Latin American art and architecture refers to the artistic traditions developed by the European colonizers of Mexico, Central America, and South America, and their descendants. Since the European discovery of the New World, the art and architecture of this vast area has evolved in two phases.  The first was the colonial phase, beginning late in the 15th century and ending early in the 19th century, after the wars for independence were concluded.  In Mexico the Revolution of the early 20th century marked the beginning of the second phase--the emergence of modern developments in architecture, painting, and sculpture.  The rest of Latin America entered this phase at various times, although generally soon after it had begun in Mexico.

Highly developed civilizations existed in the New World thousands of years before the arrival of Europeans. Pre-Columbian American centers of great importance flourished in the Andes, central Mexico, and the \TMaya\t area (Yucatan and Central America) up until the time of the Spanish conquest of the \LAztec\ls (1519-21) and of the \TInca\t (1531).  On the desert coast of Peru the ruins of sun-dried mud brick buildings carved with polychromed relief sculptures can still be seen at \TChan Chan\t (AD 1200-1450) and other sites;  remains of expertly cut stone constructions exist at \TCuzco\t, \TMachu Picchu\t (AD 1450-1532), and elsewhere in the Andean highlands.  In Mexico pyramids of earthen rubble faced with stone and finished with brilliantly painted plaster dominated the architecture of the pre-Columbian period.  \TTeotihuacan\t, a great urban center of the central valley of Mexico (200 BC-AD 750), was larger in area than Imperial Rome.  A place of pilgrimage for many ancient peoples of Mesoamerica, it was a magnificent city of streets and palaces punctuated by pyramids and plazas laid out around a great central axis.

Generally characteristic of \Tpre-Columbian art and architecture\t was its skillful integration of architecture, sculpture, and painting into a style that presents a unique synthesis of all three aesthetic forms.  This synthesizing tendency is also seen in the baroque style that appeared during the colonial period; it is likewise characteristic of much modern Latin American architecture even today.

Few of the native-American arts lasted long after the conquest. One of the best documented examples of a native art surviving past the 16th century is the art of manuscript painting practiced among the Indians of Mexico.  The earlier pre-Columbian styles with their abstract rendering of human figures gradually gave way to a more European approach to forms, the handling of the brush and pen, and even the use of European paper instead of tree bark and other native materials. Another survival of the pre-Columbian period in Mexico was the making of feather mosaics.  Here the artists changed from making garments for the Aztec rulers and nobility to making decorations for bishops' miters and for other Christian ecclesiastical objects.  In Peru the keru, a flared wooden drinking vessel decorated with carved and painted designs in the Inca tradition, continued into the colonial period with few changes except in subject matter.

Folk art traditions that began in the 16th century became widespread throughout Latin America.  They represent an art based on the copying of styles over long periods of time in isolation from the innovating impulses emanating from vital artistic centers.  The Santos, polychrome paintings and sculptures of saints, executed in a notably reverential yet primitive style, are typical examples of folk art, as is the carved facade of the Cathedral of Zacatecas (1752) in Mexico. Many church exteriors in the Andes region exhibit relief patterns resembling those found in local textiles.  This distinctive folk style is sometimes called mestizo ("mixed") art because it combines traditional Indian features with Christian elements.  Its main centers were the Peruvian towns of Ayacucho and Arequipa.

COLONIAL PERIOD

During the colonial period cities of great architectural splendor as well as local schools of painting and sculpture arose, especially in those parts of Latin America where the pre-Hispanic civilizations had thrived at the time of the conquest.  In Peru the main Inca center of Cuzco became in the colonial period a splendid city with great churches, monastic buildings, and palaces.  The School of Cuzco, a major colonial painting tradition noted for its profuse use of gold leaf, also developed there.  \TTenochtitlan\t, the Aztec capital, became Mexico City, the seat of the richest New World viceroyalty (that of New Spain) and an archbishopric;  it is still sometimes called the City of Palaces, and its school of painting became the most important in the colonial world. Cities that became in effect cultural satellites of these two early capitals include Bogota and Quito for Cuzco and Puebla and Oaxaca for Mexico City.  Colonial Buenos Aires in Argentina, Santiago in Chile, Monterrey in Mexico, and Antigua in Guatemala were more or less frontier towns by comparison, depending primarily on mining, trade, or administration rather than cultural ascendancy for their importance in colonial times.

