Search results for ""author susan verdi webster""
University of Texas Press Finding Caspicara
An examination of sculpture and authorship in eighteenth-century Quito that documents Caspicara as a participant in the innovative artistic production of the city’s workshops and its widespread commerce of polychrome sculptures. Who is Caspicara? Nothing is known of Caspicara’s life, and not a single sculpture has been documented as his work. Yet traditional histories laud him as a prolific Indigenous sculptor in eighteenth-century Quito who created exquisite polychrome figures and became a national artistic icon. Drawing on extensive archival, historical, and object research, Susan Verdi Webster peels away layers of historiographical fabrication to reveal what we do and do not know about Caspicara and his work. Rather than being a solitary master, Caspicara collaborated with other, largely Indigenous artists in Quito’s protoindustrial workshops, manufacturing sculptures now credited to him alone. The high quality of Quito sculptures produced
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University of Texas Press Lettered Artists and the Languages of Empire: Painters and the Profession in Early Colonial Quito
Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2019Quito, Ecuador, was one of colonial South America’s most important artistic centers. Yet the literature on painting in colonial Quito largely ignores the first century of activity, reducing it to a “handful of names,” writes Susan Verdi Webster. In this major new work based on extensive and largely unpublished archival documentation, Webster identifies and traces the lives of more than fifty painters who plied their trade in the city between 1550 and 1650, revealing their mastery of languages and literacies and the circumstances in which they worked in early colonial Quito.Overturning many traditional assumptions about early Quiteño artists, Webster establishes that these artists—most of whom were Andean—functioned as visual intermediaries and multifaceted cultural translators who harnessed a wealth of specialized knowledge to shape graphic, pictorial worlds for colonial audiences. Operating in an urban mediascape of layered languages and empires—a colonial Spanish realm of alphabetic script and mimetic imagery and a colonial Andean world of discursive graphic, material, and chromatic forms—Quiteño painters dominated both the pen and the brush. Webster demonstrates that the Quiteño artists enjoyed fluency in several areas, ranging from alphabetic literacy and sophisticated scribal conventions to specialized knowledge of pictorial languages: the materials, technologies, and chemistry of painting, in addition to perspective, proportion, and iconography. This mastery enabled artists to deploy languages and literacies—alphabetic, pictorial, graphic, chromatic, and material—to obtain power and status in early colonial Quito.
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