4 Ibid., p. 72. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City 379 university faculty like Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora emerged from the local presses. These imprints served the growing lettered elite, consisting principally of the regular and secular clergy associated with educational institutions, as well as members of the viceregal bureaucracy. Imported works continued to arrive from Europe at the same time, including the printed images that had a profound impact on local artists. Mexican painters Juan Correa, Cristóbal de Villalpando, and their peers serving the same lettered elite drew inspiration from engravings after European Old Masters. At the same time, local printmakers produced woodcuts and engravings for a broad audience, working either freelance or employed within typographic printing firms. The 18th century not only experienced ongoing growth in the printed medium, especially in the number of printmaking shops operating in the viceregal capital, but also saw the introduction of newspapers into Mexico City’s print culture. The Gazeta de México had two runs, first in the 1730s and again from 1784 to the early 19th century. It was joined most significantly by the Mercurio Volante published by José Ignacio Bartolache from 1772–73, the Gazeta de literatura de México edited by José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez from 1788–95 (see Achim, this volume), and the Diario de México beginning in 1805. These papers became the locus of Mexican intellectual exchange, as the intelligentsia, merchants, nobles, and bureaucrats turned to them for information and debates on matters from scientific discoveries to European politics. The newspapers furthermore provide an additional window onto Mexico City’s print culture. Shipping records and bookshop advertisements published in the periodicals reveal that imported books and prints streamed into the capital, some pre-sold by subscription and the rest destined for book dealers and merchants. Mexican printmaking shops also sold their wares in the newspapers, advertising engravings of religious and secular themes. At the close of the colonial era, these shops used their presses in support of or against Mexican independence, and the early 19th century saw royalist tracts, seditious pamphlets, scathing broadsheets, and biting caricatures published in Mexico City. Print’s ubiquity in colonial life is pictured in the visual arts, albeit in idealized, normative ways. Typographic books were depicted in the earliest local images—codices, mission mural paintings, and feather mosaics—while imported prints served as sources of inspiration for many of these same local arts. As the Mexican urban painting school matured, books and a few prints appeared in images of the doctors of the church, martyr saints, founders of religious orders, Christ, and the Virgin Mary. Among secular genre, books and prints were most frequently depicted in portraits. Sitters, particularly clerics but also laymen, were shown accompanied by relevant typographic and visual imprints, from engravings tacked to the wall and small, handheld prayer books For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 380 Donahue-Wallace to sheets of music and massive, multi-volume treatises. Books and prints also appear in the so-called casta paintings, images depicting the viceroyalty’s multi-racial society. The representation of printed objects in Mexican visual arts follows certain conventions that aid their identification as imprints distinct from other materials. Typographic books appear in leather bindings with meticulously trimmed pages. Printed books also sometimes display metal clasps, stamped gilded lettering or ink writing on the spine, and pages with colored fore-edges. When shown open, the typography inside—even if illegible—is regularly sized and spaced, precisely aligned with justified borders and broad margins, and printed in one or two columns, as seen in Miguel Cabrera’s portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Figure 16.1). When legible type appears in Mexican colonial images of books, it is the standard roman typeface popular in Spain and Mexico after the mid-16th century. These characteristics are of course shared with European early modern representations of manuscript texts as seen in well-known images of Saint Jerome in his study or the Annunciation to a reading Mary. These European works rely for their recognition as manuscripts on the long history of handwritten tomes and on the visual tradition of representing them. The American context, however, lacked a tradition of images of manuscripts presaging the visual qualities of later printed books. Native artists in Mesoamerica had produced screenfolds, not bound codices. Nor did handwritten manuscripts travel across the Atlantic in large numbers following the creation of the viceroyalty, and relatively few bound manuscript codices were made in the colonial era.5 The association of pictured bound volumes in the Mexican experience was consequently more thoroughly tied to printed books than to manuscripts. Hence, even when Mexican painters intended the books they represented to reference manuscript texts, such as in the hands of the 6th-century Pope Gregory I, their viewers likely saw them as printed works. Painters keen to police the distinction placed quill pens in the subject’s hand to make emphatic the book’s manuscript, rather than typographic, aspect. Representations of printed images in paintings are more easily distinguished from other visual media. Prints are identified by their black-and-white inking concentrated within the shape of the block or plate from which they were printed; the blank space sometimes also includes inscribed text (Figure 16.2). This leaves broad, un-inked paper borders; in some cases, the indented plate mark where the paper is embossed by the intaglio roller press’ intense pressure 5 See González Rodríguez, “Lectura e ideas”, p. 41. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City figure 16.1 381 Miguel Cabrera, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 1753 Courtesy of the Museo Nacional de Historia, México/Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 382 Donahue-Wallace figure 16.2 Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez, Saint Peter, 1701–1710 Courtesy of the Museo de América, Madrid is also depicted. Also differentiating prints from paintings is the emphatically described materiality of their paper support, with tears, curling or ripped edges, obvious folds, and general flexibility. Usually depicted unframed, prints are frequently shown tacked to the wall with nails or wax, sometimes with a corner loose. The visual manifestations of a Mexican culture of print began with the imagery produced by native artists soon after the Spaniards’ arrival. Several contact-era manuscripts by indigenous artists picture typographic books. They For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 383 A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City figure 16.3 Anonymous, Codex Telleriano-Remensis (detail), 16th century Courtesy of the Bibliotheque National, Paris do so, however, exclusively in the hands of friars. On folio 46 of the early colonial Codex Telleriano-Remensis, an Aztec artist pictured a mendicant cleric holding an oversized rosary and a printed book (Figure 16.3). The latter attribute is identifiable by the regular hash marks denoting typographic text and the shaded border suggesting the book’s colored fore edge.6 Other manuscripts similarly picture friars holding or otherwise accompanied by typographic books. These include the Codex Tlatelolco and Diego Múñoz Camargo’s Historia de Tlaxcala. In each case, only the friars, not the Spanish conquistadors or government officials represented nearby, possess books; these secular figures are instead identified by batons of power, thrones, and beards. Typographic books may thus be considered attributes of clerical identity added to the local glyphic lexicon, a kind of pictographic sign to aid in the identification of these characters along with their tonsured hair, rosary beads, and robes. 6 Quiñones Keber, Codex Telleriano-Remensis, p. 237. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 384 Donahue-Wallace That indigenous artists represented the friars of Mexico City and its environs by printed books comes as little surprise. As Roberto González Echevarría writes, “The conquest of America was carried out by the first modern state and with the aid of the printing press”.7 And the clergy were the first to deploy the press in the Americas. Native viewers were of course accustomed to the relationship of religious faith and writings from the sacred texts kept and read by the priestly class. They witnessed early mendicants equating these familiar pictographic texts with the printed books missionaries identified as their substitutes. Jaime Lara goes so far as to suggest that native viewers appreciated the resemblance of the black- and red-ink printed books and the “stories in red and black” from the local tradition.8 As with pre-Hispanic codices, printed books were not distributed in great numbers to native believers. The exceptions were the young indigenous men training for the clergy who, according to Jerónimo de Mendieta, kept their books under lock and key at the new Colegio de la Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco when it opened in 1536.9 Even if most were not privy to this type of direct contact with typographic books, indigenous Mexicans saw the friars’ reverential treatment of the imprints: revealing them for religious lessons, placing them on the altar during Mass, and restricting access to them otherwise; friars even went as far as keeping them on their person. Mendieta explains in his history of New Spain’s missions that even when native laborers carried the rest of their material needs, friars insisted on carrying their breviaries and other printed texts in a satchel slung across their bodies.10 Fray Diego de Valadés’ text on Franciscan evangelization likewise pictures a friar standing amongst native peoples with a small, printed book hanging from his belt.11 But religious books were not the only significant printed texts for native artists and viewers. As Tom Cummins notes, the 1537 printed papal bull known as Sublimus Dei had the effect of prohibiting enslavement of Amerindians, demonstrating that printed texts had “real or temporal consequences in terms of the people’s suffering”.12 Certainly being freed from the threat of enslavement made clear the power of print, but so too did Bartolomé de las Casas’ 1552–53 imprints decrying the abuse of native Americans, the multiple editions of the Recopilación de leyes de Indias that governed daily life, and even the 17th-century imprints addressing the Virgin of 7 8 9 10 11 12 González Echevarría, “America Conquered”, p. 289. Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs, p. 9. Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana, p. 415. Ibid., p. 617. McKee, “How Print Culture Came to be Indigenous”, p. 164. Cummins, “The Indulgent Image”, p. 208. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City 385 Guadalupe that crafted this cult into a pan-American devotion celebrating its native roots.13 Unlike the typographic books the friars kept to themselves, printed images were distributed in abundance during the early evangelical era. As Serge Gruzinski describes, conversion of native people was largely “laid down in terms of images”, as Cortés and the friars who followed him distributed images, especially printed ones, throughout the 16th century.14 Valadés proudly proclaimed in Rhetorica christiana that the Franciscans developed the practice of teaching with “calcographic” or engraved images.15 The late 16th-century confession manual by Fray Juan Bautista likewise advised that native converts be shown printed images while hearing confessional examples; it was even better “if each Indian had [the print] in his house, because each time he sees it, he will remember and think that the same will happen to him”.16 Documentary evidence similarly testifies to an abundance of images distributed by the mendicants. Their efforts were in fact so thorough that through the 17th and 18th centuries, Mexican Indians, mixed-race castas, and criollo colonists alike kept and displayed prints, and attributed to them miracles from aid in childbirth to finding lost animals.17 The distribution of prints supported not just religious instruction but artistic training as well. Fray Pedro de Gante gave burgeoning native artists prints to copy at the school of San José de los Naturales, so that his charges would learn European formal qualities and iconographic conventions. Likewise, native painters were provided with European prints to reproduce on the walls of new missions or in the feather mosaics used for liturgical garments and wall hangings. The mendicants additionally taught native artists to make woodcut images, praising their ability to craft these into “perfect figures”.18 Their ability to do so was considered a barometer of evangelical success and the friars’ creation of what Gruzinski calls a “new man” who abandoned pagan ways thanks in part to his engagement with printed images.19 The native-made woodcuts moreover placed Mexican Indians within what Tom Cummins has called a “common culture between Europe and the Americas”.20 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Gruzinski, “Images and Cultural Mestizaje”, p. 62. Gruzinski, Images at War, p. 37. Valadés, Rhetorica christiana, p. 237. Cited in Chocano Mena, La Fortaleza docta, p. 56. See Taylor, Marvels and Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico and Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images. Motolinía, Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España, p. 169. Gruzinski, “Images and Cultural Metizaje”, p. 56. Cummins, “The Indulgent Image”, p. 210. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 386 Donahue-Wallace The association of early colonial missionaries with printed material was visualized in the 1547 edition of Doctrina christiana en lengua Mexicana by Fray Pedro de Gante. Its title page woodcut vignette features the author holding a book and saying in the native language: “This is the word of God”.21 The image creates a self-referential loop: the physical book in which the image appears, the pictured book, the printed depiction of the spoken words pictured in the image, and the actual spoken words as Gante or another reader described the image for his audience. It had the effect of reinforcing four-fold the association between friars and their sacred books for native viewers. So, too, did Gante’s more lavishly illustrated 1553 edition, which includes the same illustrated title page, plus an additional small woodcut titled “Evangelization”, featuring a friar holding a book and standing among childlike figures. This association of missionaries and printed books with Gante himself was pictured in two portraits painted later in the colonial era. The first, now in the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City, represents Gante with one arm around a native boy and the other holding an open, printed book. That Gante’s intention for the book in this painting—a goal shared by his mendicant colleagues—was to transfer its physical ownership as well as its content to his native charges is imagined in an anonymous 17th-century painting (Figure 16.4). More than a pictographic attribute of his clerical profession, the books here act additionally as a sign of the transmission of knowledge. More specifically, the books represented for Gante’s fellow Franciscans the transfer via writing—and more exactly, printing—of predictable and exactly repeatable and repeated doctrinal information, in contrast to what Gante and his peers saw as the native mutable and inexact form of pictographic writing and its spoken interpretation.22 Its recipient, the native child, personifies for a clerical viewer the entirety of New Spain’s indigenous populations, who the friars routinely described as childlike.23 In the painting pictured here, the friar speaks to indigenous visitors while a native boy, dressed in the European style, reads from a printed book. Like the clothing, the transfer of the book from the friar’s hands to the Amerindian’s signifies the efficacy of conversion and the concomitant epistemological change; the knowledge embodied in the printed book has transferred to the boy. This transfer, as Stuart McKee notes and both paintings picture, was unidirectional, and the imprint moves only from cleric to native, revealing to modern 21 See García Icazbalceta, Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI and Hernández Triviño. “Fray Pedro de Gante”, pp. 36–38. 22 Mignolo, “When Speaking was not Good Enough”, p. 317. 23 Baudot, “Amerindian Image and Utopian Project”, p. 389. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City figure 16.4 387 Anonymous, Pedro de Gante, 17th century Courtesy of the Museo Nacional de Historia, México/Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia viewers the restrictions placed on indigenous engagement with printed materials in colonial Mexico City.24 The 1555 provincial council decreed that only 24 McKee, “How Print Culture Came to be Indigenous”, p. 164. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 388 Donahue-Wallace abbreviated printed catechisms and handwritten, translated copies of selected sermons could be given to Indians; the same council forbade distribution of printed Bibles in native languages.25 Later decrees took away other translated materials from native readers, including books of hours.26 Indigenous learning and agency in the production of knowledge via printed materials was thus limited. Early efforts to publish Nahua texts to support a nascent indigenous clergy consequently declined dramatically over the course of the late 16th and 17th centuries. As Magdalena Chocano Mena explains, evangelization by this point was kept at its most basic level, eschewing more complicated concepts requiring fuller textual support.27 Perhaps as a result, later images of native people very rarely place printed books in their hands. An anonymous 18th-century painting of a Capuchin nun illustrates how Mexican visual arts pictured the control white-skinned ecclesiastics had over native access to printed information (Figure 16.5). The locutorio grill through which she reads to the native man serves not just as a sign of her cloistered status, but also signals the barriers to his education and the