The Casa del Deán: New World Imagery in a Sixteenth-Century Mexican Mural Cycle (Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture) - Hardcover

Morrill, Penny C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292759304 ISBN 13: 9780292759305

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2014

Synopsis

The Casa del Deán in Puebla, Mexico, is one of few surviving sixteenth-century residences in the Americas. Built in 1580 by Tomás de la Plaza, the Dean of the Cathedral, the house was decorated with at least three magnificent murals, two of which survive. Their rediscovery in the 1950s and restoration in 2010 revealed works of art that rival European masterpieces of the early Renaissance, while incorporating indigenous elements that identify them with Amerindian visual traditions.

Extensively illustrated with new color photographs of the murals, The Casa del Deán presents a thorough iconographic analysis of the paintings and an enlightening discussion of the relationship between Tomás de la Plaza and the indigenous artists whom he commissioned. Penny Morrill skillfully traces how native painters, trained by the Franciscans, used images from Classical mythology found in Flemish and Italian prints and illustrated books from France—as well as animal images and glyphic traditions with pre-Columbian origins—to create murals that are reflective of Don Tomás's erudition and his role in evangelizing among the Amerindians. She demonstrates how the importance given to rhetoric by both the Spaniards and the Nahuas became a bridge of communication between these two distinct and highly evolved cultures. This pioneering study of the Casa del Deán mural cycle adds an important new chapter to the study of colonial Latin American art, as it increases our understanding of the process by which imagery in the New World took on Christian meaning.

About this title

About the Author

PENNY C. MORRILL, who holds a PhD in Mesoamerican colonial art history from the University of Maryland, teaches in the art history department at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. In addition to her work on sixteenth-century Mexican architecture and mural painting, she is an authority and has published extensively on the history of modern Mexican silver.

Review

"These images are striking, and collecting them together within the covers of a book is a contribution to colonial visual culture. Penny Morrill has done an exemplary job of tracking down primary materials that contextualize the murals and filling out our understanding of the patron, Don Tomás de la Plaza, the artist(s), and the sources and meanings of the murals’ iconography. . . . She has done a laudable job of examining the programmatic whole: that is, the way in which the murals complement one another to communicate a Christian message with humanist (neo-Platonic) imagery." (Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and author of Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0292759304
• ISBN 13: 9780292759305
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 311