Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 127

Before the appearance of mechanical reproduction, ‘fine art’, along with its many other social functions, was an important mode of documentation. Until the advent of globalization, however, eighteenth‐century Latin American ‘Casta’ painting remained a footnote in art history, a provincial variant of academic competence deemed to be of little aesthetic or historical interest. But with the twofold change in focus associated with globalization (that is, a felt imperative to ‘broaden’ the Western canon on the one hand, coupled on the other with an equally broadened interest in subject matter) the use of academic art to address issues of ethnic difference became charged with renewed significance. Casta painting was an ethnographically oriented derivative of European academic art which became a way of documenting the hybrid – and stratified – populations of Latin America. The historian Kelly Donahue‐Wallace writes of Casta painting, ‘at its core rested the desire to picture heterogeneous societies, which were largely unknown to Western audiences before Spain’s arrival in the Americas. The paintings also represented a society that accorded privileges and rights … by race, and was therefore motivated to identify and maintain racial distinctions’ (Donahue‐Wallace, Art and Architecture, p. 217). Artists included Juan Rodríguez Juárez (1675–1746) and Miguel Cabrera (1695–1768), both of whom painted series of family groups demonstrating different racial admixtures, usually with a caption spelling out what those admixtures were: ‘mestizo’, ‘mulatto’, etc. The present short text is a letter of 1770 from the Viceroy of Peru to Julián de Arriaga, a representative of King Charles III of Spain. This accompanied a shipment of 20 such paintings destined for the Cabinet of Natural History belonging to the king’s son. The extract is taken from Kelly Donahue‐Wallace, Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521–1821, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008, p. 221.

Your Excellency,

Ardently desiring to contribute to the formation of the Cabinet of Natural History which His Most Serene Prince of Asturias has begun, what I offer will contribute but little to his enlightenment but is one of the principal examples of the rare products found in these parts, the notable mutation of appearance, figure, and color that results from the successive generations of the mixture of Indians and Blacks, which are usually accompanied proportionally by inclinations and properties. With this idea, I ordered copied and sent twenty canvases, described in the accompanying registry; and I will continue urging the completion of these combinations until they are finished, if it is that this humble product of my humility finds some acceptance by Our Prince and Lord by way of Your Excellency’s hand. For better understanding, the order of the descendents are graduated by numbers; it should serve as key that the son or daughter of the first couple is, according to his or her sex, father or mother in the next; and that of the next couple in the third, and so on until the end of those which are now copied.

May God preserve Your Excellency for many years.

Lima 13 May 1770 … Sr D. Manuel de Amat