Visions of imperial power

GETTING a new empire off the ground is never easy. There are territories to be secured by armies, complicated political structures to be established, populations to be subjugated, elaborate trade routes to be forged, cosmologies to be altered and much more. New ways of thinking need to be conceived, developed, inculcated and embodied -- especially about personal and social identity.

And frequently, an awful lot of art needs to be made.

History shows that art can play a central role in embodying those new ways of thinking. Sometimes it shoots off in unexpected directions. And sometimes it takes the mundane but no less intricate form of the decorative accouterments of daily life: textiles, vessels, furniture, religious artifacts and such.

And once in a while art takes on many of those tasks at once. Consider the painting “Asiel, Fear of God,” a three-quarters life-size figure of an amazing angel made by an unidentified artist in La Paz, Bolivia, sometime at the start of the 1700s. It’s one among about 250 objects in an astounding exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the first show to focus on the rise and transformation of empires in the three centuries following Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas.

Dressed in the fine raiment and plumed hat of a Spanish or Flemish militiaman, all stamped in rich gold patterns representing embroidery on purple and crimson silk, the celestial spirit sports powerful wings nearly as detailed as an Audubon painting. The angel, Asiel, takes delicate aim with a long gun of the type employed by the conquering Europeans. Called a harquebus, the silver-trimmed weapon features a golden cord used to sling it over a shoulder.

Asiel’s pale face is youthful and serene, his figure sleek and regal. The space he occupies is virtually abstract -- a chestnut-colored field, where the military angel’s body casts an elusive shadow.

There is nothing quite like this marvelous, magical image in all of European art. The exhibition’s catalog explains that such works were common in South American villages. Asiel derives from the apocryphal Book of Enoch, which says an army of angels led by the Archangel Michael controlled the stars in the sky. In Andean towns around Lake Titicaca, Catholic teaching faced indigenous cults dedicated to celestial phenomena. Spellbinding images of conquering angels helped change their minds.

Michael turns up all over Latin American art -- almost as often as the Virgin and Christ. San Miguel wasn’t only a Biblical warrior who slew devils for God. He also virtually personified the Iberian Catholic monarchy in the Americas, in splendid triumph over New World pagans.

By the time Spain and Portugal were done, a landmass stretching from the Pacific Northwest to Tierra del Fuego had dramatically changed -- for better and for worse. The Spanish viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, which today comprise Mexico, Central America and most of South America, and the Portuguese territory of Brazil produced an abundance of richly imaginative art.

Most of that art has been underappreciated -- or even unknown, since the 19th century political independence movements and 20th century Modern art together pushed Colonial work into the realm of virtual taboo. The art of conquerors had no place in the world those revolutions forged.

A sense of discovery

ONE result of that suppression, which began to wane only in the 1980s, is that the Philadelphia show is jam-packed with surprises. The paintings, sculptures and decorative objects in “Tesoros / Treasures / Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820” have been drawn from public and private collections all over the region.

Several works come from the Philadelphia Museum, which organized the show in collaboration with Mexico City’s Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, aided by a Getty Foundation research grant. (Mark your calendar: The show travels to Mexico City in February and to L.A. in June.) And they come from excellent if sometimes unheralded museum collections in the U.S., including Denver and San Antonio, as well as European museums.

Wisely, the show is not divided into national categories -- Brazilian, Guatemalan, etc. Those states are modern. The older, transnational colonial view allows three striking aspects to emerge.

One is this art’s opulence. Veritable mountains of gold and silver made Portugal’s king the world’s richest man and Mexico the Spanish Empire’s economic fulcrum. That wealth also funded an extraordinary quantity of art, much of it produced under church guidance. Sumptuous theatricality everywhere awes and seduces. Among the more conventional floral motifs on a silk-and-gilt priestly vestment from Quito, Ecuador, flocks of brightly colored parrots seem inevitable.

The second characteristic is cross-cultural mixing. Latin American art was global before globalism became fashionable. Europeans conquered indigenous civilizations and introduced African slaves, while the region became the crossroads for trade with Asia and the Pacific. It all shows up in Colonial art.

Indigenous artists who used exotic feathers to make intricate pictures turned those talents to making new priestly garments. Based on European engravings of the Trinity, their color has faded but the intricacy hasn’t.

Blue-and-white jars painted with robust Chinese chrysanthemums -- symbols of nobility and death -- became a staple of the great pottery works in Puebla. In a muscular painted sculpture from Brazil, the Abyssinian Carmelite brother St. Elesbao -- shown holding a church aloft while trampling a white king -- assumes a pose that transforms him into an African Archangel Michael slaying a devil.

