Strange Fruit: Vicente Albán’s Quito Series And Local Ways Of Seeing In The Era Of Colonial Enlightenment
Résumé
Vicente Albán’s 1783 series provides a glimpse into the late colonial world of Quito at a moment when the environment was becoming an increasing source of interest. In accordance with the “enlightened” Bourbon reforms, administrators sought to approach the natural world in Spain’s colonies as a possible source of wealth. He became deeply involved in these enlightenment projects, executing thousands of botanical illustrations for scientific study.
I will examine these paintings as a response to the exploration impetus as well as in terms of their local production. I will discuss the ways in which the universalizing tendencies of the Bourbon reforms and Enlightenment sciences responded to and interpenetrated local forms of knowledge and ways of seeing and how local visual culture, in turn, infused the empirical aesthetic of scientific knowledge with a distinctly local artistic syntax. By investigating these paintings as both products of the baroque aesthetic and the descriptive tendencies of the enlightenment era, I will demonstrate how these series can be understood as an effort to simultaneously entice foreign audiences and investors while also allowing the artist to reimagine his environment.
Albán’s series sheds light on our understanding of the Enlightenment in its visual manifestations. The inventive responses to requests for codified knowledge gave way to a kind of artistic activity no longer bound by the religious guild system. Free to make recourse to nostalgic themes, Albán, I argue, painted his homeland in a manner that both pays homage to the artistic legacy of the highland center while evoking a sort of pride that a foreign viewer may have missed. Understood as a site of competing prerogatives and aesthetics, Albán’s series conveys a more nuanced understanding of eighteenth century visual culture as a negotiation of visual and epistemological systems.
Entrées d’index
Keywords : Vicente Albán, Quiteñan art, scientific expeditions, Enlightenment, Bourbon Reforms, empiricism
Palabras claves : Vicente Albán, arte quiteña, expediciones científicas, Ilustración, Reformas Borbónicas, empirismo
Note de l’auteur
This is an original manuscript, and it forms the basis of my ongoing research on the colonial art of Quito
Texte intégral
1Charles III (reigned 1759-1788) must have received countless gifts from his colonies across the globe. From plant specimens, to indigenous cult figurines, novel medicines, beautiful illustrations, and sumptuous paintings, it is hard to imagine that he had time to fully appreciate them all. Luckily, he had a space specially prepared to accept such items ̶ his famed cabinet of curiosities. Here, they would be archived and reconfigured as the physical evidence of his expanding power and knowledge. Perhaps he listened to tedious reports of the inventories or rather preferred to view only those most spectacular objects in moments when he was not engrossed in pressing bureaucratic matters. We do not know, therefore, if he ever spent any time viewing a curious series of six paintings sent his way in 1783 from Quito (Figs. 1 – 6). If he ever perused the colorful and meticulous surfaces of these canvases, he may have been intrigued by the peculiar lists of fruits annotated in each frame, or perhaps he would have been taken with the stunning costume of the subjects. Or perhaps he would have admired the intricate, other-worldly, patterned surfaces, gold details, and vibrant colors.
2Whatever Charles III’s estimation of these works might have been, Vicente Albán’s series from 1783 exist today as the only known example of its kind from Quito. Though these paintings have been referred to as cuadros de mestizaje, similar to the well-known casta series from New Spain, a close examination of their composition and discrete elements suggests that they have different, if associated, meanings and functions1. A series of six canvases, the works depict “types” of Quiteñan inhabitants, staged in natural settings. The paintings also include an overwhelming abundance of exotic fruits with strange names such as pitahaya, lapaia, naranjillas, tagsos, chamburos, and local “types”: yumbos, an indio and an india, and a yapanga2. For a foreign audience, they may have seemed strange, compelling, and exotic. Yet, for local audiences, these works may have appeared quite different, evoking the nostalgia for folkloric figures, delicious flavors, and the distinctive aesthetic that filled the walls of churches and homes of Quito’s inhabitants.
3In this chapter I will examine these paintings in relation to the exploration impetus as well as in terms of their local production. In so doing, I demonstrate the ways in which the universalizing impulses of the Bourbon reforms and Enlightenment sciences responded to and interpenetrated local forms of knowledge and ways of seeing. First, I will trace the developing interest in the exotic in Nueva Granada and Quito during the colonial period and into the eighteenth century era of Enlightenment and exploration. Concurrent with the production of the Albán series, a major botanical expedition was carried out under the direction of renowned physician, Celestino Mutis (1732-1808), who engaged several Quiteñan painters to produce illustrations of botanical specimens to be sent to Spain. Later, a Guayaquil expedition headed by Juan Tafalla further developed the systematic recording of specimens, again with the help of a Quiteñan recruited from the Mutis project. Together with their contributions, the artists involved in these expeditions constructed a visual language with which to communicate useful knowledge about the natural world, creating an aesthetic that seems to reflect utilitarian principles. These expeditions and the Albán series, I argue, are linked aesthetically and ideologically in this effort to describe nature and to communicate its relevance to Spanish authorities3.
