Weddigen - Hispano Incaic Fusions

Art in Translation
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Hispano-Incaic Fusions: Ángel Guido and the Latin

American Reception of Heinrich Wölfflin
Tristan Weddigen
To cite this article: Tristan Weddigen (2017) Hispano-Incaic Fusions: Ángel Guido and
the Latin American Reception of Heinrich Wölfflin, Art in Translation, 9:sup1, 92-120, DOI:
10.1080/17561310.2015.1058018
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Hispano-Incaic
Fusions: Ángel
Guido and the
Latin American
Reception of
Tristan Weddigen
(Universität Zürich) Heinrich Wölfflin 1
Abstract
This article reconstructs one of the earliest and most important transfers
of European art history and aesthetics to Latin America; more specifically,
the reception of Heinrich Wölfflin’s psychology of art by the Argentinian
architect and art theorist Ángel Guido in the late 1920s. From this impulse
emerged the intellectual networks and agendas of a specific and influential
appropriation of the notion of artistic style, programmatically building a
syncretistic Latin American aesthetic identity.
Guido and the Latin American Reception of Wölfflin 93
KEYWORDS: architecture, Argentina, art theory, baroque, historiography,

Latin America, modernism
It is All about Translating
The need to actively internationalize the discipline of art history grows

with the globalization of art.1 This process, however, uncovers, but some-
times also replicates national and colonial discourses. The present paper
presents an example of how this intellectual and political challenge might
be met. The project “New Art Histories: Connecting Ideas, Objects, and
Institutions in Latin America,” supported by the Getty Foundation, Los
Angeles, from 2011 to 2015, consisted of a collaboration between the
Universität Zürich, Switzerland, and the Universidade Federal de São Pau-

lo, Brazil, blending teaching and research in art history.2 Both institutions
and their students experienced the increasing impact of globalization, and
both realized that they needed external and reciprocal support to address
internationalization each in its own way. This essay documents one of the
project’s scholarly outcomes, developed in lectures, seminars, study trips,
conferences, and personal contacts among students and professors, which
have all had a momentous effect on both institutions, challenging and
changing the respective disciplinary canons and preconceptions. Not only
does the essay draw synergies from a Getty Research Institute Texts &
Documents translation project but it also adds to a previous article from
Art in Translation, which shows how the two institutional initiatives effec-
tively engage in the internationalization of our discipline.3
As the project progressed, the historiographic interrelationship be-
tween the early modern and the modern, between Baroque and modern-
ism, emerged as an issue essential to Latin American art history and to its
convoluted relationship with Europe. In the project, the discourse of mo-
dernity functioned as a two-way conduit across the Atlantic. As part of the
global migration of people, objects, materials, and practices, the exchange
of ideas—especially the journeys and lives of texts—stands in the focus of
a critical global art history. Indeed, the above-mentioned ideological intri-
cacies and national differences call for a careful historiographic approach,
as the present essay wants to propose. Moreover, after the criticism against
a naïve, astrological, and epidemic notion of “influence,” the correspond-
ing passive and conceptive understanding of “reception” also requires to
be inspected; both need to address agency.4
Here, translation enters as a critical medium of cross-cultural transfers.
A translation, linguistic or visual, does not transmit meaning from one sys-
tem to another; it transforms all parts involved and creates an ever-chang-
ing, hermeneutic space of communication and community. Translating
implicates issues of authorial power relations, but the translator’s ap-
propriation still originates from a position of weakness and dependence.
Translating is an act of self-estrangement that inverts and entangles the
94 Tristan Weddigen
self and the other. Instead of creating, it disproves the idea of a global art
history as a conceptually and methodologically homogeneous discipline.
Throughout the project, effects of estrangement and tactics of exposure
have been intentional and didactic, because transculturation needs to be
experienced by the scholars and students themselves.
The present essay explores, most conveniently, an early phase of art
historical transfers and translations, when the network of intertextual
and intellectual relations is still intelligible and manageable. It looks at a
discourse in statu nascendi (in the nascent state), disseminating through
untouched lands, which again unleashes neocolonial desires. Rarely, how-
ever, are texts and ideas received in a pure and original form, but more
often already in an appropriated, adapted, and indeed translated form,
and sometimes as an echo resounding from reviews, reactions, and hear-
say. It is certainly easier to reconstruct other people’s ideas than to have

one’s own, but translating still conveys a modest satisfaction, an alterna-
tive when facing either humbling or pitiable scholarship. Ultimately, trans-
lating is a pleasure, that of sharing otherness.
Creole Aesthetics
The Argentinian architect and art theorist Ángel (Francisco) Guido was
born in Rosario in 1896 and died there in 1960. He is probably the
most important and least studied early transmitter of German aesthetics,
especially of Heinrich Wölfflin’s (1864–1945) thought, to Latin America.
Initially footnoted in the 1930s and 40s, Guido was then mostly forgotten
by a flourishing scholarship on the New World baroque, but has been
rediscovered in the last decade in relation to the postmodern and post-
colonial Latin American discussions of the baroque and neobaroque, in
particular in Monika Kaup’s latest studies.5 More recently, Pablo Montini
has published a fundamental study on Guido as art collector and museum
curator.6 Only now has it become evident that Guido’s work of transmis-
sion is one of the buried roots of the postwar Latin American baroque
discourse, foundational, for instance, to The American Expression (La
expresión americana, 1957) by José Lezama Lima (1910–1976), and its
notion of postcolonial “counter-conquest”; and to the idea of Latin Amer-
ican “magical realism” (1964) of Alejo Carpentier (1904–1980).7 Trained
as an engineer and architect, Guido became professor at the Universidad
Nacional del Litoral in Santa Fe, Argentina, in 1921, its rector in 1949,
and directed the urban planning of Tucumán and Rosario. Today he is
best known for his collaboration on the design of the National Flag Me-
morial of Rosario (1940–57). In 1932 he received a fellowship from the
Guggenheim Foundation and a doctor honoris causa from the University
of Southern California a year after, and he visited Europe in 1937–38.8
Guido was a prolific author, whose early publications can be rather
difficult to trace today. The third edition of Rediscovery of America in
Art (Redescubrimiento de America en el arte, 1944), however, brings to-

