Abstract

CRUZ MEDINA, Juan Pablo. The Quito Nativity, a Polysemic Iconography: Christianization, Image and Construction of the Social Body in the Context of the Realm of New Granada. Seventeenth and Eigteenth Century. An. Inst. Investig. Estét [online]. 2022, vol.44, n.121, pp.43-89.  Epub July 31, 2023. ISSN 0185-1276.  https://doi.org/10.22201/iie.18703062e.2022.121.2792.

This paper seeks to show the way in which the “Quito Nativity” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries recomposed the iconographic discourse of Neapolitan nativity scenes, giving life to a visual rhetoric aimed at transmitting ideal models linked to both individual and social forms of behavior. From the iconographic analysis of a series of nativity figures, added to the documentary records that describe one of the manger scenes used in the framework of the evangelization carried out in the New Kingdom of Granada, it will be shown that the iconography of the colonial nativity was presented as a mechanism of social configuration. In the midst of this, the ideal is presented as the nucleus of visual discourse, structuring itself from the presence of features and forms typical of the iconographic rhetoric of the Baroque.

Keywords : Manger; Nativity; colonial imagery; social body; castes; colonial iconography; New Kingdom of Granada; Quito sculpture.