The Argument of Kinship Between Images and Speech: Forms and Uses of Kinship Iconography in Spanish America (16th-18th centuries)

Based on a corpus of different iconographic productions representing alliances and lineages (genealogical trees, lineage diagrams, paintings of New Spain’s “castes”, dynastic paintings…), this contribution seeks to question the contexts of production and, above all, the usefulness of such representations of “origin”. Trees, diagrams and even paintings are all supports for expressing the “genealogical fact”, a fact that has to be understood rather as the translation into images of a language, with its logic and codes. Therefore, it is not so much the formal aspect as the context that gives it a meaning that it is necessary to address: as any language, the genealogical reasoning is a discursive resource at the service of social actors as a rationale or justification. It constitutes a repertoire of arguments designed in order to state or assert. On the basis of these premises, this contribution locates various examples of the imaging of this imaginary by focusing first on the context and place of enunciation as well as on its agents. The argumentative nature of this iconographic “genealogical rationale’ is the guiding principle of this first moment. It then analyses, in a second step, the articulation of this genealogical logic and iconography with other competing – and a priori contradictory – forms, such as the rhetoric of “personal merit”, which also aimed to state and claim a social position. These considerations make it possible to measure the persistence up to the 18th century of recourse to genealogy and its imagery in the argumentative repertoire resorted to by social actors, as well as the meaning that should be given to it.