gether a number of his essays and represents the updated summa of his
thought, covering Wölfflinian methodology, pre-Columbian and coloni-
al art and architecture, and modern art spanning from Sergei Eisenstein
(1898–1948) to the Mexican muralists and skyscraper design.9 Yet schol-
arship needs to go back beyond that late construction of an oeuvre, com-
pile his bibliography, and scrutinize the foundational phase of modernism
in Latin America in the 1920s.
Guido’s first known autonomous publication was in the volume of po-
etry titled Caballitos de ciudad (Little city horses), 1922; three poems were
included, together with early ones by Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), in
an important, bohemian miscellany of contemporary Argentinian poetry,
Exposición de la actual poesia argentina (Exposition of Argentine poetry),
March 1927 (Fig. 1).10 It also contains a portrait of him by his brother, the
“indigenist” painter Alfredo Guido (1892–1967), and a short autobiogra-
phy (Fig. 2). The highly influential intellectual Ricardo Rojas (1882–1957),
for whom Guido later designed a house in Buenos Aries, mentions him in his
aesthetic treatise Eurindia (1924) as one of the new poets of the democrat-
ic, individualistic, secular “cosmopolitan school,” which fused native Indian
and modern European culture and thus contributed to a new Eurindian
cultural identity for Argentina and the whole of Latin America.11
Guido’s first publication that testifies to his appropriation of the Wölf-
flinian psychological analysis of style consists of a pamphlet from late
1927, documenting two papers presented at the third Congreso Panamer-
icano de Arquitectos, held in Buenos Aires in July of that year. The book
cover bears the title Hispano-American Architecture Seen through Wölff-
lin (La arquitectura hispanoamericana a través de Wölfflin; Fig. 3), while
the frontispiece more specifically relates to Hispano-Incaic architecture
(La arquitectura hispanoincaica a través de Wölfflin). As Guido states, this
first essay applies Wölfflin’s theory to the history of Spanish and Latin
American art, and constitutes the methodological basis of his later studies,
such as Orientación espiritual de la arquitectura en América (The Spiritual
orientation of Architecture in America), late 1927, a paper given in July
the same year.12 This second essay, furthermore, attacks French “painter-
ly,” decadent, Beaux-Arts, cosmopolitan eclecticism; but it also condemns
the “linear” reaction to it, namely Corbusian Machine Age modernism, a
critique Guido developed in the journal Arquitectura (1927–28) and his
Machinolatry of Le Corbusier (La machinolâtrie de Le Corbusier, 1930),
published a year after the Swiss architect had lectured in Buenos Aires.13
Up to his Redescubrimiento de América en el arte (Rediscovery of
America in art), Guido’s references to Wölfflin and European aesthet-
ics intensify:14 in his Arqueología y estética de la arquitectura criolla
(Archaeology and aesthetics of Creole architecture, 1932), combining
Wölfflin’s history of style with the Rieglian will to form of Wilhelm Wor-
ringer (1881–1965), he reduces New World baroque to the equation “arte
español + arte indígena = arte criollo.”15 His subsequent Concepto
96 Tristan Weddigen
Figure 1
José Bonomi (1903–92), cover of
Vignale and Tiempo, Poesía.
Figure 2
Alfredo Guido, portrait of Ángel
Guido, from Vignale and Tiempo,
Poesía, 23.
moderno de la historia del arte: Influencia de la “Einfühlung” en la mod-

erna historiografia de arte (Modern conception of art history: Influence of
empathy on modern historiography of art, 1935) sketches a history of art
history, also centered on Wölfflin.16 The present essay, however, limits itself
to Guido’s first and seminal reception of Wölfflinian ideas in 1927.
Figure 3
Ángel Guido. Cover of Guido, Wölfflin.
Networks of Translation
How did Guido come into contact with Wölfflin’s thought across the
Atlantic? His initiation might have happened sometime after November
1924, through the précis of Wölfflin’s works (Fig. 4) by the Spanish writer
and art historian Ángel Sánchez Rivero (1888–1930).17 As an intellectual
portrait, it is comparable to Franz Landsberger’s biography of the same
year.18 The review was published in the Revista de occidente, the influ-
ential journal founded in 1923 by the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset
(1883–1955), which aimed at spreading new currents of Western thought
across the Hispanic world. The article, reproducing the Wölfflin bust of
1923 by Edwin Scharff (1887–1955), was not only commissioned by Or-
tega, who had spent several years in German academe; it also celebrated
Wölfflin’s sixtieth birthday, which was honored in Europe by an interdis-
ciplinary festschrift.19 Most importantly, it advertizes the publication of
the Spanish edition of Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das
Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Principles of Art Histo-
ry: The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art), which
98 Tristan Weddigen
Figure 4
Opening pages of Sánchez Rivero, Wölfflin, 256–7.
since 1915 had reached its sixth German edition.20 This shows that the
Hispanic reception of Wölfflin was subject to a time lag of about a decade,
starting when Wölfflin had moved to Zurich and had almost withdrawn
from academic art history.
The Conceptos fundamentales en la historia del arte, the first ever
translation of the Principles, was the work of the Spanish poet José More-
no Villa (1887–1955) and appeared in Ortega’s avant-garde series Bibli-
oteca de ideas del siglo XX (Library of ideas of the twentieth century).
The collection promoted contemporary theory texts in translation, which
proposed progressive, socially relevant scientific models of thought to the
humanities, including, until that point, authors such as the neo-Kantian
philosopher Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), the quantum theorist Max
Born (1882–1970), the theoretical biologist Jakob von Uexküll (1864–
1944), the philosopher of history Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), and
the historian of mathematics Roberto Bonola (1874–1911). This context
defined by Ortega, which was to become focal to leading authors such
as José Vasconcelos (1882–1959), framed the Principles in a discourse of
natural sciences applied to the humanities (Geisteswissenschaften).21 As
Ortega writes in his La deshumanización del arte (The Dehumanization
of art, 1925), pure science and art are the two human activities that are
able to change collective sensibility.22 Although Wölfflin himself betrays

an attraction for evolutionary models, when he conceives a “scientific art
history” and a “natural history of art,” which is a “history of seeing” that
evolves according to psychological laws, he nevertheless does not intend to
dissolve art history into natural history, but aims at uncovering the auton-
omous principles of stylistic development within the history of the human
mind (Geistesgeschichte).23
Sánchez’s pioneering review establishes important historiographical
reference points, while also asserting some independence from Ortega’s
line. He considers the Grundbegriffe as the sum of Wölfflin’s writings,
in particular Renaissance und Barock (Renaissance and Baroque), 1888
and Die klassische Kunst (Classic art), 1889, of which only the latter was
accessible in French. Sánchez acknowledges Wölfflin’s growing reaction
against the positivist “milieu” theory of Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893), as

expounded in the latter’s Philosophie de l’art (Philosophy of art), 1865,
translated into Spanish in 1922, which understands art as the result of ex-
ternal influences, both physical ones such as landscape, climate, and earth,
and social ones such as habits, history, and genetics.24 Taine’s material-
ist aesthetics conceived art as a passive result of different given factors,
whereas the aesthetic avant-garde, such as that of Rojas and Guido, was
interested in developing a notion of the political agency of art, interacting
with all other factors of culture and nature, comparable with Uexküll’s
concept of environment (Umwelt).25
Sánchez underlines the idea of style as expression, an earlier viewpoint
that Wölfflin adjusted in his Principles to the idea of an autonomous histo-
ry of style.26 Entirely in the spirit of Ortega’s propagation of a nonfigurative
avant-garde, Sánchez sees the task of art “criticism” in establishing precise
terms—the Wölfflinian “concepts”—for the description of “aesthetic emo-
tions” produced by the works of art. Such stylistic concepts are won by
a process of abstraction from historical visual material, but achieve the
status of pure aesthetic elements and basic emotions, by which works of
art appear as the concretization of a style. Sánchez stresses Wölfflin’s idea
of a “history of art without names,” in which style appears in rhythmic se-
quences of development as a metahistorical protagonist—which must have
appealed to the reviewer with regard to a mostly anonymous history of
Latin American art. For Sánchez, Wölfflin’s empirical approach surpasses
that of his contemporaries, namely Alois Riegl (1858–1905), whose work
was not available in Spanish; Worringer, whose Formprobleme der Gotik
(Form in Gothic), 1911, appeared in Spanish in 1925; and Spengler, whose
Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), 1918–22, was
published in Ortega’s series between 1923 and 1927.27 Sánchez also un-
derlines Wölfflin’s pedagogical intention of teaching to see, and praises his
transparent, empirical methodology, performed in a comparative analy-
sis of works and mirrored in the use of reproductions for the refinement
of perceptual acuity. Notably, and in a self-referential fashion, Sánchez
characterizes Wölfflin’s language and style of thinking as a “refined, well
100 Tristan Weddigen
thought-out emotion.” Between 1924 and 1927, therefore, while shifting

