"The promotion of classicism in the visual arts in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Latin America and the need to "revive" buen gusto (good taste) are the themes of this collection of essays. The contributors provide new insights into neoclassicism and buen gusto as cultural, not just visual, phenomena in the late colonial and early national periods and promote new approaches to the study of Latin American art history and visual culture. The essays examine neoclassical visual culture from assorted perspectives. They consider how classicism was imposed, promoted, adapted, negotiated, and contested in myriad social, political, economic, cultural, and temporal situations. Case studies show such motivations as the desire to impose imperial authority, to fashion the nationalist self, and to form and maintain new social and cultural ideologies. The adaptation of classicism and buen gusto in the Americas was further shaped by local factors, including the realities of place and the influence of established visual and material traditions"--
Front Cover; Title Page; Copyright; Contents; Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction; PART ONE: Redefining Urban Space and the Promotion of Classicism; 1: Manuel Tolsá's Equestrian Statue of Charles IV and Buen Gusto in Late Colonial Mexico; 2: Gothic Taste vs. Buen Gusto: Creolism, Urban Space, and Aesthetic Discourse in Late Colonial Peru; 3: El Templete: Classicism and the Dialectics of Colonial Urban Space in Early Nineteenth-Century Havana, Cuba; 4: Neoclassical Pompai in Early Twentieth-Century Cartagena de Indias, Colombia; PART TWO: Imprinting Classicism and Its Consumption
5: A Taste for Art in Late Colonial New Spain6: The Plantation Landscape and Its Architecture: Classicism, Representation, and Slavery; 7: Buen Gusto and the Transition to Nation: 1830-1850; 8: A Western Mirage on the Bolivian Altiplano; PART THREE: Dividing Lines: Practices and Problems; 9: The Language of Line in Late Eighteenth-Century New Spain: The Calligraphic Equestrian Portrait of Bernardo de Gálvez (1796); 10: Art and Viceregal Taste in Late Colonial Lima and Buenos Aires
11: From Baroque Triumphalism to Neoclassical Renunciation: Altarpieces of the Cathedral of Cuzco in the Era of Independence12: Buen Gusto and Classicism in the Late Nineteenth Century: An Appraisal in the Context of the 1881 Centennial of Mexico's Academy of San Carlos; Contributors; Index