4However, a closer look at the Albán series complicates this reading. My aim is thus to present an understanding of these images as an idiosyncratic modification of existing genres, including botanical illustrations, casta paintings, travel books, and other widely circulated precedents, whose appearance and even meaning must be understood as it accords with the artistic climate of Quiteñan visual culture. As a major center of artistic production, Quiteñan developed a distinctive aesthetic that exhibits a tendency for surface pattern and dynamic colors and forms. Because of the enormous importance of artistry in Quito and its legacy, I want to understand these paintings as a distinctly local reconfiguration of the genres that influenced their creation.
5In so doing I hope to reconsider these Enlightenment-era images, not merely as expressions of a homogenous, universalizing impetus to codify and categorize the natural world, but as a mediation between competing interests and aesthetics. Moreover, this chapter will consider how the visual production of knowledge participated in an evolving understanding of both the natural world and local culture. I want to revise the idea that science in the Americas was little more than a distorted vision of the natural world, mired in superstition and ignorance. Rather, I will consider how knowledge gathered, visualized, and categorized on the margins of empire actually contributed to a new aesthetic that placed the “baroque”4 taste for ornament in service of proto-empirical description.
6According to the analysis that I propose, Albán’s series may be understood as an important shift whereby the sensuous surface decoration previously reserved for objects of divine adoration were employed to create a vision of social and natural orders. Moreover, as an evolution of earlier travel genres, images aimed at empirical description, like this series, may have provided the framework in which locals could creatively describe themselves and their environment. These inventive responses to requests for codified knowledge promoted a surge in artistic activity that was no longer bound by the strictures of the religious guild system. Rather, artists were free to make recourse to folkloric themes, such as the indio yumbo (seen in Figs. 5 and 6), painting them in a way that both pays homage to the artistic legacy of the highland center while evoking a sort of pride that a foreign viewer may have missed, mistaking it for empirical proof of the exotic wealth and curious characters abroad. Understood as a site of competing prerogatives and aesthetics, Albán’s series promotes a more nuanced understanding of eighteenth-century visual culture as a negotiation between autochthonous forms of knowledge and demonstrates how those local meanings could operate and, in fact, contribute to the rise of a unique brand of empiricism in the Bourbon Spanish Empire. In effect, the movement away from a focus on purely religious subjects, I argue, instantiated the emergence of the costumbrista genre ̶ an aesthetic that allowed locals to visualize themselves from without, a sort of birth of nostalgia, as the colonial order began to give way to the movements towards independence from European rule.
7The series consists of six paintings (Figs. 1-6), all of which seem to have been conceived as three pairs of two: an elite woman and her black servant (Fig. 1), a yapanga (Fig. 2) (meaning “barefoot” and also a reference to a prostitute); an indio (Fig. 3) and an india principal (Fig. 4) - privileged social positions reserved for the indigenous elite); and two yumbos (Figs. 5 and 6) - an ethnic group that inhabited the hinterlands around Quito5- one in festive dress, the other depicted in his capacity as pack-carrier. Importantly, these images are not meant to depict specific individuals; nor are they meant to demonstrate the results of racial mixing as do casta series from New Spain6. Rather, the depiction of these individuals can best be understood as “types,” or generalized depictions of peoples an unfamiliar traveler might expect to find in Quito. This categorization and codification is furthermore supported by the manner in which the various natural products are carefully displayed and labelled according to an easy-to-read lettering system.
8This approach to visual description may ably be connected to the rise in empiricism and the scientific expeditions that the Bourbon monarchs commissioned in response to these epistemological currents of the eighteenth century, as Daniela Bleichmar argues7. Early modern scientists, and later, Enlightenment natural philosophers prized curiosity and a desire for improved knowledge8. At tension with a belief in a divine and variegated nature was the belief that man, through his intellectual powers, could govern and control that very nature which he was subject to. This tantalizing promotion of man (and the European man in particular) over all other creations instilled a deep sense of curiosity and desire to fully comprehend the vast universe. Knowledge and power, which became inextricably linked in the imperial imagination, were prized as faculties to be developed and perfected through exploration. Within this conception of the world, the unknown Americas provided a blank, epistemological territory upon which the explorers could project fantasies about their own sense of power and ownership of the visible world, translating into an unbounded possibility of domination.
9Science during the Bourbon era was not yet a recognized practice as we understand it today; rather, empirical study of the natural world was subsumed under the category of natural philosophy, a tradition that reaches back to Aristotle and other Greek thinkers. Yet, in the eighteenth century, emphasis increased on the systematic study of the natural world and their categorization according to set principles. Along with the Newtonian revolution, Bacon’s The Great Instauration and Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae signaled the advent of the empirical sciences which prized direct contact and observation as the primary instruments of the natural philosopher, who could induce natural laws based on experimentation. This revised understanding of natural law inspired a new set of inquiries regarding the vast array of flora and fauna of American territories. Interestingly, Linnaeus saw nature as divided into “Kingdoms,” each ruled by laws similar to those that governed empires9. Furthermore, Linnaeus proposed a governing system that did not rely on local conditions10. Rather, it could disregard the particular in favor of a universal structure which could be indiscriminately applied to all situations. In the efficiency-obsessed environment of Bourbon Spain, such ideas were extremely appealing. Not only did they promise to organize nature in a comprehensible format, but they permitted intellectuals to establish a connection between forms of political power with the natural systems it sought to categorize and exploit for its own advancement11.
