mexico's great era of city-building

THE NEW FEDERALIST October 28, 1991 Pages 8-9

American Almanac

Mexico's Great Era of City-BuildingReflected in Los Angeles Exhibit

by Nora Hamerman

Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries

EIRNS/Diana Teran

Left: St. Christopher, over-lifesize polychromed wood sculpture from Puebla Cathedral, sixteenth century. Franciscan missionaries identified with the leg-endary giant who carried the Christ child across a river; they felt they, too, had brought Christ over the sea.

Right: Guajanuato, one of Mexico's beautiful colonial cities. The city-building ideals of the Italian Renaissance were deliberately applied in the New World by Hernán Cortés and by Viceroy Mendoza.

Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries. Introduction by Octavio Paz. The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Bulfinch Press, New York, 1990. $75.00 hardbound, $39.95 paperbound, 712 pages, index, bibliography, color and black and white illustrations.

Back in 1969, when the first Apollo astronaut landed on the Moon, a team of anthropologists from Harvard was studying the natives of San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico. A member of that expedition later reported to me with wry humor: the night the Moon landing

occurred, the Harvard anthropologists were obsessed with recording the reactions of the Indians, who were so primitive that many hardly even knew Spanish. But the Indians, on the other hand, thrilled by the first human presence on the Moon, were all gathered around the one store in town that sold televisions, to watch the Apollo landing, and to try to understand it. For them, it was truly a "great step for mankind," and they wanted to be part of it.

My friend also told me that in Chiapas, which was evangelized in the early sixteenth century, traces of Renaissance polyphony have remained in a much-degenerated form, and are studied as "native music" by the anthropol-ogists, even though the idea of multi-voiced music was completely alien to the pre-Columbian cultures.

The desire for scientific progress, and for learning the laws that govern the physical domain, is universal to the human mind, and can reach through even the most backward and isolated culture to attract individuals toward self-realization. This is the primary reason that the indigenous peoples of ancient Mexico embraced the civilization brought across the ocean by the Spanish evangelizers who came in the wake of Christopher Columbus after he first landed in America in 1492. The concept of the Golden Renaissance of Europe—that man is the center of God's creation, responsible for uplifting nature to higher levels of organization and fruitfulness through consciously changing his own species' mode of reproduction—did then, and does today, represent an untransgressable law which is proven by the very existence of 5 billion human beings today.

The concept common to all of the Mesoamerican (Mayan and Zapotec) soci-eties: that time is circular, that progress is impossible, and that the divine is inseparable from the uncontrollably productive and destructive forces of nature, that reality rests on a dualism of good and evil, is viciously false, and leads to the decay and ultimate defeat of societies which believe in it. It is not accidental that the Sun god at the center of this vicious circle eternally thirsts for blood, the blood of countless sacrificial victims.

In all art, the notion of the need for progress is expressed through the application of the laws which govern the human mind and demonstrate its coherence with the hidden laws of the universe. Artistic beauty arises from the artist's self-reflection on the process of his own mastery of these laws, which constitute natural beauty. The hallmark of such art is man's activity in measuring the universe. For music, these laws go under the name of poly-

phony and the well-tempered 24-key system, as they have been progressive-ly discovered from the Renaissance forward. For the plastic arts, it is a matter of increasing mastery of proportion and perspective, which were applied in the fifteenth century to the domain of visual representation, by taking over principles that were already known in music and astronomy. Be-cause poetry, music, painting, and the other forms of fine art unify thought and emotion in the most direct way, they are not merely a passive reflection of the society in which they occur, but a powerful cause of social change.

These facts must be understood as the background to any exhibit commemo-rating the Quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492, and the evangelization of the Americas, which we celebrate over the coming year. One of these, "Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries," will be on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California from October 6 until December 29, 1991. First mounted last October at New York's Metropolitan Museum, and later at the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas, this gargan-tuan show (and the beautiful catalog that accompanies it), is in three parts: the indigenous art of Mexico before the arrival of the Europeans; the works of the new civilization that arose after Columbus and the Conquest; and the art of Mexico after Independence in the last century.

What makes "Splendors of Thirty Centuries" worthwhile is the middle section. It brings together works of art totally unfamiliar to most citizens of the United States, from the viceregal period from the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Most of the colonial art belongs to relatively little-known museums in Mexico, or is scattered among private collections, universities, and churches. A few key items are in collections in Europe or the United States. Thus, even Mexicans with an interest in this material, would have difficulty seeing it, and would never see it all together.

The Fall of the Evil Aztec Empire

All informed writers on the Conquest of Mexico, even the most violently pro-Aztec, admit that the conquistador Hernán Cortés could never have completed the Conquest so rapidly if the non-Aztec Indian peoples had not joined the Spanish armies when they arrived in 1519, happy for the chance to throw off the brutal Aztec oppression. After the Conquest was completed in 1521, the struggle to inaugurate a humanitarian policy in the New World against both the evils of the indigenous pagan society, and the greed and cruelty of many Europeans, began in earnest.

The Spanish Crown promulgated laws against slavery and usury, and tried to curb the abuses of Spanish civilians, the so-called encomenderos, against the native population. Encouraged by Cortés, Charles V sent mendicant orders, the Franciscans in the beginning, followed by Dominicans and Augustinians, to evangelize the Indians.

The task would have been daunting, even without the opposition of those Spaniards who sought exploitation of the New World's riches above all. While the Aztecs were the most bestial of the Mesoamerican societies, by at least an order of magnitude, all of those societies practiced human sacrifice, and all were structured around religious ideologies which viewed history as cyclical. They utterly lacked the notions of the necessity of progress, and the sovereignty of the individual, who was capable of intervening to change history. Although they had originated in Asia millennia earlier, for long centuries, the constellation of Mesoamerican societies had had no contact with any outside culture, not even with the Andean (Inca) cultures of South America, and hence no challenge to the fixed rule of unending war among these societies.

The Indians of San Cristobal who yearned to see the Apollo shot in 1969 were not only acting upon their real human nature, but they were also calling upon a cultural matrix instilled in their ancestors nearly five centuries ago, which has been attenuated, neglected, and attacked but not yet destroyed.

The key figure, whose true contribution has yet to be fully appreciated, in bringing the Renaissance to America was the conqueror himself, Hernán Cortés. Following in his wake, during the 1530s, three men came to power whose impact on Mexico is of world-historical significance: Bishop Fray Juan de Zumárraga, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, and Judge Vasco de Quiroga. These men, guided by the Christian humanist theories of the European Renaissance, shared a vision of implementing the ideals of Re-naissance philosophy in the New World. They were prepared to put to the test the premise that every human individual is created in the living image of God, with the potential for creativity known as the "divine spark of reason," among a people for whom such ideas were totally strange. They had close connections to such leading Christian humanists as Erasmus of Rotterdam, St. Thomas More in England, the Platonic Academy of Florence, and Cardinal Cisneros, the sponsor of the Polyglot Bible produced in five languages at Alcalá de Henares in Spain.

Several objects in the exhibit are directly linked to these three men. These include an embroidered velvet lapcloth of about 1539, made for Bishop Zumárraga (cat. 118); and a magnificent Crucified Christ from Tlaxala, made of cornstalk paste (cat. 121), a material taken over from pre-Hispanic idol-making and used for Christian sculpture at the impetus of Vasco de Quiroga, the first bishop of Michoacán and promoter of "mechanical" arts in the region.

As to Mendoza, it was under his vice-regency that Pedro de Gante's convent school of San Jose de los Naturales in Mexico City produced once of the truly amazing objects on display, a feather-mosaic of "The Mass of St. Gregory" (cat. 119) created in Mexico City in 1539 and sent as a gift to Pope Paul III (Farnese).

The painting was done in a technique that did not exist in Europe, although the style reflects the compositional and figural skills of European art taught by Gante to indigenous craftsmen. Feather pictures (amantecayotl) were the most prized art form of the pre-Hispanic world, where aviaries were kept for purpose of producing the colored feathers. Ironically, the survival in extra-ordinarily good condition of this beautiful object is likely to be the result of piracy. It never reached its destination, and turned up on the art market in 1987, when it found its way to a French museum.

The Indians under the care of the Franciscans were particularly grateful to the Pope, because it was Paul III who had issued a bull in 1537 proclaiming the rationality of the Indians and right of the mendicant orders to administer the sacraments to them. As the catalog entry reports, "In the early years of evangelism in New Spain some clergy thought the Indians were unfit to receive the sacraments—they were considered incapable of reason—and believed it was unlawful to administer such rites to them." The Pope's historic decision, vindicating the efforts of Zumárraga, Mendoza, and Vasco de Quiroga and the missionaries under their leadership, was announced in New Spain in 1538-39.

Everything that was accomplished for the good pivoted around the idea that the Indian was equal to the European as a child of God, capable of reason, and capable of being educated to realize even projects that were unrealizable on the old continent.


Open Chapel at Teposcolula, Oaxaca, sixteenth century: an adaptation of Renaissance style to an entirely new form, suited to Mexico's needs.


Archbishop Juan de Zumárraga's embroidered lap-cloth, 1539. Zumárraga was an admirer of Erasmus who brought a master embroiderer from Spain to teach the craft to Indian converts. He published two treatises in the Christian humanist tradition: a catechism for the Indians and a manual for missionar-ies.

Building Alberti's Ideal Cities

Mendoza, the first viceroy of Mexico (1535-50), was the scion of the Spanish noble family which introduced aspects of the Italian Renaissance into Spain. According to the Mexican scholar Guillermo Tovar de Teresa, who is cited in the catalog by the American researcher Donna Pierce, Mendoza realized the ideal city plan of the Renaissance in Mexico. He brought to Mexico the Ten Books on Architecture of the Florentine architect Leon Battista Alberti; Mendoza's heavily annotated copy of the treatise survives.

Alberti was the first theoretician of the Florentine artistic Renaissance, the man who personally bridged the gulf between theory and practice. In 1435, Alberti wrote Della Pittura, the vernacular book which first described the perspective system which was the great breakthrough in painting in the early fifteenth century, transforming it from a mere craft into a true science. He also wrote an economic treatise, Della Famiglia, which describes the loving education of children as the only means by which society can be improved. In one of his shorter dialogues, written in 1441, Alberti summarized the Christian Humanist outlook: "With the forethought that we are mortal, and that every adversity can befall us, let us do what the wise have so highly praised: Let us work, so that the past and present will contribute to the times that have not yet come" (quoted in Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti, Universal Man of the Early Renaissance, 1969).

Not only were individual buildings and all of their component parts to be designed on the basis of the harmonic proportions that govern the cosmos as a whole, the so-called "music of the spheres," but cities as a whole must also reflect the rational ordering of the God's universe. Hence, the Renaissance architects, including Alberti, developed star-shaped and rectangular grid designs for ideal cities. But most of these remained on paper only, with a few small-scale exceptions. In Europe, the old cities were already built up in the haphazard and fortified manner of the Middle Ages.

What might have been considered utopian in Europe could become a reality, if only briefly, on the new continent. Viceroy Mendoza overlaid the grid plan which Alberti had developed, on the preexisting, unfortified Indian cities, starting with Mexico City itself, where Cortés had already begun the bold plan of building a great city over the Aztec capital. The streets were widened and regulated and oriented to optimum ventilation and sunlight, and the plaza was enlarged to a rectangle twice as long as wide, following

Alberti's formula. "The unfortified town with its monumental plaza and wide straight streets became a source of amazement to European visitors, and was reproduced all over Latin America. Mendoza worked closely with the Franciscan and Augustinian friars to develop a so-called moderate plan for the religious establishments of Mexico, probably also based on the Renaissance formulas of Alberti." Certain changes were made, especially in the scale, which reflected the Indian substructure. The Plaza Mayor, now called the Zocalo, Mexico City's imposing main square where the Cathedral and presidential palace are located, is much larger than any envisaged by Renaissance planners of Italy.

