The Bargueño Man

L&E

STRUCTURAL METAPHOR IN FURNITURE: PART I

1998’s The Mask of Zorro centers the eternal struggle of the Mexican peasantry to exorcize the lingering spectre of Empire. Rising again and again, bearing the likeness of Spanish governors and hacendados, it is met each time by Zorro, the swashbuckling, folkloric icon of the rural public. Anthony Hopkins is the first Zorro - hero of the peasantry, icon of the Mexican war of Independence in Alta and Baja California - who seemingly foils the villainous Spaniard governor Don Rafael Montero before being captured and imprisoned as his unmasked alter ego. Montero returns to Spain, but not before dividing the deeds to all the land in Alta and Baja California between the Dons loyal to him. The Dons will remain in the newly-born Mexican Empire and operate in an oligarchic and extractive capacity across several forms of government over the next quarter century. Antonio Banderas is the second Zorro - a man of common birth whom Hopkins’ retired Zorro begins to train after Montero returns from Spain (to what is now Santa Anna’s Mexican Republic) in order to enact a mysterious scheme. Banderas and Hopkins pose as a Spanish nobleman and servant to investigate Montero’s plan and end up uncovering the existence of a secret gold mine in the Department of the Californias called El Dorado. The mine’s output (produced by slaves) will be used to purchase the region from Santa Anna, who needs to finance his coming conflict with the United States. In spite of the formal end of the Spanish Empire that Hopkins’ Zorro fought so hard to realize, the structures of power that bind and code labor, land, and capital remain nearly identical. Changes in the formal, constitutional structure of Mexico bring no relief to the immiserated peasantry who remain yoked by the oligarchic system of Dons laid down by Montero after seeming to lose the struggle for Independence.

Montero keeps the map to El Dorado hidden in a piece of furniture that looks to be a bargueño or vargueño. The bargueño was an Iberian fall-front desk adorned with Islamic architectural motifs that was in widespread use among the bureaucrats of the Spanish Empire from the end of the 15th century to the late middle of the 17th (the Siglo de Oro). The name of this item is contested: in her reference volume Hispanic Furniture, Grace Hardendorff Burr explains that an etymology first appears in the cataloging work of Juan Facundo Riaño, who was working with the collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the late 19th century. Riaño attributes the name to the town of Vargas (or Bargas) near Toledo, where the b/vargueño may have been originally produced. By the end of the 19th century, Riaño’s etymology had taken root - culminating in the 1914 integration of “bargueño,” with his word-of-mouth assessment of the term’s history, into the dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy. The term is ultimately an anachronism for an item that would have just been understood as a mobile escritorio, dense with pigeonholes and hidden compartments. Moving forward, I will adopt the spelling bargueño to refer to this sort of furniture.

What is so interesting about the appearance of the bargueño in The Mask of Zorro - especially as a tool of an agent of empire and domination - is that by the time the film takes place, the bargueño would have been largely out of fashion (though they had been quite popular in Mexico)¹. Its appearance is anachronistic but symbolic of Montero’s imperial and reactionary perspective. He holds the same concerns as bargueño-wielders did, he interfaces with the world in the same way. The bargueño is the bureaucratic control panel of the Spanish Empire par excellence - so of course it appears in the office of a devotee like Montero. The bargueño’s tactile character, a role that mediates the organization and production of information, becomes apparent if you have the opportunity to see one in person, which can be done in the Casa del Escribano del Rey in Tunja, Colombia. The House is a well-preserved colonial villa once inhabited by Juan de Vargas, who served as the public notary of Philip III in Tunja in the late 16th and early 17th centuries². Juan de Vargas’ estate contains an excellent collection of period furniture and art, including several striking rooftop frescoes. The piece of interest is de Vargas’ bargueño, which a museum guide can rifle through if you ask politely. This bargueño contains 16 immediately-apparent partitions and at least two hidden compartments, all extensively decorated with scallop shells. When shut, the front panel of de Vargas’ bargueño bears a small, malign visage which I was told was meant to reinforce the private nature of the piece - a way of telling servants to “stay away!” The ability to close the desk, remove it from its stand, and carry it off using the handles on each side speaks to a concern for mobility. Hidden compartments and threatening symbology imply anxieties about secrecy. A multitude of drawers and cabinets reflect the desire to organize knowledge into well-demarcated, rational information. Every element of the piece is a syllable of a structural vernacular that physically instantiated - and then reinforced - the way that Juan de Vargas thought about the world and his position within it.

