Bac On The Border

Abstract

Although now on the Tohono O'odom reservation in the modern US Southwest, when the Franciscan church of San Xavier del Bac was built (1780-97), its location was the northern frontier of New Spain. From the outset the church stood out from other northern New Spanish missions in its elaborate decoration, and it still stands out because its contents remain intact, despite changes through time. This essay serves as an introduction to the church as a subject of art historical study. It highlights the following topics: the relationship of the Franciscan program to the Jesuit program that preceded it in an earlier church at the site, the original Franciscan arrangement of figures, style linkages among the sculptures and what they imply about the New Spanish workshop/s from which they must have been imported, the painters and plasterers who worked at the church itself, and the possibility of different readings of the program by the Spaniards who created it, succeeding religious who altered it, and generations of native congregations. In addition to documenting eighteenth-century Franciscan ideas, the church at Bac provides evidence seemingly not available elsewhere about the transferral of Jesuit properties and ideas after the order's expulsion from Spanish territories in 1767.