The Arts of South America, 1492–1850

The Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum held a symposium in 2008 to examine the arts of South America during the culturally complex period of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the early modern era. Specialists in the arts and history of Latin America traveled from Venezuela, Spain, Portugal, and the United States to present recent research. The topics ranged from architecture, painting, and sculpture to furniture and the decorative arts. Edited by Denver Art Museum curator Donna Pierce, this volume presents revised and expanded versions of the papers presented at the symposium.

Thomas B. F. Cummins (Harvard University) opens the volume with a discussion of the reception and reinterpretation of American motifs by European artists in the centuries after contact. Through a detailed analysis of the architecture of Franciscan churches in Brazil, Nuno Senos (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) discerns political alliances and posits a structural timeline. Susan Verdi Webster (College of William and Mary) uses new evidence from Ecuadorian archive documents to recover the names and works of native artists in colonial Quito. Sabine MacCormack (University of Notre Dame) analyzes a series of mural paintings in the church of St. Augustine in colonial Lima and traces their graphic and theological sources. Luisa Elena Alcala (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) examines the treatise of one of the earliest documented Indian artists in Peru, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, and his famous carving of the Virgin of Copacabana. Through a detailed analysis of manuscipt drawings of furniture and architecture by native artist Guaman Poma of Cuzco, Jorge Rivas Pérez (Colección Cisneros, Venezuela) assesses their accuracy and relationship to actual examples of the early colonial era. Michael Brown (Denver Art Museum) concludes the volume with an essay on Daniel Casey Stapleton and the collection of Spanish colonial art now housed at the Denver Art Museum, acquired while he was working and traveling in South America at the turn of the century.

An interdisciplinary study bringing together new research on an understudied era and area, this illustrated volume will be an important resource for scholars and enthusiasts of Latin American art and history.