The Art and Architecture of the Texas Missions

by Jacinto Quirarte

Winner, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas Built to bring Christianity and European civilization to the northern frontier of New Spain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries...secularized and left to decay in the nineteenth century...and restored in the twentieth century, the Spanish missions still standing in Texas are really only shadows of their original selves. The mission churches, once beautifully adorned with carvings and sculptures on their façades and furnished inside with elaborate altarpieces and paintings, today only hint at their colonial-era glory through the vestiges of art and architectural decoration that remain. To paint a more complete portrait of the missions as they once were, Jacinto Quirarte here draws on decades of on-site and archival research to offer the most comprehensive reconstruction and description of the original art and architecture of the six remaining Texas missions—San Antonio de Valero (the Alamo), San José y San Miguel de Aguayo, Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, San Juan Capistrano, and San Francisco de la Espada in San Antonio and Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo in Goliad. Using church records and other historical accounts, as well as old photographs, drawings, and paintings, Quirarte describes the mission churches and related buildings, their decorated surfaces, and the (now missing) altarpieces, whose iconography he extensively analyzes. He sets his material within the context of the mission era in Texas and the Southwest, so that the book also serves as a general introduction to the Spanish missionary program and to Indian life in Texas.

261 pages, Hardcover

First published May 15, 2002

Reviews

[Cynda reads little. Welcomes prayers for health. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is more or less a reference book of arcane information that together forms basis for a rather comprehensive understanding of the mission system and the life of the indigenous people. If that were my goal--to have that level of understanding--I would have read the whole text. And take in who knows how long to read and process.

Instead I have chosen to take a wider view of the mission founding, architectural, structural, wall art descriptions made by 19th-century visitors. In a world so different from ours when cameras were expensive and not universal, travellers took some black and white photographs were taken, made architectural notations, took measurements, wrote out descriptions. Art historian Jacinto Quirarte poured over details found in letters, published papers and journals, investigative reports and various other sources. Very much arcane study.

A truism became for true for me. Islamic art is Spanish art. Even when it crosses the Atlantic into the New World. When artist travelers recorded what they saw, they recorded Islamic motifs on the facades of both the San José and Concepción missions. The art either faded on walls of vaeious mission interiors or hidden under whitewashing also were originally New Spain and frescoed with Islamic art. For a time The World was very tenously New Spain therefore dotted with Islamic art. The old and new just keep integrating.