Inquisition and Images in Early Modern Spain: Proceedings in the Canary Islands, ca. 1520-1700

This project aims to delineate the influence of the Spanish Inquisition on artistic processes during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ergo, the impact of control strategies implemented by political and religious institutions related to the production, distribution, and reception of the artistic object during the Counter-Reformation era. For that purpose, I will analyse the interaction between the symbolic significances and ritual uses and functions associated with the image in its double conception — formal and sacred — and the Inquisition’s agency on this matter in the Canary Islands and the City of Mexico. I highlight the significative place occupied by images inside the transformation of ritual practices in the construction of confronted identities for Catholics and Protestants (Muir, 2001) by studying the inquisitorial records in which images were involved, especially those referring to their reception, as in cases of “heretical propositions” and iconoclasm.

Hypothesis and background

This research will draw on the symbolic significance of the image and its ritual uses as a constitutive element of religiosity and, therefore, of identity in the Modern Age. Following the trail of recent works on sacred images and social minorities (Pereda Espeso, 2007; Franco Llopis, 2008, 2010, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c), I seek to demonstrate the growing importance of images as a recognisable feature of piety in the persecution of formal and informal heresy in the Spanish territories after the outbreak of the Reformation.
The existing literature in the field suffers from the traditional division among academic disciplines. On the one hand, inquisitorial historiography has paid little attention to visual arts, focusing principally, and almost exclusively, on written culture, the focus of most research regarding censorship. On the other hand, approaches from the history of art, often based on partial aspects (artists and processed works), depend excessively on an iconographic perspective. Without denying the interest of these approaches, that have shed light on visual representations of the Inquisition, those produced by the institution itself and those created by its enemies, approaches that overcome the limits of art history to embrace an interdisciplinary dimension remain necessary. In order to enrich the traditional, formal analysis and offer an alternative to the progression concept, I support the idea of an anthropologically-informed artistic appraisal (Belting, 2009) that employs the figure of the “cultural translator” (Burke, 2007) to explain the different meanings of cultural products attending to their time and to analyse the active role played by beholders in the construction of these meanings, as well as the emotional components involved in the processes of cognition and responses (Freedberg, 1989, 2009).

Methodolody

Since the effects of censorship are not directly measurable, a historical reconstruction of the control mechanism may combine quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of inquisitorial sources. This method, first, will provide information about the social relevance of the issue and the extent of the repression, and, second, will facilitate connections among individual cases for the purpose of extracting conclusions about the representativeness of certain behaviours and ways of thinking, overcoming the anecdotal and fragmented character of such sources. The research will be developed from the comparison of the tribunals of Las Palmas and the City of Mexico, both important stations of the Spanish and West Indies trade and places of settlement of foreigner communities. Moreover, extensive documentation from both tribunals has been conserved in the Archives of the Inquisition located at the Museo Canario on the Island Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City.

General Objectives

Understanding the historical impact of inquisitorial action on images, rejecting stereotypes and legends that distort its true activity. Offering an interpretation of Reformation and Counter-Reformation phenomena based on the analysis of the ritual uses of images as an element of otherness.

Specific Objectives:

1. Examining the values, uses, and functions of the image in Christian tradition and its re-elaborations and adaptations subject to the historical constraints and, in this sense, delving into manifestations of the discourse on images in Modern Spain and Europe, attending to their root causes, arguments, and formal expressions.
2. Systematising censorial praxis around the image by structuring the information periodically and with a typological division and a quantitative approach.
3. Determining the role of the agents involved in the disciplinary process and deepening the connections between these agents, overcoming the traditional opposition víctim-executioner and pointing out the collaboration strategies.
4. Reflecting on implications of measures of social discipline and, in this sense, considering the tension between individual and collective perceptions of images and the pressure executed by political structures in acceptance and transmission.
   
   

Bibliography

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