Art
The Reign of Spain
The splendor of the Old World is on view at a new museum in Dallas—and at San Antonio's most famous mission.
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Many of these churches were rudimentary structures of wood and adobe, but many others were grandly imaginative riffs on the latest Spanish architectural fashions. Few Spanish architects worked in the New World, but engravings and architectural treatises provided a starting point for the master masons responsible for most New World architecture, a multicultural group that included criollos (Spaniards born in America), mestizos, and indigenous peoples. These skilled American professionals brilliantly synthesized a wide range of decorative influences, mixing and matching from a vocabulary that included Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, baroque, and the Moorish Mudéjar. The indigenous artisans who did much of the stone carving contributed their own interpretation of the European patterns, adding another hybrid style, reminiscent of pre-Columbian low reliefs and known as tequitqui, to the polyglot.
San Antonio de Valero was founded in 1718, the first of five missions built along the San Antonio River by Franciscan friars, who established all the Texas missions. In 1756 work began on the mission church now known as the Alamo (for a squadron of lancers from the Mexican town of Alamo de Parras who were billeted there in the early 1800's, after the mission had been secularized). But the main sanctuary remained unfinished at the time of a 1793 inventory, when it was noted that the sacristy, a large room—then almost twice as long as it is now—to the left of the nave that was intended for the storage of the priests' vestments and liturgical objects, was being used as the church.
According to art conservators Pamela Jary Rosser and Mary Canales Jary, who cleaned the Alamo frescoes, the sacristy painters were possibly guild artisans trained in north central Mexico. Most likely working from a cartoon (a stencil-like drawing used as a template for the design), the painters mixed yellow ocher, red oxide, green earth, and lampblack pigments with water and a goat's-milk binder and brushed them directly onto a layer of wet, orange-brown plaster; red tempera highlights were later applied to the dry plaster, a technique known as fresco secco. In addition to punching up the otherwise featureless walls, the ornate bands would have lightened the sacristy's ponderous Romanesque-style groin vaults, only one of which survives.
Further insight will have to await a detailed scholarly study planned to begin later this year. Meanwhile, millions of tourists will continue to file past far more compelling evidence of San Antonio de Valero's aesthetic sophistication, visible on the face of it—literally—for almost two and a half centuries. The present facade of the Alamo was probably intended to reach three stories surmounted by twin bell towers; only the first story and the partially finished second survive (the trademark arched gable that now tops it off was added by the U.S. Army in 1850). Known as retablo style because it was intended to echo an interior retablo—the lavishly decorated, multi-story repository for sacred paintings and sculptures that towered behind the altar in Spanish churches—the facade has four scallop-shell niches that once sheltered now-vanished statues of saints. The vine tendrils and fleurs-de-lis that frame the niches and the entrance portal are expertly carved but oddly stylized in a flat, shallow relief suggestive of both Mudéjar and tequitqui. The two pairs of columns that frame the first-story niches are even more complex composites, with squat Tuscan proportions, narrow Corinthian-style flutes on the bottom half, and ornate Corinthian capitals; midway, the columns are abruptly divided, with the upper half done in a distinctive corkscrew pattern known as salomónica, or Solomonic. Thought to have originated in Solomon's Temple, salomónica was the exotic hallmark of the Spanish baroque.
Even in its fragmentary state, the Alamo is arguably the finest piece of authentic early Spanish baroque style in North America. It is not, however, the masterwork of baroque architecture in San Antonio. That distinction belongs to Mission San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, seven miles downriver from the Alamo. The present church was begun in 1768, only twelve years after the Alamo, but stylistically its facade was considerably more up-to-date. Done in a cutting-edge, late "ultra-baroque" style known as Churrigueresque (after a whole family of influential Spanish architects, none of whom ever worked in the New World), the facade of San José is a fantastically effervescent concoction of carved stone: Renaissance cupids gambol over a Moorish arch; mannerist statues of saints, borne upward on vinelike columns, appear to levitate in their niches; the simplest floral motifs are improvised into frothy, deep-relief sculptures. (By comparison, San José's celebrated Rose Window, which was carved later on the southwest side of the church, is less flamboyant and not as fluently executed.) In the mid-1780's a cleric who had toured the entire frontier of New Spain recognized San José as "the first mission in America, not in point of time, but in point of beauty." San José remains just that; later claimants, such as Tucson's San Xavier del Bac or California's Santa Barbara, are far more provincial in character.
The cultural cosmopolitanism of eighteenth-century Texas offers an interesting perspective as the Spanish legacy becomes a twenty-first-century demographic groundswell. With Hispanics already Texas' largest minority and Catholicism soon to be (if not already) our most widely practiced faith, the cultural tsunami that Spain unleashed on the New World five centuries ago shows no signs of ebbing. Putting aside the traditional bias of Texas historians, for whom "the Spanish failure" has long been a knee-jerk assessment, perhaps we should begin to look at what Spain, our other mother country, did right. Tempering their greed and religious intolerance with an enlightened cultural globalism, the Spanish sent the artist and the artisan into the frontier right alongside the soldier and the priest. And as Texas' increasingly rapid Latinization attests, over the long haul, culture always trumps battles, borders, and politics. The opening of the Meadows Museum and the unveiling of the Alamo frescoes are a nicely coincident little wake-up call: Texans may never forget the Alamo, but it's time to start remembering San Antonio de Valero.
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