Conceived as an “integral counterpart” to the eponymous exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and which also appeared at the Museo Nacional de Historia in Mexico City, Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World features an impressive roster of international scholars, an interdisciplinary approach, and over two hundred full-color illustrations. The publication is not, strictly speaking, an exhibition catalogue (there are no individual entries); rather, it is a collection of related essays capable of standing independently of the exhibition it was meant to accompany. In this sense, Contested Visions (the book) is an important example of a recent and growing trend in art-historical publishing: a hybrid genre that might be called the “exhibition companion.”

The intellectual framework behind the exhibition and the publication was developed by Ilona Katzew, curator of Latin American art at LACMA. In her preface, Katzew lays out this complex and revisionist framework with remarkable clarity (two forewords and an introduction assist in guiding the reader). The truism that history is written by the victors is turned on its head repeatedly throughout the essays, and the romanticized notion of two great empires—Aztec and Inca—succumbing to superior Spanish firepower is shown to have been far more complex. In Katzew’s words, the native American peoples’ “relationship to the conquerors cannot be reduced to one of victors and vanquished; it entailed a delicate process of cultural negotiation, mutual accommodation and exchange (rather than syncretism and hybridity), a dynamic that gave rise to vital works of art” (12). It is a bold paradigm, though not always as controversial as it sounds thanks to the quality of the scholarship assembled in this handsome volume.

The essays are arranged to work both in pairs and as a dynamic progression or continuous dialogue. William Jordan provides an accessible, authoritative overview of the concepts and language in the ensuing pages. Cecelia Klein, likewise, provides an exemplary introduction to pre-Hispanic visualizations of faith, material culture, and political history. Here, readers are treated to a lavishly illustrated selection of works of art that brilliantly introduces the nonspecialist to the variety of media, styles, and iconography that were brought to bear by native artists before the Spanish conquest. As the reader will soon see, many such pre-Columbian materials and techniques would later be employed by both Spanish patrons and native artists during colonial times. Likewise, sacred iconographies would be exploited effectively by missionaries and the secular church in the service of evangelization.

Kevin Terraciano provides what might be the methodological axis on which the publication turns. History, he writes, “is not a fixed narrative of events dictated by the victors but a contested field of claims and counterclaims that we continue to revisit and revise” (77) as more evidence emerges. In written words and painted images, Terraciano examines how indigenous accounts of contact and conquest differed from histories constructed by Spanish writers. Particularly striking is the disparity between images such as the González brothers’ enconchado depicting Hernán Cortés’s courtly visit to Moctezuma’s palace and that of “Spaniards throwing the rulers of Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco in the lake,” from Book 12 of the Florentine Codex. Diana Magaloni Kerpel’s essay explores the revolutionary development of a new visual language in the colonial Americas by delving deeply into iconography that first appeared in the final book of the Florentine Codex. In particular, she introduces the reader to the tlacuiloque, Nahua painter-scribes, who were able to exploit the parallels between Biblical imagery and Mesoamerican creation mythology to create a new system of “picture writing.”

The essays by Mónica Domínguez Torres and Eduardo de Jesús Douglas function as a symbiotic pair exploring the use of coats of arms and European-style genealogies for purposes of social (and racial) mobility and legal claims to land and nobility. Outside of studies of portraiture, these important subfields have been neglected for too long; here, the essays persuasively illustrate the active self-promotion by many putative descendants of Inca nobility. Carolyn Dean treats related themes in her essay on martial theater as practiced by native performers during official festivals (“things of fun, festival, and joy” were often strategic reminders of potential native power). Katzew’s own essay on the politics of ritual in Mexico looks at processions, weddings, and other celebrations, and how they functioned to reinforce the social pact, or “covenant,” between the indigenous and Spanish republics (local indigenous leaders often took the lead in organizing the festivities).

Contributions by Ramón Mujica Pinilla and Thomas Cummins offer, in the first case, an elucidation of the intentionally frightening and often esoteric iconography of the Four Last Things (death, judgment, hell, and heaven) in Andean visual culture; and in the latter, an exploration of printed imagery in Spanish America. Cummins’s article proposes a new way of interpreting prints as active agents in the creation of an intercontinental shared visual culture. Among the surprising revelations here is that the 1534 print of Francisco Pizarro’s Capture of Atahualpa, made in Seville, was based on “eyewitness” accounts for the Spaniards, and on a German print of a king of India for the depiction of the Inca. The image, and Cummins’s discussion, at once captures the global nature of Spanish colonial culture and the disconnected, contradictory qualities of the resulting imagery.

In the final pairing of essays, Luisa Elena Alcalá and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden explore, respectively, the development of specifically Spanish-American cult devotions (Virgin of Copacabana, San Miguel del Milagro) and the rise and fall of artists’ social status in Peru. Admirably, both Alcalá and Wuffarden follow their arguments through to the nineteenth century, the latter to devastating effect: the advent of the European Enlightenment in the Americas appears to have reversed any social and political gains the natives may have made under Hapsburg or even Bourbon rule. Alcalá’s “Indian artist as good Christian” has been reduced to the anonymous, destitute “folk artist” by the mid-1800s.

In powerful ways, this collection of essays explodes the accepted historical narrative of oppressor/oppressed in favor of a more nuanced, honest approach. That is not to say that history has been whitewashed; on the contrary, images and histories of violence, slavery, cruelty, and subjugation spring from nearly every page of Contested Visions. However, the myth of “Indian” as passive victim is effectively and comprehensively rejected. Instead, the reader is faced with case after case of vitality, ingenuity, and active, often subversive “cultural negotiation” (including social self-promotion) surviving long after the conquest. What emerges is, in its essence, a very human story.

There are bound to be academic detractors of the book’s revisionist approach, but the one drawback deserving mention here is neither in methodology nor scholarship but in format. The traditional exhibition catalogue, with footnoted entries serving as a historiographical record of a museum or gallery show, has been supplanted recently in the Spanish Colonial field by the genre I mentioned earlier, the “exhibition companion.” One prominent example emerged in 2008, with Fomento Cultural Banamex’s publication of Pintura de los Reinos: Identidades compartidas: Territorios del mundo hispánico (Mexico City, 2008–9), a four-volume collection of essays released two years prior to the exhibition’s debut at the Museo del Prado and the Palacio Real in Madrid. Visitors to the 2010 show, however, could pick up a much smaller paperback edition that reproduced each work in thumbnail illustrations, arranged by gallery, theme, and venue, as they appeared in the actual exhibition. This arrangement was as unwieldy (a combined weight of twenty-eight pounds) as it was impractical, but its goals were achieved in spectacular fashion. The Brooklyn Museum telescopes this format in its companion to Behind Closed Doors: Art in the Spanish American Home, 1492–1898 (edited by Richard Aste, 2013) by illustrating every object in the show and weaving each through the accompanying essay texts.

Readers of Contested Visions (as well as lenders to the show) may be disappointed not to have such a record of exhibited works. Yet one should be forgiven for mistakenly concluding that the intellectual framework of Contested Visions is historically more valuable than the objects themselves. Nowhere is this point more poignantly made than in Cummins’s description of the featherwork Mass of Saint Gregory, the famous 1539 diplomatic gift to Paul III in thanks for his proclamation of natives’ rational humanity, which “acknowledges through its beauty the awesome power wielded by the pope” (208). Simultaneously, in this beauty lay native power, advertisement of loyalty, and proof of rationality. In this important contribution to an understanding of one particularly complex chapter in the human story, these are visions both contested and shared.