Local Tendencies in the History of Collecting: Paintings and Engravings in the Domestic Spaces of Santiago de Chile, 1650-1750
Paintings and Engravings in the Domestic Spaces of Santiago de Chile, 1650-1750
Dr. Catherine Burdick
The era between 1650 and 1750 in Santiago de Chile was a period that experienced a vibrant culture of private art collection and exhibition, particularly for the case of paintings and engravings. Elite citizens of this town maintained a phenomenal number of pictures in their homes, thereby harnessing the prestige of such images to enhance social standing and demonstrate religious and political leanings. The systematic study of over 350 private art collections in colonial inventories registered in Santiago and its outskirts suggests several questions. What subjects were collected and did thematic tastes change over time? Where were artworks displayed within the home? Given that Chile lacked its own production centers for paintings and engravings until the early nineteenth century, from where did Santiago’s private collections originate? One critical finding of this study is the presence of a selection of registry entries in which pictures are described by their place of origin, thereby providing an inroad to the partial reconstruction of regional and transatlantic circulation trends. Notably, this subset of artworks with identified origins provides evidence for shifting trends in private collection practices during the final decades of the seventeenth century, with a new predilection for interregional markets that favored images ‘del Cusco’.