from poetry to aesthetics, Guido was witnessing a burst of European art
theory in translation throughout the Hispanic world, in which Wölfflin’s
Principles played a major part.
Bioaesthetic Fusions
The first paper in Guido’s Wölfflinian essay of 1927 (Fig. 5) deals with
Hispano-Incaic baroquism.28 For Guido, the Principles not only help in
overcoming Taine’s materialist milieu theory but they also have a potential
for a regionalist modern aesthetics. Several aspects of Wölfflin’s thought,
either in its original or mediated form, must have appeared particular-
ly suitable for Guido’s revolutionary aesthetic agenda: the foundation of

an aesthetic discourse and architectural practice on a new science of art
(Kunstwissenschaft), which achieves such a level of abstraction to become
usable for criticism; style as the expression or embodiment of a people’s
psyche, a nation’s spirit, or a “race” in Rojas’s mystical sense; the idea of
a natural, bioaesthetic, and psychoaesthetic evolution of style determined
by five pairs of universal principles; the notion of a rhythmic alternation of
Renaissance and baroque styles transcending history—applicable to past,
present, and future epochs—and making developments predictable and
pliable; the emancipation of the history of art from individual authorship
and historiographic biographism in order to comprehend usually anony-
mous precolonial and colonial art; the vindication of the baroque from
neoclassical depreciation and thus the reappraisal of the Latin American
colonial heritage; and the dualistic and comparative use of works of art
and their illustrations as a means of aesthetic evidence and visual educa-
tion, which can direct aesthetic sensibility toward a new artistic style.
First, Guido applies the bioaesthetic line of progress, directed toward
Riegl’s “optical” and Wölfflin’s “atectonic,” to Spanish architecture of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the source of Hispanic American ba-
roque. As a basis he uses the material unfurled in Geschichte des Barock in
Spanien (History of the Baroque in Spain), 1908, by Otto Schubert (1878–
1968), a standard volume that continued the monumental studies on the
baroque by Cornelius Gurlitt (1850–1938), translated into Spanish in
1924.29 Guido identifies three characteristics of Spanish baroque architec-
ture: its aesthetic idiosyncrasy, and its autonomy from Italian classicism, as
shown by Schubert; the anticlassical influence of the Mudéjar style, which
had been integrated into Spanish history of style since the mid-nineteenth
century; and the baroque instability of the picaresque novel, a reference,
which seems to announce the literary outburst of Gongorism in 1927.30
From this account, the history of Iberian art and architecture already
seemed to prove that, both under the universal laws of stylistic develop-
ment and in accepting local influences, a peripheral style could reach an
idiosyncratic autonomy from the center.
Figure 5
Ángel Guido. Diagram from Guido,
Wölfflin, 14–15.
Guido then applies Wölfflinian history of style to colonial architecture.

Rather than standing under a constant colonial influence, Guido sees His-
panic American baroque as a bioaesthetic, morphological development
parallel to and independent from the mother country, a shared “destiny,”
which nonetheless molds a distinct Latin American “physiognomy.”31 This
latter influential Wölfflinian term, which understands style as an expres-
sion of a racial or national character, is here received via Spengler, who
more generally defines physiognomy as the morphology of the living, by
which Wölfflinian psychoaesthetic laws of development are transformed
into “style as a destiny.”32 The idea of basic aesthetic “emotions,” of the
“rhythm” of alternating styles, and the criticism against the “milieu” de-
rive, instead, from Rojas and Sánchez.33 Guido observes that New World
baroque, by inverting the Spanish development and subordinating orna-
ment under structure, gains “haptic” or “linear” qualities, such as clarity,
continence, planarity, stillness, and relative unity, reminiscent of but not
originating directly from the Italian Renaissance, nor indirectly through

Spain or through the “Germanic” Plateresque.
Guido identifies the source of this precocious, asynchronic anticlimax,
leading from a baroque to a new architecture, in the fusion of Spanish
baroque with Inca art, accomplished by more or less forced Quechua and
Aymara artisans, who sculpted not only native plants and animals—that
is, indigenous iconographic motifs—but also subjugated the structural
form of European baroque architecture by covering it with native “linear”
textile ornamentation. Thus, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a
uniform Hispano-Incaic school established itself in the highlands of Peru
and Bolivia, the former Inca domains, and manifested itself in all of the
visual and decorative arts. Thus, for instance, the devotional painting of
the Cusco school achieves a formal correspondence with European “prim-
itive,” which means “early Renaissance,” art, as coined by French schol-

arship of the time. While in the south the Hispano-Incaic becomes strictly
“nonpainterly,” in the north the Spanish baroque grows “pseudopainterly”
under the impact of the less contained pathos of Aztec ornamentation.
Guido’s reference to an indigenous “will to art” can be seen as a strategy
of postcolonial secularization, which marginalizes the artistic influence of
the religious orders. More generally, however, his differentiation of two
American baroquisms seems to transfer Wölfflin’s European model of the
geography of art to the Americas and to adopt Worringer’s idea of the
continuity between the Middle Ages and (northern) baroque, which dilates
the otherwise short recent history of Latin American art. Similar to the sit-
uation in Europe, the northern Aztec baroque becomes more “baroque”;
that is, remains more “medieval” than the southern Inca baroque; while
the latter overcomes the Spanish baroque “medievalism” by the reception
of the Inca “antiquity” to achieve a new colonial baroque “Renaissance.”34
Lines of Thought
The second part of Guido’s treatise, quite like Wölfflin’s Principles, expli-
cates the theory by examples. Here, he identifies the differences between
the two Hispano-American styles, the northern Incaic baroque and the
southern Aztec baroque, both starting with a common import of Spanish
baroque, with the help of the most modern method of “historic-aesthetic
research,” namely Wölfflin’s “psycho-physiological formula.” In the follow-
ing sections, Guido carefully analyzes the two Latin American architectur-
al styles by faithfully applying the five Wölfflinian concepts defining the
classical and the baroque, which are “linear/painterly,” “plane/recession,”
“closed form/open form,” “multiplicity/unity,” and “clearness/unclearness.”
Yet Guido’s essay does not adopt Wölfflin’s in-page illustrations and
their comparative juxtaposition; instead, he inserts sequences of photo-
graphs; first of Peruvian and Bolivian—that is, southern colonial (Fig. 6)
and Inca (Fig. 7)—architecture; and then of Aztec (Fig. 8) and Mexican
(Fig. 9)—that, is southern baroque—architecture. He thus takes middle
course between the Principles and Worringer’s Form in Gothic, which ex-
plicitly does not use visual material as scientific evidence but rather to
strike a chord and evoke a mood (Stimmung).35 Moreover, as in other
writings of his, Guido reproduces his own etchings of baroque facades
(Fig. 3), previously displayed at the Pan-American Congress, alluding to
his firsthand experience and visual analysis of colonial heritage, and sup-
porting his call for its conservation, a concern he shared with other Latin
American modernists such as Lúcio Costa (1902–1998).
Guido departs further from Wölfflin’s visual argumentations, however,
by including a comparative diagram (Fig. 5), which converts Wölfflin’s
psychophysiological concepts into “measuring units,” adopts the aura of
hard science backed by Ortega’s intellectual program, and echoes Spen-
gler’s historic correlation of artistic and scientific styles as universal and
superhistorical processes. Guido does not adopt the classic genealogical

