Overview

A study of domestic religious sculptures in Quito. During the eighteenth century, the colonial capital of Quito established itself as a prolific producer of wooden polychrome sculpture. With large glass eyes, smooth shiny surfaces, and minute attention to detail, the sculptures possessed an artistic refinement that enchanted contemporaries. While these objects depicted Christian sacred personages, they were not always sequestered in churches and shrines. They filled domestic spaces, becoming signifiers not only of holiness but also of a distinctive Quitenian culture. Devotional sculpture was, on its face, an aesthetic reifiction of the colonial project, commissioned by creole elites. However, drawing on published accounts and archival evidence, including wills and dowries, Leslie Todd shows that sculpture was diffused across society, contributing to a complex localized identity. As makers, viewers, and owners of sculpture, QuiteÑos of Indigenous and mixed heritage and varying socioeconomic backgrounds took active roles in creating the city’s visual culture. In doing so, Todd argues, they simultaneously underscored and challenged colonial class and power systems, investing a European form with styles that revealed and reinforced specifically Spanish American subjectivity.

Full Product Details

9781477333686

Table of Contents

Reviews

Through an exhaustive analysis of inventories, wills, and artist contracts, in concert with the objects themselves, Leslie Todd's meticulously researched book contains a wealth of new and exciting insights into the world of colonial Ecuadorian sculpture. She brilliantly situates this sculptural tradition within the aesthetic and socioracial landscape of eighteenth-century Quito, transporting us to the workshops and homes of artists and patrons to understand their roles in the co-creation of an iconic sculptural tradition. --Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Cornell University, author of Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes

Author Information

Leslie E. Todd is an assistant professor of art history at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available