10This impulse to promote the sciences in Spain was furthermore predicated on a response to charges that the great Empire was mired by superstition, laziness, and a lack of intellectual rigor. Among the more vocal critics were the French philosophes of the Enlightenment such as Diderot, Montesquieu, and Raynal as well as the father of modern taxonomy, Carl Linnaeus, who found “cause for grief that in the more cultivated places of Europe such botanical barbarism exists in our time.”12 Furthermore, with a dwindling economy, Spain had fallen dangerously behind other European powers in terms of wealth, technology, and sophistication. Perhaps in response to these critiques, as well as a result of the Bourbon dynasty’s renewed desire in efficiency, profit, and order, a new generation of Spanish intellectuals presented novel proposals for expeditions and study to the Crown, which eagerly grasped at its opportunity for prosperity and increased power. By the eighteenth century, the hinterlands surrounding the viceregal center of Quito were garnering attention as possible sources of knowledge and wealth. The rise of the naturalist profession, inspired by a newfound interest in first-hand observation and systematic restructuring of knowledge promoted by the Linnaean nomenclature, corresponded neatly with Spain’s interest in economic and political gains13. Between the years 1735 and 1800, the Spanish crown sponsored twenty-five expeditions to her colonies abroad, many of them jointly organized with other Europeans powers. The most famous of these was the Franco-Spanish expedition to Ecuador in the years 1735-1744, led by Charles-Marie de La Condamine and accompanied by the Spanish mathematicians Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa14.
11Although the expedition, whose goal was to measure the circumference of the equator, was a spectacular failure in many regards, their descriptions provided an alluring account of mysterious Indians, tropical forests, and exotic treasures which must have fascinated the first Bourbon monarch of Spain, Felipe V (reigned 1724-1746) and later, Casimiro Gómez Ortega, the head of Madrid’s Royal Botanical Garden between 1771 and 180115. In place of relying on these resources, Gómez Ortega proposed that Spain should prefer natural products like fruits and vegetables16. The combination of a new approach to commerce, scientific study, and exploitation of naturally occurring substances, it was thought, would ensure Spain’s relevance in global affairs.
12Physician Celestino Mutis (1732-1808) shared similar ideas with Gómez Ortega, proposing a botanical expedition in New Granada in 1764. Having trained as a surgeon in his home city, Cádiz, and as a physician in Seville, Mutis had already developed a successful career before relocating in New Granada where he taught Mathematics and Physics at the Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario and also administered a mine for several years17. As personal physician to the Viceroy of New Granada, Pedro Mecía de la Cerda, Mutis had not only the expertise but also the connections necessary for engineering a major botanical study of the local flora. Mutis also had in mind the exploitation of specific materia médica, which held the prospect of ensuring the physical health of the colonial body politic. Such an opportunity for enriching botanical knowledge as well as the possibility of cashing in on their marvelous properties was surely enticing, and in 1783 Mutis received the approval for his interesting proposal.
13Central to the Mutis expedition, as with many of the other expeditions funded by Spain in that century, illustrations became the prime vehicle for recording knowledge18. Over the course of his expedition, Mutis employed over forty artists from Bogotá, Popayán, and Quito who would produce over 6,700 images to be published in an exhaustive study, Flora de Bogotá19. Among other botanical expeditions, the Mutis project was quite unique in its development of a full-scaled painting workshop wherein botanists worked closely with illustrators to produce beautiful, color images of specimens20. Throughout the expedition, Mutis relied on local artists as well as botanists to assist him in his work. The local knowledge that these men brought to the workshop was an undeniable treasure, as it allowed Mutis a sort of first-hand access lacking in other European-based botanical projects. Knowing when and where to find certain flowering plants, their names, uses, and other information was generated from, almost quite literally, the ground up. Thus, while Madrid issued programs for constructing a universal natural history, the actual process of recording and interpreting data was very much a local initiative21. While ideally, this information would be configured according to the universal models of the Linnaean system, in practice, the contributions of local artists and experts meant that such knowledge was ultimately linked to the circumstances of its creation and the currents of local visual and scientific culture.
14In 1786 the Audiencia of Quito received a letter of petition from Mutis requesting five painters that could contribute to his efforts. The artists enlisted were Antonio y Nicolas Cortés, who had worked in the renowned workshop of their father, Jose Cortés de Alcocer; and Vicente Sánchez, Antonio Barrionuevo and Antonio Silva, who had studied under the famed master Bernardo Rodriguez22. Accompanied by Don Juan Pío Montúfar to Popayán and later to Mariquita, these artists began their work around the year 179023. Apparently pleased with their abilities, Mutis engaged an additional group of painters: Francisco Villarroel, Francisco Javier Cortés, Mariano Hinojosa, Manuel Ruales, José Martinez, José Xironsa, Felix Tello, and José Joaquin Pérez24.
