Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (57 page)

The most direct transmitters of peninsular styles and techniques to Spanish America were the painters, architects and craftsmen who crossed the Atlantic to use their skills in a new and potentially rewarding environment - artists like the sixteenth-century Flemish painter Simon Pereyns, or the Aragonese artist and architect, Pedro Garcia Ferrer, who travelled with Bishop Palafox to New Spain in 1640 and played a crucial part in the completion of the bishop's most durable monument, Puebla cathedral.121 Styles and images were primarily diffused across America, however, through books, engravings and imported works of art. Many of these were specifically intended for the American market, like the canvases produced in Zurbaran's workshop in Seville, or Flemish engravings and paintings on canvas or copper, done initially in the mannerist style and subsequently assuming baroque forms under the influence of Rubens.126

Inevitably there was a time-lag. This was especially true of architecture, since many of the great cathedrals, like those of Mexico City, Puebla, Lima and Cuzco, were begun to designs drawn by Philip II's architects, but often had to wait for their completion until well into the seventeenth century.'27 By the last third of the seventeenth century, however, Spanish America was using with growing assurance the visual and architectural language of Spanish baroque, itself a hybrid language with strong Italian and Flemish components. To this were added further, more specifically American, and even oriental, components, in response to local tastes and requirements. Biombos, for instance, the Japanese-inspired folding screens which divided up the spaces in upper-class Mexican houses, reflected the Asian influences introduced into New Spain through the Acapulco galleon trade with Manila (fig. 23). Indigenous craftsmen in the sixteenth century, working with materials traditional to their own culture, like feathers, were quick to appropriate European models and then reinterpret them in their own fashion, manipulating the visual language of the conquerors to reshape it as their own (fig. 24).128 Now, a century later, and more fully integrated into urban life, they continued to bring their own stylistic traditions to a baroque culture that sought to enfold within its capacious embrace all the ethnic and social groupings of an increasingly variegated and complex society.

American expressions of this baroque culture, whether in its visual or literary manifestations, might well be too naive, or too overwrought, to meet with the approval of those whose tastes had been formed in Seville or Madrid. To peninsular Spaniards the turns of phrase employed by the creoles could appear as convoluted as the gilded wooden retablos that framed the altars of their churches. 121 Yet between 1670 and the 1760s the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru succeeded in creating a distinctive Hispano-American culture that transcended replication, and represented a genuine transmutation of the forms and images borrowed from Spain (fig. 25).

This distinctive culture was to be seen in the vast theatrical canvases of the greatest of Mexican baroque painters, Cristobal de Villalpando, and in the depictions of elegant arquebusier angels and archangels by anonymous painters of the Cuzco school (figs 27 and 18).130 It was to be seen, too, in the ornate work of Peruvian silversmiths (fig. 28),131 and in the spectacular churches that arose in New Spain and the Andes, with their elaborate baroque facades and their interior surfaces intricately decorated by Indian and mestizo craftsmen and dazzling with gold. It found expression in the scintillating poems written in her Mexico City convent by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, described in the second (1690) edition as ,the unique American poetess, the tenth muse . . .' (fig. 29) 132 and in the ingenious erudition of Sor Juana's friend and admirer, Carlos de Siguenza y Gongora, mathematician, natural scientist, historian and philosopher.133

Literary and artistic tastes in Spain's American cultural provinces suggest that the creoles had set themselves to outperform the productions of the mother country in their pursuit of an idiom that would express their own distinctive individuality. At the same time, however, the kind of culture they were in process of creating possessed an internal coherence which suggests that it was well attuned to the characteristics of the racially mixed societies now developing in the Indies. It was, above all, a culture of show, in which imagery was called upon to promote the social and political aspirations of these increasingly complex communities. The sense of theatre was everywhere. Essentially urban, and overwhelmingly religious, this was a creole-dominated culture, which found its most popular expression in the fiestas and processions that formed a constant accompaniment to city life. These great ceremonial events, marking significant occasions in the life of the church and the monarchy, were so orchestrated as to create the illusion of an integrated society, every section of which was entitled to its own carefully delineated space. Ethnic and social tensions found miraculous, if temporary, resolution as all ranks of society came together to express their allegiance and devotion to the higher powers that ruled their lives - God and the king. Through these celebrations the authorities could remind the people that they were participants in a universal order. Yet the universal found its counterpoise in the particular, as creole elites used the celebrations to proclaim the unique glories of their various patrias.'34