The "fortress-convent" structures usually included a single-nave church, a convent, and an atrium, which dominated the entire surrounding landscape. One of the architectural solutions unique to the New World, the open chapel, was invented to house the altar, the Host, and the celebrating priests while the congregation stood in the churchyard that functioned as an outdoor nave. This was not done because the Indians were accustomed to outdoor worship (as the catalog asserts), but because the sheer numbers of Indians who came to Mass were too many to accommodate indoors. It was a beautiful example of the adaptation of the Renaissance ideal to the new circumstances of the people being evangelized, without falling into dubious syncretisms.

In these great monastic establishments, built as outposts of Christianity all over Mexico, where the Indians were educated and Christianized, what impresses as much as the beauty is the volume of construction and the degree to which the indigenous participated in the work. At most, there were a few hundred friars, yet by 1540, Pierce writes, there were approximately 50 establishments, and 20 years later, almost 100. In fact, almost all of Mexico's cities today, were built in the first 80 years after the conquest.

Pierce explains, too, that there were few trained architects in Mexico, and the designs were based on friars' memories of European buildings combined with book illustrations. (This is a bit inaccurate, as clear Church-prescribed models were provided to the friars, not mere memories.) At the school of San Jose de los Naturales adjoining the Franciscan convent in Mexico City, the aforementioned lay brother Pedro de Gante (Peter of Ghent, a close relative of the Emperor Charles V) taught the Indians the new formal world of perspective foreshortening, volumes, color, symbols, and so forth, beginning right after the Conquest in 1522.

How did it actually work? The few capable journeymen who crossed the Atlantic in the early sixteenth century "taught small groups of Indians, who then covered the territory in traveling teams," writes Jorge Alberto Manrique of the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the introduction to the section on Viceregal Art. "On each project they instructed the local populace and supervised the work. This explains the recurrence of similar solutions in widely separated places, as well as the application of methods that required little specialization, such as the cylindrical columns of the cloisters, all with the same bases and capitals. It was a kind of assembly-line construction that answered the need for speed." Even though they had to follow strict plans established by the Church in Spain, the Indians showed unbounded creativ-ity within these models.

One example not mentioned in the catalog is striking: The Carmelite monk Fray Andres de San Miguel, who designed the massive hydraulic works to drain Mexico City (the Aztec capital was a series of islands floating on a lake) in the early seventeenth century, had been born in a destitute family in Spain, and had learned architecture and engineering almost entirely in a monastery of New Spain from books—including Alberti's, the Divine Proportion book by Luca Pacioli with its illustrations by Leonardo da Vinci, and other Italian Renaissance treatises.

All of this goes directly back to the innovations that were made in the Florentine Renaissance, a century before the Conquest, when St. Antoninus, bishop of Florence in the 1430s, and a major figure in the development of modern Christian economic thought, had foreseen the discovery of a new continent. In the 1420s, while building the famous dome of Florence Cathedral, Filippo Brunelleschi, the first architect in the modern sense, shattered the power of the medieval guilds (the freemasonic lodges, before they were reincarnated as secret societies) by his development of "assembly line" style standardization of architectural elements, which were produced by skilled workers under his plans.

Moreover, it was Brunelleschi's invention of pictorial perspective, the application of projective geometry to the practical problem of lawfully representing three dimensional objects on a two dimensional plane, that made possible accurate drawings of buildings and machines, so that a precise design could be carried out in a distant land without the direct supervision of the designer.

Indeed, to a traveler who is familiar with Italy, journeying through the Mexican state of Jalisco from Guadalajara to San Juan de los Lagos and Tepatitlán, and southeastward into the state of Guanajuato—areas where the activity of the early missionaries was concentrated—the urban vistas punctu-ated by beautiful gilded cupolas of churches evoke the feeling that the Renaissance had migrated to New Spain and multiplied to cover the land-scape. The great dome of the Florentine genius Brunelleschi seems to have sprouted grandchildren and great-grandchildren all over central Mexico.

