Rubens in Repeat - The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America

Reviews / Votes

"Rubens in Repeat is an innovative study about the mobility of objects and their reinterpretation across the vast geography of the early modern Spanish Empire. Aaron M. Hyman's attention to buildings, cities, and viceroyalties as settings for the transformation of print into paint, stone, and other media provides a scholarly model for thinking locally and writing globally."-Jesus Escobar, Northwestern University;; "An explosive defamiliarization of the Flemish Baroque as period, geography, and mode. Hyman weaves close looking with startling archival finds to situate Rubens not so much as a transatlantic brand, but as an inflection of what exactly "European" art-and so too Latin American visual culture-was in the long seventeenth century. No longer just the art historical fellow of Van Dyck, Snyders, and Jan Bruegel, here Rubens aligns with Durer, Warhol, even Judd. But time remains fundamental: Hyman sinks us into the documents and places us before dozens of never-published objects, disabling the colonialist myth of the copy as "other." Rubens-always an artist more interesting than his art-emerges as a willful ghost, forever betwixt repetitions."-Christopher P. Heuer, author of Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image;;"Both "logic" and "copy" are carefully examined, and finally subverted, in this extraordinary book. The extensive use of prints after works by Rubens throughout Spanish and Portuguese America from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries is a commonplace in studies of Latin American art. Delving deeply into specific examples and their variations in different geographies and institutions, Hyman both informs and expands the reader's knowledge and understanding of the paths of creativity and reception."-Clara Bargellini, Instituto de Investigaciones Esteticas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico