The arts of viceregal Mexico, 1521-1821: a confluence of cultures

Magazine Antiques, April, 2002 by David B. Warren

The arts of colonial America produced along the Atlantic seaboard were dominated by the taste and fashions of the British Isles, mainly England but also Scotland and Ireland, and to a lesser extent, also of Germany and Huguenot France. Today we acknowledge with pride that our colonial material culture defines what is distinctive about our heritage. This month, an exhibition from Mexico opening at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston reveals to an American audience how the confluence of cultures in the viceregal period (1521-1821) contributed to the development of a new and distinctly Mexican colonial culture.

For people living in the United States, it has been commonly assumed that the arts of colonial Mexico, unlike ours, are simply derivative of the mother country Spain, and thus not very interesting. Indeed, that point of view is not uncommon today in much of Mexico itself. There, revolutionary political thought between about 1910 and 1930 sought to develop a national character for Mexican culture. However, unlike the United States, where colonial art was embraced in a similar search for a national character, colonial culture was denigrated as a dark period in Mexican history. Instead, the arts predating the Spanish conquest were emphasized as truly Mexican. Similar manifestations of the national character were seen in the revolutionary art of Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera (1886-1957).

Perhaps then it should not come as a surprise that the importance of colonial Mexican culture was recognized early on not by a Mexican but by a foreigner, in this case a German-born banker, Franz Mayer (1882-1975), who came to live in Mexico in 1905. The exhibition in Houston is drawn from the extraordinary collection and museum assembled by Mayer beginning in 1920.

In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, thriving cattle ranches, silver mines, and other natural resources in what was then called New Spain brought enormous economic prosperity to Mexico and made Mexico City among the wealthiest capitals in the world. As early as 1625, Thomas Gage (c. 1603-1656), an English visitor, recorded his amazement at the wealth of Mexico City's aristocracy noting the crush of some two thousand coaches that appeared in the Alameda park each afternoon as the rich paraded in their finery. (1) Two eighteenth-century portraits from the Franz Mayer collection provide compelling evidence of that wealth both among the Spanish and the indigenous nobility. The identity of the Spanish lady in Plate II is unknown, but her elevated social status is indicated by the richness of her silk brocade gown and the profusion of lace at her sleeves, her watch, diamonds on her wrists, at her throat, and on her ears, and no less than ten diamond clips in her elaborate coiffure, itself topped off with red, green, black, and white plumes. The portrait in Plate III depicts the sixteen-year old daughter of Mathias Alexo Martinez, an indigenous nobleman who was a regional governor. The inscription on the painting gives her name, her age, and identifies her parents. Her costume, a remarkable document, combines a huipil, or Mexican blouse, a European-style overgarment decorated with Chinese silk galloons and an incredible array of seed pearls, more of which are fixed into her hair Following a widespread custom of upper-class Mexicans, the portrait was made to record the daughter of the family prior to her entry into a convent. In this case it was the convent of Corpus Christi, founded in 1724 by viceroy Balthasar Manuel de Zuniga Marques de Valero (1658-1727) for the exclusive use of indigenous women. The wealth apparent in these two portraits supported a wide array of talented Mexico City artisans who produced paintings, sculpture, furniture, and objects made of precious materials, all for local consumption.

Mexico's location made it the crossroads of international trade in luxury goods. Each year Spanish imports from the Orient crossed the Pacific to Acapulco in the Manila galleon. There the silks, lacquers, porcelains, and other goods were off-loaded for shipment overland to Vera Cruz and thence on to Spain. However, many of these luxury goods remained in the viceregency of New Spain. Similarly, the Flota Indiana (Indies fleet) came yearly to Vera Cruz from Spain loaded with cargo from Spain, Flanders, and Italy for the Mexican market.

The tastes and customs of upper-class Mexicans reflected this confluence of cultures, freely mixing influences from Moorish Spain, China, and Japan with survivals of local social customs, craft techniques, and decorative motifs. The main public room of a Mexican palace of the colonial era, known as the salon de estrado, offers an interesting microcosm of this mixture of cultures. Equivalent to the English parlor, this room contained an estrado (then the word for dais), covered with rugs and cushions on which ladies sat or reclined in the Moorish fashion and entertained visitors. At first stools, and later chairs and settees, were provided for the gentlemen. Folding screens, introduced from Japan, (2) but later produced in Mexico, were an important feature of the room. Interestingly, the Spanish and Mexican word for such a screen, biombo, is derived from the Japanese word byobu, meaning windbreak The earliest of these screens produced in Mexico feature Oriental style decoration. Later, European historical and mythological subjects as well as views of Mexico City or Mexican gardens became the norm. A remarkable example in the Franz Mayer collection depicts the conquest of Mexico on one side and a bird's-eye view of Mexico City on the other (Pls. VIa, VIb). (3)