This, the most powerful testament to the evangelization, is naturally lacking in the "Splendors" exhibition (a severe lack, partly made up for by photo-graphs in the catalog) although some images of the colonial cities appear in the work of later Mexican artists: the engraving of the main plaza of Mexico City (cat. No. 238) by Fabregat, in 1797, when it was renovated; and the painting of the Cathedral of Oaxaca made in 1887 (cat. 270), one of several pictures by the gifted Jose Maria Velasco (1840-1912) in this exhibition, which mark him as a world-class landscape painter.

Museo e Gallerie Nazionali di Capodimonte, Naples/Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington

Pope Paul III (1534-49), in a famous portrait by Titian of 1543. In 1537 he issued a bull defending the baptism of multitudes of new Christians in New Spain. Some clergy had argued that the Indians were less than fully rational beings. In his bull Sublimis Deus, Paul III also prohibited anyone from making a "slave of an Indian, Christian or not."


Indian craftsmen at the San Jose school in Mexico City, deeply grateful to Paul III, dedicated this feather mosaic to him in 1539. Pedro de Gante, of the Brotherhood of the Common Life, the Renaissance movement in northern Europe, taught the Indians part-singing, perspective, and proportion at this school.

Polyphonic Music

The musical education which the missionaries imparted to the Indians of Mexico played a crucial role in the city-building movement. The connection was an obvious one to cultivated persons of that time. Leon Battista Alberti, in the treatise owned by Viceroy Mendoza, had stated that architecture is visible music, that buildings must obey the proportions of the consonant intervals of the musical scale, and elaborated this point at great length.

Pedro de Gante was a well-trained musician, coming to New Spain as a mature man in his forties, from the part of Europe—Flanders—where the best composers were born and trained. His school of San José, adjacent to the finest and largest church in Mexico City, was modeled on those main-tained in northern Europe by the Brothers of the Common Life. He himself learned the Nahuatl language and taught the Indians, not the children of the Spanish invaders.

In a celebrated letter written to Charles V in October 1532, nine years after his arrival in Mexico, he wrote: "I can tell Your Majesty without exaggera-tion that there are already Indians here who are fully capable of preaching, teaching, and writing [in behalf of the faith]. And with the utmost sincerity I can affirm that there are now trained singers among them who if they were to sing in Your Majesty's chapel at this moment would do so well that perhaps you would have to see them actually singing in order to believe it possible" (Quoted by Robert Stevenson in Music in Mexico, 1952, p. 54).

This was quite a statement. Charles V's private chapel choir, which accompanied him on all his journeys, included some of the most illustrious musicians of the age. Therefore, Gante was pitting his Indian singers, who had learned polyphonic singing in less than five years, against a choir he already knew to be superlative!

Bishop Zumárraga wrote in 1540 to Charles V and begged him to institute paid choirs among the Indian musicians. "Experience has taught us how greatly edified the Indians are by sacred music; indeed the fathers who work directly with them and who hear their confessions tell us that more than by preaching the Indians are converted by music. They come from great distances in order to hear it, and they ardently desire not only to learn the fundamentals but also to become really proficient in it" (Stevenson, op. cit., p. 59). Zumárraga also, while in Spain in 1534, engaged professional church

musicians and purchased manuscript rbooks for use in Mexico City. The Indians quickly learned to copy this music into illuminated choirbooks.

The exhibit records this activity in a beautifully illuminated initial from a choirbook (cat. 134), painted by Luis Lagarto, a Spanish artist who migrated to Mexico around 1586. The book is still in the Cathedral of Puebla, where it was one of a set commissioned from Lagarto in 1600 to serve as an aide-memoire to the choir, which guided the congregation through the liturgy. Mexico City became a major publishing center of printed music books as well. For example, twelve books of liturgical music were printed between 1556 and 1589; for comparison, in the entire second half of the sixteenth century, only fourteen liturgical books with music were printed in Spain, the home country. In light of all this evidence, one is tempted to state that the positive achievements of 1492 and beyond were more due to printing than to sailing.

