Tea at Trianon: Caste Paintings

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Caste Paintings

From It's About Time:

There was an exhibit in New York City, "New World Orders: Casta Painting & Colonial Latin America" at the Americas Society in 1996. Shown there were intimate, family portrayals of the racial mixing of the melting pot of the Americas forged from New World colonialism & Spanish Catholicism. Generally Latin America is defined as the region of the Americas where Romance languages (i.e., those derived from Latin) – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, & variably French – are primarily spoken....And then, a couple of years ago, I read the curator of that exhibit Ilona Katzew's book called Casta Painting: Images of Race in 18th-Century Mexico. It was published by the Yale University Press, in New Haven in 2004, and focused on the paintings of Miguel Cabrera c 1695-1768....Katzew used this primary source to help explain the need for the caste system in Mexico. In 1770 Francisco Antonio Lorenzana, a Spanish prelate and archbishop of Mexico from 1766 to 1772, remarked on the diversity of Mexico's population as opposed to Spain's: "Two worlds God has placed in the hands of our Catholic Monarch, and the New does not resemble the Old, not in its climate, its customs, nor its inhabitants; it has another legislative body, another council for governing, yet always with the end of making them alike: In the Old Spain only a single caste of men is recognized, in the New many and different." (Read more.)