15Alexander von Humboldt, while traveling in New Granada, later observed with admiration the painstaking labor these artists brought to the projects:
Hacían los dibujos de la Flora Bogotá en papel de Gran Aigle y se escogían al efecto las ramas más cargadas de flores. El análisis o anatomía de las partes de la fructificación se ponía al pie de la lámina. Parte de los colores procedía de materias colorantes indígenas desconocidas en Europa. Jamás se ha hecho colección alguna de dibujos más lujosa, y aun pudiera decirse que ni en más grande escala25.
16The Quiteñan artists worked, according to the admiring explorer, nine hours a day in complete silence. The resulting style of the botanical images certainly reflect the formation of these painters in the local artistic idiom, which prized flat shapes, dense color, strong delineation, and symmetry26. While the young artists of the Mutis expedition may have witnessed the widespread use of Flemish engravings as prototypes for image-making, they were encouraged to depict first-hand the appearance of the plants. Furthermore, they were urged to respect the conventions of illustrative short-hand, reconfiguring images of plants in order to more efficiently display anatomical points of interest27. However, the novel representational strategies differed significantly from their European precedents and signified a reconfiguration of the illustrative genre to meet the desires of Mutis. Given the enormous participation of Quiteñan artists, it seems likely that local ways of seeing impacted the project in numerous and complex ways. The use of indigenous pigments referred to by Humboldt, for example, would seem to be one of many influences local aesthetic practices had on these works. A preponderance with flat shapes and carefully delineated curves, too, seems to borrow something from the Quiteñan aesthetic.
17Vicente Albán executed his series during roughly the same time that these expeditions were taking place. While it is unclear whether or not he was directly connected to any of those activities, the visual similarities between his work and that of his compatriots reveals a shared emphasis on description. In the painting, Señora Principal con su Negra Esclava (Fig. 1), for example, Albán depicts several types of fruits and trees, offering various views of the vegetal wealth. The large coconuts in the foreground (E) seem to have been wildly exaggerated, such that the viewer can obtain a strong sense of the shape and color of the fruit. Albán also provides a view of the interior of the coconut, removing a slice to expose the white flesh of the edible interior. Likewise, the naranjillas (D) are shown both in their entirety as well as in two, revealing the fleshy fruit on the inside and the cross-shaped structure of the seeded segments. This thoughtful positioning of each fruit and tree seems to have been predicated on the desire to allow for maximum visual exposure. The same device is used in other paintings from the series for an equal effect. In Yumbo Indian en Traje de Gala (Fig. 5), various fruits are placed on display in a similar manner, exposing exterior and interior views while in India Principal in Gala Costume (Fig. 4), the aguacate (avocado) is neatly parted in half and placed on the plinth besides the Indian woman’s gesturing hand, as if demonstrating accurate proportions (C). These fruits are envisioned as a sort of descriptive catalogue, providing maximum information on appearance, shape, and proportions.
18Moreover, the emphasis on variety in this series seems to echo the preoccupation with vegetal wealth that characterized the Americas. An overwhelming majority of the fruits depicted are endemic to Ecuador and would not have been well-known to European viewers. Among these are: guayaba (guava), tagsos, capulic, caymitos, lapaia28, chilguacanes, chamburos, mameys, pitahayas, árbol de obo, Chilean coconuts, and varieties of plantains, among others. However, some of the fruits depicted are not native to the region; moreover, Albán seems to emphasize the familiarity of a few of these, such as the strawberries or frutillas, which he notes are similar to the European variety of strawberries. Pineapples, another fruit that would have been familiar to Continental viewers, also grace the canvases29. By incorporating fruits known to foreign viewers alongside the more obscure specimens, Albán demonstrates the wide spectrum of local natural products while also advertising Quito as an ideal environment in which other popular fruits might also be cultivated. That is, the Quiteñan environment appears in this series as a versatile environment that could produce a variety of products.
19In this way, the Albán series seems to coincide neatly with the Mutis project. Indeed, the artist’s approach to the depiction of native flora seems to incorporate the lessons learned from the physician’s project. The emphasis on full visual exposure of the specimens, the inclusion of multiple views, and the use of heavily saturated color parallels nicely with the output of the botanical workshop. Interestingly, Mutis conceived of his artists’ style as an “iconic” approach to illustration30. He encouraged his artists to collapse as much information about specimens into one, coherent, and carefully rendered image. Such an approach, he mused, would ensure that no plant “from the loftiest tree to the humble weed, will remain hidden to the investigation of true botanists if represented after nature for the instruction of those who, unable to travel throughout the world, without seeing plants in their native soil will be able to know them through their detailed explanation and living image.”31 The idea that the image could incorporate a spectrum of views, angles, and details of any given plant would ensure the intelligibility of those images for anyone, anywhere, and at any time. In Albán’s images, the seeming redundant depiction of the same fruit, given from various angles, both in whole and split open, seems to adhere to this exhaustive approach to illustration.
