Emily A. Engel. Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020. viii + 173 pp. Ill. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4773-2059-4.
Reviewed by Kelly Donahue-Wallace (University of North Texas)
Published on H-LatAm (September, 2021)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
In the historiography of colonial art, portrait series of government officials have received little notice. These formulaic works, frequently by anonymous or lesser-known artists, have merited few words compared to likenesses of indigenous elites from the pre-Hispanic and viceregal eras and images of nuns, either crowned, deceased, or both. Exceptional works like Miguel Cabrera’s Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Andrés Sánchez Galque’s Los tres mulatos de Esmeraldas have similarly taken up much of the page space allocated to viceregal portraiture. Where the official portrait series have been discussed, they are explained as manifestations of imperialism, as colonial patrons placed portraits of kings, viceroys, and bureaucrats in public or semi-public spaces as pro forma displays of loyalty and status within the state hierarchy. Emily Engel’s book, on the other hand, argues for an eminently local purpose for the official portrait series—here meaning portraits of officials rather than those produced and disseminated officially by Crown authorities—and rethinks how several South American examples functioned within their specific colonial situations rather than the larger imperial system.
The first chapter offers an extended reading of the series of official portraits in Guamán Poma de Ayala’s El primer corónica [sic] y buen gobierno. This begins with Poma’s portraits of Inca rulers and government officials, arguing that these pictured relationships and reflected indigenous colonial anxieties about lineage and social status. Engel then addresses the manuscript’s viceregal portraits and narrative images as the first cohesive series addressing colonial leaders. In a theme she repeats throughout the book, Engel emphasizes how these marked and measured moments of local—rather than imperial—history via their inscribed texts and generalized images of office holders. She claims that these images in Guamán Poma’s text established a model for portraits as visualizations of the sequential routine of appointments by royal authority rather than idiosyncratic likenesses. The chapter closes with one of the book’s key arguments: that series of portraits painted according to familiar conventions pictured continuity, “displaying a contrived world order” and offering a “collective sense of the past.” The works represented local histories measured in the span of each official’s service and were a means to resolve the uncertain moments lived in the decades following the conquest. This specifically colonial purpose distinguishes the Guamán Poma portraits and other series studied in the book, which “coalesce into an American pictorial genre imbued with the dynamics of colonial power and authority” as “alternative visual histories” of localities rather than empire (p. 34).
The second chapter examines royal portraits in South America and raises many questions. It addresses locally made works as simulacra and the material expression of coloniality. Displayed in private and public locations, the portraits and their viewing should be understood as “shaped by the colonial occupation of South America” (p. 43). Engel uses the example of a portrait of Charles II painted for his Lima funeral that gave the limeño viewers a material marker of royal succession and a collective viewing and mourning experience. Echoing the first chapter, the author interprets this and other royal portraits as “a local exercise of power … not simply a representation of the imperial manifestation of power” (p. 43). Citation of period texts would have bolstered this argument with references to local matters raised within the funeral rituals. The chapter then turns to the physical accuracy of royal portraits painted in South America, concluding that faithful likeness was not necessary; inscribed text bore the burden of identification and made the paintings into documents. The question of why and whether portrait painters viewed their work as documentation—as opposed to representation and visualization—would have offered a fruitful complement to this argument.
Next, Engel returns to the locally experienced colonial history with Bishop Baltasar Jaime Martínez Campañón y Bujanda’s Codex Trujillo del Perú and its royal likenesses. These she reads as paintings picturing other portraits to objectify the concept of monarchy. They furthermore anchor Martínez Campañón’s work within his specific context as colonial subject. Left unexplored is the relationship of the royal portraits to those of government officials and clerics that follow in the text and to Martínez Campañón’s architectural plans, maps, views, and representations of natural specimens. If, as Engel argues, the frame around the royal portraits set them apart, how is framing handled elsewhere in the multivolume manuscript? A more sustained engagement with the frames as a construct and concept would have helped the argument.
