Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493-1793.

Shubert, Adrian

by Richard Kagan (with the collaboration of Fernando Marias). New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University Press, 2000. 249 pp, $60.00 U.S. (cloth).

Richard Kagan is one of the most distinguished historians of early modern Spain. He is also one of the most versatile. His previous work includes studies of students and society, and of lawsuits in Castile, as well as a micro history of the travails of an individual woman in sixteenth-century Madrid. His latest book moves to yet another topic: the visual representations of cities, a category that goes well beyond such usual artifacts as maps and city views to include commemorative paintings and prints, ex-votos, and folding screens. His book also adopts a much more sweeping canvas than its predecessors, Spain and its American empire over a period of three centuries. The intellectual result is a provocative study that spans not only the Atlantic but also cultures as it assesses the role of indigenous Americans and their mapping practices to the development of Hispanic city views. The physical product--for which both the author and the publisher are to be congratulated--is a generously and handsomely illustrated, yet reasonably-priced, volume which provides 154 images, of which 136 are in colour.

Kagan is not concerned with the question of the degree to which these representations were objectively accurate or not. Instead, his emphasis is on what he calls the "communicentric" images, ones which used metaphor or synecdoche to convey "the special distinct character along with the memories and traditions that served to distinguish that community from another" (p. 16). This distinction derives from the Renaissance concept of the city as including both the built environment (urbs) and its human community (civitas). This was given a special twist in Spain, and subsequently in its American empire, as Spanish writers saw the city as the prime agent of "civilization" and gave more weight to its civitas.

This predilection for what he calls "symbolic geography" (p. 61) is the starting point for what will undoubtedly be the most controversial aspect of the book: Kagan's rejection of the view that the European and indigenous American mapping traditions were totally distinct, and his argument that they "almost had as many points of similarity as difference" (p. 46). On the one hand, there was a diverse indigenous mapping tradition that included representation of what Europeans would have called the civitas aspects of specific communities, a tradition which continued after the conquest and led to the emergence of a hybrid method of representing cities. On the other, European, and especially Spanish, mapping practices were far from monolithically "scientific," and had a strong symbolic strand.

Kagan is also concerned with the different ways in which travelers and local residents portrayed these cities. His extended analysis of city views of Mexico City, Cuzco, and Potosi demonstrates that foreign visitors and collections of city views published outside the Hispanic world focussed on the physical aspects of Spanish-American cities. They also repeatedly recycled existing representations so that the growth and development of these cities remained hidden. For their part, views produced by or for local residents stressed the community. This was true even for foundational plans, which offered a picture of a town before it even existed in fact. These representations also shared important features with indigenous ones, especially as "ideas about the sacred and communal aspects of the city life dovetailed" (p. 111).

Kagan's conclusion is unusual. After taking us through the major cities of Spanish America, he returns to his home field, as it were, with a detailed analysis of three representations of the city of Toledo: Anton van den Wynegarde's view prepared in 1563 as part of a series of portrayals of the principal towns in Spain and El Greco's View of Toledo and View and Plan of Toledo. These serve as the basis for a restatement of some of the principal themes of the book, particularly the difference between the communicentric approach and the chorographic approach, which sought to provide an accurate picture of the city. Van Wynegarde was an outsider, akin to the travellers who visited Spanish America, and he sought to produce a life-like rendering of the city's external appearance. In contrast, El Greco lived in Toledo for almost forty years and received his commissions primarily from local notables. His representations of the city either forego the attempt to portray the city "as it was" or force the representation of the physical urbs to share the canvas with its human communitas.

Richard Kagan has given us a highly readable, intellectually engaging, and visually pleasing discussion that will be of interest to historians of early modern Spain, the Spanish empire and of other European empires in the Americas. He has also given history a strong presence in a growing multidisciplinary literature deriving from the relatively recent insight among cartographers and geographers that maps construct reality rather than simply reproduce it.

Adrian Shubert
York University