Unlike the other major New World colonies, the former Portuguese colony of Brazil was built upon no preexisting high Indian culture.  Nevertheless, the architecture, painting, and sculpture of its principal colonial centers--Bahia, Recife, Belem--as well as of its mining towns in the province of Minas Gerais--all bear the imprint of having been created in a metropolitan environment rather than in provincial outposts. Perhaps the strict ties maintained between Lisbon and the overseas world helped keep Brazil abreast of European trends in the plastic arts;  by contrast, in Mexico and Peru, where somewhat greater autonomy was given the local government, the arts remained in general more remote and more provincial in style.

Sixteenth Century

The 16th century marked the construction of a wide range of public building (of which few are still standing);  many monastic establishments, mainly by the Augustinian, Dominican, and Franciscan men's orders;  and the beginnings of the great cathedrals.  The early military conquerors and religious orders in the New World brought with them works of art--paintings and sculptures--as well as knowledge of the main architectural styles then current in Spain.  These styles included Late Gothic vaulted churches with pointed arches, buttresses, and traceried windows.

The Late Gothic style, dominant in the early monastic establishments, was often conjoined with external facades and interior altarpieces designed in the Plateresque, or early Renaissance, style of Spain.  This combination of styles appears in the cathedral of Santo Domingo on Hispaniola, the oldest cathedral in the New World, begun in 1512.  By the end of the 16th century more advanced construction techniques appeared and a number of triple nave cathedrals on a basilica plan were built, including those at Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Puebla, the latter designed by Claudio de Arciniega (c.1528-93).

Another style the Spanish brought to their new colonies was called Mudejar, meaning the style of Moorish artisans working for Christians.  The most prevalent form of Mudejar art to reach the New World, seen especially in South America and in the Caribbean Islands, are the elaborate carved and painted coffered ceilings with exposed wooden beams.  These ceilings are decorated with abstract Moorish motifs that feature interpenetrating linear designs meeting in elaborate star patterns.  Modeled stucco decoration also using Moorish designs often appears on the outer walls of buildings.  In Lima palaces having shuttered wooden balconies are reminiscent of the Moslem world of Spain or North Africa.

Throughout the colonial period, beginning with the first foundation of cities, military architecture played an important role.  The castles and fortified city walls and forts of Havana, Cuba;  Acapulco, Mexico;  Lima, Peru;  Veracruz, Mexico;  Panama City;  and San Juan, Puerto Rico, are among the major works of military architecture designed to protect the colonies from marauding pirates or foreign navies in time of war.

City planning was also of great importance because so many new towns and villages had to be founded from early in the colonial period.  In Mexico, for instance, the Spaniards frequently relocated Indian villages from the low-lying hills to open and accessible locations so that they could be better controlled. When the new village or, as in the case of Puebla, Mexico, new town was laid out it followed the regular European Renaissance plan--a gridiron of streets intersecting at right angles with a main plaza in the heart of the town.  On this plaza were built the parish church or, depending on the importance of the town, cathedral, and other public buildings such as the city hall and jail, residences for important royal officials, and in the case of a cathedral town, the palace of the bishop or archbishop.

In painting, frescoes decorating some of the earliest colonial paintings were executed in grisaille (shades of grey that create the illusion of sculpture).  Sixteenth-century painters who migrated from Europe included Italian-born Bernardo Bitti (1548-1610) in South America, and in Mexico, Flemish-born Simon Pereyns (active second half of the 16th century).  Both painted in the Mannerist style characterized by attenuated body proportions, small heads, and a kind of withdrawn facial expression, as in Pereyns's St.  Christopher (1588;  Mexico Cathedral).  In the colonies as in Spain, the subject matter of painting was mainly of a religious nature--saints of the church and scenes illustrating the life of Christ and the Virgin. Secular subjects were limited to portraits, and landscapes were unknown.

Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

From the beginning of the 17th century to the end of the colonial period, the baroque styles dominated the artistic life of the Spanish and Portuguese colonies.  Several phases of the baroque style are clearly evident in the monumental architecture and in the carved wooden retables (altarpieces) of the colonial church.  The baroque retable is a painted and gilded screenlike construction placed behind the altar and often reaching from floor to ceiling.  In the early 17th century appeared the so-called salamonic column, derived from the European Plateresque tradition.  This spiral-shaped column, profusely carved with flower and fruit motifs, became a primary element in the 17th-century baroque altarpiece.  The arrangement of the columns in relation to the wall behind them became markedly dynamic, with surface texture and color playing an important decorative role.  Walls no longer appeared as flat surfaces but as convex and concave curves as the columns were projected further in space and piled one before or on top of another.

Colonial architectural projects were greatly expanded in the 18th century.  Universities and other educational buildings were raised, as were numerous parish churches in the rich mining towns such as Taxco and Guanajuato in Mexico.  Typically they were built on a cruciform plan with a dome over the crossing of nave and transepts.  Golden altars were richly adorned with paintings and lifelike polychromed sculptures often garbed in silk, satin, or velvet garments.

In 1718, Jeronimo Balbas (fl.  1706-50) came from Spain to Mexico and introduced the sumptuous estipite columns in the Altar of the Kings in the Cathedral of Mexico City.  The associated style of exuberant architectural decoration, commonly called Churrigueresque after the famous Spanish architect Jose de Churriguera (see \TChurriguera\t family), dominated colonial architecture for the rest of the century. It appeared on exterior facades of churches, palaces, and public buildings, on the interior altars and retables, and even as a motif in paintings.  Estipite columns are square in cross section and divided into three unequal parts by deep horizontal moldings.  They are usually covered with sculptured and gilded plants, fruits, and flowers.  The entablature above is equally elaborated so that the visual effect is often dazzling, especially when it lines the entire side wall of a church or the main altar in the apse.

The erection of countless palaces in the cities and grand haciendas in the country marked the agricultural wealth of the colonists in the 18th century.  As seen in the elegant house of the Marques de Jaral de Berrio (c.1760;  Mexico City), the city palace typically had a large formal patio in the front part of the building with an entrance from the street large enough to admit horses and carriages.  The formal staircase of the first patio led to the formal rooms on the first floor--dining room, salon, sitting rooms, bedrooms, and in the most affluent houses, even a private chapel.  Other patios followed in the plan, often one for the stables and carriage house, one for the kitchen, and another for the laundry and other services.  The sculptural decoration on the palace walls followed generally that used in churches--salamonic columns in the 17th and estipite columns in the 18th century.  In addition to architectural sculpture on the exterior facade the family coat of arms invariably appeared and often, in a niche, the patron saint of the builder.

Portrait painting became immensely popular in the late 17th and 18th centuries.  Wealthy members of the colonial nobility posed in all of their most rich and formal finery--silks from China, pearls from the Pacific, and the insignias of knighthood and nobility from Spain or Portugal.  The foreground of such full-length or half-length portraits often includes a large painted shield or cartouche with the sitter's names and titles. An important Mexican painter was Baltasar de Echave Ibia (c.1585-c.1645), son of the Spanish-born painter Baltasar de Echave Orio (c.1548-1620) and father of the painter Baltasar de Echave Rioja (1632-82).  Other prominent painters of the school of Mexico City were Cristobal de Villalpando (c.1652-1714) and Miguel Cabrera (1695-1768).

The main contribution of Brazil to the art of the baroque period was its magnificent churches and the sculptural creations of Antonio Francisco Lisboa, known as \TAleijadinho\t. Brazilian architects endowed their churches with a forceful spatial expressiveness through the use of interconnecting oval interior spaces and contrasting concave and convex exterior walls.  The octagonal nave, as seen in Sao Pedrodos Clerigos (1728) at Recife, was basic to much Brazilian church architecture.  After 1755 the province of Minas Gerais became the center of architectural activity.  Several churches were built at Ouro Preto, including the Sao Francisco di Assis (1766-94), brilliantly decorated with carvings in wood and soapstone by Aleijadinho.  His most renowned works are the dramatic statues of the Twelve Prophets at Congohas do Campo (1800-05), which highlight the monumental staircase leading to the church of Bom Jesus de Matozinhos.

