In this iteration of CLAVIS' Permanent Seminar in Latin American Art, we welcome Michael Schreffler, an expert 16th–17th Century Spain & Latin America art and architectural history. Schreffler will discuss ephemerality and permanence at the Cathedral of Mexico City in the late 17th century.
Michael Schreffler’s research centers on the art and architecture of the transatlantic Spanish world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He is the author of The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain (Penn State Press, 2007), a study of the ways in which paintings and architecture were involved in the Spanish Crown’s governance of the viceroyalty of New Spain from its capital, Mexico City. He has published a number of articles in scholarly journals examining the ways in which representation--in the form of visual images, architectural ornament, and descriptive texts--facilitated change in the early modern Spanish world. He is the recipient of a number of awards including the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize from the College Art Association; an NEH Long-Term Fellowship at the Newberry Library; an Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; a postdoctoral fellowship from the Getty Foundation; and a Fulbright Fellowship to Spain. He is currently completing a book on the transformation of Cuzco, the capital of the Inca Empire in the Andes of Peru, into a Spanish colonial town in the early-sixteenth century.