Review: Architectural Rhetoric and the Iconography of Authority in Colonial Mexico. The Casa de Montejo, by C. Cody Barteet

The home of a conquistador, particularly the rich iconographic program of its façade, guides this case study in which art historian C. Cody Barteet aims to shed light on the role of architecture in the production and reception of meaning, the deployment and transformation of diverse artistic repertoires, and the formation of identities in early colonial Yucatán. To that end, Barteet not only reconstructs the history and design of the mid-sixteenth-century Casa de Montejo façade (a remarkable vestige of elite domestic architecture in early colonial Spanish America); he also delves into the postconquest scene of this Mexican region, the context in which this built form and other cultural artifacts were produced, their signification, and their use and interpretation by Yucatán’s multiethnic society. The scene is set at a time rife with continuous instability in this southern Mexican region due to the Maya resistance to the Spanish conquistadors and the institutional...