Description

Jose Bernardo Couto was a lawyer and minister who, late in life, took charge of the Academia de San Carlos and set about rescuing the colonial paintings that were being dispersed after the suppression of the convents. He cast what he had learned as a dialogue: three friends walking the galleries, disagreeing. The form lets him do what a treatise could not — concede a point, admire a picture he cannot defend, own his uncertainty about attributions. Written in the 1860s and published posthumously, it is the first sustained attempt to think about three centuries of painting in Mexico as a tradition rather than a provincial appendix to Spain.