model, which would reduce New World art and architecture to a side
branch of European models, at most grafted on local culture. Instead, his
diagram suggests more universal geological and climatic forces, which
echo Alfred Wegener’s (1880–1920) continental drift theory, published in
the Biblioteca de la Revista de occidente in 1924.36
Diagrams construct the abstract object of the art historical text ex post.
Guido objectifies his conception of the Hispano-Incaic style with a linear
scheme, which may well be the first and for a long time the only art histor-
ical diagram that includes Latin American art in the canon of art history
and the discourse of Kunstwissenschaft.37 At the top, it shows the “Wölf-
flinian painterly curve”; that is, the evolution of Spanish Baroque from
post-Herrerian to its classicist “exhaustion” alongside Schubert’s geneal-
ogy of architects. Below, it depicts the same curve of the Hispano-Incaic
style, from the growing “gestation” of the painterly in the early sixteenth
century to the sudden “emancipation” from Spanish models under indig-
enous influence, thus establishing a long period of dominance of the His-
pano-Incaic school, which is represented not by architects but exemplary
sites of monuments “without names.” The further development of neo-
classicism and then of eclectic historicism is left out, as it would challenge
Guido’s scheme.
It must be mentioned briefly that in his second essay—The Spiritual
Orientation of Architecture in America—Guido publishes another, more
“astronomical” diagram (Fig. 10), illustrating the morphology of the his-
tory of European modern art according to Wölfflin’s two transhistorical
styles, the classical and the Baroque, and including the latter’s resurgence in
the late nineteenth century in Impressionism and other movements.38 The
chronology, extending from 1500 to 1927, is based on Karl Woermann’s
monumental Geschichte der Kunst aller Zeiten und Völker (History of Art
of All Times and Peoples), 1904–11, translated into Spanish in 1923/24.39
The cyclical manifestation of the two opposed, precisely mirrored styles is
imagined as daylight produced by twin heavenly bodies, including dawns
and dusks, and twilight zones of stylistic overlapping and blending, before
Figure 6
Church of San Sebastián, Cusco.
Photography from Guido, Wölfflin, 20.
they alternately disappear below the horizon of cultural consciousness.

While the speed of a style’s development and the length of its ascendancy
can vary, the modern era seems typically to accelerate the succession of
the sequences. “Modern” architecture is identified here as a resurgence of
classical, tectonic forms. The classical-baroque “rhythm” could have been
described with a single sine curve. The nocturnal lines, however, illustrate
the invisible, “subterranean,” or even “subcutaneous” survival of styles
that reappear in periodic revivals, as in the case of the suppressed indige-
nous culture remerging in colonial mestizo baroque.
Both diagrams seem to derive from Heinrich von Geymüller’s (1839–
1909) “fluid,” indeed “vascular,” synopsis of French Renaissance architec-
ture from 1475 to 1895 (Fig. 11) published in his handbook Die Baukunst
Figure 7
Inca wall, Cusco. Photography from Guido, Wölfflin, 35.
der Renaissance in Frankreich (The Architecture of the Renaissance in

France), 1898.40 There, “sources,” “currents,” and “canals” of stylistic
“influences” create regularly alternating historical “waves” of a stricter
“classical” and “objective” style, versus a freer “gothic” and “subjective”
style within the Long Renaissance.41 In his collected essays of 1944, Gui-
do goes further and proposes a “cardiogram of the pulse of art history
from the 11th to the 20th century,” comparable with László Moholy-Nagy’s
(1895–1946) sinuous illustration of the Wölfflinian Pulsschlag deutscher
Stilgeschichte (Pulse of German History of Style), 1930, by Georg Gustav
Wieszner (1893–1969).42 In sum, Guido’s employment of diagrams testi-
fies to Ortega’s reform program.
Patterns of Reception
Finally, to better understand Wölfflin’s impact on Guido’s early thought,

we must briefly look back at his first art historical publication, Fusión
Figure 8
Palacio de las Monjas, Uxmal. Photography from Guido, Wölfflin, 38.
hispano-indígena en la arquitectura colonial (The Hispano-Indigenous Fu-

sion in Colonial Architecture), May 1925 (Fig. 12), the lavish publication
of a conference entitled Influencia indígena en la arquitectura colonial pe-
ruana y boliviana (Indigenous Influence on Peruvian and Bolivian Coloni-
al Architecture), December 1924, but which also includes papers and arti-
cles from 1923/24, which prepared the path.43 Guido’s insistence on dating
and locating his ideas as well as his constant rethinking, reformulating,
and republishing are typical of an avant-garde modernism eager to write
history faster than it happens. Indeed, although Guido acknowledges that
his idea of a Hispano-indigenous fusion is based on the work of his men-
tor, Martín S. Noel (1888–1963), who takes care to stress this point in his
own Preface to Guido’s book.44 In fact, the “Americanist” architect from
Buenos Aires had discussed the influence of pre-Columbian art and archi-
tecture since the early 1920s on the basis of encompassing connoisseur-
ship, and proposed the Hispano-indigenous fusion in his Fundamentos
para una estética nacional (Foundations for a National Aesthetics), May
1926, as a model for a national style of architecture.45 In his foreword,
Figure 9
Sagrario, Catedral Metropolitana de la
Ciudad de México. Photography from
Guido, Wölfflin, 42.
which bears the anti-Corbusian title “Towards an Architecture of Our

Own” (Hacia una arquitectura nuestra), Guido refers to Rojas’s vision of
Eurindia and adheres to Noel’s aesthetic program, taking the synthesis of
pre-Columbian and colonial architecture as a model for America’s “aes-
thetic emancipation” from European eclecticism, as if he was confronting
the racial mixing of two advanced and inimical civilizations with bloodless
European stylistic bastardization, Vasconcelos’s racial futurism to sterile
European historicism.46
In his paper of 1924, Guido proceeds in a systematic way to prove
the indigenous influence on colonial art, an indigenist strategy of nation-
al identification at the price of a second colonization. For Guido, quite
uniquely, pre-Columbian art grew completely aside from art history’s
Figure 10
Ángel Guido. Diagram from Guido, Orientación, 52–53.
“genealogical tree” until it was—or indeed the natives were—discovered,

crushed, and assimilated at the same time. As conceived by Rojas, in the
resulting fusion of Indio and European styles, shaped by a new land-
scape and race, the “aesthetic rhythm” or heartbeat of the invaders’ art
was changed, producing “Eurindian” shapes. Guido brings his analyses
to a synthesis in seven chapters: (1) plastic formal expression of Hispanic
architecture + (2) plastic formal expression of Inca and pre-Inca archi-
tecture = (3) plastic formal expression of colonial Hispano-indigenous
architecture in Peru and Bolivia; (4) Hispanic architectural ornamentation
+ (5) Inca and pre-Inca ornamentation = (6) colonial Hispano-indigenous
architectural ornamentation in Peru and Bolivia; and (3) + (6) = (7) inte-
gral plastic and ornamental fusion of Hispano-indigenous colonial archi-
tecture in Peru and Bolivia. Guido draws his art historical information
from Schubert, Noel, André Michel (1853–1925), and Vicente Lampérez
y Romea (1861–1923), and the textual and visual archaeological material
from Charles Wiener (1851–1913), Arthur Posnansky (1873–1946), and
José Uriel García (1894–1965).47
Figure 11
Heinrich von Geymüller, Diagram of the Development of the Periods and Phases of the Renaissance Style in France, 1475–1895, from
Geymüller, Frankreich, 28–29.
Chapter 5 on pre-Columbian ornament represents Guido’s pièce de ré-

sistance, which applies “modern methods” of formal analysis to the Gate
of the Sun (Fig. 13), published by Posnansky, who had declared Tiwanaku
the cradle of the “homo americanus” and offered a detailed “iconology”
of the Gate’s astronomical “ideographies.”48 Starting from there, Guido
isolates more abstract “ornamental laws” from the Gate’s reliefs, which
consist of six specific “spatial rhythms,” formed by iconographic “orna-
mental units” included in a mostly rectilinear, rarely undulating “rhythm
of movement”: “symmetry,” “repetition,” “alternation,” “contraposition,”
“interchange,” and “series.” According to Guido, those spatial rhythms do
not derive from the Gate’s supposed astronomical meaning, but permeate
pre-Columbian ceramic and especially textile patterns, which he derives
from Wiener’s illustrated travel accounts.
Figure 12
Ángel Guido, cover of Fusión.
Chapter 7 unites the two hybrids from Chapters 3 and 6 to an inte-

gral fusion of pre-Colombian and Hispanic styles. Guido differentiates
between an “objective” and a “subjective” indigenous influence: the for-
mer consists of autochthonous iconographic elements, the latter of hidden
aboriginal ornamental rhythms of space and movement, which resurface
in an “analysis of the constructive skeleton,” and in a new American for-
mal “emotionality”; that is, in a psychophysiological expression of a will
to form. The first of Guido’s ensuing case studies was to become a debated
icon of the hybrid baroque until today: the portal of San Lorenzo in Potosí
supposedly executed by indigenous workmen in 1728.49 Among the objec-
tive influences, Guido counts the exotic, Indian-looking Caryatids, which
he later called “Indiatids” and which he understood as personifications of
creolization mestization, and of indigenist uprising.50 The subjective influ-
ences, in contrast, are mostly expressed by symmetry and repetition. Refer-
ring back to his analytical illustration of the Gate (Fig. 13), dated 1923, he
projects a red grid over the portal of San Lorenzo and highlights its square
ornaments, in order to reveal an alleged indigenous will to symmetry and
repetition, which hybridizes Hispanic colonial design.
Figure 13
Ángel Guido, relief of the Gate of the Sun. Tiwanaku, Bolivia, 1923. Diagram, from of Guido, Fusión, 34/35.
Both Guido’s diagrams and his formal concepts attest to a geometrical

objective, structural understanding of form and formal analysis, which did
not yet acknowledge the Wölfflinian psychology of art. Instead, Guido’s
analytical trellis might refer to contemporary architectural design theory,
such as August Thiersch’s (1843–1917) studies on proportion; the “reg-
ulating lines” (tracés régulateurs) in Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture
(Toward an Architecture), 1923; the modernist grid applied in Hendrik
Petrus Berlage’s (1856–1934) Grundlagen und Entwicklung der Architek-
tur (Foundations and Development of Architecture), 1908; or more di-
rectly, the architects’ pattern design books such as the Tratado de técnica
ornamental (Treatise on Ornamental Techniques, 1920).51 But it also cor-
responds to art history’s equivalent interest in geometrical formal analysis,
a scientific approach Wölfflin had left behind, but which Erwin Panofsky
(1892–1968) reactivated in 1921 as part of a history of style.52
Discovering Wölfflin’s psychology of art around 1924/25 freed Guido,
the aesthete turned aestheticist, the architect appointed professor, from
analyzing formal hybridizations on the basis of a dilettantish archaeology
of ornamental languages, a primitivist abstraction projected onto “pictur-
Figure 14
Ángel Guido, facade of the church of
San Lorenzo de Carangas, Potosí,
Bolivia, from Guido, Fusión, 29.
esque” travel drawings, which, as the above case studies show, did not of-
fer a convincing conceptual and visual formula either for a history of Latin
American art and architecture, or a prospect for its renewal. The mestizo
material did not fit the modernist grid and could not be reduced to Aztec
azulejos (tiling), as it were, whereas Wölfflin’s sweeping, dynamic, binary
concepts could be adopted as models for a “linear,” universal, although
vague history of style endowed with international academic credibility and
open to a controlled projection into the future. Correspondingly, Guido’s
visual reasoning shifted from artisanal, static, and analytical artworks to
technical growth charts and auratic photographic sequences; that is, from
artistic analysis to scientific Einfühlung.
Epilogue
In 1928 Guido sent a copy of his first book, the The Hispano-Indigenous
Fusion in Colonial Architecture, to Wölfflin with the following dedication
(Fig. 15): “For the Viennese scholar prof. Henry Wölfflin. An intellectual
homage from Ángel Guido, 1928, Department of Engineering, Rosario,
Argentina.” Today, it counts among the two thousand private books Wölf-
flin bequeathed in 1941, long after retirement, to his former department,
the Kunsthistorisches Seminar of the Universität Zürich.53 The dedication
is telling: Guido sees Wölfflin, via Worringer, in such close relation to Riegl
that he mistakenly deems him to be Viennese. Moreover, he calls his book
an “intellectual homage,” which conceals the fact that, in 1923/24, he did
not yet know Wölfflin’s work, maybe by a few months, and which suggests
that he felt this gap so acutely that it was tantamount to Wölfflin’s pres-
ence. It is probable that the book was part of a parcel sent some months
later in 1928, finding its way from Vienna, Munich, or Berlin to Zurich,
and containing the other two essays of 1927, which were sent back to their
intellectual source in order to connect directly with the aesthetic theory
and methodology that would help Guido to legitimize his own political
agenda with the help of the international, especially German, and soon to
become “Germanic” scientific discourse. Wölfflin’s acknowledgment of his
own reception abroad would have sanctioned Guido’s visionary construct.
If we trust the wording of Guido’s complacent blurb decorating his essay
on Leonardo da Vinci of 1940, Wölfflin did indeed send him a polite note
of replyword of thanks: “The notable and original form of the baroque
in America has been deciphered by you with admirable rigor. I welcome
the use of my methods very much. I know no other similar work from
America. I congratulate you warmly. Zurich 1928.”54 Wölfflin’s unsourced
statement—“What am I supposed to do in America? It is just an augment-
ed Europe”—might, however, epitomize his refusal to admit that otherness
and mestizo idiosyncrasy of the New World baroque proposed by Guido.55
In any case, Guido’s stumbling dedication testifies to a one-way relationship
across the Atlantic, which only today, with a renewed international interest
in Latin American theory of the baroque and neobaroque, finds a faltering
echo.
Acknowledgments
The present essay is part of an ongoing study on the Latin American re-
ception of Wölfflin focused on Ángel Guido’s writings, which owes much
to the Getty Research Institute’s director Thomas W. Gaehtgens, to Evonne
Levy (University of Toronto), and to Jens Baumgarten (Universidade Fed-
eral de São Paulo). The author would like to thank Anne Helmreich (The
Getty Foundation, Los Angeles) and Iain Boyd Whyte (Art in Translation,
Figure 15
Ángel Guido’s dedication to Heinrich Wölfflin, 1928, in Guido, Fusión, Library of the Institute of Art History, Universität Zürich.
University of Edinburgh) for their initiative and support, and Gabriela Si-
racusano (Universidad Nacional de San Martin) and Pablo Montini (Mu-
seo Histórico Provincial de Rosario) for sharing their research. As always,
Julia Gelshorn (Université de Fribourg) has contributed with encourage-
ment and her own precious time.
Notes
1. See, for example, James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (New
York: Routledge, 2007); David Carrier, A World Art History and Its
Objects (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press,
2008); Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, eds., The Global Art
World. Audiences, Markets, and Museums (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz
Verlag, 2009); Hans Belting et al., eds., Global Studies: Mapping
Contemporary Art and Culture (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag,
2011); Monica Juneja et al., eds., “Universalität der Kunstgeschichte?”
Kritische Berichte: Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften
40, no. 2 (2012); Catherine Grenier, ed., Modernités plurielles, 1905–
1970 (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2013); and Jill H. Casid and Aruna
D’Souza, eds., Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn, Clark
Studies in the Visual Arts Series (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 2014).
2. See the project archive online, http://www.khist.uzh.ch/nah.
3. Heinrich Wölfflin, in Evonne Levy and Tristan Weddigen, eds.,
trans. Jonathan Blower, Principles of Art History: The Problem of
the Development of Style in Early Modern Art, Texts & Documents
(Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute, 2015); first ed.: Heinrich
Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der
Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich: F. Bruckmann A.-G.,
1915); and Ángel Guido, ‘“Hispano-Incaic Architecture: A Wölfflinian
View,” trans. Claudia Heide, intro. Gabriela Siracusano, Art in
Translation 1, no. 2 (2009): 259–71, translation of “Barroquismo
hispanoincainco a través de Wölfflin,” in (Rosario: s.p., 1927), 11–42.
4. See, for example, Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On

