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- Title
'No Lord Without Vassals, Nor Vassals Without a Lord': The Royal Palace and the Shape of Kingly Power in Viceregal Mexico City.
- Authors
Schreffler, Michael J.
- Abstract
This article examines seventeenth-century visual representations of the royal palace in Mexico City, focusing especially on an image of the building and its civic setting painted on a ten-panel folding screen, or biombo. It argues that early modern representations of the palace such as that on the biombo reveal its role in the discursive shaping and structuring of the abstract notions of imperial power and all allegiance to the crown in a place where a king would never set foot. It suggests that the screen image and other representations of the palace portray imperial power in terms of intersubjective dialogue as well as spectatorial symmetry and reflexivity. It shows that this visual and spatial discourse about kingly presence and power in viceregal New Spain was part of a broader tendency in visual representation in the seventeenth-century Hispanic World, and that the imagery demonstrates an ideal form of loyal personhood rendered in visual and spatial terms as intersubjectivity and intervisuality.
- Subjects
SPAIN; MEXICO City (Mexico); MEXICO; PALACES in art; CORTES, Hernan, 1485-1547; PERSONALITY (Theory of knowledge); HOLY Roman Empire; MODERN art; SYMBOLISM in architecture
- Publication
Oxford Art Journal, 2004, Vol 27, Issue 2, p155
- ISSN
0142-6540
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/oaj/27.2.155