Mexico's painters spent three centuries working for a Spanish Church, then a century learning to paint their own country. These twelve pictures sit on that seam, where Spain and Indigenous Mexico meet. Among them are a famous retort that a later historian improved, and a skull in a feathered hat named long after its maker died.
Cool Stories About Art is a newsletter to learn art the fun way.
Join 200,000+ readers and get:
10 new art stories / month
The entire archive of content (1,000+ articles)
Comment, ask questions, and chat with other readers
How These Were Chosen
For three centuries, until independence in 1821, Mexico was New Spain, a Spanish colony, and its painters worked for the Church first, with altarpieces for cathedrals, canvases for convents and images for prayer.
Independence changed the subject. The art academy in Mexico City pushed its students toward the country itself, its past, its volcanoes, its kitchens and its faces. A painter in Mexico no longer needed a saint to justify a canvas.
Every picture here shows either the faith of the colony or the places, people and past of Mexico, whatever its medium. Scenes of European history or myth stayed out, however fine. In most of the twelve, Spain and Indigenous Mexico meet on the same surface.
12. Leandro Izaguirre, The Torture of Cuauhtémoc (1893)
Of the two prisoners held over the coals, only one flinches. He jerks his feet back from a brazier, his mouth twisted with pain. Beside him, Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec ruler of Mexico, sits tied to a carved stone with his bare feet stretched toward the fire, and his face shows nothing. Spanish soldiers in helmets watch from an open doorway on the left.
The scene takes place in 1521, a few days after the Spanish took Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital on whose ruins Mexico City was built. The man who flinches is Tetlepanquetzal, Cuauhtémoc's cousin, who ruled Tlacopan, one of the three cities of the Aztec alliance. The Spaniards burned the feet of both men to make them reveal where the treasure was hidden.
Leandro Izaguirre painted the episode in 1893 for the Chicago World's Fair, on a canvas nearly fifteen feet wide that was shipped north for the occasion. By then the torture came with a famous reply, spoken by Cuauhtémoc under the fire and usually quoted as "Am I lying on a bed of roses?"
That reply has a history of its own. The chronicler Francisco López de Gómara, writing in the 1500s, recorded something plainer: "Am I in some pleasure or bath?" The roses were added much later by the historian Eligio Ancona, and they are the version that stuck.
Izaguirre's answer to the legend is the cousin. Without Tetlepanquetzal, Cuauhtémoc's calm could pass for a studio pose. Next to a man who draws up his knees and pulls his feet from the coals, the stillness on the stone reads as a choice.
At a Glance
Artist: Leandro Izaguirre (1867 to 1941)
Painted: 1893
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: About 300 × 450 cm (about 118 × 177 in)
Where to see it: Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL), Mexico City
11. José Agustín Arrieta, Puebla Kitchen (1865)
Light divides this kitchen in Puebla, the colonial city southeast of Mexico City, into two halves. On the left, one woman stands at the stove over a clay pot of mole, the thick chile sauce of the region, and another kneels at a metate, a flat grinding stone, crushing chiles. On the right, nobody cooks. An old woman wrapped in a rebozo, a long Mexican shawl, leans in to whisper something to a young woman dressed far too finely for a kitchen.