Spanish Colonial Art in the California Missions

Abstract

Art work throughout almost the entire history of the Church has been primarily didactic. Man was taught through the arts of sculpture, painting, mosaic, and stained glass, all that he should know of the creation of the world, the dogmas of religion, the virtues, the hero-saints, and during the middle ages especially, the range of the sciences, the arts and crafts. Thus, in the latter half of the eighteenth century when the Franciscans came to the remote outposts in California, they brought with them the pictures and statues by which the simple and ignorant Indian might learn, through his eyes, much of what he was to know of his new faith. “Through the medium of art the highest conceptions of theologian and scholar penetrated to some extent the minds of even the humblest of the people.”