20Albán’s adoption of the illustrative techniques expounded by the Mutis workshop seems to suggest a connection. However, a lack of documentation makes it difficult to establish the exact nature of the relationship between the Albán series and the Mutis expedition. According to Briana Simmon’s research, no record of a Vicente Albán survives in the list of Quiteñan painters engaged for the Mutis expedition32. However, Vargas links Albán’s 1783 series with Mutis, claiming that the latter actually commissioned the works33. The series of six canvases, now housed in the Museo de América in Madrid, purported to be the originals, were evidently sent to Madrid to be exhibited in the Museo de Historia Natural for the pleasure of the intellectual elite34. Each of these paintings bears a small number “2” on the canvas, a detail whose significance has been unresolved. A series of four paintings, copies of those in the Madrid set, were auctioned by Christie’s in 1992. According to the auction records, this series bore a number “1” on each canvas35. Drawing from this evidence, it seems likely that Albán created multiple copies of the series. Perhaps Mutis (if he was, indeed, the original patron) commissioned one set of works for himself while ordering an additional copy or copies to be sent to Spain or other important patrons. Perhaps these multiple sets were destined for export both as proof of his efforts abroad as well as serving as exotic evidence for curious viewers in Spain of the wealth of their foreign territories.
21Looking to the human subjects in the painting also permits for an analysis of how the descriptive genre associated with the Enlightenment and botanical expeditions was applied to describe and categorize cultural “types.” Because of the artist’s choice to exhibit ethnic types in general and indigenous types in particular, Albán’s images have been mistakenly interpreted as cuadros de mestizaje or casta images36. Gladly, Simmons corrects this error in her research, pointing out that the images do not, in fact, display racial mixing37. More accurately, the individuals depicted in the series may be understood as the various kinds of indigenous people one might encounter in and around the highland center. Importantly, the series do not contain images that portray mixing according to the quasi-mathematical structure seen in many casta paintings38. Oftentimes, casta paintings were made for export, commissioned to fulfill a desire for an image of the exotic. Much like the botanical illustrations, they adhered to a strict nomenclature that echoes the Linnaean system of classification, perhaps out of an anxiety with regards to the unbounded process of racial mixing that so preoccupied both peninsulares as well as criollos39.
22Yet, the impulse towards classification in the Albán series is not so much about racial mixing, but rather appears to be an early expression of costumbrismo. In particular, the focus on distinctive types that one might see in Quito - the Indio and India Principales, the Yumbos, Yapangas, and Señora Principal with her black slave - seem to be caricatures of local figures that would have been familiar to a local audience and a source of fascination to foreigners. The Indio and India Principales likely refer to an elite group of indigenous leaders who were charged with extracting tribute from their local communities and were provided with various political and economic privileges40. Meanwhile the yumbos serve as a representation of a heterogeneous group that inhabited the areas surrounding Quito, Guayaquil, Ibarra, and the impenetrable forests in the northern regions of Ecuador41. According to folkloric tradition, these people were understood as both exotic and common - they were both wild, yet ubiquitous in the urban markets.
23Well known as indomitable travelers, the yumbo existed in the Quiteñan imagination as a friendly and non-threatening figure. Albán visualizes them accordingly, positioning them in thick forests far removed from civilization. Here, the yumbos appear to seamlessly integrate into their surroundings. Decked out in feathers, shells, animal skins, and face paint, the yumbo in his gala costume stands proudly, appearing gamely and almost effeminate in his strange wardrobe. On the other hand, the yumbo with cargo envisions the subject as an agent of transport and trade42. Laden down with his heavy burden, he runs barefoot along a forest path. Depicted as the only individual in this series engaged in labor or in motion, this yumbo fulfills his culturally assigned role - he is excluded from the urban, civilized sphere, yet his labor implicates him in Quito’s social structure. Curiously, the monkey, who hunches over his delicious meal, actually seems to echo the pose and facial expression of his indigenous counterpart.
24It seems that Albán adopted fictitious tropes that were being deployed in contemporary images of indigenous subjects. Another prescient example of this is a painting by one of Albán’s contemporaries, Antonio Astudillo, of Fray Jodoco Ricke Baptizing the Natives from 1786 (Fig. 21)43. In the painting, the indigenous figures appear decked out in fantastic feather headdresses similar to those seen in the yumbo images from Albán’s series. Even more striking in their similarity to Albán’s figures, the indigenous supplicants in the Cortés Alcocer’s Royal Charity Hospital, Quito, also a contemporary image, appear semi-nude, wearing headdresses made of feathers44. Though it is not known whether or not Cortés, Astudillo, and Albán knew each other, it seems highly likely that they must have had some correspondence. In comparing these images, it seems that they must have also been working from similar sources as a means of developing visual strategies to portray the array of ethnic types found in the city.
