Sara Ryu

Sara Ryu

Director of Academic Planning, College of Arts & Sciences, Washington University in St. Louis

sararyu@wustl.edu

Ambiguous foundations: Material and textual discourses of iconoclasm in sixteenth-century Mexico City

Abstract:

This paper will consider how iconoclasm as discourse played a critical role in shaping the Conquest narratives that emerged in the wake of the Spanish invasion of Mexico. Over the course of the sixteenth century, iconoclasm appeared not only as the physical manipulation of objects and buildings, ranging from destruction to burial and reuse, but also in a series of discursive practices by Spaniards seeking to control communication around historical change. The discourse of iconoclasm was at once an imperial directive to rebuild Mexico City from the rubble of Tenochtitlan and a rhetorical trope that retroactively constructed a concept of conquest itself from the material fabric of the viceregal capital.

 

From the point of view of Spanish textual accounts, the reuse of Mexica art and architecture in the building campaign of Mexico City partook in a triumphalist rhetoric integral to the ideology of Christian imperialism. Yet the objects themselves were not always straightforward or willing participants in that narrative, and the column bases of the old cathedral, for example, which had been made from fragments of the Mexica sacred precinct, both exemplify and undercut claims to absolute conquest. These stones, the paper will argue, lay bare the semantic opacity of artifacts and raise a broader question concerning art’s capacity to figure rhetoric.

 

Sara Ryu is Director of Academic Planning in the College of Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Since receiving her PhD in the history of art at Yale University in 2015, Sara has held a position at the Saint Louis Art Museum and a National Endowment for the Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Getty Research Institute. Her current book project, The Art of Making Again in New Spain, studies the reuse of art in the aftermath of iconoclasm in terms of two intersecting themes: changing conceptions of antiquity in viceregal Mexico City, and new sacred economies of art-making in the early modern transatlantic world.