I.

Introduction

Latin American Sculpture, sculpture produced in South America, Central America, and Mexico after the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese colonists in the early 16th century. (To learn about other artistic developments in Latin America, see Latin American Painting; Latin American Architecture.)

Until the 20th century, Latin American sculpture comprised three main types. Stone sculpture was used primarily to decorate the exterior of churches and other important buildings. Carved wooden sculpture, often painted and gilded, was generally used to decorate church interiors. The third type, called retablos or altar ensembles, included architectural elements, carved relief sculpture, paintings, and other decorations around church altars. In addition, ceremonial religious objects, usually crafted from precious metals, fell somewhere in between sculpture and the decorative arts. Not until the 20th century did artists create significant sculpture that did not serve a religious function.

Colonial sculpture built on a strong base of indigenous (native) American traditions, especially on a Mexican tradition of outdoor sculpture. Monumental stone sculpture had enjoyed 2000 years of development in Mexico before the arrival of Spanish colonists in 1519 (see Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture).

II.

Early Development

Among the early European settlers of Latin America were Roman Catholic clergy, who came to convert the Native American population to the Christian religion. By necessity, religious leaders initially relied on indigenous artists to decorate the many new missions and churches that were built. Government officials similarly relied on native labor to build and decorate government buildings. To provide European models for these artists, the colonists imported European prints, statues, crosses, and other objects of worship. As a result, 16th-century sculpture in Latin America typically mixed European and indigenous elements into an artistic hybrid known as mestizo art (a Spanish word also applied to people of mixed European and Native American ancestry). In Mexico this cultural mixture appeared in 16th-century courtyard crosses, baptismal fonts, and other stone objects, and is usually referred to as Indochristian art.

By the middle of the 16th century the European population in Latin America had significantly increased, and European sculptors began setting up workshops to compete with indigenous artists. Bernardo Bitti, an Italian Jesuit painter and sculptor, established a workshop in Peru in the late 16th century. In Mexico, immigrant sculptors and carpenters formed a guild in 1568, and although the guild did not exclude artists on the basis of race, it did enforce European artistic values such as an emphasis on realism, Renaissance idealism, and the use of Christian imagery.

By the 17th century, European styles dominated sculpture—even the work of mestizo artists—in such centers of colonial power as Mexico City and Puebla, Mexico, and Lima, Peru. Mestizo styles generally moved to the periphery, where they survived as folk art, although indigenous leaders and mestizo patrons continued to encourage mestizo art in some regions, especially in Pátzcuaro Michoacán, Mexico; Cuzco, Peru; and the booming mining area of Potosí, Bolivia.

III.

Wooden Sculpture

Most carved wooden sculpture was created as part of altar ensembles for church interiors. Much of it was polychrome (multicolored) and in some cases decorated with gold leaf. The painted pieces exhibit an especially close relationship with the art of Spain and Portugal. Works produced at the centers of colonial power, such as Mexico City and Lima, are hardly distinguishable from the European originals they imitated. In 17th-century Peru, the availability of imported works by Spanish sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés enabled his many followers in Latin America to study his work firsthand. Montañés’s painted sculptures of Christian saints combine powerful realism with a feeling of controlled dignity.

A sculptor’s skills could be seen to greater advantage in the unpainted wood carvings commissioned to decorate the choir areas of large churches and cathedrals. Spanish-born Peruvian sculptor Pedro de Noguera was asked in 1623 to design choir stalls for the Cathedral of Lima. The Lima choir stalls feature an enormous, elaborately carved architectural framework with dynamic, realistic figures carved in high relief behind each wooden seat. Other important schools of carving developed in Guatemala, where ivory carvings brought by trade ships from Manila, the Philippines, influenced local sculpture, and in the Spanish colony of New Granada (now Ecuador and Colombia), where the super-realistic style of southern Spain was tempered by a graceful delicacy.

Art historians have not yet identified the sculptors of many early Latin American works. One work that remains anonymous, a painted wooden image of Fray Felipe de Jesús (about 1650) in the Cathedral of Mexico in Mexico City, presents the saint striding forward, his face locked in a tragic expression. Its combination of opposites—realism with a formal composition, dynamism with arrested motion—places this work among the most important pieces of 17th-century Mexican sculpture. Other 17th-century masters, including Tomás Xuárez and his son, Salvador de Ocampo, are better known to scholars. Ocampo’s choir stalls (now at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria) for the former church of San Agustín in Mexico City combine exuberant baroque decoration with precisely carved reliefs depicting biblical scenes. Although they worked in a European style, Xuárez and Ocampo were of native origin. The fact that they were entrusted with large-scale, and therefore expensive, projects provides evidence of the degree of racial integration in the Spanish colonies.

The 18th-century Peruvian Melchor Huamán of Cuzco developed a realistic three-dimensional version of the hypnotic images found in local paintings. Manuel Chil Caspicara of Quito, Ecuador, extended the exquisitely delicate New Granada style to multiple figures in his Assumption of the Virgin (mid- to late-1700s, Church of San Francisco, Quito). Other notable sculptors of the 18th century include Peruvian Baltazar Gavilán and Ecuadorian Bernardo de Legarda.

IV.

Religious Objects

Artisans created splendidly crafted religious objects in silver and gold for the newly built churches and cathedrals of Latin America. These objects included candlesticks, processional crosses, cups, plates, and monstrances (vessels used in Roman Catholic religious ceremonies). Designs became especially elaborate in silver mining areas such as Potosí, in Bolivia, and Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Taxco (Taxco de Alarcón), in Mexico. Throughout the colonial era, the cities of Lima, Mexico City, and Bogotá, Colombia, were known for their highly developed craftsmanship.

V.

