La Catedral de Mérida: La gran casa de Dios en medio de T'hó

Abstract

Native laborers built the massive Cathedral of Mérida in a remarkably short period of time. Begun in the early 1560s, just two decades after the foundation of the Spanish colonial town, the building's sand-colored walls, soaring vaults supported by massive columns, and idiosyncratic facade were in place by the end of the century. Aimed at a mixed audience of historians and nonspecialists, Miguel Bretos's book synthesizes scholarship on the cathedral, emphasizing the ways in which the ambitions of bishops and the trajectory of Mexican history shaped the structure that visitors see today. The author's engagement with the literature on the cathedral is supplemented by a close visual analysis conveyed through descriptive language and an abundance of photographs, most of them in color.Following a consideration of cathedral as both an institutional and an architectural term, Bretos surveys the history of Spanish exploration and occupation in Yucatán before turning to the construction of the building in question. This story, considered in chapters 3 and 4, is the most engrossing part of the book. It centers on the contributions of three sixteenth-century bishops—Francisco de Toral (in the 1560s), Diego de Landa (in the 1570s), and Gregorio de Montalvo (in the 1580s)—and looks at formal and stylistic precedents for the building in the religious architecture of Andalusia. Bretos dwells at length on the formal relationship between the cathedral of Jaén and that of Mérida, a connection made by Diego Angulo and rooted in both buildings' use of the Hallenkirche plan and elevation (that is, with a nave and side aisles of the same height). For Bretos, the church in Mérida is a simplified version of its counterpart, but he takes issue with the notion that the Mexican cathedral's relative austerity is evidence of economic poverty. Instead, he suggests, its severity should be regarded as a stylistic choice, perhaps one encouraged by Bishop Toral, a Franciscan, who may have insisted on the use of forms reflecting his vow of poverty (pp. 76–77). The work of Andrés de Vandelvira, the sixteenth-century designer of the cathedral of Jaén, is key to the author's consideration of the forces that gave rise to the building in Mérida. Following observations made by John McAndrew, Bretos examines architectural forms at San Salvador in Úbeda and San Francisco in Baeza. The ties that bind the Andalusian churches to the Cathedral of Mérida are strong, leading Bretos to hypothesize that Toral, who was from Úbeda, carried a plan for a church by Vandelvira on his transatlantic voyage (pp. 101–2).Turning to the cathedral's facade, Bretos argues against interpretations that center on its defensive function. The thin vertical openings scattered across the facade were not arrow slits, he writes, but instead were designed to provide light to the interior, and the use of these forms might be seen in relation to the symbolic references to fortresses in the architecture of mendicant missions elsewhere in sixteenth-century Mexico (p. 85). Bretos counters George Kubler's claim that the facade's enormous arch was designed to protect the portal, claiming instead that the triumphal arch, together with the coat of arms that it frames, unequivocally proclaims Yucatán as the dominion of the crown (pp. 77–79). Of the coat of arms itself, the author notes its installation during the reign of Philip III as well as the modification of the form in the early nineteenth century, when the eagle and cactus of Mexican national iconography replaced the center of the escutcheon.Later chapters consider the cathedral's fortunes in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, noting its role as the setting for important religious and political events and the addition of elements such as the episcopal palace, the retablo for the main altar, and a clock on one of the towers. Dramatic period photographs document the aftermath of the church's looting in 1915 during the Mexican Revolution. The volume's appendixes include a nicely documented timeline for the building's construction history and an illustrated list of sixteenth-century cathedrals in Spanish America supporting the claim that the Cathedral of Mérida was the first to be completed on the mainland. The book's subtitle, a quotation from the Chilam Balam of Tizimin, underscores the existence of a pre-Columbian settlement on the site of the cathedral. Bretos, however, does not focus so much on the building's place in an indigenous history as on its position in a transatlantic Spanish world in which people, ideas, and architectural forms traveled back and forth across oceans.Historians of art and architecture will appreciate this well-documented synthesis of the literature on this important building, but they will undoubtedly be less enthusiastic about the parts of the book that are more directly pitched at a nonspecialist audience.