The following essay centers around an assessment of the bargueño as not only a curiosity in the history of furniture, but also as a structural metaphor - a tool to process messy, illegible knowledge, observed in a particular physical and psychological context, into material, documentary information made intelligible through its placement in an abstract, structural order. What exactly characterizes the sort of bureaucrat whose cosmovisión was filtered through the bargueño? What were the internal concerns and external material impetuses that drove the emergence and adoption of this particular form of furniture and how did it reinforce the epistemic prejudices from which it arose?

In his essay “Pascal’s Sphere,” Jorge Luis Borges wrote that “Perhaps universal history is the history of the various intonations of a few metaphors.” By traveling from the bargueño during the apex of the Spanish Empire, through the desks of Boston merchants, and finally arriving at Napoleon’s Empire Style, I hope to illustrate some of the artistic variations on the structural metaphors of governance that have underpinned transhistorical Empire. This work is to be part of a project linking metaphorical representation to the genealogy of governance, and so focuses on the structural metaphors of the powerful - none of which is to say their subjects lacked similar sophistication.

Finally, this is not to suggest that the idea of a structural metaphor or the physical mediation of knowledge is an original concern - everything written here builds on tremendous works including Michel Foucault’s The Order of the Things, Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory, and Lisa Bolzoni’s The Gallery of Memory among others.

In describing the lossy nature of scientific forestry, James C. Scott wrote that “foresters’ charts and tables, despite their synoptic power to distill many individual facts into a larger pattern, do not quite capture (nor are they meant to) the real forest in its full diversity.” Structural metaphor is a type of cartography that makes use of this same synoptic power to tame the boiling uncertainty of a complex world into a stable form obeying strict, architectonic principles. It is through this form - a building, a piece of furniture, a garden - that the cartographer can manipulate and understand the real.

THE BARGUEÑO MAN: STRUCTURAL METAPHOR IN THE SIGLO DE ORO

The evolution of the bargueño begins with the robust, undifferentiated chest that inhabited the communal great halls of Western European landowners during the Early Middle Ages. Medieval European chests - ubiquitous, unadorned, and utilitarian - were built by generalist carpenters and tended to be passed through generations until failure³. Between the 14th and 16th centuries, more durable specimens produced by specialized craftsmen displaced the chest and created an archaeological break with used-until-ruined mobile court furniture. Furniture history can make use of paintings to understand which sorts of pieces would be present in particular contexts, but selective depictions, contingent on the whims of patrons, inhibit the completeness of this practice⁴. The mobile circumstances of medieval aristocratic life - to which we will return - demanded different priorities than the emphasis on longevity evinced by the fixed-in-place furniture prominent in the Renaissance. This makes it difficult to ascertain the precise, material genealogy of Renaissance furniture - including our titular subject, the bargueño. Even more challenging, ‘bargueño’ is an anachronistic 19th century term that refers mainly to 16th and 17th century pieces - this was not a category of furniture used at the time that most ostensible bargueños were produced and employed⁵.

The bargueño exhibited a puzzling stylistic eclecticism compared to other contemporary furniture, drawing on aesthetic currents from multiple continents. It is in tracing the origins of this stylistic ecology that the bargueño becomes situated in the symbolic system of the Spanish imperial bureaucracy. The bargueño’s role in this system reflects the mindsets and attitudes common among governing elites.

After the formal conclusion of the Reconquista in 1492, Mudéjar Muslim artisans would continue working for Christian Spanish patrons until the Expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609⁶. Throughout that time, the artistic and architectonic mudéjar style would play a role in Iberian, post-medieval chest storage furniture. In Spain, elegant cabinets first emerged in churches (incorporating Classical architectonic elements and Christian iconography) where they were used to store ritual items⁷. These stylistic overtones merged with mudéjar carpentry practices that employed many small pieces of wood through joinery - due to the climatic conditions of Southern Spain and Northern Africa, which would split and warp larger elements - to produce the gothic-inspired, sort-of Plateresque style characteristic of early bargueños⁸. The bargueño may have survived the ornamental austerity of Philip the Second by virtue of its strongly-built, conventionally-rectangular outer shell and the loss of Mudéjar artisans by virtue of Philip the Fourth’s Baroque patronage, stylistically in keeping with the bargueño’s ornate interior⁹.