POSTCOLONIAL PERIOD

At the end of the 18th century the Spanish colonies received a royal order to cease building altarpieces in the opulent estipite style and also to destroy the ones in use and replace them with more chaste altars.  Polychromed sculpture, lavish use of paintings, and the overwhelming profusion of gilding were all to be discontinued;  the architectural elements were thenceforth to be made of white marble, alabaster, or of wood painted white to imitate marble.  Columns were to be made in the simple forms associated with classical antiquity;  the baroque predilection for carving plant decorations on the shaft was to be eliminated.  This largely French-derived neoclassical style, reflected in such buildings as the College of Mines palace (1797-1813;  Mexico City), emerged in both the Hispanic and Brazilian colonies in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, forming a bridge between the colonial period and the period of Latin American independence, which began in 1821.

Nineteenth Century

Architectural activity remained rather limited until the latter part of the 19th century, when the disturbances of the immediate postindependence period had abated and a new prosperity gained ground in Latin America.  During the renewed period of building, new technologies such as plumbing, electrical equipment, and elevators were imported from Europe or the United States.  Another import was the eclectic style associated with the Ecole des Beaux Arts of Paris.  Decorative detailing is rich and varied in this Beaux Arts style, as exemplified in the Venetian Gothic-styled post office in Mexico City and, on a corner diagonally across from it, the baroque national theater (now the Palacio de Bellas Artes), both by the architect Adamo Boari.  Bronze or wrought-iron balustrades, carved marble facades, finely finished interior wood paneling, as well as matching rugs, furniture, and draperies were all part of the architectural program in the many Beaux Arts-inspired urban buildings of the late 19th century.  The Art Nouveau style stemming from France was also widespread at the turn of the century, although this phase of Latin American architecture has been little studied.

Latin American painting in the 19th century can be divided into three major categories:  academic painting sponsored by the government or by members of the ruling elite;  folk art, continuing the strong currents of popular art that originated in the earliest days of the colonies;  and a new element, the painting of everyday life in Latin America by European or North American artists traveling through the New World.

Academic painting in Mexico reflected the styles of academic painting that arose in Europe.  Early in the 19th century neoclassicism was introduced, the foremost representative being the Mexican painter Rafael Jimeno y Planes (1759-1825), who decorated (1810) the dome of the cathedral of Mexico City.  A revival of the baroque in the mid- and late-19th century was characterized by the use of light and shade and by large, complex compositions depicting historical subjects.  Whereas in Europe classical Greek or Roman subjects were generally portrayed, in Latin America subjects from its own past were favored, including scenes of Christopher Columbus, the Catholic kings, and other subjects from Spanish history.  Uniquely New World subjects such as the invention of pulque (a Mexican fermented beverage) or the torture of Cuauhtemoc (an Aztec ruler) were also depicted, especially in Mexico.

Landscape painters also found much of their inspiration in European art styles .  The landscapes of the great Mexican master Jose Maria \TVelasco\t stand out as among the most impressive paintings of their genre in the European tradition on either side of the Atlantic.  In such works as The Valley of Mexico Seen from the Hill of Guadaloupe (1905;  Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno, Mexico City), foreground details studied with the care of a geologist or a botanist appear alongside a sweeping distant view of almost epic dimensions.

Nineteenth-century folk art is represented not only by the continuation of rather stiff portraits but also by increasing numbers of Ex-Votos, a type of religious painting still being produced today.  The Ex-Voto is rendered to offer thanks for a miraculous intervention by a particular saint or image of the Christ.  Usually the account of what happened and the nature of the intercession is written out in detail, including the date and place in which the event occurred.

Among foreign artists who painted Latin American subjects were the German Johann Rugendas (1802-58) and the Englishmen Daniel Egerton (d.  1842) and Frederick \TCatherwood\t, who excelled in making extraordinarily accurate views of Mayan ruins.  The painters of the customs of the people, sometimes linked with native painters of similar subject matter who were called costumbristas, delighted in the picturesque character of country life.  In Argentina they painted gauchos on the pampas, colonial buildings, and festive local costumes.

