UC Berkeley

ABSTRACT

Rubens in a New World: Prints, Authorship, and Transatlantic Intertextuality

by

Aaron Michael Hyman

Doctor of Philosophy in History of Art

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Elizabeth Honig, Chair

In the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, artists produced works that copied, in part or whole, prints by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) that had been sent across the Atlantic. Focusing on the period from 1650 to 1775, this dissertation uses this transatlantic frame to reassess how works of art relate to one another across geographic distances and cultural divides, and to rethink the terms of originality, invention, replication, and slavish copying through which early modern authorship has been understood. Rubens serves as a lens through which to understand the much greater range of artists—from similarly renowned painters to anonymous makers—who reconstituted his printed compositions in paint and stone in the Americas. Close examination of “copies,” a term this project seeks to trouble, and their contexts allows for exploration of what copying meant for those who engaged in this type of production and the audiences that viewed the resultant works of art. The various kinds of connectivities established through print transmission and artistic copying are bundled under the mantle of transatlantic intertextuality: a system of spatial reference effectuated by the copy and premised upon both the potential for carefully coded relationships of pictorial forms across the Atlantic, and disconnects set up by long-distance print traffic and heterogeneous artistic practices of reproduction.

Three chapters move from Europe through the New World and back across the Atlantic. Chapter one focuses on paintings in Mexico City’s cathedral that derive from Rubens’s prints. It argues that artists in New Spain’s capital considered their familiarity with a European canon, as transmitted in print, central to their self-conception as New World creators. Artists including Cristóbal de Villalpando (c. 1649-1714) and Juan Correa (c. 1646-1716) used pictorial and textual citation to assert a connection to a Europe they knew in black and white. European models of emulation were complicated by the space of the Atlantic that lay between European originals and colonial works of art, and by the practices of New World painters, who evidently made little operative distinction between transformative pictorial citation and so-called “slavish” copying. Charting how the popular imagination of prints evinced a colonial dislocation from Europe, I probe how artists of different ethnicities—Villalpando the creole and Correa the free mulato—experienced the intersections of ethnic identity with the geographic distances underscored by the painterly work of copying.

Chapter two explores the repetitious reproduction of Rubens’s compositions in and around Cuzco, Peru. The connectedness of the places that housed such paintings meant that viewers in the Andean highlands had repeat encounters with specific compositions and families of forms. Through analysis of archival contracts, I suggest that multiplicity became the condition in which the population of Cuzco and the surrounding region came to think about and see paintings: as objects connected to and in relationship with other local objects. Illustrating this sensibility to “the local” in Cuzco revises assumptions about the one-to-one correspondence between European prints and colonial works of art. Revealing a rhizomatic system of reference, I argue that Cuzco’s artists and patrons forged an alternative model of copying and creativity, one in which the copy was always understood as potently originary. Using seminal theological and catechetical tracts from the period, I further suggest that the semiotic deferral occasioned by multiplied, repeated, and dispersed compositions should be understood within the context of debates about Catholic images and how best to teach Christian neophytes in the Andes.

Chapter three focuses on a single printed composition: Rubens’s Austroseraphic Heavens, an allegory of joint Habsburg and Franciscan devotion to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. The chapter traces the print’s robust reception in Latin America, where the entire composition was copied and where individual figures were excised from it to produce all manner of paintings and sculptures. Close analysis of New World copies in both New Spain and Peru reveals the function of the original Rubens engraving. In two instances, however, the print’s central figure, a kneeling St. Francis bearing three orbs and an Immaculate Virgin on his shoulders, was extracted and made into sculpted bases for miracle-working statues: the so-called Virgins of El Pueblito (Querétaro) and Tepepan (Xochimilco), both in present-day Mexico. Because they were deemed miracle-working, these icons, which included Rubens’s St. Francis as a constitutive component, spawned their own copies in prints, paintings, and sculptures. This chapter traces the complicated intertextuality that linked this broad range of objects—from icons to allegories—and investigates the different ways in which authorship mattered within this pictorial matrix.

The conclusion looks back across the Atlantic. Focusing on Rubens’s designs for the triumphal entry of the Cardinal Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp in 1635, and particularly on an allegorical arch figuring the mines of Potosí (present-day Bolivia), this coda suggests how transatlantic transmission and intertextuality might help the field of early modern art history explore European pictorial circulation and practices of copying that have remained marginal to art historical discourse.