Colonial Art In Mexico Manuel Toussaint 1967 HC/DJ (Ex-Lib) -

Description: COLONIAL ART IN MEXICO. MANUEL TOUSSAINT THE THREE HUNDRED YEARS between conquest by Spain and the winning of independence saw a special and characteristic culture develop in Mexico. This was a frontier society, but a rich one, with all the resources of imperial Spain and the Roman church to develop and support the natural wealth of the land. Public and private buildings were ornamented with rich sculpture and embellished with colorful paintings depicting religious scenes and views of daily life. A wealth of minor arts supplied jewelry for the nobility and liturgical objects for the churches. The Viceroyalty of New Spain stretched from Guatemala to California and embraced Indian cultures of considerable variety. In this period the preponderantly Indian population was converted to the Christian faith and introduced to the civilization of post-Renaissance Europe. Artists came to Mexico from the Old World and brought with them the current styles, but most of the practicing artisans had never seen Europe. Natives of New Spain, of both Indian and Spanish blood, developed the imported styles in new modes appropriate to the new country that was to become Mexico. This art, as a visual record of accultura-tion, is of utmost sociological interest. It is this great corpus of art, ranging from Primitive and Medieval through Renaissance and Baroque to the nineteenth-century Neoclassic and popular art, which this book presents. It is the cornerstone of the study of Mexican colonial art, the first attempt to consider the whole panorama of one of the most interesting, varied, and significant of the American cultures in its colonial phase. Manuel Toussaint y Ritter (1890-1955), more than anyone else, is responsible for our appreciation of this art. Travel in Spain aroused his interest in the Mexican viceregal heritage, and forty years of exploration brought him an unrivaled acquaintance with the monuments of his native land. The translator of this book, Elizabeth Wilder Weismann, provides in her Foreword an indication of Toussaint's dedication to his work: "Scholars accustomed to the well-cultivated fields of European art can have no notion of what it was like in the early 1920's in Mexico. Don Manuel ... set out, with a handful of companions, usually on horseback, to visit places that no one had noticed for centuries. There were no secondary texts to use, no photographs, no paved roads, no maps; you used the account of a sixteenth-century friar like Father Ponce for a guide-book, and travelled much as he had." In the 1920's when Toussaint began to publish his findings, an interest in the colonial period was not merely unfashionable; its study required something like courage. Mexico, coming of age, was in the full tide of anti-Spanish reaction, and "colonial" was a bad word. Toussaint nevertheless argued that sixteenth-century sculpture was already an integration of Indian and European styles, not a crude failure to duplicate imported art, and that the eighteenth-century Baroque, instead of being a provincial mutation of Spanish style, was a true expression of the Mexican spirit. For him the colonial centuries were in fact the formative period for a national art. The significance of Toussaint's work was recog-nized. The Chair of the History of Mexican Art at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México was estab-lished for him, and he founded at the University first the Laboratorio de Arte, then the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, of which he was the director from 1938 until his death. From 1945 to 1955 he was director of the division of Monumentos Coloniales y de la República of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología, where he worked relentlessly for the preservation of colonial monuments. His bibliography extends to some three hundred books and articles. Elizabeth Wilder Weismann has been active in the field of Latin American art for thirty years; she has lived in Mexico and traveled in eleven of the Latin American countries. She holds degrees in the history of art from Smith College and has taught at Wellesley College and The Ohio State University. Working in the Archive of Hispanic Culture in the Library of Congress, she was co-author of A Guide to the Art of Latin America. She is also the author of numerous other books and magazine articles. 🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽🇲🇽 THANK YOU for looking at our listing. A purchase is supporting Friends of Spanish Peaks Library District! These books are all donated from different sources. This book is in very good condition, and an ex-library book with library stamps and markings, see photos for details. I will combine shipping for each additional item purchased. Please do not pay for books until you are done bidding/shopping, and I will create a new Invoice with the reduced shipping charges. Please, please, I cannot issue refunds due to penalties that EBay assesses. Feel free to submit any questions you have. Thanks!

Price: 25 USD

Location: Walsenburg, Colorado

End Time: 2025-02-12T04:17:45.000Z

Shipping Cost: 6.88 USD