Parution : The untranslatable image : a mestizo history of the arts in New Spain 1500-1600

Créateur

• Russo, Alessandra (chercheur). Auteur
• Emanuel, Susan. Traduction

Alessandra Russo is an art historian studying and teaching the early modern worlds in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University in New York City. She is author of El Realismo Circular: Tierras, espacios y paisajes de la cartografía novohispana and the coeditor of Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe. She has participated in the curatorship of the international exhibitions El vuelo de las imágenes and Planète Métisse and has been the recipient of several international grants, including the Getty Collaborative Research Grant and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin’s fellowship.

Résumé de l’éditeur

From the first contacts between European conquerors and the peoples of the Americas, objects were exchanged and treasures pillaged, as if each side were seeking to appropriate tangible fragments of the “world” of the other. Soon, too, the collision between the arts of Renaissance Europe and pre-Hispanic America produced new objects and new images with the most diverse usages and forms. Scholars have used terms such as syncretism, fusion, juxtaposition, and hybridity in describing these new works of art, but none of them, asserts Alessandra Russo, adequately conveys the impact that the European artistic world had on the Mesoamerican artistic world, nor treats the ways in which pre-Hispanic traditions, expertise, and techniques—as well as the creation of post-Conquest images—transformed the course of Western art.

This innovative study focuses on three sets of paradigmatic images created in New Spain between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—feather mosaics, geographical maps, and graffiti—to propose that the singularity of these creations does not arise from a syncretic impulse, but rather from a complex process of “untranslatability.” Foregrounding the distances and differences between incomparable theories and practices of images, Russo demonstrates how the constant effort to understand, translate, adapt, decode, transform, actualize, and condense Mesoamerican and European aesthetics, traditions, knowledge, techniques, and concepts constituted an exceptional engine of unprecedented visual and verbal creativity in the early modern transatlantic world.

Sommaire

• Note on Translations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: From One Triptych to Another
• Introduction: At the Frontiers of Art Histories
• Part One: A Triptych from New Spain
• Chapter 1. Treasures
• Chapter 2. Figures
• Chapter 3. Malicias
• Part Two: Images between Words
• Chapter 4. Mosaics
• Chapter 5. Landscape
• Chapter 6. Scratching
• Part Three: The Creation of Unexpected Languages
• Chapter 7. Relics of Ixiptla
• Chapter 8. Circular Realism
• Chapter 9. Figurative Condensation
• Conclusion: Untranslatable Images?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Photographic Credits
• Index

Informations pratiques

• Éditeur : Austin (Tex.) : University of Texas press
• Date de parution : 2014
• Description matérielle : 1 vol. (XIV-357 p.- [32] p. de pl.) : ill. en noir et en coul., jaquette ill. en coul. ; 24 cm
• Note : Texte remanié et traduit de : Thèse de doctorat : Histoire et civilisations : Paris, EHESS : 2006. – Bibliogr. p. [307]-336. Notes bibliogr. Index
• ISBN 978-0-292-75413-3 (rel. sous jaquette). – 0-292-75413-2 (rel. sous jaquette). – 978-0-292-75414-0 (br.). – 0-292-75414-0 (br.)

Localisations

• Absent à la BnF (en 2020)
• MADRID-Casa de Velázquez
• PARIS-BIS, Fonds général
• PARIS-INHA
• PARIS-Médiathèque MQB

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