In this, Rubens was not alone: the European print was—for roughly three hundred years, or the entirety of the colonial period—arguably the single most important force to shape the artistic landscapes of the Spanish Americas. Paintings in churches but also sculpture, liturgical objects, ornamental reliefs, and even the very architecture of colonial cities all took shape in response to imported designs that had been sent from afar.
Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Getty Research Institute, $70.00) is the first comprehensive study of this transatlantic phenomenon, despite broad recognition that it was one of the most important forces to shape the artistic landscapes of the region. Copying, particularly in colonial contexts, has traditionally held negative implications that have discouraged its serious exploration. Yet, analyzing the interpretation of printed sources and recontextualizing the resulting works within period discourse and their original spaces of display allow a new critical reassessment of this broad category of art produced in colonial Latin America—art that has all too easily been dismissed as derivative and thus unworthy of sustained interest and investigation.
Rubens in Repeat takes a new approach to the paradigms of artistic authorship that emerged alongside these complex creative responses, focusing on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the use of European prints was an essential component of the very framework in which colonial artists forged ideas about what it meant to be a creator.