A collection of 163 photographs of Mexican colonial churches and an authoritative commentary on the history of colonial religious architecture are contained in this book. The photographs display the buildings and parts of buildings in several moods, some being sharp and detailed, others deliberately impressionistic. Their arrangement is chronological and the examples are selected to illustrate impartially the entire period from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. Each photograph is keyed to a descriptive and historical statement, written by Joseph Baird, which identifies the subject and comments on its position in the stylistic analysis and the historical sequence. Other parts of Baird’s text discuss the architectural history as a whole, Spanish origins, special Mexican styles, and the biographies of some major architects. There is a glossary of terms and a bibliography.
The Baird text may be recommended as a brief, clear exposition cast in the most modern terms. In popular writing Mexican church architecture has suffered from careless interpretations and loose terminology, here clarified and improved. The new understanding depends especially on the work of Kubler, Soria, Kelemen, Weismann Angulo, Dorta, Toussaint, Fernández, and Baird himself, twentieth-century scholars who have in effect created this as a field of study and defined its terms. Concepts such as Mannerism and Baroque, the question of Indian survivals, relations between Mexican and Spanish styles, all are treated with a firm hand. The sources and concepts are professional, but the presentation is designed for non-professional readers and should relieve them of dependence upon such writers as Baxter and Sanford.
Essentially Baird reduces Indian background, which has frequently been overemphasized, to a subordinate role. More crucial problems involve transfers and diffusions of Spanish styles and analyses of local characteristics in the regions of New Spain. Baird rejects most of the implications of a north-south differentiation for the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Mexico City vs. Puebla and Oaxaca) in favor of a more disparate regionalism brought about by differences in natural environments and materials, and by the local and itinerant designers. European Baroque appeared unevenly in Mexico, both geographically and with regard to selected emphases on façades and altar screens. The architectural history is organized about three periods of building, 1530 to 1580, 1630 to 1680, and 1730 to 1780. In the first period monasteries dominated. In the second the great cathedrals were built. The third was the period of new parish and pilgrimage churches. The treatment of styles is especially illuminating in its discussion of Mexican columns (salomónica and estípite).
Comment on the individual photographs is informed in each case by identification and dating, stylistic discussion, and comparisons, though exact citations in the literature are rarely provided. The photographs themselves are new and carefully selected to illustrate the text and emphasize the variety of examples. This is an attractive and successful book.