the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1985), 58–62; Wolfgang Kemp, Der Betrachter ist
im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik, in DuMont-
Taschenbücher series 169 (Cologne: DuMont, 1985); and Alfred Gell,
Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1998).
5. See, for example, Miguel Solà, Historia del arte hispano-americano.
Arquitectura, escultura, pintura y artes menores en la América española
durante los siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII, Biblioteca de iniciación cultural,
Colleción Labor, Sección IV, Artes plásticas (Barcelona: Editorial
Labor S.A., 1935), 371–2 and 182–4; Alfred Neumeyer, “The Indian
Contribution to Architectural Decoration in Spanish Colonial
America,” Art Bulletin, 30, no. 2 (1948): 105, n. 11; Leslie Bethell,
ed., The Cambridge History of Latin America, 11 vols. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984–2008), vol. 11 (1995), 153–4;
Arabella Pauly, Neobarroco: Zur Wesensbestimmung Lateinamerikas
und seiner Literatur, in Bonner romanistische Arbeiten Series 46
(Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1993) (Ph.D. thesis Universität
Bonn, 1992), esp. 13–36; Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a
Geography of Art (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 278–82;
Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Carla Rahn Phillips, and Lisa Voigt, “Spain
and Spanish America in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Current
Trends in Scholarship,” Renaissance Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2009):
7–9; Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, eds., Baroque New
Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2010), 178–82; and Monika Kaup,
Neobaroque in the Americas: Alternative Modernities in Literature,
Visual Art, and Film, New World Studies Series (Charlottesville, Va.:
University of Virginia Press, 2012), 261–5.
6. Pablo Montini and Gabriela Siracusano, Anales del Museo Histórico
Provincial de Rosario. 1: Ángel Guido (Rosario: Museo Histórico
Provincial de Rosario Dr. Julio Marc, 2011).
7. Ángel Guido, Redescubrimiento de América en el arte, Conferencias y

textos 16 (Rosario: Facultad de ciencias matematicas, fisico-quimicas
y naturales aplicadas a la Industria de la Universidad Nacional del
Litoral, 1940), 121–64; José Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, ed.
Irlemar Chiampi (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993);
first ed.: (La Habana: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1957), 83 and
103–6; Alejo Carpentier, “De lo real maravillosamente americano,”
in Tientos y diferencias, Colección Poemas y ensayos (Mexico City:
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1964), 115–35; Alejo
Carpentier, Razon de ser [conference] (Caracas: Universidad Central
de Venezuela/Ediciones del Rectorado, 1976), 19–20 and 51–73 (“Lo
barroco y lo real-maravilloso”); and Pauly, Neobarroco, 57–63 and
94–9.
8. On Guido’s biography, see obituary by Julián Garcés, “Ángel Guido

(1896–1960),” Revista de historia de América, no. 50 (December 1960):
504–5; Ana María Rigotti, “Monumento a la Bandera de Rosario.
Síntesis de búsquedas excéntricas en la modernidad Argentina,”
CURDIUR. Laboratorio de Historia Urbana. Comunicaciones
congresos (2011); and Montini and Siracusano, Guido.
9. Ángel Guido, Redescubrimiento de América en el arte (Buenos Aires:
Librería y editorial ‘El Ateneo’, 1944); first ed.: (Rosario: Facultad
de ciencias matematicas, fisico-quimicas y naturales aplicadas a la
Industria de la Universidad Nacional del Litoral, 1940).
10. Ángel Guido, Caballitos de ciudad (Rosario: Empresa Fenner, 1922);
and Pedro-Juan Vignale and César Tiempo, eds., Exposiciónde la
actual poesía Argentina, 1922–1927 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Minerva,
1927), 23–27.
11. Ricardo Rojas, Eurindia: Ensayo de estética fundado en la experiencia
histórica de las culturas americanas, Obras de Ricardo Rojas (Buenos
Aires: Librería ‘La Faculdad’, 1924), 5, 23, 27, 39, 141, and 224. He
calls Alfredo an indigenist painter: ibid., 304, 314. On Alfredo, see
Louise Le-Bellot, “Alfredo Guido, pintor,” Apolo: Revista de arte y
letras 1, no. 1 (April 1919): 23–27; and Elizabeth Kuon Arce et al.,
Cuzco-Buenos Aires: Ruta de intelectualidad americana, 1900–1950
(Cusco: Universidad de San Martin de Porres, 2009).
12. Ángel Guido, Orientación espiritual de la arquitectura en América
(Rosario: s.p., 1927). Partially republished as Ángel Guido,
“Decadencia de la arquitectura moderna francesa,” Arquitectura:
Revista de la Sociedad de Arquitectos 1, no. 9 (1928): 19–21; and
Ángel Guido, “Orientación espiritual de la arquitectura en América,”
Arquitectura: Revista de la Sociedad de Arquitectos 1, no. 9 (1928):
33–40.
13. Ángel Guido, La machinolâtrie de Le Corbusier (Rosario: s.p., 1930);
Adriana Collado, “La difusión de la arquitectura moderna en el
interior de Argentina: Revistas de Rosario, 1926–33,” De arquitectura
23 (2001): 26–30; and Le Corbusier (i.e. Charles-Édouard Jeanneret),
“Arquitectura de época maquinista,” Revista de occidente, 6, no. 59

(1928): 157–93.
14. See also Ángel Guido,“Einfluss der Landschaft auf das südamerikanische
Barock,” Ibero-Amerikanisches Archiv 13, no. 2 (1939–40): 148–57;
Ángel Guido, La arquitectura mestiza en las riberas del Titikaca, pt.
two, Documentos de arte coloniál sudamericano 9 (Buenos Aires:
Publicaciónes de la Académia nacionál de bellas artes de la Republica
Argentina, 1956).
15. Ángel Guido, Arqueología y estética de la arquitectura criolla, ed. by
Colegio libre de estudios superiores (Buenos Aires: Editorial “Cles,”
1932).
16. Ángel Guido, Concepto moderno de la historia del arte: Influencia de
la “Einfühlung” en la moderna historiografia de arte, foreword Jose
Leon Pagano, Publicaciones de la Facultad de Ciencias Matemáticas,

