The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity by Eleni Kefala (review)

Abstract

with special attention to a cycle of graffiti in the Convent of San Nicolás de Tolentino, Actopan, which is exceptional for how it combines different temporalities, stories, iconographies, and styles. Russo concludes with a call to practice what she calls “a mestizo history of art,” with an everpresent focus on the production of the object in a precise time and place. Recalling the words of Aby Warburg about “difficult objects,” presented in the epigraph to the introduction, Russo reminds the reader that the objects she has studied over the course of The Untranslatable Image are also “composed of additions, erasures, and combinations with which the ‘primary’ text is—paradoxically—already contaminated” (247). Russo’s exquisite study of exceptional objects from sixteenthcentury Mexico will be of interest as much to scholars of early modern global studies as it is to specialists in colonial Latin American cultural studies.