The Sociability of the Signature in Northern New Spain

Cristóbal de Villalpando, the most famous New Spanish painter, signed his paintings with particular flourish. This paper explores the unusual visuality of Villalpando’s signatures—wrought performances dissimulating exuberant, cultivated penmanship through complicated maneuvers of the brush—identifying two curious features: no signature is quite like any other, nor does any correspond to his signature on documents. That is, painted signatures do not index Villalpando’s actual mode of signing—a charged, if quotidian, gesture within a colonial environment dependent upon the bureaucratic engine of paperwork. Social circumstances of signing were shifting, as the reform of Mexico City’s painters’ guild brought artists together around documents—statutes, painters’ examinations, testimonies—with ever greater frequency. Against this backdrop, Villalpando’s painted signatures publicly and perpetually animated the sociability of signing, stabilizing an otherwise fleeting performance of self. Villalpando’s most elaborate signatures appear on objects quite obviously produced by his workshop and sent to northern New Spain, to an “uncivilized” frontier zone, suggesting that these signatures could do particular work for audiences at a remove. There, overemphasis on autography might overcome the actual absence of Villalpando’s hand and bespeak the cultivated, metropolitan character of their maker, a double-guarantee for patrons commissioning from afar. The goal of this paper is thus twofold: historically, to reveal an artistic sensibility to the geography of the frontier amongst painters in Mexico City and, methodologically, to argue for a sensibility to archival documents that foregrounds visual and material qualities rather than data of semantic content alone.