church’s mediating role in native intellectual development. Other images reinforce the connection between printed books, native conversion, and the mediating role of the clergy, such as a portrait of Father José Antonio de Flores Ribera at the Museo Nacional del Virreinato in which the sitter stands before his book-laden shelves, resting one hand on a printed text and another on the head of a kneeling Amerindian, and an early 19th-century engraving of Fray Miguel Tellechea offering his Tarahumara grammar text to stereotyped indigenous figures. The native men reach for the proffered text, which they are not quite given by the cleric. By keeping the potent printed book out of the native hand, the print of Tellechea, the painting of the Capuchin nun, and others like it embody Ángel Rama’s assertion that in the lettered city, the viceroyalty’s literate elite produced the conditions that kept themselves at the apex of a colonial society that equated knowledge and power.28 This restrictive culture of print was what was pictured in works produced for Mexico City’s lettered, art-buying population. On the other hand, printed images were routinely painted into depictions of natives’ belongings throughout the colonial era. They operate most commonly as a sign of poverty, as the owners are pictured so poor as to only own a paper 25 26 27 28 Chocano Mena, Fortaleza docta, pp. 91–92. Gruzinski, Images at War, p. 110. See also González Rodríguez, “Lectura e ideas”, p. 40. Chocano Mena, Fortaleza docta, pp. 96–98. Rama, The Lettered City, pp. 22–24. The exceptional 18th-century painting of Córtes’ so-called humiliation by José Vivar y Valderrama, in which a native man holds a book above the prostrate conquistador taking communion, is less a testament to Amerindian literacy than evidence of the humbled Spaniard. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City figure 16.5 389 Anonymous, Capuchin Nun, c.1750 Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Dr. Robert H. Lamborn Collection, 1903–33 print. Their careless display with torn edges and loose corners acts as metonym of the print’s cheapness and ephemerality. But the prints also signal a normative Catholic piety and the fruitful results of evangelization. An example from For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 390 Donahue-Wallace a parish church in Tlaxcala seems to illustrate Fray Juan Bautista’s recommendation that native people possess a print to emulate. In the painting, a dying Amerindian gives his final confession gazing upon a printed image of Saint Joseph and the Christ Child hanging on his humble wall.29 Likewise, several of the casta paintings place a religious print hanging on the wall behind the family unit.30 While not all prints in casta paintings depict religious subjects, a point to which I shall return later, the religious prints painted in the casta series pictured how the Church, as Gruzinski notes, “attempted to extract maximum benefit from the use of the image while still trying to maintain control over it”.31 The evangelical benefit of printed texts and images communicated by these representations was, more specifically, their efficacy as tools of instruction and the perceived indelibility of information learned from printed sources. As William MacGregor explains in the European context, print technologies became “a powerful set of metaphors to explain the abstract, invisible workings of perception and cognition; to conceptualize, that is in terms of printmaking, how sensations get recorded in the mind and retrieved from memory as discrete units of knowledge”.32 The association of printed-ness with cognition was not confined to written metaphors, as the language of cognitive indelibility derived from printing in turn reaffirmed the authority of real printed texts and images. In her study of early printmaking, Elina Gertsman concurs, “The chain of imprints and incisions that begins with the woodcutter’s knife” and the type founder’s graver, “and continues with impressions on paper, the eye, the brain, the memory, and the heart, culminates in the imprinting and transformation of one’s entire soul”.33 The viewer who read a printed text or gazed upon a holy print had this image and the truths it represented made indelible in his mind. Mexican viewers understood that to estampar, grabar, or imprimir knowledge on one’s heart or mind was to make it permanent. In 1579, Valadés explained that, “By means of images that imprint themselves in different areas [of our minds], we can learn by what we find in those spaces”.34 Fray Jerónimo de Mendieta likewise relied on the language of printed-ness to refer to the 29 30 31 32 33 34 This painting is illustrated in Lara, Christian Texts for Aztecs, p. 74. Saint Joseph came to be associated with “good death” in colonial New Spain. See Rubial García, “Icons of Devotion”, p. 51. For example, the painting De Sambaigo e India, Cambujo in the collection of the Denver Art Museum pictures a small print of what appears to be Saint George just inside the door of the family’s home, its gray tones and wide, un-inked margin identifying it as an engraving. Gruzinski, Images at War, p. 102. MacGregor, “Authority of Prints”, p. 404. Gertsman, “Multiple Impressions”, p. 330. Valadés, Rhetorica christiana, p. 237. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City 391 indelibility of acquired knowledge among his native charges, writing that doctrine “imprint[ed] in their memories from a tender age”.35 This metaphoric process is visualized in a 1701 Peruvian funeral book for Charles II (Figure 16.6), with an illustration featuring the king’s name printed onto two hearts by a platen letter press. The closing couplet in the accompanying sonnet declares that “when he is taken from their eyes, Charles remains printed on their hearts”.36 A particularly charming example of the slippage between metaphoric printed-ness and real print is the 1782 printer’s proof from Mexico City’s Nueva Madrileña Press. It features an engraving of the Virgin of Sorrows and typographic passages in various fonts and sizes. Each merges actual print (in the typeface letters), printing metaphors, and religion, referring to Mary as a book, a press, and a printer for her holy son. Her soul was prepared to receive the imprint of sacred history, her heart was imprinted with Christ’s pain, and her press, or physical body, did not fail in the face of intense suffering. For his part, Christ in the proof is the book printed by God with “Royal Privilege”, a play on typographic approvals and monopolies.37 The representation of printed texts and images in Mexico City’s culture of print thus exceeds simply signifying poverty or evangelical efforts, as the very material of the prints pictured made them efficacious tools of indoctrination. Ink, paper, and printing signified internalized learning that survived forever, allowing us to see Gante’s young reader as forever impacted by the learning the missionaries provided New Spain’s indigenous population, even when the books were accessed only via clerics like the Capuchin nun who read through the locutorio’s bars. The perceived potency of printed texts and images was a double-edged sword for Spanish religious and secular authorities.38 Mexico City’s printers labored under Spanish laws seeking to control their imprints. The viceregal government approved all local texts for printing, while books addressing the Americas required the approval of the Council of the Indies in Spain to insure that texts unflattering to Spain’s efforts in the Americas did not circulate. Religious texts followed an additional, parallel course, securing both civil and ecclesiastical approval for the sake of religious orthodoxy. Printed images initially escaped this pre-publication scrutiny until a 1672 decree demanded that Mexican printers submit any printed item for approval, thereby expanding the law to include all images as well. The archival record reveals, however, that while book printers generally complied with Spanish law from the outset, print 35 36 37 38 Mendieta, Historia ecclesiastica Indiana, p. 27. Portocarrero Lasso de la Vega, Parentación real, n.p. See Garone Gravier, “De las fuentes como fuentes”, pp. 191–192. See González Rodríguez, “Lectura e ideas”. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 392 Donahue-Wallace figure 16.6 Anonymous, Sonnet, 1701 Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City 393 publishers never did. Printed images consequently escaped review before publication for the most part, seeking authorization only in cases where churches or shrines held monopolies on the sacred figures print publishers sought to reproduce. In these cases, the question was less about the decorum or orthodoxy of the printed reproduction and more about revenue. In addition to laws governing production, the local branch of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, founded in 1571, censored printed materials already in circulation. The Inquisition’s proscriptive Index of Prohibited Books, which banned entire printed works or parts therein, vexed local book sellers as early as 1547. The Index likewise prohibited printed images—for example, in 1551, it banned images that insulted or mocked holy figures, and in 1640, prohibited lascivious images. Other Inquisitorial edicts addressed specific printed representations of, for example, the so-called China Poblana and the controversial Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. From local Inquisition investigations of faulty imprints, we may appreciate the darker power Church officials attributed to printed materials as they simultaneously championed their efficacy in conversion and education. As Serge Gruzinski notes regarding a 1571 investigation of a heretical woodcut by émigré blockcutter Juan Ortiz and his boss, printer Pablo Ocharte, “These Frenchmen were even more dangerous for their prominence in the little world of Mexican printing”.39 That is, the potency of print multiplied the foreigners’ seditious potential, which Inquisition records bear out. In 1773, after examining and banning an image critical of King Charles III , Inquisition authorities declared that these imprints “perturb[ed] the consciences of the timid and foolhardy who believe to be true and holy all that is printed and stamped with a mixture of our Sacred Religion”.40 On another occasion, Inquisitors concluded that “the simple people, in whose hands this type of imprint commonly falls” were unable to distinguish heretical prints from “true” images.41 In fact, the Inquisitors repeatedly referred to print’s power to confuse, seduce, and fool the masses. Thus, the same powers that made imprints effective didactic tools could be subverted to make faulty information indelible as well. Their associated power combined with their intrinsic qualities of reproducibility, relative 39 40 41 Gruzinski, Images at War, p. 153. See also González Obregón, Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI, pp. 85–244; Donahue-Wallace, “Prints and Printmakers in Viceregal Mexico City”, pp. 134–141; and Chocano Mena, Fortaleza docta, pp. 351–352. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico (hereafter AGN), Edictos de la Inquisición, t. 2, fol. 27r (1773). AGN, Inquisición, vol. 699, exp. 7, fol. 339v. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 394 Donahue-Wallace cheapness, and easy concealability to make the imprints dangerous and provide them with great, and uncontrollable, power. An example from Puebla seems to prove the Inquisitors’ point. When María Narvaez’ brother lay dying in 1753, the Jesuit clerics who came to hear his confession and administer last rites refused to do so until she removed a prohibited printed portrait of Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza from the wall above his bed. María refused, the priests would not relent, and the brother died without confessing his sins or receiving last rites.42 Fray Bautista’s promotion of printed images in the home to encourage good Christian living consequently becomes more complicated in the uncontrolled environment of Mexico City’s print market, where orthodoxy took a backseat to profit and personal sentiment and interpretation of religious doctrine unleashed thousands of unsanctioned images into the market. Needless to say, unorthodox uses of printed materials were not regularly recorded in colonial paintings. Instead, the visual