Plaza Mayor and the Engraved Re-Production of Mexico City

The Ideal City in Print: Plaza Mayor and the Engraved Re-Production of Mexico City Asiel Sepúlveda On the morning of December 9, 1796, thousands of people publications by Clara Bargellini, Stacie Widdifield, and Susan gathered in Mexico City’s Plaza Mayor and its surrounding Deans-Smith have offered various perspectives that take into streets to witness the unveiling of Charles IV’s equestrian account the civic importance of the equestrian statue (Figure statue. The ceremony was followed by a three-day festival 2), its place within the artistic zeitgeist of Mexico City, and composed of military parades, sermons, music, light displays, the cultural politics behind the aesthetics of buen gusto or fireworks and bull runs that sought to entertain city dwell- good taste.3 However, the scholars’ overwhelming interest ers from every stratum of society.1 Following the festivities, in Manuel Tolsá’s sculpture has greatly overshadowed other New Spain’s Viceroy, Marqués de Branciforte, commissioned productions, such as Fabregat’s View, which was circulated distinguished faculty of San Carlos Academy of the Three and seen independently from the statue. Noble Arts, painter Rafael Ximeno y Planes and engraver Kelly Donahue-Wallace has shifted the focus from the José Joaquin Fabregat, to design and produce an engraving sculpture to argue that Branciforte understood the power of of the newly erected statue and the surrounding plaza (Figure reproductive print and used Fabregat’s engraving to “imprint 1). The print presents a solemn view devoid of the spectacle his vision of the viceroyalty into Mexican and European that accompanied the unveiling of the statue. In this version, minds.”4 The present article builds on Donahue-Wallace’s the Zócalo, as the space of Plaza Mayor is most commonly study to explore the engraving’s efficacy to “imprint” an known, appears as a utopian public space cleansed of its idea of space on the viewers’ minds. The discussion begins inhabitants, odors, noises and urban maladies. The crowds by proposing that Fabregat’s View did not simply illustrate have disappeared and the Zócalo is inhabited only by a Charles IV’s equestrian statue, but rather re-produced the handful of miniature figures that provide a sense of scale, monument, and the space of Plaza Mayor, in graphical form. emphasizing the size and grandeur of the structure. Such re-production required the monumental urban space The comparison between these two different produc- to be translated and condensed into an engraved image on tions of the same space speaks to the manifold ways in paper, which in turn allowed the viewer to experience the which Mexico City’s Plaza Mayor was used, seen and rep- plaza in different terms. Lastly, this essay argues that Fab- resented. For the common festival goer, Plaza Mayor was the regat’s engraving served as a platform where Plaza Mayor, setting of a spectacle; for the viewers of Fabregat’s View of vis-à-vis Mexico City, was reassembled for a royal audience Mexico’s Plaza, the city center was a space of sobriety and whose imaginary of the space was constructed upon viewer- literal enlightenment. It is this last production of the space ship of the print.5 through printed material that is investigated here. For over two centuries, scholars have marveled at the artistic produc- Re-Producing Mexico City tion emerging out of this key historical moment.2 Recent Shortly after his arrival to Mexico City in 1794, Viceroy 1 For a detailed description of the December 9, 1796 festivities see hispano-americano (Mexico City: UNAM, 1987), 207-20; Stacie “Descripción de las fiestas celebradas en la imperial corte de México, G. Widdifield, “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Portrait of Charles IV: Art con motivo de la solemne colocación de una estatua ecuestre de History, Patrimony, and the City,” in Journal X 8 No.1 (2003): 61-83; nuestro augusto soberano el señor D. Carlos IV, en la plaza mayor,” Susan Deans-Smith, “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Statue of Charles IV Gazeta de Mexico, 28 December, 1796. and Buen Gusto in Late Colonial Mexico,” in Buen Gusto and Classi- cism in the Visual Cultures of Latin America, 1780-1910, ed. Paul Niell 2 Alexander von Humboldt was one of the first to praise the statue for and Stacie G. Widdifield (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico its “purity of style” and “beautiful execution.” Vues des Cordilleréres Press, 2013), 3-18. et monumens des peoples indigens de l’Amerique (Paris, 1816) 57-61. Archive.org, accessed 28 November 2015, https://archive.org/details/ 4 Kelly Donahue-Wallace, “Spinning the King: Prints, Imprinting and the vuesdescordill01humb. Also see Luis González Obregón, La vida de Equestrian Portrait of Charles IV,” in Print Quarterly 29, No.4 (2012): 415. México en 1810 (París: Vda. de C. Bouret, 1911), 9; Eloísa Uribe, “La estatua ecuestre de Carlos IV