All of the early missionaries who commented on the use of music in evange-lization noted the extraordinary enthusiasm of the Indians for polyphony, the multi-voiced form of music which had not existed anywhere in any Meso-american society prior to the arrival of the Spanish, even though musical performance had played an important role in these societies. The first recorded attempt to teach Indians part-singing occurred in 1527; by 1530 Pedro de Gante's small Indian choir is singing in the new cathedral of Mexico City, accompanied in their more ambitious part-singing by an organ just brought over from Seville. The Indians quickly adapted their chirimias, a kind of flute, to the new music, and became skilled builders of all sorts of European-type instruments. By 1615, the smallest villages had choirs which could sing "the Offices, the Mass, Vespers, and were proficient in polyphon-ic music," according to a report of that date, and "competent instrumentalists are found everywhere," especially in Michoacán and Jalisco. There was no longer any need to import instruments from Europe; the Indians, under supervision, even made organs and played them. They had also begun to compose villancicos (a Spanish form similar to madrigals), four-part polyphonic music, and liturgical works so superior that many Spanish masters of the day "often thought they could not have been written by Indians." (Stevenson, pp. 67-68).

This music, like the architecture, did not represent the violent grafting of a foreign culture upon a native one, as charged by those who say there is nothing to celebrate on the Quincentenary of 1492. Rather, it represented a higher cultural matrix, more coherent with the laws of the universe, which is

in continuous self-development to more complex levels of organization, and in which the individual himself must grow and develop to attain higher creative powers. Another word for this is beauty.

The Indians responded to beauty, which is universal, while adapting the principles of polyphony in music and proportion in architecture to their own customs, styles, and climate, which are particular. They also, for reasons the pot-smoking "poet" Octavio Paz, in his long-winded introduction to the catalog, confesses himself unable to explain, voluntarily participated to a very large extent in the enormous work of construction of the temples, convents, aqueducts, and other structures under Spanish rule, and were converted to a "sincere and fervent" Catholicism that has endured from the sixteenth century to the present day.

The central lie of Octavio Paz—and of the entire group whom Pope John Paul II, during his 1990 trip to Mexico, targeted as Mexico's "intellectual mafia"—is Paz's contention that the Catholic concept of the supernatural trans-substantiation of the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ is the same as Aztec human sacrifice and cannibalism. The purpose of this lie is to justify genocide today.

While there was indeed much syncretism— the hasty and superficial translation of pagan rituals and sacred places into Christian equivalents, reflected in "tequitqui" architecture and other sometimes unsettling hybrids in this exhibit—the primary reason for mass conversion to Christianity is not to be sought, as Paz asserts, in the Indians' misperception that the new religion was their old religion in an altered guise, but, rather, in the attraction of a higher, and more human, spiritual identity.

This is what they assimilated of "European" Christian civilization, just as, many centuries earlier, the barbarians of Europe had assimilated the Christian message brought to them by St. Paul—a Jew from Asia Minor—and by St. Augustine of Hippo, an African.


Left: Cornstalk paste life-size Crucifix from Michoacán, the finest example of its kind in the sixteenth century. Vasco de Quiroga, an admirer of English humanist St. Thomas More, was proud to have transformed this idol-making technique into a perfect material for making lightweight processional figures, expressing the notion of man in the image of God.

Right: Illuminated initial Q in a Puebla Cathedral choirbook by Luis Lagarto, ca. 1600, shows influence of the best Flemish and Italian book illustrators. Tens of thousands of Indians learned to sing from such choir-books and from numerous liturgical books with music printed in Mexico City.


Left: A copy of a lost Aztec codex by a colonial artist shows the altars where mass human sacrifice was carried out. While Aztec cruelty was by far the worst, all Mesoamerican societies shared the practice of the ritual ball game, in which there was only one goal, and the losers were sacrificed to the gods. It is not surprising that many Indians rapidly embraced Christianity.

