Neoclassicism: Spain's Last Bid

Neoclassicism in Mexico never intended to outshine the splendors of its preceding colonial architecture. Rather, it offered design sophistication, previously an unrealistic, even undesired, outcome in New Spain where surface decoration had been the artistic hallmark. Rather, Neoclassicism doused the fervent fire of indigenous individualism with an exacting European aesthetic. Instantaneously absent was the syncretism symbolized by the Indochristian art which for nearly three centuries had flavored Spanish colonial art and architecture in Mexico. However, just as the European styled Mexican cathedrals of the 17th century had yielded admirable results, so did some of New Spain's Neoclassicism, ironically just as Mexico was at the cusp of grabbing its political independence from Spain.

México, D.F., Museo Nacional de San Carlos, rotundaThe focal point of new world Neoclassicism was the Academia de San Carlos, established in Mexico City in 1783, and its premier director, the imperious, self-taught Spanish architect, Manuel Tolsá (1757-1816). Although some eminent eighteenth-century Mexican Baroque artists had already fostered the appetite for a royal academy in New Spain, the formation of La Academia was imposed onto Mexico as part of a reformist Bourbon agenda aimed at greater centralized control by the Crown over its colonies.

In the formalistic mold of those at Madrid and Valencia and headed by Spanish artists highly influenced by the French Enlightenment, La Academia de San Carlos sought to ensure seamless Spanish oversight to Mexico’s urban architecture and its uniform direction towards the mother country’s economic interests. This of course included the ever-precious production of silver, with a grand new Palacio de Minería realized in Mexico City by Tolsá between 1797 and 1813.

With its political might and royal patronage, the new Academia fully fostered the European “Buen Gusto”. The ascendency of this “Good Taste” art and architecture over previous Mexican styles was epitomized when the classically trained José Damián Ortiz de Castro (1750-1793) won the competition for the design completion of Mexico City’s cathedral in 1786, the same year in which the first Spanish art professors arrived to constitute The Academy’s faculty. Upon Ortiz de Castro’s untimely death, Tolsá himself completed the project, forevermore leaving his mark on the greatest cathedral of The Americas.

"El Caballito", Equestrian Statue of King Charles IV of Spain by Manuel TolsáBesides Manuel Tolsá’s architectural accomplishments, his monumental bronze sculpture (cast in 1802) of King Charles IV (1748-1819) was placed in front of the Viceregal Palace. It survives as final testimony to Spain’s monarchic Mexican legacy, and suitably belongs in an exclusive list of acclaimed equestrian statues of illustrious historical figures, none more iconic than that of Emperor Marcus Aurelius at Rome’s Campidoglio. The last Spanish king to rule the Americas, Tolsá represented Charles IV dressed in imperial Roman armor, crowned by a laurel wreath, holding forth his regal baton, and riding a graceful, sinuous horse modeled after the one known as “El Tambor” (the Drum), owned by the prominent Marqués de Jarral de Berrio.

One Neoclassical architect who stood out from those working in Mexico City was Francisco Eduardo Tresguerras (1759-1833), whose most significant projects reside in the Bajío region and in his native city of Celaya, Guanajuato, site of his masterpiece, Nuestra Señora del Carmen (1802-07). This conspicuous church is classical in form its exterior is far from proportional. A central, two-storied bell-tower surges over a portico or narthex, while a recessed lateral portal frames a statue of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. Its interior is harmoniously fluid, serene if not solemn.

“Both unity and grandeur are achieved: the superb high altar; the six side altars, all white and gold, pairing in different designs, and the pairs of altars in the transepts; the strongly marked cornice; the pilasters; the gallery above; and the vaulting are vividly neoclassical -- but not without extra baroquish flourishes.” (Collis, John, and Jones, David M. Mexico Blue Guide, W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1997, p. 422)

Celaya, Guanajuato, El Carmen, nave & choir loftIn advancing their aesthetic, New Spain’s NeoClassicists promoted the expurgation of what they considered to be the crude gaudiness of what history has come to appreciate as Mexican Popular and Estípite Baroque These academicians saw vainglorious vulgarity in the religious redundancy of images, particularly regarding Mexico’s penchant for saliently sanguinary biblical representations like the Via Crucis, the Flagellation, or Ecce Homo. They classified Mexican religious art as obscurantism, an obstacle to the dissemination of their modernist ideas. To validate their contra-clerical stance they also relied heavily on the “Black Legend”, a historiographical phenomenon represented by a ferociously anti Spanish colonial literary style.

Such vehemence and revulsion towards local religious practices and aesthetic values resulted in the untold devastation of colonial art and architecture at the hands of the Neoclassicists. Baroque churches were gutted and remodeled, their bedazzling retablos chucked or cut up for use as “legna dorada” (gilded firewood). Curiously, had not the progressive social revolution of liberal clergyman Miguel Hidalgo (1753-1811) been so tragically crushed, many more wonderful colonial church interiors would likely have been demolished in the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Europe soon faced its own artistic struggle between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, embodied in the famous French caricature (circa 1828) of a sword duel between Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) and Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) in front of the Institut de France. In Mexico, however, Neoclassicism continued to dominate the nineteenth century. In his excellent chapter on the movement in Art & Architecture in Mexico (Thames & Hudson, London, 2013), James Oles points out that Neoclassicism endured as the prevalent style in Mexico well after independence from Spain, with the Academia de San Carlos (currently called the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas) remaining its most prominent art school well into the twentieth century.

A corollary of colonial architecture, the temporal, civic, and worldly expression Neoclassical architecture complemented a Mexican century of secular reform and ecclesiastic constriction, and served as a long, parenthetical bridge between Mexican Baroque and modernism. Fortunately, its brief but intense rigors were sufficiently circumscribed in time and scope as to fail in cleansing Mexico of its preceding Colonial art.

Bucareli, Querétaro, La Purísima Concepción

Churumuco de Morelos, Michoacán, San Pedro in the Infiernillo Reservoir