Domesticated Nature as an Attribute of the Person in New Spain Portraiture

The portrait as a pictorial genre and the portraiture of New Spain in particular constitute an inexhaustible source of information for the history of representation. Read at multiple levels, portraits offer diverse data about the people they portray: their lives, and the political, social and economic context in which these were lived. Portraits painted in New Spain during the eighteenth century, abundant and rich in aesthetic value, operate from a particular synchrony between this dimension and another: the construction of the person as a member of a complex society, by means of narrative strategies such as the use of elements from other pictorial genres, whose presence contributes to the work’s objectives. This article analyzes landscape as “domesticated nature,” perhaps the most notorious of these genres within the genre.