25This proto-costumbrista vision of Quito, reflected in Albán’s series, also accompanied the release of Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa’s Travels. In the engraved illustrations that accompanied the printed editions, various local figures, plants, and animals populate the engraved plates appeared with descriptive labels45. I propose that Albán might have had access to these kinds of illustrations. Together with his possible familiarity with the Mutis expedition, Albán was able to envision local peoples and environs in a way that conformed, in part, to the classificatory tastes of European consumers. Staged on and around nameless bodies, these works can be understood not as an attempt to depict local realities, but rather as a concentrated effort to distill the most salient and exotic qualities of Quiteñan society in an easily comprehensible manner. The frontal, organized way in which Albán presents his scenes provides for a degree of legibility - a readable space upon which viewers could experience a fantasy about the foreign, uninterrupted by the inconvenience of specificity or narrative.
26Although Albán’s descriptive approach to local types, flora, and fauna catered to the desires of a curious, and, likely, foreign audience, what is remarkable about this painting is the manner that he presented his subject using an artistic idiom that demonstrates characteristics of Quiteñan art. Throughout the colonial period, pupils trained at art schools associated with the different religious orders created paintings of saints, virgins, Christ, and other figures to be used within the church setting or for personal contemplation. Because these paintings had a spiritual function, they adhered to a set of standards that changed little over the years. Adornment and ornamentation on paintings of the Virgin, saints, and angels was meant to accentuate the holy nature of the subject and inspire viewers to piety. Gold highlights, called brocateado, and patterned surfaces set the venerable figures apart from the mundane world. In Quito, like elsewhere in the Americas, religious art was strictly bound to its intended function.
27The Albán series incorporates many of these aesthetic strategies, manifesting his training in the religious arts. Little is known of Albán or his œuvre - as is the case with many Quiteñan painters from the colonial period, attribution of works remains difficult. Albán, like other artists of his time, was likely trained in religious arts in either the Colegio de San Luis, San Fernando, San Gregorio, or through some apprenticeship associated with one of the city’s religious orders. In this kind of training, Albán would have learned traditional iconography of local devotional images, how to blend pigments, and how to adorn the surfaces of his canvases with gold brocateado techniques. Applying these methods in his descriptive approach to Quiteñan types, flora, and fauna, Albán achieved a synthesis of the Quiteñan taste for surface décor with the descriptive style that typifies enlightenment illustrations of the natural world.
28These paintings thus mark an important change in artistic practices in Quito towards the end of the eighteenth - century, as new economic imperatives began to affect how Quiteñans interpreted and viewed their local environment. Prior to the scientific expeditions, painters envisioned the landscape as a locus of divine workings - the droughts, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes a sign of God’s wrath, the verdant beauty and temperate climate as a sign of His benevolence towards the people. Yet, with the Enlightenment-era expeditions, the local environment became a source of empiric curiosity. What was previously interpreted as a sign of divine order became increasingly viewed as a source of wealth, of a system to be codified and exploited to ensure the economic health of the struggling colonial order. As the gaze towards the natural world began to alienate itself from that more mystical way of seeing, cultural concepts arose that would allow Quiteñans to understand themselves as though from the gaze of the outsider. Costumbrismo, a new genre that evidences itself in the rendering of these local types, thus registers a remarkable transition in visual economies.
29Yet, to assume that this shift towards the scientific would expunge the visual of its previous baroque reliance on ornamental celebration would miss the mark. For, in the painted surface, the flatness and apparent superficiality of the decorative approach, rests an ongoing undercurrent of that very mystical way of interpreting the world aesthetically that the scientific gaze so ardently seemed to oppose. In viewing the conjunction of this Quiteñan aesthetic with the empirical qualities of the canvases, we as modern viewers are forced to reconsider in what ways the Enlightenment, in some ways, must be understood as an outgrowth of that colonial paradigm46. The resulting visual forms - the Albán series, much like casta paintings, travel images, and costumbrista images - are an evolution of the colonial; a new kind of mysticism that enthroned culture and nature as the objects of its gaze.
Fig. 1 - Vicente Albán. Señora Principal. 1783

Oil on canvas, 80 x 109 cm. Museo de América, Madrid, Spain
Foto: Joaquín Otero Ubeda
Fig. 2 - Vicente Albán. Yapanga. 1783

Oil on canvas, 80 x 109 cm. Museo de América, Madrid, Spain
Foto: Joaquín Otero Ubeda
Fig. 3 - Vicente Albán. Indio Principal. 1783

Oil on canvas, 80cm x 109 cm. Museo de América, Madrid, Spain
Foto: Joaquín Otero Ubeda
Fig. 4 - Vicente Albán. India in Festive Dress. 1783

Oil on canvas, 80 x 109 cm. Museo de América. Madrid, Spain
Foto: Joaquín Otero Ubeda
Fig. 5 - Vicente Albán. Feathered Yumbo. 1783

Oil on canvas, 80 x 109 cm. Museo de América. Madrid, Spain
Foto: Joaquín Otero Ubeda
Fig. 6 - Vicente Albán. Cargo Yumbo. 1783

Oil on canvas, 80 x 109 cm. Museo de América. Madrid, Spain
Foto: Joaquín Otero Ubeda
Bibliographie
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Carrera, Magali Marie. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
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De Vos, Paula Susan. "An Herbal El Dorado: The Quest for Botanical Wealth in the Spanish Empire" In Endeavour. 27, no. 3 (2003): 117-121.
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10.2307/j.ctvqr1dp8 :Estrella, Eduardo. El pan de América: etnohistoria de los alimentos aborígenes en el Ecuador. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Centros de Estudios Históricos, 1986.
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Juan, Jorge and Antonio de Ulloa. A Voyage to South America. Translated by John Adams. New York: Knopf, 1964.
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Muñoz Garmendía, Félix, and Esther García Guillén. La botánica al servicio de la corona: la expedición de Ruiz, Pavón y Dombey al Virreinato del Perú (1777-1831). Barcelona: Lunwerg Editores, 2003.
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Simmons, Briana B. Vicente Albán's Quiteño Series of 1783: Science and Spectacle in Representing the New World. Thesis (M.A.) - University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010.
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Notes de bas de page
1 Daniela Bleichmar erroneously defined these images as such in her dissertation, Visual Culture in Eighteenth-Century Natural History: Botanical Illustrations and Expeditions in the Spanish Atlantic, Thesis (doctoral)--Princeton University, 2005. However she later revised that assessment in her book, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 161. Before the book was released, Briana Simmons authored an excellent unpublished Master’s thesis in which she astutely acknowledged the divergent meaning and function of Albán’s series. See Briana B. Simmons, Vicente Albán's Quiteño Series of 1783: Science and Spectacle in Representing the New World. Thesis (M.A.)-University of California, Santa Barbara, 2010.
2 This term means “barefoot” in Quechua, an issue that I will discuss later on.
3 Another major expedition to Peru and Chile headed by Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón in 1777 before these expeditions and probably inspired both the New Granada study as well as the Guayaquil expedition. However, because this first expedition did not embark in the territories around Quito, I will not discuss it in this essay. For more information, see Félix Muñoz Garmendía and Esther García Guillén, La botánica al servicio de la corona: la expedición de Ruiz, Pavón y Dombey al virreinato del Perú (1777-1831) (Barcelona: Lunwerg Editores, 2003). Also, see Daniela Bleichmar, “A Visible and Useful Empire: Visual Culture and Colonial Natural History in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish World” in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009): 290-310, 293.
4 The term “baroque” has been used to characterize Latin American colonial art in the historiography of the 20th and 21st centuries and is used to refer to a kind of aesthetic, characterized by elaborate surface decoration, emotion, dynamism, and a focus on religious subjects. Moreover, the idea of the baroque has become strongly associated with the religious and political colonization of the new world. However, the idea of the baroque as a descriptive category has been called into question, most recently by Ramon Mujica Pinilla, as it tends to imply an homogenous appearance and meaning throughout the Americas, tending to obscure regional and temporal differences in the art produced between the 15th and 18th centuries. Here, I use the term “baroque” merely as a means of orienting the general discussion, though I hope to convey that Quiteñan art, far from being representative of all colonial art, had its own unique trajectory, concerns, and characteristic, even when it shared similar qualities with art produced in other colonial centers. See Ramón Mujica Pinilla, Barroco peruano (Lima, Perú: Banco del Crédito, 2002) for an in depth discussion of the theoretical concerns regarding the term “baroque.”
5 Frank Salomon, Los Yumbos, Niguas y Tsatchila o Colorado durante la colonia espaǹola: etnohistoria del Noroccidente de Pichincha, Ecuador (Quito: Ediciones ABYA-YALA, 1997).
6 Briana Simmons makes this excellent point in her master’s thesis, a point which Daniela Bleichmar recently revised in Visible Empire, 2012.
7 See Daniela Bleichmar, 2014 and 2005.
8 Paula De Vos, "An Herbal El Dorado: The Quest for Botanical Wealth in the Spanish Empire" in Endeavour. 27, no. 3: 117-121, 274. Also see “The Rare, the Singular, and the Extraordinary” In Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2009: 271-289, 274-275.
9 Antonio Lafuente and Nuria Valverde, “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics” In Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, edited by Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005: 134-147, 136.
10 Ibid., 136.
11 However, as Paula de Vos notes, the underlying principle of exploitative possibility that characterized the earliest colonial projects seems to have changed very little. Paula de Vos, The Science of Spices
12 Quoted in Bleichmar, 2005: 15.
13 Bleichmar, 2005: 11.
14 Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa wrote two texts describing their journey, one called La Relación Histórica del Viaje a la America Meridional and the other Noticias Secretas, which constituted a report of contraband smuggling to the Spanish crown. This reported contraband was resulting in a loss of revenue, something which the enlightened monarchs hoped to address with the reforms.
15 The expedition was conceived of to resolve a dispute between Descartes and Newton regarding the shape of the globe. See Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, 2003: 735.