There was nothing comparable to all this in the contemporary cultural life of the British colonies, although, in so far as Britain itself participated in an international culture of the baroque, North America, too, felt its influence. The selfconscious erudition of Cotton Mather, with its philosophical speculations deeply rooted in theological certainty, had something in common with that of Siguenza y Gongora, his contemporary in New Spain (figs 30 and 31).1;5 The morbid and the miraculous were far from being the exclusive prerogative of Hispanic, or Latin, civilization, and the Puritan culture of Massachusetts was not without its own tendencies towards `baroque' excess. Nor were the reading tastes of the two colonial worlds widely dissimilar, as a comparison of the inventories of book dealers in Boston and Mexico City in 1683 reveals. Readers in both cities, while turning to the classics and history, showed a strong preference for devotional works, sermons and moral disquisitions. Only where dramatic literature was concerned was there a real parting of the ways. Spanish America, where companies of actors gave public performances of plays written by Spanish or local playwrights in the major urban centres, was an enthusiastic participant in the theatrical culture of the metropolis. New England was not, and its hostility to the theatre was shared by Quaker Pennsylvania, where in 1682 the assembly prohibited the introduction of stage plays and masques. Although small troupes of actors from England toured the southern colonies with some success in the opening decades of the eighteenth century, it was not until the 1750s that the theatre in any sustained form arrived in North America, and hostility remained deeply rooted in Philadelphia and New England.136

If Spanish America far outshone British America in the coherence and sophistication of its cultural life at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were good reasons for this. Spanish America, unlike British America, had created an urban civilization, in which civic elites, largely Jesuit-educated 117 and with time on their hands, spoke a common religious and cultural language that spanned the continent. The viceregal courts of Mexico City and Lima transmitted to the New World the latest fashions in the court culture of the Old, and provided the patronage and the setting for the kind of activities that lay at the heart of baroque culture - dramatic spectacles, masquerades and literary jousts, in which competitors sought to outdo each other in elaborate conceits and ingenious word-play. Above all, a rich and powerful church had not only stamped its authority on society, but deployed its massive resources to convey its message to vast populations through spectacle and imagery.

The scattered populations of British America possessed neither the resources nor the political and religious cohesion to follow suit. The majority of Britain's colonies were still struggling societies, far younger than those of the Spanish Indies. Only in 1743 was Benjamin Franklin able to write that the first Drudgery of Settling new Colonies, which confines the attention of People to mere Necessaries, is now pretty well over; and there are many in every Province in Circumstances that set them at Ease, and afford Leisure to cultivate the finer Arts, and improve the common Stock of Knowledge. 138

Over the preceding three decades certain sections of colonial society had in fact already transcended `the first Drudgery of Settling new Colonies' and revealed a quickening interest in acquiring the refinements of life, as their increasing expenditure on clothes and furnishings from England made clear. Their civic projects, too, had become more ambitious, although, in contrast to Spanish America, ceremonial considerations tended to take second place to commercial. Sir Christopher Wren's plans for the rebuilding of London in 1667, themselves inspired by French town-planning, may partly have inspired the design of Annapolis. Planned by Governor Francis Nicholson of Maryland in 1694, this was intended to be a characteristically baroque city, its principal streets radiating outwards from two circles, which housed respectively the centre of colonial government and the Anglican church. It was Nicholson, too, who as governor of Virginia, projected the colony's new capital of Williamsburg, where the governor's `palace', begun in 1706 in the manner of Wren, helped set the fashion for `Virginian baroque' - the style chosen by planters and gentry for the mansions they constructed in the following decades.139

Even the grandest of these mansions, however, were small-scale affairs when compared with the magnificent country houses that the English nobility were building for themselves (fig. 32).140 If these testified to a wealth beyond compare, it was none the less true that substantial wealth was to be found on the American seaboard, both among the southern planters and in port cities like Philadelphia, where the urban professional classes built their town houses in the style made fashionable in the home country by Wren. But the colonies were as yet no more than distant cultural provinces of a Britain still establishing its own criteria for gentility. Colonial patrons remained uncertain about the fashions they should follow, while craftsmen who commanded the latest styles and techniques remained in short supply.

It is not therefore surprising that the cultural achievements of Britain's American colonies around the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a good deal less independent of their sources than those of their Spanish American counterparts. In general, the English colonies were still at the stage of imitation, and had yet to transmute metropolitan influences into distinctive and original styles of their own. The very absence, indeed, of an indigenous workforce, of the kind to be found in the Spanish viceroyalties, may have reduced the chances for originality and innovation, although the presence of Dutch and German colonists offered the possibility of creative alternatives to predominantly British tastes and fashions.

Nevertheless, a distinctive British American culture did begin to emerge as the eighteenth century progressed. When contrasted with Spanish America's culture of show, it could fittingly be described as a culture of restraint (fig. 26). Although the pursuit of English-style gentility by the wealthier colonists meant that they were happy to fill their houses with growing quantities of English luxury goods, and to deck themselves out in the latest English fashions with printed cottons, linen, ribbons and lace imported from Britain, their taste, more classical than exuberantly baroque when it came to the construction of their houses or to their locally produced furniture, tended towards the simple, the convenient and the practical. This taste, which gave rise to a degree of stylistic uniformity through the mainland colonies, no doubt drew its inspiration both from New England's traditional culture of moderation, and from a Chesapeake culture that had long emphasized the virtues of simplicity, perhaps as a form of self-protection against English gibes about the backwardness of the colonies in the arts of civilization. 141

A similar restraint was apparent in the approach of the North American colonial elite to commissioning and acquiring works of art. There was a brisk market in prints imported from England, but the only paintings on their walls were likely to be portraits of themselves and family members. Painted for the most part in a highly formulaic manner by artists who travelled through the colonies in search of commissions, these family portraits were a mark of social status and a record for posterity of personal and family achievement (fig. 33). To the frustration of the more talented artists there was no market for still lifes, landscapes or genre scenes. Nor, in a Protestant society, was there any demand for the devotional paintings which provided a living for so many artists in the Hispanic world, although biblical scenes were popular subjects for the prints with which the colonists decorated their walls. Lacking the patronage provided in Spanish America by the church and the viceregal courts, and restricted to the endless production of family portraits, it is not surprising that the more ambitious North American artists of the eighteenth century - Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart - should have set their sights on London. They went, not only in search of fame and fortune, but also to study the works of the great European masters and enjoy the wider creative possibilities that were not available to them at home.142 By contrast, large numbers of original Spanish and Flemish paintings were available in Spanish America for studying and copying, 14' and Mexican and Peruvian artists apparently felt no comparable need to travel to Madrid.

Artists and craftsmen in Spanish and British America alike, however, were caught between conforming and not conforming to Old World conventions. When artists, writers and artisans produced their own innovative variations on the styles reaching them from Europe, fidelity to the original still remained the measure by which Europeans judged their cultural attainments. Creoles, for their part, believed that the more closely they approached the levels of civilization of the mother country, the stronger would be their claims for inclusion in a partnership of esteem. Yet, even as they struggled to assert those claims, they were striving to find and assert an identity that was distinctively their own.