Twentieth Century

Following the Mexican Revolution of 1910 an entirely new trend emerged in Latin American art and architecture--first in Mexico and at various times thereafter in other Latin American countries.  The academic salon painting of Hispanic or pre-Hispanic historical subjects disappeared from the scene. In its place mural painting portraying the revolution emerged as the representative type.  While the Parisian school was experimenting with cubism and collages and the Bauhaus group in Germany was creating abstract geometric exercises in retreat from human meaning and significance, the Mexicans were returning to representational traditions of Late Gothic and Renaissance Italy--paintings with didactic, humanistic meaning, now charged with clear political overtones.  Like the great quatrocentro masters of the Italian Renaissance, the major Mexican muralists--Diego \TRivera\t, Jose Clemente \TOrozco\t, and David Alfaro \TSiqueiros\t--painted large-scale figures using the fresco method;  integrated painting into the framework of architecture;  and recounted for the people large historical epics, the one religious, the other of contemporary history.

Diego Rivera, the most politically oriented of the three, painted dramatic scenes from the Mexican Revolution (such as the 1923-28 cycle in Mexico City's Ministry of Public Education building) and made comments on the life of his times in a style similar to that of the Renaissance.  His clear figures were painted in a linear fashion and arranged in a series of flat planes, sometimes with landscape backgrounds which derive from the majestic visions of the valley of Mexico conceived by Velasco.  Orozco painted in a more baroque or expressionist style with great swirls of color defining the figures in painterly rather than linear fashion, as in his murals for the National Preparatory School (1923-26;  Mexico City).  Where Rivera suggests the careful and conscientious reporter, Orozco seems more like the epic poet, and Siqueiros, who also painted in an expressionistic, highly dynamic style, seems more like the intense pamphleteer.  The artistic energy represented by the work of these three men surfaced in an entire school of painters, all focusing on the human form as their main artistic motif, some in terms of history, some in terms of sociological significance, some as painters of scenes from Mexican life and lore, some even as surrealists.

Candido \TPortinari\t is the most widely recognized of Brazil's recent painters.  A true modernist, he did fresco murals as well as panel paintings of the Brazilian people, especially cowboys and city workers.  Although he was trained in Paris he abandoned his academic French training once he returned to Rio, where he developed his particularly Brazilian style.  Emilio Pettoruti, on the other hand, studied for 12 years in Europe and on his return to Argentina continued as one of the foremost continental avant-garde painters.  His cubist-styled painting The Quintet (1927;  San Francisco Museum of Art) is startlingly similar to the work of Picasso.  Other well known avant-garde painters include the Chilean Roberto \TMatta Echaurren\t and the Cuban Raul Martinez, the Mexican Rufino \TTamayo\t, and, in the next generation, Colombia's Fernando Botero and Venezuela's Raphael Soto.  In the 1980s, the paintings by Rivera's wife, Frida \TKahlo\t, began to attract attention.

Modern architecture in Latin America began as early as the 1920s with the functionalist principles of such Mexican architects as Juan O'GORMAN and Jose Villagran Garcia.  In Brazil the construction of the new Ministry of Education and Health building (1934-43;  Rio de Janeiro) signaled the definitive inception of the modern international style.  Among the participating architects were Lucio \TCosta\t, Oscar \TNiemeyer\t, and Alfonso Eduardo Reidy (1909-64);  Le Corbusier came from France to act as consultant.

Contemporary architecture in Latin America for the last several decades has been as vital as the architecture of the United States and Europe and, in some respects, even more imaginative. An almost baroque use of curving walls and dynamic definitions of internal and external space are found in much Latin American architecture, notably that of the Mexican architect Felix \Tcandela\t.  Furthermore, throughout much of Latin America the climate is so mild and even tropical that an openness to the environment unknown and impossible in Europe or the United States dominates design.  The combination of painted murals or mosaic-work with sculpture often forms an integral part of the architecture, as in O'Gorman's mosaic-filled Library Building at the monumentally planned University of Mexico (1953), designed principally by Mario Pani and Enrique de Moral.The University City in Caracas, Venezuela, built (1950-57) by Carlos Raul \TVillanueva\t is another example of the focused campus in place of the older tradition of the university occupying a scattered series of buildings in the heart of a metropolis.

Perhaps the greatest urban design of this century in Latin America and one of the major examples of urban planning in the world is that of \TBrasilia\t, the new inland capital of Brazil designed (1957) by Lucio Costa.  Here an entire city, with all of its administrative, legislative, and executive functions clearly laid out according to the plan, was intended to bring the life of Brazil inland from the old coastal cities of the colonial period.  Most of the individual buildings were executed by Oscar Niemeyer.

Donald and Martha Robertson

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