Letterform Literacy in Sixteenth-Century New Spain

Dienstag, 25. November 2025 | 18:00 Uhr | Raum 2.138 | UNIPARK | Erzabt-Klotz-Straße 1 | 5020 Salzburg | Einladungskarte

Historians and art historians alike are used to mining texts for the who-what-where-when-why of cultural production. This talk takes a different tack by looking at the inculcation of literacy in sixteenth-century New Spain. There we find a formal process by which Indigenous came not just to read letters and words but to understand that letterforms could themselves have valences and be mobilized for meaning well beyond their semantic content. Artists were among these subjects. By attending to the visual rather than purely semantic potential of words, one can locate the traces of a Euro-American negotiation in works of art produced in New Spain. Isolating this process has far greater ramifications, serving as a prompt to begin reanimating a period visuality around the formal features of script that have largely eluded art historical evaluation.

Aaron M. Hyman is Professor and Chair of early modern art history at the Universität Basel. He is author of Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Getty Research Institute, 2021) and Formalities: Seeing Script in Art of the Early Modern Spanish World (Chicago University Press, forthcoming); and he has edited, along with Stephanie Porras, The Dutch Americas: Art Histories of the Atlantic World (Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 2025).