Casta painting
Subtitle: images of race in eighteenth-century Mexico
By: Ilona Katzew.
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: New Haven
Language: eng
Number of pages: 242
Subjects: Casta painting; Racially mixed people in art; Miscegenation in art; Mexico -- Social life and customs -- 18th century
Description: "With over two hundred illustrations, including some of casta sets and other visual materials that have never been published before, the book draws on a variety of archival sources to provide the most comprehensive study of casta painting to date. Katzew considers how casta painting developed art historically, why race became the subject of a pictorial genre that spanned an entire century, who commissioned and collected the works, and what meanings the works held for contemporary audiences. The book sheds new light on racial dynamics of eighteenth-century Mexico and on the ways the colonial elite attempted to order an increasingly confusing society. While casta paintings can be placed within contemporary European concepts of the exotic and the impetus to classify, Katzew demonstrates that the genre also reveals aspects of the construction of identity and self-image unique to the colonial world."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 227-237) and index.
Table of contents: title: Painters and paintings: a visual tradition and its historiography; title: "A marvelous variety of colors?": racial ideology and the Sistema de Castas; title: The rise of Casta painting: exoticism and Creole pride, 1711-1760; title: Changing perspectives: Casta painting in the era of the Bourbon reforms, 1760-1790; title: The theater of marvels: Casta paintings in the textual microcosmos.