Date of Award
Spring 5-9-2025
Document Type
Honors Project
Degree Name
Bachelor of Arts
Department
Art and Art History
Department Chair or Program Director
Mentore, Laura
First Advisor
Suzie Kim
Major or Concentration
Art History
Abstract
This research explores artworks within the Global Baroque as visual and ideological evidence through which colonial power, trade, and cross-cultural influence shaped the material culture of the early modern world. Centering on blue and white ceramics as a key medium of transcultural and trans-local exchange, the study analyzes how global motifs, particularly those drawn from Aztec and Chinese traditions, were reinterpreted, aestheticized, and circulated in Aztec and Novohispanic artistic practices.
Through a close observational comparison of Aztec and Chinese decorative systems, the study recognizes contrasting systems of cultural documentation embedded within similar visual forms. Aztec motifs, rooted in ritual, calendrical, and pictographic symbolism, were frequently misunderstood or abstracted into surface patterning by Western historical narratives, especially while under colonial rule. In contrast, Chinese blue and white porcelain, especially from the Ming and Qing dynasties, was received with a sense of admiration tied to its perceived technical perfection and classical elegance. Yet both were subsumed into a visual economy of display, where their meanings were reframed through colonial perspectives and Baroque aesthetics that emphasized excess, theatricality, and accumulation.
By examining methods of trade, creation, and acquisition, this thesis argues that the Global Baroque operated as a mediating aesthetic, one that masked and reconfigured the cultural specificity of non-European motifs within systems of power and constructed taste. The continued legacy of these design elements in Mexican art reflects deeper entanglements between collecting, empire, and the production of global art histories.
In reframing these motifs not as isolated curiosities but as part of a shared, if unequal, visual dialogue, the study contributes to broader efforts to more deeply understand the impacts and nuances of transcultural exchange, and reevaluate the dynamics of artistic influence.
Recommended Citation
Ramirez, Natalia, "Trans-Pacific Connections: Chinese Porcelain and Aztec Motifs in Colonial Mexico" (2025). Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects. 640.
https://scholar.umw.edu/student_research/640
Rights
Included in
Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture Commons, Art and Materials Conservation Commons, Asian Art and Architecture Commons, Ceramic Arts Commons, Chinese Studies Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Latin American Languages and Societies Commons, Painting Commons, Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons