Gallery
The spiritual conquest of Mexico’s indigenous people was carried out by cadres of exceptionally zealous friars selected for the unprecedented task at hand. The massive conventos (monasteries) which miraculously materialized throughout Central Mexico were conceived by these religious while constructed by a vast native workforce. In just a matter of decades the Amerindians, previously unfamiliar with the Roman arch, had erected towering ribbed vaults aloft long church naves as had recently been done in Gothic Europe. While history has made its just judgment on the human horrors of 16th century Mexico, the harnessing of an inherent artistry in the polytheistic prehispanics peoples and its reapplication to Christian models is an astonishing story within the annals of world history.These conventos introduced inventive, new-world architectural adaptations, the most compelling being the open chapel, a direct response by the friars to the en masse ministration they bestowed upon their countless catechumens and a deft decision on their part to adhere to the outdoor form of worship to which Amerindians had been accustomed for centuries. European artistic styles ranging from Isabelline Gothic, Plateresque and Mannerism came to Mexico along with the Moorish mudéjar of Southern Spain. Christian and Moslem designs were flavored by the characteristics of pre-Colombian carving, forming a distinct visual language known as tequítqui. This Indochristian art form is discernable in the deliberately plane carvings along portal pilasters, jambs and spandrels, if not along the shafts and arms of atrial crosses. The study of such Spanish and Amerindian syncretism, aesthetic if not ethnographic, serves to shed light onto the initial accommodations both civilizations made in order to interact and coexist, the cultural coalescence which followed, and ultimately the hybridized society comprised by modern-day Mexico. This deliberation begins within the atrial walls of the convento. |
In 17th century Mexico, Seculars began to replace Regulars as temporal authority was prioritized and attention shifted from establishing rural conventos for converting the indigenous to constructing urban cathedrals that catered to a burgeoning Spanish congregation. Professional Spanish architects were imported, and the first seven diocesan cathedrals founded in the present-day state capitol cities of Mexico, Puebla, Guadalajara, Morelia, Oaxaca, San Cristóbal de las Casas, and Mérida. Also arriving from Spain was the spiraling, serpentine structure known as the Solomonic column which found its way to church façades, retablos, and bell-towers, as well as richly colored, enameled earthenware tiles so-called azulejos, that came to adorn façades, domes, even nave walls in the form of dados.The incorporation of these European ingredients was concurrent with the rapid rise of a “popular” style of architecture, rooted in the innate creativity of the native hand, silenced for a century, yet freshly ascendant. Regionally diverse and highly original, Mexican “popular” Baroque found a more malleable medium in stucco a rather than in stone. Its application spread unrestrained to church exteriors and interiors alike, often manifest in the jolly faces of riotously abundant cherubim. Idiosyncratic and innocent, eclectic and eccentric, over the centuries popular art has become an enduring Mexican practice. |
The sheer volume of artistic production in eighteenth century Mexico is difficult to conceive. The country had become a veritable workshop, its capital city a wonder to behold. Ecclesiastical and civic architecture culminated in quantity and quality as great sources of newfound wealth sponsored the construction of staggeringly ornate churches, splendid urban residences, elegant rural haciendas, the completion of cathedrals in Central Mexico and the construction of soaring new ones to the North. Azulejo tilework reached its zenith in the states of Puebla and Tlaxcala, let alone in the emblematic form of Mexico City’s Casa de los Azulejos, as did Pueblan “Popular” Baroque in the form of the provincial churches Santa Isabel Tepetzala, San Bernardino Tlaxcalancingo, San Francisco Acatepec and particularly Santa María Tonantzintla. The allover interior stucco work of these shrines reverberates with religious fervor, flaunted in countless carvings, mesmerically iterated with astounding skill. Church façades in Southern Puebla at Tzicatlán, Tlancualpican, and Jolalpan, and at nearby at Tepalcingo (Morelos) offer beguiling Baroque interpretations, as do the five famed, far-flung Franciscan façades of Querétaro’s Sierra Gorda. By mid-century an irrepressibly fresh style known as the Churrigueresque had taken root, introduced by the Andalusian architects Jerónimo de Balbás and Lorenzo Rodríguez, the former the designer of the grandiose high altar for Mexico City’s cathedral, the latter the two façades of the cathedral’s Sagrario. These prototypical structures inaugurated the estípite as the singular outstanding architectural order of the century. An ornamental pilaster tapering downward to form an inverted obelisk, the estípite was eventually upstaged later in the 1700s by Anastyle and Neostyle Baroque, stylistic outcroppings of the Churrigueresque. The ubiquitous estípite reigns supreme at such towering parish landmarks as Tepotzotlán (México), Ocotlán (Tlaxcala), let alone Dolores Hidalgo (Guanajuato), on whose church steps modern Mexico was born. |
In the final decades prior to its independence (1821), Mexico experienced a Spanish imposed Neoclassicism, part of the Bourbon Crown’s agenda for greater, centralized control over its colonies. For Mexico, Neoclassicism represented a violent reaction against the exuberance of Mexican Baroque and its inexhaustible array of Catholic imagery. Fostering European art of the “Buen Gusto”, the movement’s focal point was the Academia de San Carlos, established in Mexico City in 1783 to champion an artistic cleansing at the auspices of the French Enlightenment. Appallingly, many exceptional Baroque churches were gutted and remodeled to conform to this new aesthetic austerity, while a handful of graceful ones were founded as part of Colonial Mexico's final architectural experiment.
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