Under review here are two art historical studies of the artistic media—painting and textiles—that dominated the church interiors of colonial Mexico and Peru. Aaron Hyman’s intellectually ambitious book tackles a fundamental aspect of colonial painting that is, at last, receiving the dedicated study it merits: the high degree of repetition of painted compositions based on European prints. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi’s well-researched and thoughtful monograph, full of new material, is the first cultural and technical history of ecclesiastical textiles—imported, locally produced, or a combination of the two—highlighting the ways in which Indigenous artisans participated in outfitting the church. Both books share an interest in the peculiar colonial conditions of the makers, and in works that can be considered nonauthorial. Both also track the intermedial interactions generated by the transatlantic media empire: for Hyman, between (European) print and American painting, and for Stanfield-Mazzi, between different types of textiles, as well as print, drawing, and painting.Hyman’s book, focusing on the period 1690–1775, is a most welcome addition to the already sizable literature on painting in New Spain and Peru. The choice of Rubens, prototypical European artist and “megaphone” of Church and Empire, is based on the robust reception of a handful of Flemish artist’s prints that can be found clustered in discrete ecclesiastic complexes, populating so many altars in a single city (Cuzco), and dispersed throughout the Spanish viceroyalties. Sumptuously illustrated and including many unpublished works, Rubens in Repeat confronts head on one of the most problematic aspects of colonial painting: the predominant use of European prints as the basis for paintings, for “copies.” Hyman does not underestimate the condemnatory and deadening effect of this term hanging over much of colonial artistic production. Copies, sometimes referred to as slavish, were the antithesis of a European notion of art based on authorial style and invention. The high visibility of painted copies after European engravings has made colonial painting seem a lesser shadow of European art. Hyman’s book makes every effort to disrupt that unproductive narrative.Hyman does not run from the copy but boldly toward it, arguing that we need to understand copying as a positive basis for colonial production. He settles on the modified term “conforming copy” based on the language of contracts that hold artists to a model (a print) to which their work should conform. Acknowledging the extreme prejudice toward these works—one reviewer called the paintings garbage—Hyman is intellectually disciplined in resisting the interpretation of the many apparent differences between model and copy as signs of either invention or Indigenous resistance. Looking to meet the European definition of art, he insists, has distracted from the main issue: how the repeated image became the colonial pictorial method. Drawing on sparse documentation and abundant chains of image and copies, he teases out a theory of copying as a colonial condition that almost entirely bypasses style and authorship.Part 1 of Hyman’s book, “The City: Cuzco,” explores the mode of production of the many iterations of Rubens’s compositions, what he calls “Cuzco’s aesthetics of sameness” (77), attributing collective creative agency to a city rather than the largely anonymous artists who are conventionally given collective authorial agency in the term Cuzco School. Teresa Gisbert and José de Mesa’s prior characterization of a kind of proto–mass production of paintings in the city (Historia de la pintura cuzqueña, Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas, 1962) is close to Hyman’s manufacturing mode of painting as a consumer good (“product of Cuzco”)—the way Subaru, Mazda, and Toyota are continually producing practically the same car though we are all very attuned to the design differences. Why was this amount of repetition (perfectly acceptable where cult images are concerned) desirable? Hyman argues that contrary to European patterns, Cuzco institutions did not compete with but rather related to each other with their commissions of so many Rubens copies. While he acknowledges the Church’s motivation and use for repeated images, I wonder why the attribution of a generalized authorship could not be assigned to the Church rather than the city itself.Part 2, “The Cathedral: Mexico City,” narrows the lens on tightly interrelated commissions of paintings for the cathedrals of Mexico City and Puebla by painters who cleaved more closely to European art. The goal here is to reconcile the conforming copy with the self-declared inventiveness of copies that creatively combined imagery of a transatlantic canon composed primarily of prints. In a subtly constructed argument, Hyman suggests that we should understand the conspicuous signatures of the painters as assertions that they are inventors. Along with the striving for recognition of painting as a liberal art and the concept of the slavish copy, they were part of the same cultural moment as the two failed attempts to establish an artistic academy in Mexico City. Hyman rereads the 1720s petition for the establishment of an academy as driven primarily by status seeking, rather than a belated (ennobling) corrective of their method of painting to include the conventional European training that valued drawing and invention. In other words, the artists were not striving to become European auteurs; nor were they striking down the practice of making conforming copies.Part 3, “The Viceroyalty: New Spain and Peru,” is a case study of Rubens’s The Austroseraphic Heavens (1632), an allegorical print that demonstrated Franciscan