Fisico-Químicas y Naturales Aplicadas a la Industria de la Universidad
Nacional del Litoral, in Serie tecnico-científica Series 3 (Santa Fe:
Imprenta de la Universidad, 1935), see footnote on p. 92 for a list of
his Wölfflinian studies.
17. Ángel Sánchez Rivero, “Enrique Wölfflin: Una manera de considerar
la historia del arte,” Revista de occidente 2, no. 17 (November 1924):
256–73.
18. Franz Landsberger, Heinrich Wölfflin (Berlin: Elena Gottschalk
Verlag, 1924).
19. Paul Wolters, Ernst Beling, and Karl Vossler, Festschrift Heinrich
Wölfflin: Beiträge zur Kunst- und Geistesgeschichte. Zum 21. Juni
überreicht von Freunden und Schülern (Munich: Hugo Schmidt
Verlag, 1924), which contains two papers on Spanish art.
20. Heinrich Wölfflin, Conceptos fundamentales en la historia del arte,
trans. José Moreno Villa, Biblioteca de ideas del siglo XX Series
7 (Madrid: Calpe, 1924); first ed.: Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche
Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren
Kunst, 4th ed. (Munich: Hugo Bruckmann Verlag, 1920).
21. For example, José Vasconcelos, La raza cósmica: Mision de la raza
iberoamericana: Notas de viajes a la América del Sur (Paris: Agencía
Mundial de Librería, 1925), 36. This refers to Jakob von Uexküll,
Ideas para una concepción biológica del mundo, trans. Ramón María
Tenreiro, Biblioteca de ideas del siglo XX Series 3 (Madrid: Calpe,
1922); first ed.: Von Uexküll, Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere (Berlin:
Verlag von Julius Springer, 1909).
22. José Ortega y Gasset, La deshumanización del arte e Ideas sobre la
novela (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1925), 62.
23. Wölfflin, Conceptos, XII, XIII, and 23. To mention another example
of Ortega’s bending of Wölfflinian concepts: he sees a motor of the
stylistic development in an increase of stimulus required to overcome
aesthetic “fatigue,” an idea he attributes to Wölfflin, who actually
refuted it in his Principles. See Wölfflin, Conceptos, 307; and Ortega y

Gasset, Deshumanización, 67.
24. Hippolyte Taine, Filosofía del arte, trans. Ambrosio Cebrián,
Colección universal Calpe (Madrid: Calpe, 1922); first ed.: Hippolyte
Taine, Philosophie de l’art: Leçons professées à l’École des beaux-arts
(Paris: Germer Baillière/Hipp. Baillière/Baillière Brothers/C. Bailly-
Baillière, 1865).
25. Rojas, Eurindia, 127, 264, and 333.
26. Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock: eine Untersuchengüber
Wesen und Entstehung der Barockstil in Italien (Munich: Theodor
Ackermann, 1888); and Wölfflin, Die klassische Kunst: eine
Einführung in die italienische Renaissance (Munich: F. Bruckman A.-
G., 1899).
27. Wilhelm Worringer, La esencia del estilo gótico, trans. Manuel G.

Morente, Publicación de la Revista de occidente (Madrid: Revista
de Occidente, 1925); first ed.: Worringer, Formprobleme der Gotik
(Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1911); and Oswald Spengler, La decadencia
de occidente, Bosquejo de una morfología de la historia universal, 4
vols., in Biblioteca de ideas del siglo XX Series 4/6/8/9 (Madrid: Calpe,
1923–27). See also Wilhelm Worringer, “El espíritu del arte gótico,”
Revista de occidente 2, no. 11 (1924): 178–211; and Oswald Spengler,
“Pueblos y razas,”Revista de occidente 2, no. 15 (1924): 351–74. For
a pre-Worringerian re-evaluation of medieval architecture, see Ángel
Guido, “Cristianización de las formas,” La revista de “El circulo”
(spring 1923): 34–36.
28. The main points of the essay are republished with a focus on Cusco in
Ángel Guido, “El Cuzco, problema de arte,” Arquitectura: Revista de
la Sociedad de Arquitectos 1, no. 12 (1928): 33–44.
29. Otto Schubert, Historia del barroco en España, trans. Manuel
Hernández Alcalde (Madrid: Editorial Saturnino Calleja, 1924); first
ed.: Schubert, Geschichte des Barock in Spanien (Esslingen: Paul Neff
Verlag/Max Schreiber, 1908).
30. See, for example, José Amador de los Rios, El estilo mudejar en
arquitectura: Discurso leido en junta pública de 19 de Junio de 1859
(Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel Tello, 1872).
31. Wölfflin, Conceptos, 316. See also Daniela Bohde, Kunstgeschichte als
physiognomische Wissenschaft: Kritik einer Denkfigur der 1920er bis
1940er Jahre, Schriften zur modernen Kunsthistoriographie 3 (Berlin:
Akademie Verlag, 2012).
32. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse
einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte. Erster Band. Gestalt und
Wirklichkeit, 7th ed. (Munich: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung/
Oskar Beck, 1920); first ed.: (Vienna: Braumüller, 1918), 276 and
144–45.
33. Rojas, Eurindia, 11–13 and 18–20.
34. See Worringer, Gótico, 11 and esp. 129.
35. Worringer, Gótico, 11.

36. Alfred Wegener, La genèsis de los continentes y océanos, trans.
Vicente Inglada Ors (Madrid: Biblioteca de la Revista de Occidente,
1924); first ed.: Wegener, Die Entstehung der Kontinente und Ozeane
(Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1915).
37. For art historical diagrams in general (not including Guido’s), see Astrit
Schmidt-Burkhardt, Stammbäume der Kunst. Zur Genealogie der
Avantgarde (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005); and Wolfgang Cortjaens
and Karsten Heck, eds., Stil-Linien diagrammatischer Kunstgeschichte
(Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2014). See a partial exception in
Francisco Mujica, History of the Skyscraper (Paris: Archaeology and
Architecture Press, 1929), pl. I.
38. The diagram is republished in Ángel Guido, “Arquitectura moderna,”
Arquitectura: Revista de la Sociedad de Arquitectos 1, no. 12 (1928):

52.
39. Karl Woermann, Historia del arte en todos los tiempos y pueblos,
6 vols. (Madrid: Saturnino Calleja, 1923–24); first ed.: Woermann,
Geschichte der Kunst aller Zeiten und Völker, 6 vols., 2nd ed. (Leipzig:
Bibliographisches Institut, 1920–2).
40. Heinrich von Geymüller, Die Baustile: Historische und technische
Entwickelung: Des Handbuches der Architektur, pt. 2, vol. 6:
Die Baukunst der Renaissance in Frankreich; vol. 1: Historische
Darstellung der Entwickleung des Baustils (Stuttgart: Arnold
Bergsträsser Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1898), 28 and illus.
41. Karsten Heck, “Der Schreibtisch als Denkraum: Heinrich von
Geymüllers Tableau graphique,” in Josef Ploder and Georg German,
eds., Heinrich von Geymüller (1839–1909): Architekturforscher und
Architekturzeichner (Basel: F. Reinhardt, 2009), 54–63; and Heck,
“Formen des Stils: Heinrich von Geymüllers grafische Methoden
der Stilgeschichtsschreibung,” in Wolfgang Cortjaens and Karsten
Heck, eds., Stil-Linien diagrammatischer Kunstgeschichte (Munich:
Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2014), 168–85.
42. Guido, Redescubrimiento, 536–37; and Georg Gustav Wieszner,
Der Pulsschlag deutscher Stilgeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis ins
16. Jahrhundert. 1. Teil: von den Anfängen bis ins 16. Jahrhundert.
Mit Bildern des Verlages Dr. Franz Stoedtner, Berlin, und einer
Zeitübersicht in Fotomontage von L. Moholy-Nagy (Stuttgart:
Akademischer Verlag Dr. Fritz Wedekind & Co., [1930]).
43. Ángel Guido, Fusión hispano-indígena en la arquitectura colonial,
foreword Martín S. Noel (Rosario: Editorial ‘La casa del libro,’ 1925).
44. Guido, Fusión, 24, 44, and 161; and Martín S. Noel, “Preface,” in
Guido, Fusión, 11–18.
45. Martín S. Noel, Fundamentos para una estética nacional: Contribución
a la história de la arquitectura hispano-americana (Buenos Aires:
Rodríguez Giles, 1926), esp. 151–216.
46. Guido, Fusión, 21–26.
47. André Michel, ed., Histoire de l’art depuis les premierstemps chrétiens

