COLONIAL CULTURE AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT 147
borrowers from the church were also threatened
by the Consolidation decree.
The measure caused a storm of protest, and its
application was gradually softened by willingness
on the part of the offi cials in charge to negotiate the
amounts and other terms of payment. So strong
was the opposition of debtors, both creoles and pen-
insulars, to the decree that little effort was made to
implement it outside of New Spain, which provided
more than two-thirds of the 15 million pesos col-
lected before it was canceled in 1808 following Na-
poleon’s invasion of Spain. The Consolidation left a
heritage of bitterness, especially among individu-
als like Father Miguel Hidalgo, future torchbearer
of the Mexican War for Independence, whose haci-
enda was embargoed for several years for failure to
pay his debts to the Consolidation.
Thus, despite, and partly because of, the re-
formist spirit of the Bourbon kings, the creoles
became progressively alienated from the Spanish
crown. Their alienation intensifi ed an incipient cre-
ole nationalism that, denied direct political outlets,
found its chief expression in culture and religion.
Colonial Culture and
the Enlightenment
At least until the eighteenth century, a neomedi-
eval climate of opinion, enforced by the authority
of church and state, sharply restricted the play of
the colonial intellect and imagination. Colonial
culture thus suffered from all the infi rmities of its
parent but inevitably lacked the breadth and vital-
ity of Spanish literature and art, the product of a
much older and more mature civilization. Despite
these and other diffi culties, such as the limited
market for books, colonial culture left a remark-
ably large and valuable heritage.
Colonial art drew its principal inspiration from
Spanish sources, but, especially in the sixteenth
century, indigenous infl uence was sometimes vis-
ible in design and ornamentation. Quito in Ecua-
dor and Mexico City were among the chief centers
of artistic activity. The fi rst school of fi ne arts in the
New World was established in Mexico City in 1779
under royal auspices. As might be expected, reli-
gious motifs dominated painting and sculpture. In
architecture the colonies followed Spanish exam-
ples, with the severe classical style of the sixteenth
century giving way in the seventeenth to the
highly ornamented baroque and in the eighteenth
to a style that was even more ornate.
The intellectual atmosphere of the Spanish
colonies was not conducive to scientifi c inquiry
or achievement. As late as 1773, the Colombian
botanist Mutis was charged with heresy for giving
lectures in Bogotá on the Copernican system. The
prosecutor of the Inquisition asserted that Mutis
was “perhaps the only man in Latin America to
uphold Copernicus.” In the last decades of the
eighteenth century, however, the growing volume
of economic and intellectual contacts with Europe
and the patronage and protection of enlightened
governors created more favorable conditions for
scientifi c activity. Science made its greatest strides
in the wealthy province of New Spain, where the
expansion of the mining industry stimulated inter-
est in geology, chemistry, mathematics, and metal-
lurgy. In Mexico City there arose a school of mines,
a botanical garden, and an academy of fi ne arts. The
Mexican scientifi c renaissance produced a galaxy
of brilliant fi gures that included Antonio de León y
Gama, Antonio de Alzate, and Joaquín Velázquez
Cárdenas y León. These men combined Enlighten-
ment enthusiasm for rationalism, empiricism, and
progress with a strict Catholic orthodoxy; Alzate,
for example, vehemently denounced the “infi del-
ity” and skepticism of Europe’s philosophes.
Spain itself, now under the rule of the enlight-
ened Bourbon kings, contributed to the intellectual
renovation of the colonies. The early-eighteenth-
century friar Benito Feijóo, whose numerous essays
waged war on folly and superstition of every kind,
exerted a major liberalizing infl uence in both Spain
and its colonies. Feijóo helped to naturalize the En-
lightenment in the Spanish-speaking world by his
lucid exposition of the ideas of Bacon, Newton, and
Descartes. Spanish and foreign scientifi c expeditions
to Spanish America, authorized and sometimes fi -
nanced by the crown, also stimulated the growth
of scientifi c thought and introduced the colonists
to such distinguished representatives of European