The home of a conquistador, particularly the rich iconographic program of its façade, guides this case study in which art historian C. Cody Barteet aims to shed light on the role of architecture in the production and reception of meaning, the deployment and transformation of diverse artistic repertoires, and the formation of identities in early colonial Yucatán. To that end, Barteet not only reconstructs the history and design of the mid-sixteenth-century Casa de Montejo façade (a remarkable vestige of elite domestic architecture in early colonial Spanish America); he also delves into the postconquest scene of this Mexican region, the context in which this built form and other cultural artifacts were produced, their signification, and their use and interpretation by Yucatán’s multiethnic society. The scene is set at a time rife with continuous instability in this southern Mexican region due to the Maya resistance to the Spanish conquistadors and the institutional challenges the latter were facing. Built in the 1540s, this house was intended to serve as the residence of the adelantado Francisco de Montejo and his family in the new city of Mérida, and as the official seat of his governorship in Yucatán.The book’s five chapters broaden the picture of architecture and visual culture in postconquest Yucatán and contextualize the Montejo façade and its legacy within the political, social, cultural, and urban dynamics of the region and the larger sixteenth-century Iberian Atlantic world. The documentary evidence on the house is scarce, primarily due to the loss of archival sources from the time. For instance, it remains unknown who designed it and formulated the façade’s decorative program, the main remaining feature of the building. Thus, to decipher this façade, Barteet draws from other interdisciplinary sources that reveal the historical context in which the patrons operated, which allows him to construct a rationale behind the artistic and iconographic choices they made. By applying a methodology rooted in semiotics and critical theory to the production, meaning, and reception of space and built environment, Barteet complicates our understanding of the façade, its location, and its audience in a city (and region) where cultural interactions abounded and the new artistic and built forms that emerged in the colonial order were “neither wholly Spanish nor wholly Maya” (19).Founded in 1542 as the administrative center of postconquest Yucatán, Mérida’s urban form embodied the new order (social, political, spatial, architectural) that Spanish conquistadors brutally imposed. The Casa de Montejo was among the first and largest constructions to be erected in its Plaza Mayor, a prominent location that was instrumental for Montejo’s strategy. It provided visibility to reaffirm the family’s interests and the values (settling the land, building permanently) that aligned with Spanish colonial rule. Yet with its potentially contentious location and construction, the house might have entered the politics of power in early colonial Mexico by challenging those viceregal institutions that increasingly aimed to weaken the conquistadors’ grip. Barteet’s rereading of the 1573 Laws of Indies and other early colonial urban legislation suggests that Montejo’s house and others like it might have prompted the monarchy to enforce stricter policies to make the colonial city centers uniform and reclaim them for royal authority.Building upon recent ethnohistorical and art historical studies that transcend the interpretation of the façade as a visual narrative of Indigenous defeat, Barteet argues that it admits more than one reading as a result of the multicultural context in continuous transformation that defined early colonial Spanish America. Therefore, he considers the two audiences (Spanish and Maya) for whom the façade’s emblematic program would have resonated; he also contends that the façade speaks to Spanish narratives and colonial institutions that questioned Montejo’s deeds and privileges. By 1549, when the house was completed, it was clear that Montejo’s rule over Yucatán was in jeopardy. Thus, the façade is both a visual commentary about his past and an enduring statement about his future leadership in the region and the status and legitimacy of his family.Barteet parcels his analysis of the Montejo façade along contextual and stylistic lines. The discussion’s core centers around what has remained an understudied (and still debatable) subject: the diversity of styles (and problematic labels ascribed to some) that were popular in the Iberian Peninsula in the late fifteenth century and early 1500s, and how these prevalent artistic idioms (merging Gothic features, Italianate classicizing forms, and elements of peninsular Islamic origin) were employed in the Spanish Renaissance and transmitted, reinterpreted, and received in colonial architecture. Thus, Barteet’s analysis is transatlantic, as we are confronted with the Iberian practice and codification of these stylistic vocabularies and their selective application in the Montejo façade. He hypothesizes that the use and interaction of these styles (and the imagery associated with them) in the house had a rhetorical component that served the patron’s agenda, provided an indisputable mark of Spanish cultural order, and created a model for other colonial visual products. Key to this study, and to the field at large, is to understand what the plateresco (Plateresque) style entails, into what chronological frame we situate its works, and the reasons why its profuse ornamentation was appealing in the Renaissance Iberian world.Although the identification and interpretation of the figurative decoration has been debated, Barteet’s convincing reading of what these elements connoted, their arrangement, and interaction reinforces “the role of the architectural façade as a signifier of cultural concepts as well as a repository of visual-cultural forms” (157). Of particular interest is the discussion about Beatriz Álvarez de Herrera, Montejo’s wife. Unfairly neglected in scholarship, she reemerges as a key figure to understand Montejo’s noble aspirations and the visual discourse of self-promotion and family lineage intended for the façade. Recovering Herrera is paramount to colonial architectural history, where female patronage remains insufficiently addressed. Equally revealing is the recognition of Montejo as a tenacious Yucatecan Hercules. Equating in visual terms the Spanish conquistador and the ancient Greek hero had further implications because the home of the former was transformed into a palace of virtue and civility. Therefore, this peripheral American home was situated at the center of contemporary European appropriations of Herculean imagery, Renaissance humanistic narratives, and intellectual discussions on the expression of magnificence and civic virtue in built form.Other components of the façade (as occurred with the title of adelantado) speak to a medieval legacy being transferred to Spanish America in the early stages of the colonization. Sixteenth-century conquistadors were imbued with the frontier mentality of the Iberian Reconquista and bestowed with prerogatives also enjoyed by their peninsular peers. It is only fitting that this model would guide Montejo’s actions in Yucatán and permeate, in visual terms, his noble façade. It is particularly compelling how the triumphant halberdiers are here reimagined as a metaphor of the militant Santiago, the Christian saint rooted in medieval Iberia, and therefore of the prowess, distinction, and piety Montejo was heralding. If we follow this interpretation, then this is an early visual reference to a saint whose image later abounded in colonial Latin American works. Barteet also considers the appropriation and reinterpretation of some late Gothic imagery in the façade as an inheritance of courtly and Spanish noble cultural practices, which provided the conquistador with an additional ideological nexus that asserted power, lineage, and sophistication.Practical reasons guided the founding of Mérida over the remains of the abandoned Maya city of Tihó. Some of its ruins, which functioned as quarries for the new architecture, were still visible in the colonial city after the completion of the Montejo façade. The memory of Maya Tihó lived on (conceptually and physically) for the Indigenous audience, conferring it a dual identity that is traceable in other forms of visual culture in colonial Yucatán. These cultural products (some maps and two documents ascribed to elite Maya man Gaspar Antonio de Herrera Chi), also interest Barteet. Building upon previous studies of colonial cartography and Indigenous conception and representation of space, he examines the way Maya peoples envisioned the hybrid identity of Tihó-Mérida as a locale of power structures and cultural prestige, as well as the impact of the Montejo façade on these Indigenous audiences, particularly on those who recognized in its visual program a model to exercise agency and navigate the complexities of the viceregal system.This splendorous façade was rooted in contemporary examples of Spanish domestic architecture with which the peninsular nobility aimed to reaffirm its lineage and prestige in the face of a dominating monarchy. The Montejos, and presumably the façade’s author, were familiar with these Iberian visual discourses of noble self-promotion that they sought to reimagine in Spanish American soil. Yet as scholarship in colonial Latin American visual culture continues to demonstrate (and this book is a significant contribution to that corpus), the Montejo façade was not a derivative replica of European models; instead, as Barteet rightly asserts, this architecture was tailored to the needs of a particular colonial audience, born of a context in continuous negotiation that was also at play in other contemporary cultural artifacts and built forms.