Abstract

KATZEW, Ilona. The Saga of Origins: An Americanist Reinterpretation of Two Paintings by Cristóbal de Villalpando. An. Inst. Investig. Estét [online]. 2011, vol.33, n.99, pp.33-70. ISSN 0185-1276.

The question of origins of the indigenous peoples of the American continent became an unavoidable issue almost from the start of the colonization process, and the debate was to continue well into the eighteenth century. The existence of a fourth continent at the confines of the planet-a land that, if the Ancients were to be believed, ought to have been largely inhospitable and uninhabitable because of its straddling the famous "torrid zone"-caused a revolution not only where those ancient beliefs were concerned, but also as regards Holy Writ. This article addresses the debate at its height in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and its repercussions in the Americas, above all among local intellectuals armed not only with the pen but also with the paintbrush. A reading is offered of a group of works that show the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise and the episode of Noah's Ark, including two by the celebrated Novo-Hispanic painter Cristóbal de Villalpando. The article gives a fresh interpretation of these works, in contrast with previous readings that saw in them merely a conventional treatment of Biblical subjects in accordance with the Western canon. It links their iconography to a broader historicist tendency that sought to resolve the question of origins of the indigenous peoples and its implications from an ontological point of view regarding the locus of the American continent.

Keywords : Indians origins theory; Cristóbal de Villalpando; Cathedral of Puebla; paintings of the Flood and Noah's Ark.

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