Enfilade

I’m sorry to be months late with this posting. See also Tara Zanardi’s review for Journal18 (November 2020) and Michael Schreffler’s review from caa.reviews (February 2021). –CH

From the University of Texas Press:

Emily Engel, Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020), 184 pages, ISBN: 978-1477320594, $60.

Featuring almost eighty illustrations from between 1590 and 1830, Pictured Politics is the sole study in English or Spanish to examine the role of portraiture in constructing the history of South American colonialism.

The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent’s viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.

Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogotá as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence—including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals—Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent’s multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.

Emily Engel is an independent scholar based in Southern California who has published widely on visual culture in early modern South America. She is a coeditor of Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches and A Companion to Early Modern Lima, as well as the founding associate editor of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Art and Authority in Late Colonial South American Portraiture
1  New Pictorial Practices: Early Official Portraits in Viceregal Peru
2  Visualizing Empire’s History: Royal Portraits in the Iberoamerican World
3  Picturing Viceregal Authority in the Lima City Council
4  Municipal Collecting: Viceregal Portraits in Bogotá and Buenos Aires
5  Portrayal in a Time of Transition: Early Nineteenth-Century Portraits
Epilogue: The Afterlife of Official Portraits

Notes
Bibliography
Index