The book “History of Art in Latin America and the Philippines. Didactic Materials 1: Pre-Hispanic Cultures” exposes the necessary models for the understanding of cultural processes. The events happened since the end of the 15th century in American territory until the conquest of the Philippines by Legazpi in 1565, imply a contact of western culture with two social fields in which different and, until that moment, unknown degrees of development can be seen.
The Spanish Empire reached its maximum extension in the 16th century thanks to the incorporation of the lands of the American continent and the possessions of the Pacific ocean rediscovered, after the first round-the-world trip by Fernando de Magallanes and Juan Sebastián Elcano between 1519 and 1522. In this sense, the arrival of the western man to America revealed, on the one hand, that the initial objective of reaching the Spice Islands by a different route than the Portuguese of the Cape of Good Hope had not been achieved and above all made evident the existence of a large extension of inhabited land, unknown until that moment and where a series of cultures had developed with a different degree of evolution, some of which were real civilizations.
The book “History of Art in Latin America and the Philippines. Didactic Materials 1: Pre-Hispanic Cultures”, published by the University of Granada and written by Miguel Ángel Sorroche Cuerva and Alejandro Villalobos Pérez –under the supervision of the director of the collection, Professor Rafael López Guzmán—exposes the necessary models to understand cultural processes. The events happened since the end of the 15th century in American territory until the conquest of the Philippines by Legazpi in 1565, imply a contact of western culture with two social fields in which different and, until that moment, unknown degrees of development can be seen.
The study of the history of American art forces, according to the authors of this volume, to progress from the first stages in which the presence of a cultural and artistic production has been registered of enough importance to be considered an inherent quality of the generating societies. It is essential to analyse the most important periods, especially due to the weight they will have in the following modern and even contemporary stages.
According to historians, “carrying out a study on the production of cultural signs before the Spanish arrival to America and the Philippines is without doubt a thrilling labour that intends to be a synthesis work to expose the necessary models for the understanding of both cultural processes. The events happened since the end of the 15th century in American territory until the conquest of the Philippines by Legazpi in 1565, imply a contact of western culture with two social fields in which different and, until that moment, unknown degrees of development can be seen.
The authors of the book maintain that there is a lot of material: “it is not new and has forced us to carry out a series of selections to maintain the idea of a global approach of the existing materials. The previous period to the arrival of Europeans to America is known as pre-Hispanic, alluding to the period in which the main American cultures developed. Although we are not going to gauge the wisdom of terms such as pre-Hispanic, pre-Columbian, pre-colonial, pre-Cortesian, etc., it is evident that such conceptual discussion reveals the need of defining a period that stands out for the importance of the performance and solidity of the artistic and cultural signs developed during these periods”.
Reference:
Prof Rafael López Guzmán.
Dpt. of Art History. University of Granada.
Phone number: 958 243626 / 243627.
E-mail: rlopez@platon.ugr.es