In this very useful volume in the Diálogos series, Kelly Donahue-Wallace examines chronologically and by medium the art and architecture of colonial Spanish America. As with many excellent textbooks, Donahue-Wallace's has its origins in her classroom teaching, surveying standard topics in secular and religious painting and in ecclesiastical and civil architecture and urban planning. A major virtue of the volume is its balancing of different regions of Spanish America, especially in its comparisons between Mexico and Peru, but also some more peripheral areas. Although she is ‘comfortable describing the scope of this book as Latin America without considering every part of the Americas’ (p. xvii), her exclusion of any consideration of Brazil is an unfortunate omission, particularly since historians are increasingly analysing similarities and differences between Spanish and Portuguese America.

As a main textbook for a course on Spanish American art history or as supplementary reading for colonial Spanish American history, the book's eight well-structured chapters fit a one-term course quite well. Particularly valuable are sidebars of key primary sources in readable translations by the author. There are 32 high-quality colour plates and over a hundred black and white photos. Appropriately for a textbook, footnoting in the main text is kept to a minimum, but occasionally, when the author makes sweeping statements without specific citations, the limits of the book for scholars become evident. The separate and extensive bibliography is valuable, but the index could be more ample. In general the author has an engaging prose style, only occasionally lapsing into specialised art-history terminology. A minor quibble is that the term ‘New Spanish’, referring to people and things of colonial Mexico, is not generally used by Mexicanist scholars.

The organisation of the volume is straightforward. Following the introduction laying out the parameters of the book, Donahue-Wallace proceeds in chap. 1 to discuss the architecture and sculpture of what she calls ‘the Missions’: the densely populated central areas of Mexico and Peru during the early sixteenth century. Her discussion of the similarities and differences between ecclesiastical buildings in New Spain and Peru shows that the indigenous populations played an important role in creating the new sacred buildings – this influence is clearly evident in the elaborate relief stonework decoration found in churches in colonial Mexico, where there was a pre-Hispanic tradition of decorative stonework, while Andean churches lack this feature, consistent with its absence in the pre-Hispanic era. Although chap. 2 is ostensibly on early colonial ‘painting’, Donahue-Wallace examines more broadly two-dimensional visual art, including murals decorating the newly built churches, indigenous codices of Mesoamerica, coats of arms of indigenous lineages, and indigenous pictorial maps in the relaciones geográficas. For native pictorials, the major work of James Lockhart is relevant but apparently unknown to the author. Stretching the category of painting to include ‘traditional arts in the colonial context’, Donahue-Wallace includes Mesoamerican featherwork compositions, the painted images on ritual Andean ceramic quero vessels, and ritual Andean woollen tunics called uncus. She notes that ‘Andean artists continued to weave their beautiful cloth under Spanish rule’ (p. 70), but misses the opportunity to discuss the one area of artistic production where women played a significant role. Her discussion of the political importance of the ritual uncus during the colonial era is incisive, however.

Chapter 3, on colonial cities, deals with the Iberian ideas of city planning and function and shows how these were realised in several urban centres including Mexico City, built on the ruins of the Aztec capital, and in the strategies of reshaping the Inca capital of Cuzco and the new-built capital of Lima. Donahue-Wallace includes excerpts from Philip II's 1573 royal ordinances for laying out urban areas, and says that the king ‘hoped that [the ordinances] illustrated the futility of rebellion’ (p. 76). The illustration she uses for Mexico City is Cristóbal Villalpando's famous painting of the Zócalo, but she does not point out the half-destroyed viceregal palace, damaged in the 1692 riot.

Not surprisingly, religious art and architecture (including altar screens) merit considerable analysis. Especially in the chapters on this subject (4–6), the less than optimal quality of the black and white photos hinders the reader's ability to appreciate the analytical insights Donahue-Wallace provides and lessens the direct enjoyment of the aesthetics of those works, but the excellent colour plates include some of the finest examples of religious art.

In chap. 7, on secular painting in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Donahue-Wallace examines portraiture, biombos (painted free-standing screens to divide rooms) and casta paintings. Her survey of colonial portraiture is very engaging, drawing the reader to look carefully at the symbolic elements in the examples. She shows why biombos are worthy of special consideration, although some of the most famous examples focus on the Portuguese, and these lie outside of the parameters of her work. She does not survey historical paintings, which is unfortunate since there are many with the theme of the conquest of Mexico. On the other hand, she does succinctly do justice to eighteenth-century casta paintings, racial groupings in hierarchical order, which were once ignored by scholars and are now recognised as a major colonial Mexican genre.

The final chapter on art and architecture at the end of the colonial era brings the volume to a close. Donahue-Wallace does not stray outside the colonial era, but could well have discussed the continuing presence of art and architecture from this era in modern times. There are hints in some of the book's photos of the current fate of some buildings, but a discussion of the later history of colonial buildings recycled as hotels, museums, cultural centres and commercial retail shops could have enriched our understanding of the colonial heritage. Nonetheless, Donahue-Wallace's work does provide an entry point for further exploration of these aspects.

This text on colonial Spanish American art is a welcome addition to a growing body of work that is accessible to scholars, students and the general reader. Colonial-era Latin American art is now an increasingly vibrant field in its own right, no longer representing three centuries of artistic production dismissed as derivative of European forms. Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America will be of considerable interest to those exploring colonialism and the formation of regional and national identities in Spanish America.