culture that emerges out of this civil and religious concern for the production and circulation of printed material neutralized the threat and placed the culture of print within socially accepted roles. This is particularly true of portraits. The famous likenesses of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz previously examined, with shelves filled with books, are exceptionally abundant in printed materials, particularly for a woman. The portrait of Sor María Ana Teresa Bonstet (Figure 16.7), with a small prayer book in her hand, three larger volumes on her desk, and an engraving on the wall beside her is more typical in its relatively modest array of imprints; most nuns are pictured with only a single prayer book. Bound, printed volumes likewise flank male clerics in their portraits as evidence of their erudition. While modern scholarship on these works has consistently noted that the books accompanying these sitters signify their learning and lives dedicated to producing or consuming knowledge through printed texts, we may now appreciate that knowledge as particularly efficacious in its ability to teach and to promote retention, as well as its indelibility once learned. They moreover signify the privileged position of these sitters, whose ownership of and direct engagement with books sets them visually apart from Mexico City’s native and mixed race populations. Printed images appear less frequently than books in painted portraits, but similarly signify ideas beyond their immediate referent. Engravings like the image of Our Lady of the Pillar shown tacked to Bonstet’s cell wall, as I have argued on another occasion, represent the nun’s dedication to poverty and humility, visualizing Saint Theresa of Avila’s famous declaration that “it seemed 42 AGN, Inquisición, vol. 945, exp. 12, fols. 56r–56v. See also Rubial García, La santidad controvertida, pp. 203–250. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 395 A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City figure 16.7 Anonymous, Sor Maria Anna Teresa Bonstet, c.1757 Courtesy of the Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán like poverty to me to have [no image] but one on paper”.43 Bonstet’s engraving furthermore denotes more personal associations, as it represents her individual cell where the print hung and her identification with this advocation from her hometown of Zaragoza, Spain. Other clerics pictured with printed representations of favorite advocations are similarly placed within their specific institution, cell, or office. Thus, the print in the clerical painted portrait operates as a convenient signifier of vows, heritage, and corporate identity as member of an order, physically and temporally present at this or that convent. 43 Cited in Portús and Vega, La estampa religiosa, p. 185. See Donahue-Wallace, “Picturing Prints”, pp. 339–341. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 396 Donahue-Wallace Just as significantly, the printed materials in secular and clerical portraits signify a complicated and contradictorily dizzying idea of time in the Mexican culture of print. In the examples with ample painted libraries, the bookshelf is covered by a curtain temporarily pulled back to reveal its contents. Their owners are caught in the act of reading, with a finger inserted between the pages of the temporarily closed devotional book; when the portraitist is finished capturing the likeness, reading will resume or the curtain will fall. The portrait in this way captures a moment. In both cases, however, that fleeting moment of active readership or displayed library is contradicted by the books themselves. These take advantage of print’s ability to preserve and disseminate texts written at another time, including antiquity in the case of Sor Juana’s library with titles by Virgil, Quintilian, Martial, Seneca, and Cicero; the clock resting nearby, in its role as memento mori, reifies this awareness of temporality. Sor Juana will die but her books, including those she wrote, survive, as she and the other authors are immortalized by the printing press, a sentiment echoed by Felipe Santoyo in his 1714 sonnet to the recently deceased Sor Juana, when he wrote that her fame lived on “when they print her writings”.44 Yet, at the same time, printed materials in Mexican paintings force the viewer back to the present since printing was a recent invention. In a 1790 presentation to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, José de Vargas y Ponce declared that printing was an invention of the modern age, unknown to antiquity, a point made two centuries earlier by Diego de Valadés. The printers’ and printmakers’ efforts made the medium an “inseparable ally of the present philosophical century”.45 Hence, José de Ibarra’s famous painting in the Puebla cathedral of the Christ Child appearing before saints holding an engraving of his mother locates this sacra conversazione in the modern age, even if the Christ Child lived earlier. It evokes all of the poetic metaphors referenced in the printer’s proof discussed here: the Virgin Mary as the book, the plate, and the imprint for Christ’s suffering. A similar anachronism appears in a c.1710 series of apostles by the Mexican painter Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez. Once again the painting of Saint Peter, with his papal regalia to one side and his cross to the other, includes an angel holding a large engraving.46 The single-sheet print, depicted as if engraved with superior technical skill, pictures Peter’s martyrdom, with a barely legible inscription below the grisaille image. Other paintings from the series picture prints bound in large portfolios recalling the period’s luxury imprints 44 45 46 Castorena y Ursúa, Fama, y obras posthumas del fénix de México, p. 306. Distribución de los premios, p. 73. A similar anonymous series from San Luis Potosí pictures the martyred apostles being shown engravings by angels. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City 397 produced in Paris, Antwerp, and Rome. Interestingly, only the doubting apostle Thomas interacts with the printed material, slipping the fingers of his left hand between the pages, much as he probed Christ’s wound in Baroque paintings. What did the print in the painting prove to the doubting Thomas, in this case, or signify within Mexico City’s culture of print? The printed materials depicted in these paintings cross time, providing the apostles proof that their sacrifices bore fruit, with cults that persisted to an age of glorious luxury imprints used to disseminate and demonstrate devotion in the 18th century. Thomas’ doubtfulness is eased as he handles the printed proof of his success. The viewer is similarly assured that the cult of saints is a modern one, proven by the angel pointing to the efficacious didactic tool and the authoritative imprint of the apostle’s sanctity. As much as a biblical scene painted in modern dress, the printed image moves the apostles forward to be relevant in the current age. By the early 18th century, the print in the painting reveals that the cult is fixed and indelibly stamped into the Catholic heart. Whereas this painting, as a singular object, might decay and disappear, the many printed images of Saint Peter and the rest guarantee their persistence. The scale and quality of the painted print in Rodríguez Juárez’ paintings moreover demonstrate the richness and sophistication of the modern cult and the institutions that promoted it. These are not cheap woodcuts with simple line drawings, but large, expensive engravings executed with technical mastery. They display all of the qualities of the best academic, reproductive prints of their era: precise and illusionistic designs executed with complex linear syntaxes to create tonal variation recalling painting’s coloristic qualities. Prints and luxury books of this size and technical proficiency were yet not made in Mexico City in the early 18th century.47 The simulated prints in the paintings therefore referenced travel across the Atlantic and embodied for viewers the printed medium’s wide dissemination, tying this cult to Europe and establishing Nicólas Rodríguez Juárez’ participation in the common culture of artistic currents. Printed materials in the so-called casta paintings, on the other hand, signify more local concerns. The urge to paint the sociedad de castas in series of up to 16 canvases likely rested at least in part with the Creole elite’s desire to identify and maintain racial distinctions while simultaneously promoting to local 47 By mid-century, Mexico City had a nascent reproductive engraving industry promoted by painter Miguel Cabrera and engraver Baltasar Troncoso y Sotomayor, but even these works were yet to display the visual qualities Rodríguez Juárez simulated in his painted engraving. Not until the foundation of the Royal Academy of San Carlos in 1781–83 were these illusionistic pictorial qualities found in local prints. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 398 Donahue-Wallace and European viewers New Spain’s social harmony and economic abundance.48 Printed images appear painted in at least 15 paintings from 10 of the series created in the second half of the 18th century; printed books appear in still more. In each, the imprints support the artists’ and patrons’ attempts to construct the world of New Spain’s diverse peoples. Printed books on tables and engravings hanging on the walls of the castas’ homes craft the physical and social settings for the figures; they complement dress and occupation to assign social status. In several cases, printed images designate poverty, for example, as a damaged landscape print hangs loosely alongside functional items on a wall. Yet prosperous families are similarly painted with a print tacked to the walls of their homes. That these families would also own a print and tack it to the wall is supported by evidence from throughout the colonial era. Advertisements in the bi-weekly Gazeta de México routinely offered “persons dedicated to the noble arts” printed books, individual engravings, or subscriptions for print series.49 This was the same population of “persons of taste” invited in a 1784 notice to purchase a new, illustrated edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, not unlike the volume pictured in José Magón’s casta painting, De español e india, mestizo.50 The books and engravings in these casta paintings signify social distinction in this culture of print. Not surprisingly, books are shown exclusively in the hands of Spaniards, as learning from books was as much a sign of elite privilege in the casta paintings as it was in the works already discussed. The printed images are presented as objects displayed in the home for their thematic and visual qualities; that is, as art. In fact, it is clear that from the outset Mexicans thought of prints as art, rather than just didactic instruments. Even as early as 1572, printmaker Juan Ortiz employed indigenous Mexicans to hand color and frame his prints of the Virgin of the Rosary on taffeta.51 Similarly, a 1665 Inquisition edict referred to printing on cloth, and prohibited imprints on taffeta, and Cristóbal de Villalpando’s painting of Mexico City’s Parián market pictures a vendor offering printed images mounted on red fabric to augment their aesthetic value.52 As I have argued elsewhere, the print-owning castas represented in the paintings therefore display the works as art—made emphatic by the secular themes of most legible prints in these paintings—and shared in a polite art-buying society 48 49 50 51 52 See García Saiz, Las castas mexicanas; Katzew, Casta Painting; and Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain. Gazeta de México, 1, no. 29 (25 January 1785), p. 240. See Donahue-Wallace, “Picturing Prints”, pp. 342–349. Gazeta de México, 1, no. 20 (6 October 1784), p. 166. Fernández del Castillo, Libros y libreros, pp. 235 and 238. Gruzinski, Images at War, p. 156. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City figure 16.8 399 Anonymous, De español y Mestissa produce Castizo, 18th century Courtesy of the Museo de América, Madrid like the “persons of taste” mentioned in the Gazeta advertisements.53 The prints on the walls of the castas’ homes in the paintings therefore signified not abject poverty, but relative poverty, and signaled the castas’ participation in or emulation of the rituals of high (or at least higher) society. At the same time, however, the culture of print pictured in the art of colonial Mexico City delimited social status, much as the colonial mimicry studied by Homi Bhabha allowed colonized Others to be “almost the same, but not quite”.54 Associating imprints with the indelibility of knowledge, faith, or identity led the prints represented in the casta paintings to signify the indelibility of race and social status. This is visualized in an anonymous casta series now in the collection of the Museo de América (Figure 16.8). In each of the canvases, the text identifying the specific racial categories is painted as if printed, with typographic letters and wide, un-inked borders surrounding a clear plate mark. Their status, to borrow from the era’s language of printed-ness, was permanently imprinted by those who controlled Mexican presses and policed access to its products. The castas may have mimicked their social betters by collecting art, but their aspirations to social improvement were securely limited by the position into which they were born. By picturing the imprinted categories, the 53 54 This portion of the essay comes from Donahue-Wallace, “Picturing Prints”, pp. 348–349. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 85–92. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV 400 Donahue-Wallace colonial elite again deployed notions of printed-ness to preserve the lettered city for themselves, conditions that would unfortunately persist even after Mexico gained its independence from Spain. Bibliography AGN Primary Sources Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Mexico Castorena y Ursúa, I., Fama, y obras posthumas del fénix de México, Madrid, 1714. Díaz del Castillo, B., The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J.M. Cohen, London, 1963. Distribución de los premios, Madrid, 1790. Gazeta de México, 1, no. 29 (25 January 1785), p. 240. Gazeta de México, 1, no. 20 (6 October 1784), p. 166. Mendieta, J., Historia eclesiástica indiana, ed. J. García Icazbalceta, Mexico City, 1870. Motolinía, T., Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España, Mexico City, 1973. Portocarrero Lasso de la Vega, M., Parentacion real al soberano nombre e immortal memoria del Catolico Rey de las Españas y Emperador de las Indias el serenissimo senor don Carlos II, Lima, 1701. Valadés, D., Rhetorica christiana, ed. E.J. Palomera, Mexico City, 1989. Secondary Literature Baudot, G., “Amerindian Image and Utopian Project: Motolinía and Millenarian Discourse”, in R. Jara and N. Spadaccini (eds.), Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, Minneapolis, 1992, pp. 375–400. Bhabha, H., The Location of Culture, London, 2004. Carrera, M., Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings, Austin, 2003. Chocano Mena, M., La fortaleza docta: elite letrada y dominación social en México colonial (siglos xvi-xvii), Barcelona, 2000. Cummins, T., “The Indulgent Image: Prints in the New World”, in I. Katzew (ed.), Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, Los Angeles, 2011, pp. 203–225. Donahue-Wallace, K., “Picturing Prints in Early Modern New Spain”, The Americas 64:3 (2008), pp. 325–349. Donahue-Wallace, K., “Prints and Printmakers in Viceregal Mexico City, 1600–1800”, doctoral dissertation, University of New Mexico, 2000. Fernández del Castillo, F., Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI, Mexico City, 1914. García Icazbalceta, J., Bibliografía mexicana del siglo XVI, Mexico City, 1886. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV A Culture of Print in Viceregal Mexico City 401 García Saiz, M., Las castas mexicanas: un género pictórico americano, s.l., 1989. Garone Gravier, M., “De las fuentes como fuentes: La historia de la tipografía y el estudio material del libro”, Primer Coloquio Argentino de Estudios sobre el Libro y la Edición, La Plata, 2012, pp. 188–198. Accessible at http://coloquiolibroyedicion. fahce.unlp.edu.ar/actas. Accessed 30 October 2015. Gertsman, E., “Multiple Impressions: Christ and the Winepress and the Semiotics of the Printed Image”, Art History 36:3 (2013), pp. 310–337. González Echevarría, R., “America Conquered”, Yale Review 74 (1985), pp. 281–290. González Obregón, L., Libros y libreros en el siglo XVI, Mexico City, 1914. González Rodríguez, J., “Lectura e ideas”, Revista Complutense de Historia de América 23 (1997), pp. 39–74. Gruzinski, S., “Images and Cultural Mestizaje in Colonial Mexico”, Poetics Today 16:1 (1995), pp. 53–77. Gruzinski, S., Images at War: Mexico From Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019), Durham, 2001. Hernández Triviño, A., “Fray Pedro de Gante (1480?-1572): la palabra y la fe”, Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Historiografía Lingüística 9 (2014), pp. 29–46. Johns, A., The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago, 1998. Katzew, I., Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico, New Haven, 2004. Lara, J., Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico, South Bend, 2008. MacGregor, W., “The Authority of Prints: An Early Modern Perspective”, Art History 22:3 (1999), pp. 389–420. McKee, S., “How Print Culture Came to be Indigenous”, Visible Language 44:2 (2010), pp. 161–186. Mignolo, W., “When Speaking was not Good Enough: Illiterates, Barbarians, Savages, and Cannibals”, in R. Jara and N. Spadaccini (eds.), Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, Minneapolis, 1992, pp. 312–345. Portús, J., and Vega J., La estampa religiosa en la España del antiguo régimen, Madrid, 1998. Quiñones Keber, E., Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript, Austin, 1995. Rama, Á., The Lettered City, Durham, 1996. Rubial García, A., La santidad controvertida, Mexico City, 1999. Rubial García, A., “Icons of Devotion: The Appropriation and Use of Saints in New Spain”, in M. Nesvig (ed.), Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, Albuquerque, 2006, pp. 36–61. Taylor, W., Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico before the Reforma, Albuquerque, 2010. Taylor, W., Marvels and Miracles in Late Colonial Mexico: Three Texts in Context, Albuquerque, 2011. For use by the Author only | © 2021 Koninklijke Brill NV