It’s also often bloody. Imagine the Spanish Inquisition merging with Aztec sacrifices.

Third is an extreme emphasis on surface embellishment. We think of Baroque art as employing extravagant spatial elaboration -- dynamic ovals, twisting spirals and the erasure of horizon lines to embrace infinity. But mostly that’s because we think of European art first.

Colonial Baroque is different. Like its European counterpart, it harnesses movement, emotional intensity, irregularity in composition and wild variety of form. The purpose is also the same -- a Counter-Reformation effort to secure the people’s religious allegiance and assert the Church’s centralized authority. But the look is distinctive.

In this art, surface -- not space -- is everything. Surface is conceived like an enigmatic membrane separating two domains -- the worldly and the spiritual -- and partaking of both.

That describes “Asiel, Fear of God,” who is gossamer personified. Asiel, despite the pounds of silk and heavy wings, is painted like a thin decal.

It characterizes the exquisite small painting on copper by Mexican artist Jose de Paez, showing a sacred heart adored by saints and angels. They occupy a pastoral landscape, but it’s shallow, shadowy and fictional. All eyes fix on the enormous floating heart.

With acutely rendered aorta, ventricles and pulmonary veins, the heart is anatomical. But it’s also an utter fabrication, encircled by a crown of thorns and radiating light. (Think tattoo.) The Jesuit image reflects the intersection between natural science and mystical faith.

Even three-dimensional sculpture considers space mostly as a lateral spread. A carved Brazilian figure of St. Michael weighing souls in a scale is all chunky muscularity, but the sinuous undulations describe the frontal figure’s profile contours. He’s nearly 4 feet tall but barely 20 inches deep.

Likewise an Ecce Homo from Quito, Jesus’ twisted form, with breeze-blown hair and loincloth, describes agitation and suffering that is both physical and spiritual. But the figure fits inside a shallow envelope of space, never bursting out from its slim visual container.

And perhaps the show’s most charming sculpture is a Peruvian Nino, largely contained within the columnar space of the tree limb from which it was carved. With his hypnotizing stare and the bobbed hair of an Indian convert, the Christ child holds a sacred heart in one hand and a split avocado in the other. He proffers elemental nourishment for the spirit and the body.

For a long time the emphasis on flat, decorated surfaces has been regarded as a symptom of Latin American artists’ inability to render complex space. But that interpretation is mistaken. Far from a quaint colonial backwardness akin to folk art, it’s a conception with uncommon power.

And it’s startlingly contemporary. The simple fact is that these artists didn’t need grand illusions of the material void, so they didn’t make them.

Why not? The European Baroque preoccupation with the mysteries of expansive, unbounded space has several sources. One was Columbus’ encounter with the New World. The Age of Exploration sent ships sailing over the edges of known experience -- journeys that helped fuel European artistic fantasy.

But for artists actually living in those uncharted spaces -- artists working in Mexico City and Cuzco rather than imagining the great beyond from ateliers in Brussels and Rome -- what need had they of wallowing in imaginative worldly space? Most were working for the church, and their inventive, often innovative labor took them elsewhere -- to the space of spirituality. Their art represents the interval between physical and metaphysical worlds.

The familiar tendency to use European art as the measuring stick for Latin America distorts all kinds of understanding. Consider bronze and stone, the preferred materials for European Baroque sculpture. None of this show’s sculpture uses them.

Bronze and marble were culturally important in Europe because they invoked the classical antiquity of Greece and Rome, not for some inherent superiority. Polychromed wood, common in Spain, was Latin America’s favored material. Stone and metal could not compete with wood’s unlimited possibilities for surface embellishment.

Besides, Greece and Rome were remote from Inca, Aztec and other antique Mesoamerican and South American civilizations. There, stone and metal sculptures were customary -- but in colonial Latin America it was culturally important to suppress, not invoke, that history.

“Tesoros” is a landmark exhibition, its thick catalog a trove of fascinating insights. A few omissions are surprising -- most notably, perhaps, a haunting full-length portrait of a young Creole novitiate in Queretero, Mexico, painted by an unidentified artist. (Some think it’s by Paez or his elder, Miguel Cabrera.) It’s arguably the most beautiful portrait in all New Spain.

But given the abundance of exceptional material that has been gathered, she is hardly missed. The empires are gone, but their art is no longer forgotten.

christopher.knight@latimes.com

Knight is The Times’ art critic.