and Habsburg support for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. One of the most widely diffused of Rubens’s engravings, it yielded many significant medial and compositional variants (inserting varied colonial actors, as well as an icon-like extract of the figure of St. Francis supporting three globelike orbs). These are considered active commentaries rather than passive derivations, cultural drift, or forms of resistance. They are “transformational copies” (218) that use the flexibility of allegory to “invert an imperial logic” (221) as colonial artists explain Europe’s history.Rubens in Repeat walks a fine line in setting colonial painting in relationship to and apart from the hierarchy of values (invention, style, authorship) of early modern European art theory. Hyman is right that European artists also copied while maintaining a strict hierarchy between original works and copies. There was quite a bit of anxiety around copying in European art, but there is also plentiful evidence of it, even among the auteurs like Bernini (see Evonne Levy, “Repeat Performances: Bernini, the Portrait and Its Copy,” Sculpture Journal 2 [2011]: 239–49). Hyman’s European foil could be profitably complicated. For example, a painting by the European Jesuit Gerard Seghers based on a Rubens is excoriated as a kind of theft but could easily be given as an example of all of the conforming copies that fly under the radar of the history of European art. There are alternative narratives of dissemination of works like that of Seghers, such as the global diffusion of Jesuit imagery repeated, revised, and remediated, especially in Europe and beyond. In other words, these are not only problems of colonial art; therefore, they could be described as a product of the colonial condition with more nuance and punch by pointing to the resistance on the part of European scholars to seeing the conforming copies in European art too.Stanfield-Mazzi opens her book by pointing out that textile, not painting, was in fact the dominant church art of the colonial period, clothing the living actors who performed the liturgy and covering floors, altars, and walls of churches. Based on extensive research in archives, church sacristies, and collections, the book is the first extended history of ecclesiastical textiles in colonial Mexico and Peru from conquest through the eighteenth century. Each chapter, dedicated to a different textile type, systematically investigates material origins (much made in Europe, but not all); the involvement of Indigenous peoples and both men and women in the manufacturing, care, and repair of textiles; the guild organization of the various trades and subtrades; the imagery and cultural meanings of textiles in Europe and Latin America; and relationships to other media. Many of the textiles are seen as truly mestizo inventions or “hybrid manifestations” of the “New World church” (3). Weaving, with its binding together of weft and warp, and the finished textile, with its constituent parts of border and field, pattern and ground, are, for the author, apt metaphors for the colonial condition.The chapters of Stanfield-Mazzi’s book are organized around five textile types, beginning with the most prestigious and decorous and ending with what was considered the least. Counter-Reformation policies reinforced the need to distinguish church textiles from the everyday with an elevated material. “Woven Silk” (chapter 1), with its luxurious palette, texture, and delicate designs, was the implicit choice. A color-coded array of silk vestments and altar bedecking was necessary for the proper dressing of clergy and church. The author clearly explains where silk came from and the different types and the techniques used to make it, including the conditions under which silk was produced for a brief time in Mexico, which was followed by the dominance of Spanish and Chinese silks. She analyzes the technical and stylistic features of extant examples. She is attentive to the roles accorded to artisans of European lineage versus Native workers in all aspects of silk production, as well as the diverse symbolisms, European and Andean, that supported the endowing of silk with sacred properties.Chapter 2, “Embroidery,” begins with Indigenous antecedents, which were few. Though the art was initially practiced by European-trained Spaniards working in Mexico, schools were established immediately to develop local skills, and a guild formed by 1546, demonstrating the status attached to the art. Next to silk, embroidery (added largely to imported cloth) was the second most common textile found in Spanish American churches and was mostly locally done. Embroidery is a hinge medium, both between Europe and the Americas and between media. Threadwork could imitate patterned silks, and satin stitch—aptly called pintura a la agujo (needle painting)—could render painting-like figurative scenes, including nuances of shaded flesh, the proof of the embroiderer’s mastery. The history of embroidery also taps into the history of style: extant examples fall into four distinct stylistic phases that correspond to European trends.In chapter 3, “Featherwork,” the focus is on how a medium closely tied to the prestige activities and gods of the Indigenous peoples was put to use for Christian textiles. Other authors have recently provided answers to this question: textual sources reveal how European admiration for accomplished Indigenous featherworks entered them into a European aesthetic system that was able to override their non-Christian use. Stanfield-Mazzi characterizes some transitional works that preceded liturgical textiles, the production of which was facilitated by the monastic workshops. Seven bishops’ miters that have been preserved are