Description:

Spain’s transoceanic empire ran on paperwork. There were mountains of bureaucratic record keeping to be sure; but musical scores, missives, missals, and all manner of other handwritten and printed materials were no less important in the functioning of a newly expanded church and colonial administration.

This talk treats the inculcation of a communal literacy that stretched across oceans as a formal process, locating traces of its negotiation both within some of the most famous works of art produced in New Spain and those almost entirely overlooked.

These objects will serve as a prompt to begin reanimating a period visuality—a formal system of script that has largely eluded art historical evaluation.

Aaron M. Hyman is assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University and author of Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Getty Research Institute, 2021). For 2021-22, he is the Marilyn Thoma Post-Doctoral Fellow; his research is currently further supported by an ACLS Faculty Fellowship, and for fall 2021 he is in residence at the Newberry Library as the 
Audrey Lumsden-Kouvel Long-Term Fellow.