2024 Italian Art Society/Kress Lecture in Italy
In May 2010, the Italian Art Society together with the Samuel H. Kress Foundation launched a new lecture series. Known as the IAS/Kress Lectures in Italy, this series seeks to promote intellectual exchanges among art historians of North America and the international community of scholars living or working in Italy. The 13th IAS/Kress Lecture was held on June 28, 2024 at the Musei Reali di Torino in Torino, Italy.
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Guarino Guarini and Early Modern Hispanic Americas: Books, Images, and Architecture between Torino and Mexico
Luis Javier Cuesta Hernández, Universidad Iberoamericana/Mexico City
"Late seventeenth-century/early eighteenth-century architecture in New Spain (today´s Mexico) cannot be explained without the influence exerted by Guarino Guarini. In the last few years scholars have been offering insights on dissemination of Guarini’s ideas in Colonial Americas. The existence of architectural works featuring the Theatine monk’s Ordine Corintio Supremo or Ordine Ondeggiante, raises interesting questions about Guarini’s possible influence through different sources.
This lecture starts with an examination of Guarini’s visual language in the context of New Spain’s architecture. Then it reconsiders the arrival and use (misuse?) of theoretical sources in New Spain. Unfortunately, art historical scholarship concerning this matter has remained largely local. I therefore aim to discuss the movement, reinstallation, and reinterpretation of architectural images; the sources of architecture and their changing (or unchanging) meaning; printed and other reproductions and their relationship to new originals.
Finally this conference also aims to be part of the 400th anniversary of Guarino Guarini´s birth (1624–1683), in taking into account an important (and yet almost forgotten) role of his theoretical work. For that, I will try to reconstruct the possible ways that Guarini´s work followed in arriving to Early Modern Hispanic Americas: if that work was able to reach almost every corner of New Spain, we need to find out how that was achieved (some initial ideas about it could be related to Jesuit fathers such as Giovanni Battista Zappa from Torino or Simon Bohuradsky from Bohemia)." (Luis Javier Cuesta Hernández via IAS)
Watch the recorded lecture on the IAS's Youtube channel.
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