Rococo Architecture and Spirituality in South America

This groundbreaking multidisciplinary study of Rococo church architecture and religious culture in South America will challenge the field in three significant ways. First, it will dispute the consensus among Latin Americanists that the 18th century was dominated by Iberian Baroque by highlighting the prominence of the International Rococo, not only in urban centers, but also in peripheral missions where it was transformed through contact with Native American cultures and resulted in novel categories of artistic blending (known often as 'hybridity'). Second, it will break with the prevailing viewpoint of historians of both European and Latin American art that Rococo was merely a visual manifestation of a frivolous and decadent age. A primary goal of this study is to understand the socio-religious motives for the importation of this style into an ecclesiastical setting: I will show that it was the expression of a new mysticism promoted by the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), the institution most responsible for introducing Rococo into Latin America, and that a favourable religious and political climate made Brazil and Spanish South America particularly receptive to this new spirituality. Finally, this will be the first large scale study to acknowledge the substantial contribution made by non-Iberian European artists and architects-primarily Central European and Italian Jesuits-to Latin American art. By exploring the legacy of the Rococo in South America, I will demonstrate the extraordinary artistic wealth of the Southern Cone (primarily present-day Argentina, Chile and Paraguay), a frontier region in colonial times that is still widely considered to be of little cultural significance. My ultimate hope is to drive the scholarship, with its increasingly narrow focus on New Spain (Mexico) and Peru (primarily Cuzco), past its cultural frontier and encourage future studies of hitherto uncharted parts of Hispanic America and more trans-Atlantic inquiries-an approach that remains inexplicably uncommon. This interdisciplinary project will not only integrate different art historical fields in novel ways but will also interact with church and social history, literary and post-colonial studies, and anthropology, opening up new horizons in these fields. I was inspired to begin this project after reading innovative new work on Brazil by Myriam Ribeiro (2003) which astonished Brazilian scholars by revealing that the so-called 'Brazilian Baroque,' a style label with enduring nationalistic ramifications, was in reality a form of International Rococo and profoundly influenced by French and Germanic models. My study will extend beyond the scope of Ribeiro's work in two significant ways. First, it will embrace the reception of Rococo in all of South America, thus breaching a boundary between studies of Portuguese and Spanish America that remains entrenched. This breach is crucial for this study because Brazilian Rococo had a powerful impact on the Rococo in Spanish America, both through the migration of its artists (such as Pedro Carmona, a Brazilian retablo maker at El Pilar in Buenos Aires in the 1770s) and illicit trade. Second, unlike Ribeiro, I will consider Rococo in both urban and mission contexts--the latter my focus for over a decade.

I will undertake this research by investigating three kinds of visual/textual sources. First, I will complete my photo survey of rococo motifs from churches and church furnishings in South America to enhance my existing database. Second, I will continue to investigate manuscript sources in archives in Italy, Argentina, and Brazil, such as the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu in Rome, the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires, and the Colecção Pedro de Angelis in Rio de Janeiro. Finally, I will revisit and review in more detail 18th century treatises on the spiritual rococo, anthropological literature,and church history studies at the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris and the British Library.