Letterform Literacy in the Spanish World

Hyman, Aaron Michael (2023). Letterform Literacy in the Spanish World (Unpublished). In: Keynote Lecture, Annual Undergraduate Art History Symposium. Florenz. 04.05.2023.

Spain’s transoceanic empire ran on paperwork. There were mountains of bureaucratic records, to be sure; musical scores, missives, missals, and all manner of other handwritten and printed materials were equally important to the functioning of a newly expanded church and colonial administration. However, this lettered sensibility came into conflict with the traditions of analphabetic inscription—pictograms, oral tradition, and numerical record keeping—that were common in the pre-conquest Americas. Historians have thus often looked at the process of “literacy formation” as one of semiosis: the ways that both European and American semiotic systems were transformed in forging cross-cultural communication. This talk takes a different tack by looking at the inculcation of literacy as a formal process by which Indigenous subjects of sixteenth-century New Spain came not just to read letters and words but to understand that letterforms could themselves have valences and be mobilized for meaning well beyond their semantic content. Artists were among these subjects. By attending to the visual rather than purely semantic potential of words, one can locate the traces of a Euro-American negotiation both in the most famous works of art produced in New Spain (multi-color featherwork) and those almost entirely overlooked (relief carving in volcanic stone). But isolating this process has far greater ramifications: these objects serve as a prompt to begin reanimating a period visuality around the formal features of script that have largely eluded early modern art historical evaluation on both sides of the Atlantic.

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