jusqu’à nos jours, vol. 6, L’Art en Europe au XVIIe siècle (Paris:
Librairie Armand Colin, 1905–29), 405, cited in Guido, Fusión, 45;
and Charles Wiener, Pérou et Bolivie: Récit de voyage. Suivi d’études
archéologiques etethnographiques et de notes sur l’écriture et les
langues des populations indiennes (Paris: Librairie Hachette et Cie,
1880), esp. 636–39.
48. Arthur Posnansky, Eine prähistorische Metropole in Südamerika
(Berlin: Verlag von Dietrich Reimer/Ernst Vohsen, 1905), 118–84. See
also Guido, Fusión, 159–73.
49. Kaufmann, Geography, 276–99.
50. Ángel Guido, “El Cuzco, problema de arte,” Arquitectura: Revista
de la Sociedad de Arquitectos 1, no. 12 (1928): 35; and Guido,
Arqueología, 10.
51. August Thiersch, Handbuch der Architektur: Vierter Teil:
Entwerfen,Anlage und Einrichtung, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Arnold
Bergsträsser Verlagsbuchhandlung/A. Kröner, 1904); first ed.:
(Darmstadt/Stuttgart: Bergsträsser, 1883); Le Corbusier (Charles-
Édouard Jeanneret), Toward an Architecture, trans. John Goodman,
foreword Jean-Louis Cohen, Texts & Documents (Los Angeles: Getty
Publications, 2007); first ed.: Le Corbusier, Vers une architecture
(Paris: G. Crès, 1923), 131–44; Hendrik Petrus Berlage, The
Foundations and Development of Architecture, trans. Iain Boyd
Whyte, Texts and Documents (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 1996);
first ed.: Berlage, Grundlagen & Entwicklung der Architektur: Vier
Vorträge gehaltenim Kunstgewerbemuseum zu Zürich (Berlin: Verlag
von Julius Bard, 1908); Rafael Doménech, Gregorio Muñoz Dueñas,
and Francisco Pérez Dolz, Tratado de técnica ornamental (Barcelona:
Editorial y Librería de Arte de M. Bayés, 1920); Hubert Locher,
“Diagrammatische Abstraktion als Grundlage der Stilbestimmung:
Erwin Panofsky und Rudolf Wittkower,” in Wolfgang Cortjaens and
Karsten Heck, eds., Stil-Linien diagrammatischer Kunstgeschichte
(Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2014), 212–31.
52. Wölfflin, Barock, 54, fig. 12; and Erwin Panofsky, “Die Entwicklung
der Proportionslehre als Abbild der Stilentwicklung,” Monatshefte für
Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1921): 188–219.
53. Book number 13 in the inventory list.
54. Ángel Guido, Leonardo de Vinci. Meditaciones sobre la vida, la obra
y el dolor del gran Florentino (Rosario: Talleres Graficos ‘Fenner’,
1940): “‘La notable y original modalidad del Barroco en América, ha
sido descifrada por Ud. Con rigor admirable. Celebro mucho el uso
de mis métodos. No conozco otra obra similar procedente de América.
Le felicito vivamente’. Zürich, 1928. Enrique Wölfflin.”
55. Cited in Udo Kultermann, Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Der
Weg einer Wissenschaft, 2nd ed. (Munich: Prestel, 1996); first ed.:
(Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1981), 168–71.

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Art in Translation

ISSN: (Print) 1756-1310 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfat20

Hispano-Incaic Fusions: Ángel Guido and the Latin

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2015.1058018

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Download by: [181.171.198.4] Date: 17 December 2017, At: 11:13

KEYWORDS: architecture, Argentina, art theory, baroque, historiography,

It is All about Translating

The need to actively internationalize the discipline of art history grows

Universität Zürich, Switzerland, and the Universidade Federal de São Pau-

say. It is certainly easier to reconstruct other people’s ideas than to have

Art (Redescubrimiento de America en el arte, 1944), however, brings to-

moderno de la historia del arte: Influencia de la “Einfühlung” en la mod-

able to change collective sensibility.22 Although Wölfflin himself betrays

against the positivist “milieu” theory of Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893), as

thought-out emotion.” Between 1924 and 1927, therefore, while shifting

ly suitable for Guido’s revolutionary aesthetic agenda: the foundation of

Guido then applies Wölfflinian history of style to colonial architecture.

originating directly from the Italian Renaissance, nor indirectly through

itive,” which means “early Renaissance,” art, as coined by French schol-

superhistorical processes. Guido does not adopt the classic genealogical

they alternately disappear below the horizon of cultural consciousness.

der Renaissance in Frankreich (The Architecture of the Renaissance in

Finally, to better understand Wölfflin’s impact on Guido’s early thought,

hispano-indígena en la arquitectura colonial (The Hispano-Indigenous Fu-

which bears the anti-Corbusian title “Towards an Architecture of Our

“genealogical tree” until it was—or indeed the natives were—discovered,

Chapter 5 on pre-Columbian ornament represents Guido’s pièce de ré-

Chapter 7 unites the two hybrids from Chapters 3 and 6 to an inte-

Both Guido’s diagrams and his formal concepts attest to a geometrical

4.  See, for example, Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On

7.  Ángel Guido, Redescubrimiento de América en el arte, Conferencias y

8. On Guido’s biography, see obituary by Julián Garcés, “Ángel Guido

“Arquitectura de época maquinista,” Revista de occidente, 6, no. 59

Leon Pagano, Publicaciones de la Facultad de Ciencias Matemáticas,

refuted it in his Principles. See Wölfflin, Conceptos, 307; and Ortega y

27. Wilhelm Worringer, La esencia del estilo gótico, trans. Manuel G.

35. Worringer, Gótico, 11.

Arquitectura: Revista de la Sociedad de Arquitectos 1, no. 12 (1928):

47. André Michel, ed., Histoire de l’art depuis les premierstemps chrétiens

Potrebbero piacerti anche

4. See, for example, Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On

7. Ángel Guido, Redescubrimiento de América en el arte, Conferencias y

8. On Guido’s biography, see obituary by Julián Garcés, “Ángel Guido

27. Wilhelm Worringer, La esencia del estilo gótico, trans. Manuel G.

35. Worringer, Gótico, 11.

47. André Michel, ed., Histoire de l’art depuis les premierstemps chrétiens