Every scientific discipline, in order to determine with the greatest possible exactitude the phenomena that come within the scope of its particular domain, creates a vocabulary of technical terms with specific significances which it uses as indispensable tools in its research work. On many occasions, when one and the same phenomenon is considered according to the fundamental concepts of related disciplines, various designations are used, giving different meanings and nuances in the development of the analysis. This leads most frequently to an enrichment of the given interpretation, but sometimes also obscures it.

Just a very few years ago no one would have thought of introducing an article with this title, because only more or less isolated religious traits and complexes of traits were known to be common to Mexico and China on the one hand, like the series of animal etc. names used in the calendar, and to Mexico, India and Indianized Southeast Asia on the other, like the belief in four or five destructions and re-creations of the world, the pachisi-patolli game connected with the four directions, the tearing out of the heart of a still-living victim of human sacrifice, the piercing of the tongue by priests and the pulling through of thin objects, and a considerable number of motives in religious art, including the representation of specific gods with their characteristic paraphernalia.

If the Royal Commentaries of the Incas, published in 1609, for a long time enjoyed an authority and exceptional prestige, if this work created the image in the French 18th century of an ideally ordered, just and virtuous society, it was no doubt due more to the admirable skill with which Garcilaso presented an especially brilliant and fascinating picture of the civilization of his maternal ancestors, the lords of Peru, than to the title of Inca, in which he could take pride—as the son of a Peruvian princess and a noble Spanish conqueror—or to the fact that he witnessed the aftermath of the conquest and the fall of the empire. It was perhaps a too attractive picture, and toward the middle of the 19th century it raised some doubt and scepticism. The Commentaries were then considered to be a romanticized history of the Inca civilization, even a utopia pure and simple. Modern criticism has reversed this view. It has pointed out that many facts in the book were valid, and that some were indisputable. Recent works tend to revindicate in their conclusions the historical importance and the sincerity of Garcilaso, without denying in the process the stylization, idealization and prejudices of the book. The viewpoint of the erudite Peruvian scholar Porras Barrenechea is in this respect significant: “The image of the Inca Empire that Garcilaso projects,” he writes, “is neither false nor deceptive. It is only one-sided. He gathered and related essentially favorable facts, those which exalted the memory of the lost empire and not which would have justified its disappearance…”

Unlike recent proponents of indigenismo I shall try to show that the physical phenomenon of the colonial city in Latin America was entirely European in genesis and in form. I shall also review some recent theories concerning the psychology, the transmission, and the reception of European urbanism in colonial America. Finally I hope to set colonial metropolitan centers into perspective with the longer span of archaeological history as well as with events in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I purpose to deal with the subject literally: to what extent is Spanish-American art an adaptation and to what extent is it spontaneous?

If one considers the immediate reaction of the artist faced with the complex reality that surrounds him, our question is addressed on the one hand to the Spanish artist who found himself facing the new American reality and, on the other hand, to the Indian artist who had to find his mode of expression within this new reality, created by the Spanish conquest.

The problem of spontaneity and the capability of adaptation in the development of civilizations, which is the subject of the current issue, is in my view inseparable from the problem posed by the relations between reality and the images of reality. Two cultures existing side by side confront each other in many ways and in countless sectors. And in every case this confrontation gives rise in each of them to a particular image of the other. Unstable, changing images succeed each other, and from the moment they appear condition the terms of the confrontation to the extent to which they constitute the key that every culture possesses for judging the singular characteristics of the other. It is this image that gives meaning to each of the isolated elements and consequently to the whole. Judging—or prejudging—on the basis of this established meaning, the social groups through which two cultures make contact with each other accept or reject the peculiar characteristics of their opposite number, and react in this confrontation with conditioned attitudes. Thus, the image of a cultural reality has become an established fact of the reality and operates as such. What appears spontaneous in one culture, which has become merged with another, or what results from adaptation, may derive from certain genuine forms of the other culture but also from the idea that one culture may have gained of another. And as this belief —which operates as a given factor of the reality—has been elaborated through very obscure psycho-social processes, it is indispensable to start from the basis of the accepted forms that have created it and to follow from there the process of its formation.

It would be foolhardy and fruitless to try to cover in a few pages all the aspects of the development of Celtic civilization during the period of Roman domination. In effect, the civilizations involved were extremely heterogeneous, and the contacts among them highly complex. This pageant of transfer, mutation, amalgamation and revival stretched over more than half a millenium and varied significantly according to time and place. Only a superficial observer, judging from a few broad common characteristics, would be so bold as to speak of a unified Celto-Roman civilization. In reality, the Celtic territory subjugated by the Romans comprised a good number of well-differentiated provincial civilizations : the civilization of Roman Galicia is not the same as that of Brittany, the civilization of Provence differs considerably from that of Northern Gaul, and the Danubian provinces, in their turn, are distinguished by certain characteristics which cannot be confused with those of Galatia or Cisalpine Gaul. Yet all these regions were inhabited by Celtic tribes at the time of the Roman conquest; the cultural divergences can be accounted for by variations both in the pre-Celtic substrata of these areas and in the way in which their inhabitants reacted to the contact of Roman civilization.

Probably the most momentous experience in the contacts and mergings among civilizations in the Far East—one shared by China, Japan and Korea—is the introduction of Buddhism from India. This is, of course, a subject on which much has already been written, and even when narrowed to China alone its complexities do not lend themselves readily to summary treatment. Ideally one should have a clear conception of what “Chinese Buddhism” and the “Chinese tradition” represent before proceeding to discuss their interrelations. The most that we can hope for here is that by examining specific points of contact or friction batween Buddhism and the more articulate spokesmen of Chinese tradition some reciprocal identification may emerge.

In chapter 79 of his Doctrina pueril Raymond Lull, a professional educator whom Jaime the Conqueror engaged to tutor the future king of Majorca, describes “the mechanical arts” at about the middle of the 13th century as “sciences” peculiar to men who “do physical work.” Here the treballan in the Catalan text has obviously lost all reference to the tripalium, the instrument of torture reserved for slaves, and the word is no more pejorative than the Latin laborant. For Lull the mechanical arts were not the exclusive province of a lower class of society (the class that Plato had placed on the margin of his “Republic”).