Art: New World Baroque

The craftsmen of the baroque preferred a curve to a straight line and a contorted curve to a plain one. When the Spaniards brought baroque to the New World, it blossomed in fresh and wonderful variations. Pal Kelemen, Hungarian-born art historian, has spent nearly three years tracing baroque’s high-spirited course through Latin America. In a handsome new book with a sky-high price, Baroque and Rococo in Latin America (Macmillan; $16.50), he gives a rich account in words and pictures of what he saw.

Over & over, Kelemen found “a style more baroque in its daring than the baroque of Europe.” The New World innovators: mainly Indians under the supervision of Spanish architects and churchmen. Working just for their keep, or less, the Indians adopted baroque as “their own exuberant language,” brought to their craft a religious enthusiasm such as European builders had not had since the Middle Ages.

By the early 17th Century, the Americas sparkled with 70,000 churches. As the baroque influence increased, façades and portals were encrusted with a rich mixture of Christian and pagan symbols: angels topped by feathered headdresses; decorative borders of puma heads, papayas, pineapples and bananas; mermaids playing native guitars side by side with powerful primitive versions of the saints.

Native craftsmen also lavished loving skill on the churches’ ornate, polychromed interiors, hewing their sculptures from native woods and stone or molding them from a paste made of corn. The ceiling of a chapel in the sanctuary of Ocotlán, one of the most beautiful in Latin America, took 20 years to decorate. Mexico City’s magnificent cathedral, long the largest in the Western Hemisphere,* took more than two centuries to finish.

For all their splendor, many of the buildings and details that caught Kelemen’s eye were in a crumbling state. Even in a few years’ time, “the volcano of Paricutin in Mexico . . . floods in Guatemala, seismic catastrophes in El Salvador and Ecuador, civil strife in Colombia and an earthquake in Cuzco have all taken a tragic toll.” Worst of all, according to Kelemen: civil authorities who are letting local masterpieces deteriorate through neglect—or are tearing them down to make way for widened streets and modern buildings.

* The largest now: the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (Episcopal) in Manhattan.