9 Tolsá. 1 Hence the engraving has a long string of attributions along its lower margin, recognizing the efforts of the academy faculty who had contributed to the project. It also acknowledges the patronage of Miguel de la Grúa Talamanca, the viceroy of New Spain, who commissioned the sculpture and the print so that Mexicans could show their loyalty to the king. The print consequently reminds us of the medium’s collaborative aspect. There was no single hand, no solitary artist responsible for its creation, and the edition of works would eventually reach a wide audience. But, as they say, there were issues and these issues point to some of the things that I find most fascinating about prints. First, the sculpture was not ready on its installation date and would not be finished for another seven years. Instead, the 1796 celebration was held with a stand-in, a wood sculpture covered in gold leaf. Nevertheless, the viceroy immediately ordered the print made to commemorate the installation and had copies sent to Spain. The multiple copies of the print consequently became the stand-in for the sculpture, and served as the proof of the installation event that only partially happened, the document of a sculpture that did not yet exist, and the confirmation of a Mexican loyalty to the monarch that did not really extend much beyond the viceroy and the academy faculty. The print was furthermore disseminated widely, offered for sale in local shops, given as gifts, and sent to the court Madrid. But the print was a lie. It allowed the Mexican viceroy to construct an ideal, fictitious world that did not exist and it permitted the king to see a colony that exhibited all the characteristics of a good subject people. The Mexican people in turn purchased the print and displayed it in their homes to demonstrate their participation in the charade and their loyalty to the absent king and the present viceroy. But also, and probably more importantly, they purchased it to locate themselves within the social milieu of a moneyed elite who collected prints as a duty and social ritual of their group. This was, after all, the late eighteenth century and the display of tastefulness was as important in Mexico as it was in Europe. But the story and the problems continued. After sending a shipment of prints to the king to demonstrate his loyalty, the viceroy was informed that the prints never arrived; the ship was seized by pirates. The viceroy then ordered another batch of prints sent, and then another. Each shipment was preceded by a letter from the viceroy to the court offering apologies and explaining the logistics of the latest offering. Why was the viceroy so desperate to get the prints to the king? In part, he sought to provide visual evidence of his efforts. Even if the sculpture was not yet installed, the prints were; more copies of the print simply multiplied the proof. The print confirmed the effort and made visible the viceroy’s fealty. It furthermore locates printmaking at the core of the Royal Academy of San Carlos, the art academy created by the Spanish crown to assert control over the messy artistic practices of the New World. Printmaking was key to As a historian of Latin American art engaged for the last 15 years in studying the history of Mexican prints, I have in some ways none of the credentials necessary to ask these questions. I am not an artist, a critic or a theoretician; I don’t work with contemporary artists very often. Instead, I began looking at prints that inspired paintings and then became fascinated with the prints themselves. My first projects looked at the Mexican printmaking profession and how it operated. Then I considered prints and the censoring powers of the Inquisition. This led me to examine how viewers responded to prints, what they expected of them, and what they wanted prints to do that paintings could not. And here I encountered printmaking’s under-theorized aspect. To begin to address this question, let me use a current research project as a point of departure. My current research examines a 1796 engraving (Figure 1) in its context. The print was made in Mexico City by Joaquín José Fabregat, the director of copperplate engraving at the Royal Academy of San Carlos, the first art academy in the Americas. Like most academic engravings at this time, it is reproductive rather than “original,” and informational rather than creative. It reproduces a drawing made by academy painting director Rafael Ximeno y Planes of the newly renovated main square of Mexico City. The square had been redesigned by academy architect Antonio Velázquez in preparation for the installation of the new monumental bronze equestrian portrait of Spanish King Charles IV sculpted by academy professor Manuel Figure 1 Joaquín José Fabregat, View of the Main Square, 1796, 13 1/4 x 26 in., engraving. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas, Austin. Toward Theories of Printmaking How do we think about prints? What do we expect them to do or to perform for us? What crosses our minds as we hold them in our hands and admire them on the wall? What constitutes a print at all and how do we feel about printedness or the intrinsic material, formal, social, and historical characteristics of the medium? Why haven’t we theorized print in the same way that we have photography? Figure 2 Albrecht Dürer, Adam and Eve, 1504, engraving 9 7/8 x 7 7/8 in.,. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1. The history of the equestrian portrait of Charles IV is discussed in Stacie Widdifield, “Manuel Tolsá’s Equestrian Monument to Charles IV: Art History, Patrimony, and the City,” Journal X, 8:1 (Autumn 2003): 61-83. Dr. Kelly Donahue-Wallace