o la persistencia de la belleza,” in 5 The term “imaginary” is borrowed from Jacques Lacan’s theory of “The Escultura Ecuestre de México (Mexico City: SEP, 2006), 76-125. Mirror Stage.” Lacan uses “the imaginary” to describe a stage where an individual fashions a fantasy of the self, one that he/she constructs 3 Clara Bargellini, “La lealtad Americana: El significado de la estatua by projecting his/her own image into a mirror. In its socio-political equestre de de Carlos IV,” in Iconología y sociedad: Arte colonial usage, the mirror is often composed of other people (role models), ATHANOR XXXIV ASIEL SEPÚLVEDA Branciforte petitioned the Spanish Crown to authorize the experience of the space. After all, the Spanish monarchs to construction of a monumental bronze sculpture that was whom the monument was dedicated would never set foot to embody the image and power of King Charles IV in his in Mexico City. American territories.6 On November 30 1795, he received Branciforte was well aware of the print’s effectiveness as confirmation from Spain, and construction on the Zócalo a visual tool. Almost immediately after the plate was finished, began on June 15th of the following year.7 With only six he sent four different shipments with over seventy impres- months to the inauguration date, Branciforte counted on sions to Spain’s prime minister, Manuel Godoy, whom he the resources available to him: the peninsular faculty of the asked to “present as many as you see fit to the Royal Persons recently formed San Carlos Academy of the Three Noble of Their Majesties in my name as proof of my recognition and Arts, and the local government that would eventually raise gratitude, [and] distribute the rest among the persons you the funds required for the project.8 The realization of the consider most convenient.”10 With the help of Godoy, Fab- project was contingent upon collaboration of academicians, regat’s print would carry Branciforte’s message to the King, government officials and local donors. Fabregat’s View out- and distribute an image of modern Mexico City throughout lined the work of San Carlos’ faculty. At the bottom of the Europe. Rather than made from wood and stone, this Mexico print four names appeared credited from left to right in the City was constructed using engraved lines. following order: Manuel Tolsa, Dir. de Escult, hizo el pedestal y la Estatua; Antonio Velasquez, Dir. de Archit, los adornos The Problem of Engraving de la Plaza; Rafael Ximeno, Dir. De Pint, la dibujó; J. Joaquin During the late eighteenth century, Spanish intellectuals Fabregat, Dir. del Grab, la grabó en Mexico, 1797.9 The considered engraving to be a liberal art and an esteemed four names detail the works of each faculty member: Tolsá academic discipline. Scholar of the Spanish Enlightenment sculpted the pedestal and the statue; Velásquez designed Jesusa Vega masterfully demonstrated how Spanish Enlight- the elliptical enclosure; Ximeno y Planes drew the plaza; enment thinkers and Bourbon bureaucrats, known as los and Fabregat engraved it. The credits thus provide a crucial ilustrados, perceived engraving as a universal visual language insight into the way the entire project was imagined by those that was essential to the modernization of the arts and sci- who produced it: as a joint effort between members of the ences, and in turn the state.11 She adds that engraving was academy. To these four names we must also add the local elemental in displacing a baroque apparatus of seeing with contractors, craftsmen and builders, who laid the pavement, a new one of buen gusto or good taste.12 As Vega and other constructed the water fountains (one can be seen in the scholars have articulated, buen gusto did not simply refer to lower right of the print), cast the iron gates, and carved the neoclassical taste, but to a way of seeing and behaving that decorative vases adorning the elliptical fence. promoted secular and rational thinking.13 Thus, the task of The names also imply an order of production. The sculp- engraving was not only to reproduce, as in copying, but to tor and the architect, responsible for the physical structure illustrate, in the full potential of the word, an image. This appear first, the painter who provided the drawing follows, theoretical framework, which seeks to link the medium of and, last, the engraver. This progression suggests that the engraving with the visuality of the Enlightenment, was part engraving was not simply representing the monument, but of late eighteenth-century Spanish academic discourses. In was an integral part of it. The progression from the physical a keynote address given at the San Fernando Academy of construction to its visualization in print implies that rather Art in Madrid, where Fabregat and Ximeno y Planes were than the statue or the plaza, the engraving is the finished trained, naval officer and academician of merit Joseph Vargas product.

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