Retablos

An extremely important category of Latin American sculpture is the retablo (Spanish word meaning “altarpiece”). The retablo, sometimes referred to as a reredos or retable in English, comprises the architectural, sculptural, and painted components around the altar in a Roman Catholic church. Originally these consisted of a framework behind the altar that was meant to hold paintings and polychrome statues or relief carvings. But after about 1670, retablos became far more elaborate and embraced the area around the altar. Extensively decorated with carved or stucco figures, they also incorporated spiral columns modeled after those at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. These twisting columns are called solomonic because the ancient columns at Saint Peter’s are thought to have come from the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. Solomonic columns appeared in retablos throughout Latin America. They are especially spectacular in the retablo of the Franciscan monastery of São Francisco in Salvador (1700-1723), in the Brazilian state of Bahía. There the columns combine with architectural decoration, stone sculpture, painted tiles, stucco work, and frescoes to form a spectacular gilded and polychrome retablo.

The 18th century saw an explosion of retablo construction as the silver boom, improvements in agriculture, and increased trade generated tremendous wealth, leading in turn to the building of new churches and the redecoration of earlier cathedrals and churches. The solomonic baroque style evolved into a new style, sometimes called Churrigueresque (after Spanish architects José Benito Churriguera and his brothers). The flamboyant Churrigueresque style spread from retablos to the facades of churches. In Mexico, Spanish sculptor Jerónimo de Balbás set a precedent for hundreds of subsequent designs with his Altar of the Kings (1724-1734) in the Cathedral of Mexico City. This immense ensemble, covered entirely with gold leaf, fills the apse of the cathedral. Elaborately carved rectangular columns, called estípetes, alternate with broader half columns and polychrome statues in niches.

As the new wealth spread within provincial areas, it benefited both mestizo and Native American patrons. In some areas this triggered a return in the mid-18th century to hybrid styles in architectural decoration. The mixture of European and folkloric elements that had prevailed in the 16th century was widely imitated in newly developing regional centers such as Cuzco, in Peru, and Querétaro, Oaxaca, and Zacatecas, in Mexico. In these areas, the decorations of church facades and interior courtyards featured abstract patterns and figural sculpture that are strikingly reminiscent of Indochristian decoration, the hybrid style developed in Mexico in the 16th century. The influence carried to retablos and other decorations in church interiors, while secular decorative arts such as furniture design showed extraordinary combinations of indigenous techniques, European and Asian imagery, Mudéjar (Hispano-Islamic) design, and folk art motifs.

In Brazil, richly ornamented 18th-century retablos, such as the one in the Church of São Francisco de Asís in Ouro Prêto, provide the centerpieces for elegant church interiors reminiscent of churches in central Europe. The church in Ouro Prêto was designed by Brazilian architect and sculptor Antônio Francisco Lisbôa, known as Aleijadinho (Portuguese for “Little Cripple”). Aleijadinho suffered from a disfiguring illness that is said to have eventually forced him to work with his tools strapped to his wrists. Despite his handicaps, Aleijadinho’s sculptures convey a breathtaking realism, and he is Brazil’s most celebrated pre-modern sculptor. In addition to his work in Ouro Prêto, he carved a moving series of soapstone prophets that guard the entrance to the Church of Bom Jesus de Matozinhos (1800-1805) in Congonhas do Campo, Brazil. These statues express the suffering of the Christian faithful with a typically baroque psychological realism and dramatic sense of movement.

VI.

19th Century

Art academies set up by Latin American governments between 1780 and 1820 functioned as centers of artistic training and as channels for transmitting emerging European art styles. Both the Mexican and Brazilian academies had strong programs in sculpture. In 1791 Spanish sculptor Manuel Tolsá arrived at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City with a vast collection of plaster casts of ancient Greek and Roman statues. These served as models for works in the quietly dignified neoclassical style through which he and subsequent academicians expressed a variety of political and social ideals. In Brazil, sculptor Auguste-Marie Taunay helped spread the neoclassical style. By the mid-19th century, academic sculptors such as Spaniard Manuel Vilar in Mexico had begun to infuse the serene forms of neoclassicism with more emotion in keeping with romanticism, a movement then popular in Europe. Vilar’s larger-than-life figure Tlahuicole (1851, Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City), for example, uses ancient Greek models to express the emotional intensity of Tlahuicole, a general who died in gladiatorial combat in precolonial Mexico.

VII.

20th Century

European movements continued to influence Latin American sculpture in the 20th century. Mexican sculptor Jesús Contreras, for example, was influenced by the heavily modeled, expressive works of French sculptor Auguste Rodin. In the first years of the 20th century Contreras and his younger associates, Mexicans Agustín Ocampo and Fidencio Nava, sculpted increasingly stylized figures. After the 1920s the powerful mural painting movement tended to overwhelm sculpture in importance, especially in Mexico. However, monumental sculptures of indigenous women by Costa Rican-born Mexican sculptor Francisco Zúñiga offer a sculptural parallel to the muralists’ portrayals of native cultures. Guatemalan-born Mexican artist , who is best known for his paintings of simplified figures within geometric designs, also sculpted stylized partial figures. Similarly, Colombian artist Fernando Botero translated the rotund figures of his dreamy, satirical paintings into three-dimensional sculptures.

Abstract sculpture was established in Latin America with free-form metal and wood constructions by German-born sculptor , who worked in Mexico after 1949, and with the geometric sculptures of Colombian . But it was in Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina that international abstract movements of the 1960s, such as op art and minimal art, found fruitful sculptural responses. Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica both worked in a geometric abstract style related to minimalism. Venezuelans and and Argentines and Eduardo Mac Entyre experimented with the visually hypnotic effects of op art while incorporating movement into their work.