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Examines the visual qualities of written words in works of art created from 1540 to 1700 across the transatlantic Spanish Empire.

Pieces of text are found across paintings produced in the early modern Spanish Empire, but their role as aesthetic elements has long been overlooked. With Formalities, Aaron M. Hyman argues that these words were important, not only because of their literal content but also because of their forms, which artists and their audiences across the Spanish world understood in terms of meanings beyond semantic content. 

The widespread phenomenon of writing in or on works of art is one of the most distinctive features of art in the early modern Spanish world, yet it has received little art historical attention. Hyman focuses on this feature, demonstrating how artists mobilized particular scripts and carefully integrated the pictorial qualities of the written word. He explores how letterforms of the era were strictly codified, with different forms being particular to different genres and contexts. Chapters look at painted, embroidered, and incised words alongside texts in archival documents, books, and prints, showing how the visual arts drew on sources including calligraphy manuals, notarial documents, merchant account books, liturgical texts, and pictograms. Artists relied on their audiences’ understanding of the contexts in which such objects were used and connotations that texts thus produced, using visual languages to make meaning in addition to—or in spite of—what the words themselves actually said. 

Winner of the Latin American Studies Association's 2022 Best Book in Colonial Latin American Studies.

This book examines the reception in Latin America of prints designed by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, showing how colonial artists used such designs to create all manner of artworks and, in the process, forged new frameworks for artistic creativity.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) never crossed the Atlantic himself, but his impact in colonial Latin America was profound. Prints made after the Flemish artist’s designs were routinely sent from Europe to the Spanish Americas, where artists used them to make all manner of objects.

Rubens in Repeat is the first comprehensive study of this transatlantic phenomenon, despite broad recognition that it was one of the most important forces to shape the artistic landscapes of the region. Copying, particularly in colonial contexts, has traditionally held negative implications that have discouraged its serious exploration. Yet analyzing the interpretation of printed sources and recontextualizing the resulting works within period discourse and their original spaces of display allow a new critical reassessment of this broad category of art produced in colonial Latin America—art that has all too easily been dismissed as derivative and thus unworthy of sustained interest and investigation. This book takes a new approach to the paradigms of artistic authorship that emerged alongside these complex creative responses, focusing on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the use of European prints was an essential component of the very framework in which colonial artists forged ideas about what it meant to be a creator.