Giovanni Mazzaferro. From Brescia (1670) to Mexico City (1745): cultural migrations in the shadow of the 'Main Art' by Francesco Lana. Part Two: Mexico City

Translation by Francesco Mazzaferro
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Giovanni Mazzaferro
From Brescia (1670) to Mexico City (1745 ca): 

cultural migrations in the shadow of the Main Art by Francesco Lana
Part Two: Mexico City

Go back to Part One

A completely unproven allegation of plagiarism 

I feel useful to address a problem immediately: discussing the Spanish translation of the Main Art, one immediately encounters the nasty question whether there was or not a plagiarism. As mentioned, in 2005 Myrna Soto published the first edition of the manuscript, titled El Arte Maestra. Un tratado de pintura novohispano [27]. Both she and her husband, Guillermo Tovar de Teresa, a famous professor who authored the prologue to the work, considered it the first treatise on painting written by a local artist in the Kingdom of New Spain, and identified the author in the person of José de Ibarra (1685-1756).

A year later, however, another scholar, Paula Mues Orts, published a new edition of the treatise, proving that El Arte Maestra in reality was the (incomplete) translation of the work by Francesco Lana [28]. Mues probably followed an indication from Soto who assumed that the title El Arte Maestra resulted from Lana’s treatise, but apparently had no possibility to consult the Italian text. Mues succeeded to do it, and immediately realized it was a translation.

It's just obvious that Mues’ discovery resized Soto’s patriotic triumphalism. Yet it is not clear why the latter brought the first to the Court of the University of Mexico because of plagiarism, obtaining the volume would be seized. The ruling was appealed by Mues, who benefited from a drastic improvement of the verdict, now consisting only of an official warning for not having behaved correctly vis-à-vis Myrna Soto.

Frankly, I fear this was simply a muscular turf-war conflict between university powers. I read the book by Mues: the authoress cited Myrna Soto at least twenty times (I counted them) and explained clearly in what respects she agreed with the author of the first edition and where she did not. Then it is clear - and inevitable - that Mues was somewhat influenced by the work published in the previous year. Really, at least at a first glance, I failed to understand why the incident occurred. And on the web one can find well-argued statements of solidarity in favour of Paula Mues Orts.

Juan Correa (1646-1716), Screen with the allegorical depiction of the four continents, Soumaya Museum, Mexico City
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Cristóbal de Villalpando (1649-1714 ca), Virgin of the Apocalypse, Bello y González Museum, Puebla City
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The manuscript

The manuscript entitled El Arte Maestra. Discurso sobre la Pintura. Muestra el modo de perficionarla con varias invenciones y reglas practicas pertenecientes a esta materia (The Main Art. It Speeches on Painting, Showing the Way to Enhance it through Various Inventions and Practical Rules Relative to this Matter) can be found among the manuscripts of the Fondo Reservado of the Biblioteca Nacional de México, in Mexico City. In particular, it is contained within folders called Borradores (drafts) of Cayetano de Cabrera y Quintero, a leading neo-Spanish intellectual of the early eighteenth century. The precise signature is Manuscript 29 ff. 265r.-273v. Despite the name, not all sheets that are part of Cabrera y Quintero’s drafts were actually authored by him. In particular, El Arte Maestra has no indication of the author and - as we shall see - both Soto as well as Mues agree that the author was the painter José de Ibarra, tied to Cabrera by common interests and professional opportunities.

Juan Rodríguez Juárez (1675 - 1728), Self-portrait, National Museum of Art, Mexico City
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The manuscript is an incomplete translation of Lana’s Main Art. To facilitate the examination of the text, Paula Mues has numbered the paragraphs both of the original copy in Brescia as well as the neo-Hispanic one: compared to the 74 paragraphs in the Italian version, the number is reduced to 57. The text is then condensed. In reality, this is however not the only difference. The Mexicans author (or authors) remained essentially faithful to the original, but operated a transformation of the text, effectively appropriating it and making it (almost) perfect for the local reality. The operation, in this sense, was very successful [29]. Yet, as in a kind of puzzle, the elements for the solution are all there. The name of the true author appears at the beginning of the second of the four chapters of the work; on this occasion, however, Lana became only a name to be mentioned as a reference that supports the thesis of the authors: "Father Francesco Lana, of the Society of Jesus, wants, for this reason, that wax statues are produced" (p. 93). The fact that the translators have in hand the book of Lana, i.e. the entire Prologue mentioned in the first part of this post, is confirmed by at least two factors: at the end of par. 51, in which the work cites the work of "Nicolas dela oja de Marsella" (in the Italian original, Nicolò della Foggia di Marsiglia or the French Nicolas la Fage), it is said that he executed a needlework portrait of Pope Urban VIII around 1670. The year does not appear in the original by Lana, but is the year of publication of the Prologue. The neo-Hispanic manuscript then closes with two Latin verses that are not contained in the Main Art; but, on a closer inspection, the second of these verses ("Evanescunt in cogitationibus suis", a quote from a letter of St. Paul to the Romans) is presented right in the introduction of the Prologue [30].

Juan Francisco de Aguilera, The Immaculate Conception with some Jesuits, 1720,
National Museum of Art, Mexico City
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Changes between original and translation

The four chapters of Lana retain their original names. It appears, however, that there is a different level of completion of the translation. In the case of the first two chapters, the work is fully accomplished and changes and omissions seem to be made for specific reasons only. The same is almost true for the third chapter, the one on colour, lights and shadows, from which the last four paragraphs however disappear. The fourth chapter, of an eminently more practical nature, is made in draft form, while whole paragraphs are omitted or sometimes summarized with some simple inscriptions, a sign that the authors wanted to continue the translation. It is obviously not known why the project was suspended.

The omissions made in those parts of the work in which the translation appears completed seem to be either due to brevity or justified because the references made by Lana were incomprehensible for the same translators. The praise of Clemente (we still do not know for sure who he was - see Part One) is an opportunity to remove the entire respective paragraph. Minor and only partial changes and omissions appear then, clearly due to the need to adapt the text to the neo-Hispanic world [31]. This is one example among those proposed by Paula Mues: talking about contrasting features, Lana had pointed out "the candour of a European face [standing out] in comparison with an Ethiopian"; a passage that would become incomprehensible in the Kingdom of New Spain in which the comparison is operated between "the whiteness of a face and the blackness of another" (p. 49).

But the real changes that characterize the work as something "different" and not as simple plagiarism are actually two substitutions, aiming at taking account on the one hand of local traditional phenomena and on the other hand of neo-Hispanic artistic development. The first case is simple. The paragraph which, in the fourth chapter of Lana’s original, is dedicated to images and portraits made with the feathers of birds [32] disappears. But in its place, indicating that the work is incomplete and that it was the intention of the authors to develop it further, appears the inscription "Pintura de Nuestras Plumas de Indias" (Painting of our Feathers of Indies). The translators believed that Lana was talking about a century-long tradition. The second situation is even more significant. The long paragraph from the third chapter is erased in which Lana explained how to mix colours on the canvas. Who translated, however, wrote simply that some artists worked the mixture directly on the canvas:"in estos nuestros Reynos de las Indias, duró mucho años esta destemplada necedad; hasta que Juan Rodriguez Juares, el Villalpando, y Aguilera famosissimos en sus pinturas despreciaron con animo verdadermente heroyco esta cansada timidez, introduciendo las mezclas delos colores delos pincelos al lienzo" (in these our kingdoms of the Indies, this strident folly lasted many years, until the most famous Juan Rodriguez Juares, Villalpando, and Aguilera despised this tired shyness in their paintings with a veritable heroic soul, introducing mixtures of colours with brushes on the canvas) (p. 102).

