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Call for papers #37

Spain in the Age of Exploration, 1492-1819. Edited by Chiyo Ishikawa. Seattle, Wash.: Seattle Art Museum, 2004.

A large, 240-page, beautifully illustrated volume, Spain in the Age of Exploration, 1492-1819, commemorates an exhibition of Spanish art and science at the Seattle Art Museum, in collaboration with the Patrimonio Nacional of Spain, from 16 October 2004 to 2 January 2005. The University of Nebraska Press, in cooperation with the chief curator of collections, Chiyo Ishikawa, distributed this volume. In addition to large and superbly produced plates of the 120 paintings and artifacts in the exhibition, it also contains six essays on Spanish art and science by historians in the United States and Spain as well as introductory essays by the co-curators, Ishikawa and Javier Morales Vallejo, of the Patrimonio Nacional in Madrid.
Over the past twenty years, Spain has used its new democratic institutions and its prosperity to support a plethora of cultural initiatives to educate the public about Spanish culture and history, both in Europe and America. The government quite rightly decided that some of the country's new fortune should be directed to revisiting its glorious past. Perhaps even more, Spaniards would like to readdress the perceptions of the Black Legend - the historiographic (and propagandistic) image of early modern Spain as a backward and brutal land, lacking culture and learning.
The Seattle Art Museum's exhibition is the third in a series of art exhibits in regional museums in the United States, co-sponsored by the Patrimonio Nacional and celebrating Spanish art and learning. Seattle's recent exhibition concentrated on both art and science and their connections to the New World.
While the Patrimonio is the owner of some of the best art of early modern Europe (which was on display in the Seattle exhibit), the scientific artifacts and illustrations in some respects stole a good deal of the thunder in the show and now in this volume. After informative introductions by Ishikawa and Morales Vallejo, the book is divided into two parts: "Empire and Image," detailing the interconnections between court history and Spanish art, and "Giving Life to Geography: Natural History and the Spanish Worldview," providing interpretations of the engagement between Spanish art and science and the New World.
"Empire and Image," begins with "The World of Early Modern Spain: Empire and Its Anxieties in the Golden Age," by Richard L. Kagan and Benjamin Schmidt, a synthesis of the history of the Spanish court in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries and political, specifically imperial, concerns reflected in courtly art before, during, and after the Golden Age. Kagan and Schmidt render the early modern Spanish monarchy's patronage patterns comprehensible by blending political history and art in the commissioning of various works. Of course, many of the works in the Seattle exhibit (the Patrimonio Nacional clearly loaned some of the best of its collection) are admittedly more focused on Italy and Flanders than on its territorial bounty in the New World. But the point is well made that the Spanish court did not distinguish between politics and aesthetics, and court painters understood this.
The Kagan and Schmidt essay is followed by a fairly brief work, "Art in the Time of the Catholic Monarchs and the Early Overseas Enterprises," by Joaquin Yarza Luces, that does not expand our understanding of the Catholic Monarchs' use of art much beyond what was noted in the previous essay. Sara Schroth, in "Veneration and Beauty: Messages in the Image of the King in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," delves into the political/aesthetic issues that Kagan and Schmidt raise. One of the rising stars of Spanish art history in the United States, Schroth writes an elegant essay on the aims of court portraiture in the imperial context. In particular, Schroth does an effective job of explaining the importance of imperial armor to Spanish notions of political aesthetics and the curious (at least to the modern mind) predominance and veneration for royal armor in the patrimonial collection.
While the general reading public will obtain a good understanding of Spanish courtly art and its aims from the reproductions and essays of "Empire and Image," the Spanish historian may find "Giving Life to Geography," in many respects more revealing and interesting. In "'The World is Only One and Not Many': Representations of the Natural World in Imperial Spain," José Carrillo-Castillo demonstrates the revival of natural history and the ideological context of empire through Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo's development of a genre of writing that blended descriptions of nature with historical accounts of discovery and conquest -- a kind of early version of the imperial travel writing accounts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Carrillo-Castillo notes, however, that Oviedo's Historia general y natural de las Indias remained unique for its time as the monarchy pursued a policy in the relaciones geográficas of passive surveying of the Americas rather than collecting eyewitness accounts of those who lived there.
José de la Sota Ríus, in "Spanish Science and Enlightenment Expeditions," is a fine companion and continuation of the previous essay as he demonstrates that Spanish science in the Enlightenment returned to the active collection of data in the field from the American perspective. His essay on expeditionary science, particularly the royal botanical missions to Peru, New Granada, and New Spain in the eighteenth century, notes the similarities to field work in sixteenth-century New Spain, both in its imperial context and the superior and impressive collections of American flora and fauna. Remarkable illustrations of these scientific collections fill nearly every page of this second section of the volume.
Andrew Schultz then returns the discussion to aesthetic representations in "Spaces of Enlightenment: Art, Science, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain." First touching on subjects of royal portraiture and composition, Shultz switches to frescoes and presents a very nice interpretation of the ceiling of the throne room of the National Palace in Madrid. Giovanni Baptista Tiepolo's "Wealth and Benefits of the Spanish Monarchy under Charles III" (a model of which was at the Seattle exhibit) has been analyzed before, but here Schultz sets the allegorical language of the fresco in the context of palace frescoes celebrating the scientific bounty and abundance of the New World. When one is reminded of the overheated rhetoric of eighteenth-century Spanish reformers who hoped to derive some new imperial bonanza from the tired old imperial burdens of the Americas, Schultz's observations of imperial angst in fresco allegories is very interesting.
For those who missed the Seattle Art Museums exhibit of imperial Spain, this volume is most welcome. The illustrations are large and superb. For the most part, the essays satisfy, and those on Spanish science further illuminate Spain's sometimes misunderstood contribution to the history of Europe and the Americas in the early modern period. Spain's cultural leadership should be most pleased with this addition to their projects, and Americans should be grateful for the Patrimonio Nacional's generous sharing of Spain's wonderful cultural legacy.

Patricia Lopes Don,
San José State University