Skip to Main Content

 Admission is always freeOpen today: 10:00  to 5:00  Directions             Play Artle            

                  -  Visit                      - Visit
                    - Getting Here
                    - Accessibility
                    - Tours, Guides & Maps
                    - Food & Drink
                    - Gallery Shops
                    - Visitor Policies 
                  -  Collection                      - Collection
                    - Highlights
                    - Search the Collection
                    - Artists Search
                    - Acquisition Highlights
                    - Stories
                    - Games 
                  -  Exhibitions                      - Exhibitions
                    - Current
                    - Special Installations
                    - Upcoming
                    - On Tour
                    - Past 
                  -  Calendar                      - Calendar
                    - Films
                    - Performances
                    - Talks
                    - Guided Tours
                    - After Hours
                    - Fun for Kids
                    - Festivals
                    - Workshops 
                  -  Learn                      - Learn
                    - Teachers
                    - Families
                    - Teens
                    - Adults
                    - Learning Resources
                    - Music Programs
                    - Film Programs 
                  -  Conservation                      - Conservation
                    - Projects
                    - Publications
                    - Resources 
                  -  Research                      - Research
                    - The Center
                    - Publications
                    - Make an Appointment
                    - Archives
                    - Library
                    - NGA Online Editions 
                  -  Support                      - Support
                    - Donate Now
                    - National Membership
                    - Circle Membership
                    - Leadership Groups
                    - Planned Giving
                    - Major Giving
                    - Gifts of Art 
                  -  Shop                      - Shop
                    - Books
                    - Jewelry
                    - Apparel & Accessories
                    - Kids
                    - NGA Custom Prints 
                  -  Play Artle

Home>Research>Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts>Research Projects>Members' Research Report Archive>Oscar E. Vázquez, 2014-2015

About Fellowships

Senior Fellowships

Visiting Senior Fellowships

Postdoctoral Fellowships

Center/YCBA Postdoctoral Fellowships

Predoctoral Dissertation Fellowships

Center Members

Members’ Presentations

Former Members

Members’ Research Reports, 2011–2018

About Center Meetings

Recent & Upcoming Meetings

A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

Wyeth Foundation for American Art Programs

Sydney J. Freedberg Lectures on Italian Art

Research at the Center

The Index of American Design

History of Early American Landscape Design

The History of the Accademia di San Luca, c. 1590–1635

About the Center Publications

Recent & Upcoming Publications

Reflections on the Collection: The Edmond J. Safra Visiting Professors at the National Gallery of Art

Studies in the History of Art

Seminar Papers

*Center Report*

From the *Bulletin*

Research Publications

Special Publications

National Gallery of Art Shop

# Members' Research Report Archive

*Learning to Draw in Spanish: Copying the Body in Latin American Academies of Art, 1781–1910*

**Oscar E. Vázquez**, University of Illinois at Urbana-ChampaignPaul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, September 1–October 31, 2014

My book “Learning to Draw in Spanish” will examine the relationship between art pedagogy and political power in Latin American art academies during the colonial and early independence periods. I consider how the legislative statutes and regulations governing these institutions facilitated ideological views that reinforced a colonial condition and, after independence, the construction of the national body politic. Specifically, “Learning to Draw in Spanish” analyzes practices surrounding the copying of the life model in four of the earliest and most influential academies in late colonial and postcolonial Latin America. In these academies, training replicated European models of copying: from drawings, prints, and plaster casts, but, most important, from the life model. During my two months at CASVA I analyzed artists’ manuals and anatomical treatises in the collection of the National Gallery of Art Library that were employed by academicians in Spain and Latin America. Among these were Gérard Audran’s *Les proportions du corps humain* (1683), translated into Spanish by Jerónimo Antonio Gil as *Las proporciones del cuerpo humano, medidas por las mas bellas estatuas de la antigüedad*(1780), and Juan de Arfe y Villafañe’s *Varia commensuración para la escultura y arquitectura* (sixth edition, 1773; originally 1585), which were used in or influenced the teaching of theory and anatomy in Mexico’s Academia de San Carlos.

