Faculty Fellow Lecture Series, Emmanuel Ortega, Art History, “Taming the Wild: Franciscan Imagery and the Ideology of Domestication in Colonial Mexico”

In this talk, Emmanuel Ortega will present a chapter from his upcoming book in progress, Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission, to explore how the project of Christian missionizing in the Americas during the Spanish colonial period carried at its innermost ideological base European ideas of domestication. During the first phase of the so-called Golden Era of Missionizing (ca.1524-1600), images of preachers in the wilderness began to circulate in Europe and the Americas. Some of the most influential images were produced by the Brotherhood of St. Francis to celebrate their missionizing work in the newly conquered territories. Imperial visual creators made connections between episodes from the life of St. Francis and their perilous enterprise in the Americas—often conflating the saint’s encounters with animals and wildlife with their own interactions with Indigenous communities—to demonstrate how the Brotherhood continued to carryout their ideological dogma of poverty and communion with nature in the seseemingly untamable territories. However, these images and their pictorial conventions worked to emphasize the spiritual dimensions of conquest, while obscuring their underlaying colonial domesticating impulses. By tethering domestication to concepts of Franciscan innocence, this presentation will show how the violent taming of the Chichimec region in central Mexico was justified as a religious initiative rather than a violent mining industry.

Emmanuel Ortega is a Curator, the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library (2023–2024). Ortega has lectured nationally and internationally on nineteenth-century Mexican landscape painting, ex-votos, and visual representations of the New Mexico Pueblo peoples in Novo hispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. His recently curated art show titled "Contemporary Ex-Votos Devotion Beyond Medium" produced an accompanying catalog published by the New Mexico State University Art Museum this spring. An essay titled “Beyond European Palettes: The Overlooked Contributions of Indigenized Artists in the Historiography of Painting in Mexico.” will appear this fall as part of the Routledge Companion to Art and Empire: Aesthetics and Imperialism, 1800-1950. His book Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission is under contract with Routledge.