16 A manual sent to botanical collectors throughout Spain and her colonies in 1779, indicated that “the vegetable riches of Spanish America…have over the mineral ones the advantage that they can be propagated and multiplied ad infinitum once they are possessed and naturalized in the peninsula. “Quoted in Bleichmar, 2005: 37. Also in De Vos, 2003: 118-119. Indeed, by this time Spain had already realized the economic potential of monoculture. For example, sugar cane, like the Africans bought and sold to harvest the product, was, in theory, an inexhaustible source of wealth. More importantly, sugar cane, like slaves, could reproduce and be sold for profit. The silver of Potosí and the gold of the Pacific coast of New Granada, on the other hand, were limited.
17 Bleichmar, 2006: 84.
18 Idem.
19 Daniela Bleichmar has noted that these illustrations, perhaps more so than the actual botanical specimens themselves, were prized by the crown. Ibid., 84.
20 Ibid., 87.
21 Daniela Bleichmar, “Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire,” In Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. 225-252, 237-238.
22 José María Vargas, Arte Quiteño en los siglos XVII, XVIII (Quito: Litografía e imprenta Romero, 1949), 129.
23 Idem., 129.
24 Ibid., 130.
25 Idem., 130.
26 Bleichmar argues that these choices were conscious considerations that had little to do with artistic traditions, relating rather to botanical considerations Bleichmar, 2006: 91.
27 Idem., 91.
28 This likely refers to a type of papaya. See Eduardo Estrella, El pan de América: etnohistoria de los alimentos aborígenes en el Ecuador (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Centros de Estudios Históricos, 1986), 270, also referenced in Simmons, 2010: 42.
29 Though known and coveted for their flavor since the early colonial period, the pineapple was not cultivated in Europe until the seventeenth century when John Rose, royal gardener to King Charles II of England, introduced them to the royal gardens.
30 Quoted in Bleichmar, 2006: 97.
31 Idem., 97.
32 Simmons, 2010: 18.
33 Vargas, 1949: 128.
34 Stratton-Pruitt, et. al., 2012: 8-9.
35 The auction record notes that this was owned by a private collector in Miami, which leads me to believe that this series stayed in the Americas and was, perhaps, commissioned for someone living in Spanish America. Whether or not that person was Mutis I am uncertain. See the record under “Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture” Lot 1, sale 7538. Sold 24 November 1992, New York City. http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/vicente-Albán-2360326-details.aspx?intObjectID=2360326. Accessed 21 November 2013.
36 Bleichmar, 2005.
37 Simmons, 2010: 21.
38 The emergence of the casta system, or racialized hierarchy based on the idea of limpieza de sangre, can be traced to the earliest days of the colonial period, wherein Spaniards, Indians, mulatos, mestizos, and Africans were divided and accorded separate privileges, obligations, and spiritual statuses. Despite the Spaniards’ attempts to control these distinctions, interracial mixing confounded the carefully theorized notions of race. Official recognition of separate castas, or possible mixtures, began to gather steam in the seventeenth century, reaching its zenith in the latter half of the eighteenth century. The genre of casta paintings coincided with the increasing desire to understand and categorize American societies, though, as Katzew notes, the casta genre encompasses an enormous corpus of works and cannot be understood according to a single theory or interpretation. Nonetheless, some commonalities emerge in her analysis. Largely speaking, casta series are often comprised of sixteen discrete images, which, when viewed together, imagine the entirety of possibilities of racial mixing. Often, the images contain three or four figures: the parents, who are of distinct ethnic origins, and their children, who are the resulting mixture. Accompanying these images a short text, configured almost like a mathematical equation, describes the mixture. See Ilona Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Also see Magali Marie Carrera, Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.
39 Katzew, 2004.
40 See Karen Viera Powers, Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.
41 Saloman, 1997.
42 Yumbos were essential to Quito’s trade routes, as they often carried heavy parcels of goods, and even people, on their backs across high mountain passes, through dangerous river crossings, and across deep, the precarious gorges that marred the terrain in and around the urban center. For a first-hand account of indigenous people and their role in transportation, see Blanca Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso, Culture and History in the Upper Amazon. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991, which details, first-hand, the difficulties of such labor.
43 Fray Jodocko Ricke was celebrated for having baptized the first Indians in Quito and also for introducing the first wheat in the region following the conquest. Housed at the Franciscan monastery, this image would have been understood as a powerful reminder of the order’s commitment to the natives as well as spoken to their prestige as the first founding religious institution in the community.
44 I was unable to attain the rights to reproduce this image in this chapter. This image was commissioned by the president of the Audiencia of Quito, José García de Leon y Pizarro, to this work for the newly christened Royal Charity Hospital during the years of Leon y Pizarro’s regency, 1777-1784.
45 This method of illustration has older origins in travel and costume books, pioneered by the Dutch and Venetians centuries earlier.
46 Also see Juan Pimentel, “Baroque Natures: Juan E. Nieremberg, American Wonders, and Preterimperial Natural History” In Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800, Edited by Daniela Bleichmar, Paula de Vos, Kristin Huffine, and Kevin Sheehan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009: 93-114, for a discussion that touches on similar theoretical issues.
Auteur
-
Sonya Wohletz
PhD Student Roger Thayer Stone Center for Latin American Studies, Tulane Univ., USA
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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