Miguel Rudecindo Contreras (attributed to), Portrait of José de Ibarra, National Museum of Art, Mexico City
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Art in New Spain

Let's make a step back. Most probably, the Prologue reached the Kingdom of New Spain via a Jesuit traveller (i.e. a brother of Lana). Here, in some way, the writing must have come in the hands of a man of letters related to the art world, or directly of one or more artists, who decided to undertake the translation. The author(s) were fully aware of the rarity of the work (in the colonies already circulated, for example, the treatises of Palomino or those of Vitruvius) and then they triggered their effort of text transformation, which included the elimination of the name of the author and the birth of a "Mexican" manual. This was not a plagiarism by itself, because the text was adapted to the neo-Hispanic reality (they did it so well that they even deceived Myrna Soto). And the neo-Hispanic reality reveals important elements: the conscience of a diverse pictorial tradition and the awareness of the evolution of the techniques and style (by mixing colours directly on canvas). These specific factors are far from obvious.

José de Ibarra, Ecce Homo, Regional Museum of Querétaro
Source: http://www.pintoreslatinoamericanos.com/2013/09/pintores-mexicanos-jose-de-ibarra.html

In her introduction, Paula Mues explicitly states to disagree with Myrna Soto when the latter believes that the development of art in New Spain was still standing at a level of artisanship, with no awareness of the "nobility" of Painting. According to this view, in particular painting would have been stifled by the constant and cumbersome presence of the Church, which would have required the replication of models always equal to themselves. For Ms Mues, to the contrary, the reality was much more varied; the artists were no longer craftsmen, they were fully aware of their role and did no longer dedicate themselves to sacred painting only. In particular, the transition to mixing colours on canvas and no longer on the palette corresponded to the advent of a generation of artists led by the brothers Rodriguez Juarez (we are at the beginning of '700), who showed technical and educational concerns which  were previously absent. It is no coincidence that the two brothers and other artists gathered themselves in their own Academy in 1722, of which the young José de Ibarra will be part of. We do not know much of this academy as of other ones. In reality only in 1754 (two years after the creation of the first publicly funded Academy in Spain, the Academy of San Fernando) a neo-Hispanic Academy was constituted formally, which claimed from the King of Spain the same privileges as San Fernando's one. The only figure of continuity between the Academy of 1722 and that of 1754 was José de Ibarra, which in the latter appeared as dean and chairman of the artists. According to Mues, the translation of Francesco Lana’s Main Art and the (never finished, for all we know) drafting of an "adapted" treatise to the neo-Hispanic reality was part of the activities of the core of academic painters and aimed at providing material educational and technical knowledge to young people.

Even according to Soto the drafting of the translation was the result of one of the Academies (whether private or official) but was aiming at claiming the role of painting as liberal art, i.e. to obtain the recognition of fiscal privileges for artists. Therefore, this would be a very similar phenomenon to the one which Francisco Calvo Serraller found in Spain during 1600 and testified in his incredibly successful anthology of Iberian art literature entitled Teoría de la Pintura del Siglo de Oro (Theory of Painting of the Golden Age). All happened in a framework which was continuously dominated by the suffocating control of the Church. To the contrary, Mues points out - I think rightly – that, if this had been the case, the Main Art would have been the least suited Treaty to be used for that purpose. In fact, although written by a Jesuit priest, the Main Art was not a writing animated by the spirit of the Counter-reformation. Moreover, Lana even failed to claim the nobility of pictorial activity, which - if anything - was considered an already widely acquired fact.

José de Ibarra, Virgin of the Apocalypse, Pinacoteca de La Profesa, Mexico City
Source: https://lourdeschavezblog.wordpress.com/tag/museo-nacional-de-arte/

The author

Both Myrna Soto and Paula Mues Orts agree that the author of the translation cannot have been Cayetano de Cabrera y Quintero, the scholar of the folders where the script was traced. The main arguments would be the difference in the literary style (but this statement, made by Soto, becomes less stringent since we know that we are facing a translation and not an original work), and also his supposed inability to master the technical vocabulary proposed by Lana and translated into Castilian.

