Pictured Politics

Emily Engel is an independent scholar based in Southern California who has published widely on visual culture in early modern South America. She is a coeditor of Manuscript Cultures of Colonial Mexico and Peru: New Questions and Approaches and A Companion to Early Modern Lima, as well as the founding associate editor of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture.

Engel’s book is a welcome addition to the scholarly dialogue about portraiture, one that brings the complexities of colonial relationships to bear on the discussion of a genre viewed as embodying power. Pictured Politics will appeal to specialists and students of colonial art and portraiture studies. Most of the images she analyzes have never been reproduced in an English language art history text. Their appearance within Engel’s book widens our understanding of portraits produced in the eighteenth century and the ways in which they were employed and displayed in a colonial context. Engel treats this understudied material in richly nuanced ways with compelling discussion. (Journal18) Pictured Politics provides a model for studying the ways in which local and imperial concerns converged in artistic patronage and serves as a fine example of how interviceregal comparison can be revealing and, at the same time, generate new research questions. (caa.reviews) Engel’s work makes important contributions to the understanding of South American colonial art and that of the early nineteenth century...Pictured Politics is the first stand-alone analysis of South American portraiture. As such, Emily Engel’s research offers insights beyond the physical portraits’ stylistic traits and icono-graphic content, helping the reader see what cannot be seen, by examining portraiture as more than just historical artifacts. Her comprehensive analyses of the sociopolitical roots of this genre over time reveal deep material relationships that intricately intertwined portraiture with complex regional and local notions of authority. (Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe) Pictured Politics makes an exemplary contribution to one of the least studied aspects of the history of Hispanic viceregal art: portraiture in South America...a nuanced and deep reading of the official-in other words, corporate, and predominantly male-portrait in the primary political and commercial centres of South America. (Hispanic Research Journal) Pictured Politics offers a new and much-needed reframing of official portrait series that have rested in the background of colonial art history. It offers provocative conclusions and will undoubtedly inspire further research. Moreover, the book will hopefully help secure the preservation of surviving examples of these important records of colonial history. (H-Net Reviews)

• Acknowledgments  Introduction: Art and Authority in Late Colonial South American PortraitureChapter 1. New Pictorial Practices: Early Official Portraits in Viceregal PeruChapter 2. Visualizing Empire’s History: Royal Portraits in the Iberoamerican WorldChapter 3. Picturing Viceregal Authority in the Lima City CouncilChapter 4. Municipal Collecting: Viceregal Portraits in BogotÁ and Buenos AiresChapter 5. Portrayal in a Time of Transition: Early Nineteenth-Century PortraitsEpilogue: The Afterlife of Official Portraits  NotesBibliographyIndex