The remainder of the chapter considers corporate patronage of royal portraits. It begins with a Spanish example, then shifts to Buenos Aires, explaining that works like the city cabildo’s portrait celebrating the coronation of Charles III offered the group a chance to “illustrate its place in this new historical moment” (p. 51). For another portrait commissioned by the council, Engel provides an extensive analysis of the adjustments made by its painter, Francisco Pimentel, to its print source after a portrait by Anton Rafael Mengs. These included repositioning the king closer to the viewer, which, Engels argues, “closes the gap between the painting’s subject and viewer by fashioning the Spanish king as a dominant yet approachable ruler who is accessible to his South American subjects” (p. 52). This, too, Engels reads as a local statement. Unfortunately, she does not provide the image—only the Mengs is illustrated—nor does she justify her conclusion or her assertion that American colonists sought an approachable and accessible ruler. The following paragraph in fact challenges a local desire for closeness, stating that the painting was “protected with curtains” (p. 52); subsequent paragraphs on the display of similar portraits place them atop inaccessible platforms. And herein lies a challenge throughout the book: while the author succeeds in reframing our view of official portraits as products of local circumstances and as statements of local interests, support for other arguments would benefit from additional visual and textual evidence.
The text is strongest where Engel convincingly argues for official portrait series to be seen within their local contexts, which she does through case studies in chapters 3 and 4. In the former, she successfully links notions of authority in viceregal society to portraits and then pursues an extensive discussion of the Lima cabildo’s series of viceroy images. She concludes that the series offered a “pictorial genealogy” that was cohesive in its conception and execution—“a lineage of imperial authority executed in American terms” (p. 64). These portraits embodied not just the viceroys, but the cabildo itself. They entered into struggles for power in the viceregal capital and even responded to the reduction of viceregal authority under the Bourbon reforms as “a forum in which Limeño elites could assert their own agenda over the Crown’s” (p. 76). Because the chapter traces the history and shifting conventions of this series since its inception under the Hapsburgs, that bold assertion of self-determination is entirely successful.
Chapter 4’s analysis of official portraits by Joaquín Gutiérrez in New Granada reveals that the series developed a different formula to represent the new viceroyalty and its political lineage. Engel explains that these were examples of prosopography or the representation of a portrait, with each viceroy pictured within a fictive frame, following the fashion seen in contemporary European prints. Selecting this model rather than the limeño approach born in the Hapsburg era broke with the visual tradition of South American portraiture. It furthermore offered a vision of local political stability in the Bourbon era that belied lived realities. This argument would have benefited from broader comparisons, since the neogranadino paintings were executed by a single artist rather than the sequence of Lima painters who embraced that series’ visual coherence. That is, the argument for continuity in the New Granada series is undermined by its exclusive authorship. The chapter then contrasts Gutiérrez’s images with individual official portraits painted for the cabildo in Buenos Aires that hewed closer to the Lima model for political purposes. The chapter ends with a discussion of the official portraits as manifestations of creole patriotism for their role as “primary record of the viceroyalty’s colonial history” (p. 105). Supporting this argument, Engel reveals that the Buenos Aires portraits were replaced with a rebel flag during the independence struggle, as official portraits were no longer acceptable signs of collective identity.
The final chapter of the book traces official portraiture into the national period. The author identifies episodes of iconoclastic rebellion, as the removal and destruction of colonial portraits made room for new visualizations of power. She then explains changes in portrait formats and iconography as well as how the heroes of independence wars borrowed from established models. Engel argues that increased physiognomic specificity as well as greater intimacy via shallow foregrounds in official and individual portraits manifested “interpersonal relations that shaped the distribution and negotiation in the revolutionary environment” (p. 121). This continued as heroes like Simón Bolivar as well as governmental bodies commissioned portraits, but now to celebrate individuals and assert power rather than visualize collective histories.
Despite the caveats noted above, 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.
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Citation:
Kelly Donahue-Wallace. Review of Engel, Emily A., Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
September, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56839
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