San Gabriel, Cholula, View from Plaza

1555-1570

Name(s) currently unknown

Cholula, MEX

In this photograph, the monastic church of San Gabriel is glimpsed from the adjacent main plaza of Cholula, Mexico. Both in pre-Hispanic cities and in Spanish colonial ones, religious buildings were set at the heart of the city, either in a ceremonial precinct or on the main plaza. San Gabriel is slightly off-axis from the grid that Franciscans used to plan the city in the 16th century, and may have been aligned to the rising sun on Saint Gabriel’s feast day.

Barbara E. Mundy

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Kubler, George. 1985. “The Colonial Plan of Cholula.” In Studies in Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler. Thomas Reese, ed., pp. 92-101. New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press.