Styles of Mexican Colonial Architecture. —Of the early colonial edifices of Mexico, more middle-age than Renaissance, one of the best examples is the church of San Francisco at Cholula, about which there still clings that mysterious atmosphere that the Indian work man lent to all he touched in the years follow ing the Conquest, while his ancient traditions were still vividly alive.
The Renaissance soon made itself felt in Mexico as it had already done in Spain. The Moorish dome was its inseparable attendant, and New Spain, in a few years, became the centre of tireless building activity which was to cease only when the Spaniards withdrew from the country. This movement was at its height when the cathedrals of Mexico and Puebla were begun, in the latter half of the 16th century, when Mexico was under the Baroque influence; and before they were finished the Churrigueresque had supplanted it_ The Puebla edifice was built more in accord ance with the original Spanish Renaissance ideas of its architect; but the cathedral of Mexico, especially in its interior decorations, was strongly under the influence of these latter two ornate styles, both of which are character ized by the interruption of straight lines, the breaking of entablatures and pediments and an inclination toward unexpected arches and curves. The retains the original col umn of the Renaissance, but it takes liberties with it by twisting it out of its primitive shape, running it into panels and stories and decorat ing it in an unorthodox way.
The Churrigueresque,, child of the Baroque, ran to extravagance in its love of the ornate. It made of the column a thing of decoration; it broke it into all kinds of geometrical forms and transformed it into pillars and pilasters, which became part of the mass-decoration. It laid its hand, too, upon the sculpture, making of it an integral part of the decoration scheme from whose involved mass it peeped forth just as did the curved and broken lines of the columns.
Both Baroque and Churrigueresque are char acteristic styles of architecture, developments of the Renaissance, influenced by Moorish and other ideas dominant in Spain at the time of its introduction. Both are splendid in their general effects, in their monumental facades and in their elaborate stone carving which, at a distance, gives to the facades the appearance of one huge piece carved from the living stone en bloc. This is the same impression that the great Maya buildings give. The Baroque in Spain was stamped with a strongly individual istic character; and the Churrigueresque, a very ornate development of it, became in Mex ico the most truly expressive medium of the native mind. In the early part of the 18th
century Mexico went mad over Churriguer esque, and all the invention, all the grotesque ness, all the fertility of imagination, all the originality of the native mind, were exercised in creating new forms of ornate and in tricate adornments for church facades and interiors, which became masses of gold and silver, of richly-adorned columns and pilasters reaching to the lofty ceilings, of elaborate altars, splendid in their intricate carving, their paintings and their dominant tones of the pre cious metals. Intricate scroll work, fruits and shells proclaimed the influence of the native Mexican workman, while strange mythological designs showed that there still reached him echoes of the creed of his ancestors and of his pre-Columbian art. Yet the sense of proportion is ever there, and this strange minghng of various systems of art gives one the impres sion of a magnificent and unified ensemble. The touch of the artist is ever perceived in the best of these old colonial buildings; for Catholic mysticism, Moorish mysticism and native Indian mysticism seem to feel the bond that binds all mystics together.
Influence of Tolsa.— Manuel Tolsa, a noted Spanish artist and architect, who came to Mexico as a teacher in the National Academy of Art in the latter part of the 18th century, had been trained in a school that disliked in tensely the Churrigueresque and he set about reconstructing the interiors of many of the public buildings of the capital, of Puebla and of other cities of Mexico. Under his direction the magnificent Churrigueresque altars and decorations were torn out of the Mexico City cathedral and replaced by very plain Greco Roman, so that how only mutilated parts of the grand old decorations remain to give an idea of the magnificence of the interior when the most gorgeous of all the Spanish styles of architecture held supreme rule there. For tunately, however, the north chapel of the building has been left practically untouched; the colossal facade of the Sagrano could not very well have been altered, and its interior has suffered much less than that of the cathe dral. The example set by Tolsa spread rapidly and it became the fashion to decry this most characteristic of Mexican architecture; and untold harm was done to the unity of the old buildings, very few of which remain intact as their builders left them. The parish church of Taxco, the Sagrario and La Santisima in Mexico City, and San Martin Seminary, Tepozotlan, are examples of the magnificence of the old Churrigueresque churches in the days of their glory. But even of these only San Martin and Taxco have escaped the hand of the reformer.