*Musculature of the Body*, from Juan de Arfe y Villafañe, *Varia commensuración para la escultura y arquitectura*, 6th ed. (Madrid, 1773), 165. National Gallery of Art Library, Washington

“Learning to Draw in Spanish” examines the Academia de San Carlos (1784) and Cuba’s Academia de San Alejandro (1818) as instances of colonial academies and, in turn, Chile’s Academia de Pintura (1849) and Argentina’s Academia Libre de Bellas Artes (1878) as examples of arts institutions of independent nations. While acknowledging their relationship to Italian and French academies, whose legacy was manifest in the curriculum and ideals of art in Spain and Latin America, my work examines how these later academies diverged both pedagogically and artistically. I contend that, although the Latin American academies adopted similar pedagogical methods, their particular geographic, historical, and sociopolitical conditions engendered differences in life drawing practices and in finished paintings and sculpture that reveal dissonances between European institutional models and their colonial copies.

“Learning to Draw in Spanish” begins with the premise that in academies of Latin America, copying, and its theoretical counterpart of mimesis, were central both to artistic pedagogy and to the apparatus of political power. On one hand, copying was a tactic that allowed for the institutionalization of Spain’s power over its colonies by the extension of regulations (for example, the adoption in Mexico of statutes nearly identical to those of Spain’s academies). On the other hand, duplication in curricula of repetitive training exercises ensured that the taste and vision of elites, namely their stylistic and subject preferences, would be perpetuated.

Copying began early in the student’s career with drawing from prints and moved on to plaster copies of antique statues and, finally, to the human figure to produce “académies,” as these drawings were called. A sequential, methodical, and disciplinary curriculum was further supported by a number of tools. These included anatomical training texts that instructed students in a canon of proper human proportions, poses and style.

The uniformity of students’ drawing was further ensured through the interior layout of life drawing classrooms, where controlled, amphitheater- style assigned seating guided students’ views toward producing similar representations of the nude model positioned at the very center of the room. Training that employed the use of the nude human model was by law the exclusive domain of the art institution, a privilege that had distinguished academies from guilds since the seventeenth century. Thus students in the life drawing classroom reproduced through their drawings the very symbol of the monopoly granted to the academy. It was a performance that allowed the academy to assert and replicate its own power, quite literally.

Still, the practice of copying did not preclude technical and stylistic variation. Differences in life drawing techniques and finished paintings and sculpture indicate that Latin American academies diverged from European institutional models. For example, although indigenous models were frequently used in certain Latin American academies’ drawing classes, their ethnic and racialized features were erased and rarely appeared in finished canvases placed on public display. By the late nineteenth century, however, incipient indigenist, nationalist currents in the pictorial arts produced an inversion: in later nineteenth-century productions, plaster casts served as models for any number of nativist narratives in a process whereby the antique Greco-Roman model became the indigenous Latin American subject on a finished canvas or in marble.

The particular characteristics of artists and subjects in the Spanish American colonies, especially after independence, emerge as quite different from those of their European progenitors with regard to the framing of the human body. It is these differences—as they may be discerned in training, works, and academic regulations—that my research examines. My investigations further ask what effect the arrival of ethnographic, anthropological, and medical photography may have had on artists’ conceptions of the human body. These changes and their differences from the practices of European academies reveal that, while many of the works their students produced in certain periods *appear*formally similar, academies were not homogeneous institutions. Rather, they were individually adapted to the different political and social demands of colonial and national powers. The differences among them are valuable for what they tell us not only about the functions of Latin America’s arts pedagogy, but also Europe’s.

*Center 35*

### Stay connected

Learn more about our exhibitions, news, programs, and special offers.

About
          - About the National Gallery
          - Stories
          - Press
          - FAQs
          - Contact Us

Plan a Visit
          - Getting Here
          - Accessibility
          - Today's Tours
          - Food & Drink
          - Calendar
          - Downloadable Map

Get Involved
          - Donate
          - Membership
          - Volunteer
          - Opportunities
          - Shop Online

Resources
          - Search the Collection
          - Conservation
          - Library
          - Archives
          - The Center
          - Film Programs
          - Music Programs
          - Audio/Video
          - Open Access Images

Hours: 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily

**West Building**6th St and Constitution Ave NW*Enter or exit from Constitution Avenue, 4th Street, or 7th Street. The Madison Drive entrance is currently closed.*

**East Building**4th St and Constitution Ave NW*Enter and exit from 4th Street.*

**Sculpture Garden**7th St and Constitution Ave NW*Enter and exit from 7th Street, Constitution Avenue, or Madison Drive.*

We are closed on December 25 and January 1.

*The National Gallery of Art serves the nation by welcoming all people to explore and experience art, creativity, and our shared humanity.*

          -  Twitter 
          -  Facebook 
          -  Instagram 
          -  Pinterest 
          -  YouTube 

© 2024 National Gallery of Art   Notices   Terms of Use   Privacy Policy