convincingly attributed to regional workshops through ornithological connoisseurship based on their hummingbird feathers and techniques as well as their imagery, showing the importance of the broad historical and technical knowledge of textiles the author brings to bear. She also catalogs the medial analogies used to characterize the featherworks, which were related by their European patrons to paintings (for their mode of design and display on a flat surface), textiles (for their thread-like appearance and incorporation into larger textile pieces), and mosaics (for the meticulous technique of assembling small colored elements). Here, as elsewhere, she is attentive to the gender of various types of feather workers, though she is unable to determine with certainty whether the European gendering of labor excluded women from work they would have done before the colonial period.Chapter 4, “Tapestry,” considers fine woven woolens, the material of garments associated with Inca nobility and largely produced by women, also put to some use as church textiles. A group of compelling surviving works show the ways in which the function, imagery, and color palette of a prestige art of the Andes was adapted to Christian purposes (though the technique did not change). Very early evidence suggests that q’umpi pieces (capes, then tunics) were used to dress statues of the Christ Child, incorporating Christian motifs as well as Andean ones (butterflies, mantises, Andean flora and fauna) that could bend toward Christian beliefs. Here again, some Andean tapestry imitated, or remediated, other types of textiles: embroidery, lace, damask, pile carpet, and, in rare cases, painting. The use of local materials that resembled other, more acceptable ones was one way in which the Andean weavers met their Christian occupiers halfway: the materials and techniques of traditional Andean weaving met the imagery and function of Christian textiles. Woven woolens, though, remained largely in the secular realm of dress, and after 1625 silk became the default material for church furnishings.Chapter 5, “Painted Cotton and Cotton Lace,” treats the little-known medium of dye-painted cotton cloth, which in its effect resembles European distemper, though the actual paint source and method of application differs. This chapter narrows to Peru and a case study of forty-six works made in Chachapoya, a cotton-producing region. The examples are similar in scale, Lenten imagery, and use to European sargas, though much closer in their technique to the pintados (cloths produced in India and exported by Portuguese merchants, possibly to Peru). The technique also impacted the style of these works and made them quite distant from European examples. Produced by anonymous makers, possibly women, painted cotton was the dominant form of decoration of modest churches.Although Hyman and Stanfield-Mazzi do not employ the terms of media theory, both publications significantly enlarge the corpus of media objects and set the stage for future reflection on the intermedial condition of colonial arts. Reading the two monographs together makes amply clear that remediation—the imitation of a work in one medium in another—is the central artistic activity in the absorption of an entirely new world of images (mostly via prints) into the Latin American mediascape. Hyman sees the intermedial movements he studies (print to painting) as largely medium indifferent, though he makes frequent reference to intertextuality. His effort to not look for inventiveness seems to prevent him from acknowledging the creative work of remediation that occurs between media. Stanfield-Mazzi is very alert to the pleasures of remediation: she finds them in the 1729 Augustinian history of Michoacán by Matías de Escobar, who marveled that “the letters rendered in feathers rivalled those of the printing presses of Antwerp” (149), in records left by admiring Spaniards who likened plain-weave Andean textiles to silks and Flemish tapestries, and by the Spaniards in Mexico who likened the wondrous featherworks to velvet and embroidery.A media studies perspective matters because the stakes of remediation could not be higher in the colonial context. In the Christian imagery of European prints or paintings that were remediated in featherworks, Bartolomé de las Casas (Apologética historia sumaria, 1555) saw nothing less than evidence of the intelligence and creativity—the very humanity—of the Indigenous peoples:But what certainly seems to exceed all human ingenuity and which will be more new than rare to all the nations of the world, and all the more worthy of admiration and esteem, is the trade and art that those Mexican people know how to ply so well and perfectly, of making with natural feathers with their natural colors everything that they and all other excellent and first-rate painters are capable of painting with brushes.…After the departure of the Spanish they saw our images and our things, they had a very effective occasion to show the liveliness of their mind, the neatness and deliberateness of their faculties or inner and outer consciousness and their great ability, for since our images and altarpieces are large and well painted in various colors, it happened that they enlarged them and practiced them and distinguished themselves in their very subtle and new art when they want to take our things and imitate them (as quoted in Alessandro Russo, The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600 [University of Texas Press, 2014], 85–86, emphasis mine).The theorization of these bodies of works from a media studies perspective would bring these media into close dialogue and render an integrated approach to those strategies of colonial artistic production to which both authors rightly point.