Right: A 1763 canvas by Miguel Cabrera, representing the popular "Racial Mixtures" genre. While racial discrimination certainly existed, the inter-marriage of Europeans with Africans and native Americans reflected a concept that all men are in the image of God. Here, the European father turns tenderly to his Indian wife and "mestiza" daughter.

'Racial' Mixtures

Indeed, it is in breaking down the rigidity of "racial," ethnic, and class barriers of old Europe, that the Mexican art of the period after the Renais-sance makes its most remarkable historic contribution. Some examples:

The section of the exhibit on Viceregal Art opens with a splendid biombo, or painted screen, attributed to Juan Correa, depicting the Encounter of Cortés and Moctezuma on the front, and the Four Continents on the reverse. The word biombo is Japanese in origin, and these uniquely Mexican objects became popular after 1614 when they were brought there by the Japanese ambassador. Apparently they were used much in the manner that tapestries were used in Europe. Correa, working in a florid baroque style, seemed intent on conveying that the two men, Moctezuma and Cortés, confronted each other as equals.

Juan Correa, the catalog reports, was the son of a mulatto doctor from Cádiz (Spain) and a free black woman from Mexico City. This black artist, born around 1645 and died in 1716, hence a contemporary of Leibniz, "had a long, productive, and prosperous life, was highly esteemed in the society of New Spain, and achieved a great artistic triumph: he made more paintings for the Mexico City Cathedral than any other painter." To this writer's knowledge—and I am quite familiar with the painting of this period—no black artist in Europe, much less the English colonies in America, came even close to achieving such success. The Spanish genius Velázquez's moving portrait of his valet, the mulatto and former slave Juan de Pareja, who became a worthy disciple to Velázquez himself, perhaps heralded such a leap in such status, but Pareja never had a lustrous career.

Miguel Cabrera, another leading artist of the period, is a mestizo, of mixed Indian and Spanish background. Salvador de Ocampo, whose workshop carved the opulent wooden choirstalls of the church of St. Augustine in Mexico City with Old Testament scenes, was an Indian, as were large numbers of woodcarvers, joiners, and instrument makers in New Spain.

The "creole" segment of Mexican society is explored in another section of the exhibition, which includes the splendid portrait (cat. 151) of the great poet Sor Juana de la Cruz (1648-85) from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Sor Juana was the outstanding example of Creoles, those born in the New World of European parentage. (It could also perhaps be asserted that Sor Juana's preeminence, as a woman, would find few parallels in European society of that day. The catalog entry on this painting, by Yale University's Marcus Burke, paints a fascinating picture of the unique intellectual culture permitted among Mexico's urban orders of nuns in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.)

One reflection of this diversity of Mexican culture, with respect to the Old World, appears in the eighteenth century Pinturas de castas, or "Depictions of Racial Mixtures," of which the exhibit includes four (cat. 197-8). Despite the overtones of categorization by "racial" type—"racial" equality was far from being social reality in New Spain—still the recording of these mixtures constitutes a strong proof of the fact that the conquest and evangelization were based on the idea of the brotherhood of all men created in the living image of God.

The series portrays individuals who formed American society at that time, when the ethnic mix of whites, blacks, and Indians had created a compli-cated social structure. Each canvas depicts a family group of father, mother, and one or more children, each representing one of the castas produced by progressive mestizaje; the paintings are marked by great tenderness between the parents and child, and exude serenity, familial warmth, and optimism. The pictures selected for this show contrasted with the factional position of other painters who represented the indigenous people as savages, or even promoted their "culture."

Before and After

If Mexico survives the gruesome Anglo-American conquest which marches today under the banners of free trade, the future of Mexican art will not come out of the pre-Columbian pit of horrors nor the revival of pseudo-Aztec primitivism cum Marxism which inspired the most famous Mexican painters of this century. Now that the peaceful revolutions unfolding in eastern Europe and the martyrs of Tiananmen Square have buried the reputations of the Bolshevik heroes of Rivera, Orozco, and the other Mexican muralists, no one whose brain has not been damaged by drugs could seriously consider taking their work as a model for anything enduring.

So why do the pre- and post-Spanish works form such a large chunk of the "Splendors" exhibit? One reason would be, that it is not "politically correct" these days to celebrate anything that came out of Columbus's discovery of America, without paying some homage to the society the Conquest crushed. Another, more sinister hunch stems from the fact that the show was orga-nized by the radical business and intellectual circles around the Salinas de Gortari government of Mexico, which is quite willing to revive human sacrifice in the form of maquiladora sweatshops, in order to appease the new Aztec gods, the New York banks, on the altar of free trade.

However much some organizers of the show may have wanted to convey what the New York Times reviewer asserted—the nonsense that Mexican art "slumbered" under Spanish rule and reawakened only in modern times—the art itself conveys a quite different message. The only way to really benefit from the show, in fact, is to rush past the oppressive images of beast-gods which squat upon the pre-Hispanic portion of the exhibition (and try to avoid vomiting, especially in the Aztec rooms), and to skip the third part, which is an "awakening" to the nightmare of the Mexican Revolution. The Revolu-tion killed a million Mexicans in 1910-16. Thousands more were slaugh-tered in the Cristero war that broke out in the 1920s, when the free-masonic President of Mexico, Elias Calle, tried to wipe out the last vestiges of the Catholic faith in which Mexico's humanist civilization is deeply rooted. Precisely in Jalisco state, where the golden cupolas proclaim that living heritage eloquently, an armed rebellion broke out to oppose him. The civil strife of those decades was a true holocaust, dwarfing even the terrible (and frequently exaggerated) death rates that occurred in the sixteenth century as the Indians succumbed to European diseases.

Diego Rivera (1886-1957), the most lionized of the Bolshevik muralists of Mexico of the Revolution (he actually spent those years in Paris, imbibing European nihilism), boasted that he had practiced cannibalism. His paint-ings in the exhibit, along with those of Tamayo, Kahlo, Orozco, Siqueiros, et al., celebrate a culture of death, the culture of fascism and communism. Of the twentieth-century painters exhibited, Antonio M. Ruiz alone redeems himself with (at least, at times) a sense of humor. Otherwise we cannot fail to notice, that the God with human features, and mankind in the image of God—that idea which informed the city-building efforts of Mexico from 1521 until the early nineteenth century—has given way to the renewed worship of demons, gods in the images of beasts or bestialized human monsters.

The true roots of Mexican civilization put forth promising blossoms when Pope John Paul II visited in May 1990 and set into motion the process of the political and economic liberation of Mexico, in the same way he had earlier prepared the peaceful revolution of Poland. Some 20 million Mexicans, one-fourth of the population, welcomed him in person.

When the Pope spoke to over 2 million Mexican youth at San Juan de los Lagos (Jalisco), he called on them to understand their role in building a better future, saying, "Christ . . . places in you a demanding responsibility, as the builders of a new civilization, the civilization of solidarity and love

among men." He called on the business community to "reproduce this divine design and collaborate with the Creator in the transformation of the world, according to God's plan," and also to pay a "just wage." He warned an assembly of Mexican intellectuals and artists, that there is "an absence of valid cultural projects capable of responding to the profound aspirations of the human heart," and that in Latin America there is "the need to forge new pathways based on your own identity, and this directly calls upon your responsibility for thought and for culture." He appealed to them to "be promoters of messengers of a culture of life that makes Mexico a great nation."

Indeed, because Mexico was the first non-European nation where the full-blown Christian Humanist image of man was tested as a model of universal civilization, the "culture of life" it can still produce from those roots is of precious significance to the whole human race. No matter how many flaws there were in that experiment in exporting the Renaissance, the Spanish destroyed a society based on genocide and slavery, and built one in which beauty was the instrument of reason and hope.

mexico's great era of city-building

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