Engel’s book is a welcome addition to the scholarly dialogue about portraiture, one that brings the complexities of colonial relationships to bear on the discussion of a genre viewed as embodying power. Pictured Politics will appeal to specialists and students of colonial art and portraiture studies. Most of the images she analyzes have never been reproduced in an English language art history text. Their appearance within Engel’s book widens our understanding of portraits produced in the eighteenth century and the ways in which they were employed and displayed in a colonial context. Engel treats this understudied material in richly nuanced ways with compelling discussion.
~Journal18
Pictured Politics provides a model for studying the ways in which local and imperial concerns converged in artistic patronage and serves as a fine example of how interviceregal comparison can be revealing and, at the same time, generate new research questions.
~caa.reviews
Engel’s work makes important contributions to the understanding of South American colonial art and that of the early nineteenth century...Pictured Politics is the first stand-alone analysis of South American portraiture. As such, Emily Engel’s research offers insights beyond the physical portraits’ stylistic traits and icono-graphic content, helping the reader see what cannot be seen, by examining portraiture as more than just historical artifacts. Her comprehensive analyses of the sociopolitical roots of this genre over time reveal deep material relationships that intricately intertwined portraiture with complex regional and local notions of authority.
~Estudios Interdisciplinarios de America Latina y el Caribe
Pictured Politics makes an exemplary contribution to one of the least studied aspects of the history of Hispanic viceregal art: portraiture in South America...a nuanced and deep reading of the official—in other words, corporate, and predominantly male—portrait in the primary political and commercial centres of South America.
~Hispanic Research Journal
Pictured Politics offers a new and much-needed reframing of official portrait series that have rested in the background of colonial art history. It offers provocative conclusions and will undoubtedly inspire further research. Moreover, the book will hopefully help secure the preservation of surviving examples of these important records of colonial history.
~H-Net Reviews
Pictured Politics constitutes an exceptional study of an important corpus of art in colonial Spanish South America, namely, official portraiture. Dr. Emily Engel delivers an unparalleled analysis of the significance, aesthetics, and historical evolution of paintings that virtually everyone with experience in Latin American art history will have encountered in the literature or the museums.
~Jeffrey Schrader, University of Colorado, Denver, author of La Virgen de Atocha: Los Austrias y las imágenes milagrosas
Pictured Politics is a theoretically informed and historically sensitive examination of official portraiture in Spanish South America, interweaving visual analysis with examinations of crucial period documents, all the while engaging meaningfully with art-historical, ethnographical, and related scholarship. Significantly, it also links Spanish South American official portraiture to European and indigenous artistic traditions and collecting practices. The result is a multifaceted examination that takes into consideration the multiple, complex, and culturally diverse agencies that influenced the tradition of portraiture in early modern/colonial and republican-era Spanish South America.
~James M. Córdova, University of Colorado, Boulder, author of The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent
