Biography

Luisa Elena Alcalá is Associate professor in the Department of History and Theory of Art at the Universidad Autónoma (Madrid). Her research focuses on the history of religious images, painting, and the Jesuits in the Spanish American viceroyalties, especially New Spain. She edited Fundaciones jesuíticas en Iberoamérica in 2002 and was co-editor, with Jonathan Brown, of Painting in Latin America, 1550-1820 in 2014. She recently published the monograph La localización de un culto global. La Virgen de Loreto en México (2022) and is currently directing the research project “Agents: Jesuit Procurators and Alternative Channels for Artistic Circulation in the Hispanic World” (www.ProJesArt.org) funded by the Spanish government.

Project Summary

Jesuit provincial procurators were named every three years from their respective provinces around the world to travel to Rome for congregational meetings. For Jesuits from the Spanish Americas, the trip required crossing the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, and provided, through its many stops along the way, an opportunity to purchase a great variety of objects. These acquisitions were primarily destined for their churches, colleges, and missions, and included different types of crosses and crucifixes, agnus dei, small devotional paintings produced in Rome, Milanese objects in real or imitative lapislazuli, and Sicilian alabaster sculptures. Despite the scant attention many of these works have received - in part because they are by unknown artists or belong to a lower tier of works according to art history´s parameters of canon, quality, and originality - they were fundamental for the Society of Jesus in the construction of a common visual and material corporate identity, as well as for the ways they served the interests of their recipients and local networks. This project seeks to reconstruct and understand this travelling corpus of works by connecting Italy, and a specific type of its vast artistic production, with the Iberian world; in this way, it seeks to reframe and endow these objects and agents with a place in the global history of art.