Geographies of the Mudéjar in the Spanish Colonial Americas

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the use of Islamic-looking motifs in the Spanish colonial Americas has questioned the value of approaches rooted in formal analysis and an understanding of this phenomenon, known as the mudéjar style, as a stylistic survival. Calling instead for more historically grounded research, scholars have advocated for contextual studies of mudéjar forms, among them the wooden ceilings often called alfarjes or artesonados. Their studies have sought out identities of the designers and builders of wooden ceilings, exploring construction techniques and recuperating period-specific terminology. Studies of the ways in which the ceilings conveyed meaning to their colonial-period viewers have been fewer. This essay explores their reception through the analysis of texts from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. It approaches the subject through two case studies, one centering on the region of Michoacán in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, and the other on cities in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Drawing primarily from ecclesiastic chronicles, it explores the ideas and values that the chroniclers and presumably some of their contemporaries projected onto wooden ceilings in churches, convents, and monasteries. The ways in which they described those ceilings were shaped by colonial-period conceptions of territories and their boundaries, and thus their writings map geographies of artistic production that differed considerably from the landscape traced in the field’s foundational scholarship.