Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections

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Emily Engel

Pictured Politics

Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections

Emily Engel

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Hardback

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English

University of Texas Press
26 May 2020

Colonial art

The Spanish colonial period in South America saw artists develop the subgenre of official portraiture, or portraits of key individuals in the continent's viceregal governments. Although these portraits appeared to illustrate a narrative of imperial splendor and absolutist governance, they instead became a visual record of the local history that emerged during the colonial occupation.

Using the official portrait collections accumulated between 1542 and 1830 in Lima, Buenos Aires, and Bogota as a lens, Pictured Politics explores how official portraiture originated and evolved to become an essential component in the construction of Ibero-American political relationships. Through the surviving portraits and archival evidence-including political treatises, travel accounts, and early periodicals-Emily Engel demonstrates that these official portraits not only belie a singular interpretation as tools of imperial domination but also visualize the continent's multilayered history of colonial occupation. The first stand alone analysis of South American portraiture, Pictured Politics brings to light the historical relevance of political portraits in crafting the history of South American colonialism.

By: Emily Engel
Imprint: University of Texas Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 254mm, Width: 203mm, Spine: 20mm
Weight: 739g
ISBN: 9781477320594
ISBN 10: 1477320598
Pages: 184
Publication Date: 26 May 2020
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Emily Engel is an independent scholar based in Southern California who has published widely on visual culture in early modern South America. She is a coeditor of Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches and A Companion to Early Modern Lima, as well as the founding associate editor of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.

Reviews for Pictured Politics: Visualizing Colonial History in South American Portrait Collections

Engel's book is a welcome addition to the scholarly dialogue about portraiture, one that brings the complexities of colonial relationships to bear on the discussion of a genre viewed as embodying power. Pictured Politics will appeal to specialists and students of colonial art and portraiture studies. Most of the images she analyzes have never been reproduced in an English language art history text. Their appearance within Engel's book widens our understanding of portraits produced in the eighteenth century and the ways in which they were employed and displayed in a colonial context. Engel treats this understudied material in richly nuanced ways with compelling discussion. * Journal18 *