DALMI-
Flemish Textile Trade and New Imagery in Colonial Mexico (1524-1646)
by Neil de Marchi & Hans van Miegroet in: Painting for the Kingdoms, edited by J Brown,878-923. Fomento Cultural BanaMex, Mexico City, 2010.
Abstract:
European imagery and textiles played complementary roles in the colonization and conversion of the indigenous population of New Spain. When the Franciscan Order arrived, just three years after the fall of Tenochtitlán to Hernán Cortés, its members brought with them not only their devotion to Catholicism and representations of the Passion of Christ and other favorite images, they also created an immediate demand for textiles that were either unavailable, or present but in inadequate quantity, in local markets. The new demand stemmed from a requirement that the Indians be clothed and from a need for instructional charts and religious paintings. Linens served both ends, Flemish linens in particular. There had been Flemish houses trading internationally in textiles for years, and it required no great adjustment for some of them to add New Spain to their list of destinations. Those same firms just as easily added paintings to their shipments. Such specialized traders, rather than émigré artists, were the proximate agents through whom Flemish imagery came to infuse early colonial visual culture.
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