A ‘Church of Mosque Proportions’: Debates of Mudéjar Style in New Granada

The early studies on Ibero-American, so-called colonial art, focused on key questions such as the nomenclature of its historic styles, the descriptions of its visual language, and the legitimacy of American art under Spanish rule. Hispanic culture, as a strong cultural model in the Americas, set the caste system as a rule to measure cultural production value and purity. Within that frame, Spanish scholars conceived the category Mudejar, defined as the visual heritage of Islamic culture in the Iberian Peninsula. But the problem of Mudejar arrival in the Americas remains due to the prohibition for Arab descendants to travel to the New World and the Spanish struggles as a Catholic nation with Islamic traditions. This essay addresses this issue from a historiographic standpoint, seeking to show how an art historical debate reflected many ideas tied to religion, race, and cultural identities in studies of New Granada—roughly modern Colombia.

Keywords: Artesonado or Arteson ; biological and anthropological hybridization in the arts ; Carpinteria de lo blanco ; caste system in the arts ; castillian invariants on architechture ; Hispanic architectural legacy ; intra-historia ; New Granada architechture ; sense of space ; struggling convivencia