In my candid view, these arguments put forward in favour of the authorship by José de Ibarra are absolutely of a circumstantial evidence only and should be considered very carefully. We do not know, for example, whether Ibarra knew Italian. Mues suggests that it was probably mulatto (p. 75), and yet in a couple of pictures reported of him he does not seem to have the corresponding traits. The latter circumstance, however, can have its own importance, taking into account that the neo-Hispanic society was organized by castes, on top of which there were obviously the Spaniards and then down the various classes until you reached the Indians. In any case, Ibarra was in an intermediate situation (i.e. he was not Spanish; if he was not a mulatto, he was creole) and then the translation of the Treaty could also have had the purpose of personal promotion.

José de Ibarra (attributed to), Spaniard and Indian Produce a Mestizo (1725 ca)
Source: http://www.pintoreslatinoamericanos.com/2013/09/pintores-mexicanos-jose-de-ibarra.html

The same authoress also considers that the translation was a collective work, at least a four hand-one, in which a writer and a painter helped each other.

Certainly Cabrera Y Quintero and Ibarra knew each other and must have met. The first half of the '700 is marked by the irresistible rise of the cult of Santa Maria de Guadalupe (today patroness of all the Americas), a Madonna – let us not forget - that takes on the traits of a young mixed-race and is represented with some attributes that may result directly from the Aztec world. At the end of the 30s of the eighteenth century Cabrera Y Quintero was commissioned by Archbishop Juan Antonio de Vizarrón to write a work (titled Escudo de armas de México - Coat of Mexican Arms) to remember the plague of 1736 in Mexico City and the consequent miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who liberated the city from the epidemic when it was decided to name her as patron. In the following years the Virgin became the patron saint of all New Spain. But what is more important is that the etching, which is the title of the Escudo is the work of Ibarra. Cabrera and Ibarra therefore knew each other and worked together. Moreover, in the cards of Cabrera was also found the original design for the engraving of the title, a sign that there was even a transfer of documents from the cards of the erudite to the ones of the painter. In addition, it must be added that Ibarra participated - as mentioned above – to the activities of the Academies of which we have very little evidence, but which, in the opinion of both Soto and Mues were the underpinning habitat that gave rise to the translation of the Main Art. Mues stopped short of proposing a possible date of the translation, which - in his opinion - dated back to around 1745 (p. 82).

The frontispiece of Escudo de armas de México 
Fonte: https://books.google.it/books?id=-kdIGpzZcVwC&printsec=frontcover&hl=it&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false

These are however all hints not supported by objective data. Clearly there is still much to be still said on the subject.

Meanwhile, I would like to think that the almost completely unknown treatise of Francesco Lana made the journey from Brescia to Mexico City not on a ship, but on one of those "airships" that the Jesuit designed in his writings, the one and only aspect for which, even today, he is known to the public.

NOTES

[27] Myrna Soto, El Arte Maestra. Un tratado de pintura novohispano. Prologue by Guillermo Tovar de Teresa, Mexico City, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 2005. I tried to get hold of the work by writing at least seven e-mails to several contacts of the UNAM. Unfortunately, I never received any response. Moreover, the book cannot be bought even on the Mexican site of Amazon. So I was forced to read only the sections of the volume which are available on Google Books (around seventy pages at the start of the book, which include the prologue of Tovar de Teresa and much of the introductory essay by Myrna Soto).

[28] El Arte Maestra: traducción novohispana de un tratado pictórico italiano. Estudio introductorio y notas de Paula Mues Orts. Museo de la Basilica de Guadalupe, 2006. The book is available online on the Academia.edu page of the scholar. Moreover, she was so kind to send me a paper copy, for which I am much grateful.

[29] This is shown by the fact that both Myrna Soto and Guillermo Tovar de Teresa (in good faith) credited the manuscript as original.

[30] Francesco Lana Terzi. Prodromo all’Arte Maestra. Edited by Andrea Battistini, Milan, Longanesi Publishers, 1978. p. 45.

[31] I would like to recall that the Kingdom of New Spain at the time included much of the current southern states of the USA, Mexico and entire Central America, and territories which were in turn very far, like the Philippines.

[32] Francesco Lana Terzi. Prodromo all’Arte Maestra... quoted. p. 263.