Catalan hembras (brides’ chests) and machos (grooms’ chests) also resembled the early Plateresque bargueño, suggesting the emergence of this stylistic tendency in Catalonia. However, little points to Catalonia as the specific origin of the bargueño save for its exposure to Islamic artistic currents. Similarly, while Bargas - the bargueño’s apocryphal cradle - enjoyed Toledo’s substantial Mudéjar population, the town’s principle industries were bakeries and oil mills, not carpentry workshops¹⁰. There is ultimately no certainty regarding a precise birthplace of the bargueño, and it seems plausible that similar forms of furniture arose in multiple places at once. However, the architectonic principles of mudéjar and Plateresque styles alongside the existence of useful, non-church antecedents like Catalonian hembras and machos does provide a general idea of how a piece like the bargueño could have emerged - or, at least, where its Iberian principles originate.

Another attempt to determine the locus of the bargueño or proto-bargueño focuses on Valencia and Aragon. The port of Valencia may have received certain pieces of Venetian furniture, including the cassone (possible inspiration for Catalonian hembras and machos) and some of the portable writing desks that existed in Venice during the 15th century (though a competing claim suggests portable, fall-front writing desks were introduced by the Moors)¹¹. In some accounts these desks arrive in Spain as proto-bargueños, essentially without need for refinement through contact with Mudéjar artisans or the Spanish Plateresque incubator, having obtained their Islamic artistic character and ornate internal structure through other vectors¹². Venice’s “secure and stable domestic existence” - facilitated by environmental advantages and commerce intertwined - may have provided the material impetus for the emergence of specialized, ornate furniture earlier than in other European cities¹³. Alternatively, that same commerce may have brought stylistic tendencies from further abroad into Europe and then into Spain by way of Valencia - Burr notes that the Portuguese found extraordinary architectural woodworkers in India, and some of the cabinets produced in Goa even resembled the decoratively inlaid chest-on-stand form of the bargueño¹⁴.

Moving across the Atlantic and forward in time, the bargueño’s trajectory can be traced through the circuit between Andalucian ports (supplying stylistic norms) and the New World (supplying mahogany, especially well-suited for furniture)¹⁵. The papacy sent carpenters to the Empire so that the churches sprouting up alongside settlement would be just as ornate as their Old World counterparts - by the start of the 16th century, woodworkers were especially well-established compared to other artisans in Spanish America¹⁶. Colonial urbanization allowed for guilds - organizationally inspired by their peninsular counterparts - to spring up around these clusters of New World professionals and begin aggressively curtailing indigenous furniture-making practices in favor of their own¹⁷. For instance, a 1589 Mexico City guild ordnance issued to carvers and sculptors excluded indigenous people from guild examinations and barred Spaniards from purchasing and reselling indigenous furniture in their shops¹⁸. However, by the 18th century, indigenous iconography as well as New World flora and fauna had found a niche with furniture made by and for natives¹⁹. Prior to these developments, New World furniture had begun to diverge from the stern stylistic tenor of peninsular craftsmen: rather than retreating, Plateresque notes accelerated into Baroque exaggeration. Aesthetic innovation produced works “bolder and more confused” than those of any metropole workshop²⁰. Silver-adorned New World furniture reached such immoderation that Philip II even forbade its use in a 1593 sumptuary law²¹. By the 1700s, the bargueños at the edges of the Empire had become more ornate than their Iberian counterparts, and had begun playing with an exotic and foreign iconographic suite. Already coming together from multiple, indeterminate origins, our subject has begun to mutate, evolve, and speciate, further complicating a conclusive genealogy. Our Darwinian excursion dissolves the question of origins entirely: there is no real bargueño. As María del Pilar López Pérez writes:

“The terms to designate [this type of furniture] used in the original documents of the Kingdom of New Granada were: escritorio, escritorio de estrado, arquilla contador, papelera or escritorio papelera, and escribania."²²

I keep the Spanish terms because many translate poorly, but the quote illustrates that even at the frontiers of the Spanish Empire there was a complex vocabulary devoted to describing furniture designed for storage and writing. This diversity existed not just between categories of furniture, but also within them: each specimen bore a unique collection of symbols with a meaning particular to the owner. The term ‘bargueño’ lossily summarizes a profound and complex relationship with certain types of furniture in a way germane to art collectors but inconvenient to historians. Today, standardization and industrial fabrication has compressed the variation and particularity of this type of furniture into the binary of “desk” (escritorio) or “table” (mesa, mesita for the diminutive incarnation). The kinds of practices that determined the real meaning of the bargueño to its owner may have an equivalent in 21st century relationships between user and computer, but pushing the comparison would inhibit understanding of the bargueño’s unique position in the intellectual and administrative life of the Spanish Empire. It is a comparison I will cautiously return to.

Material Life and Medieval Furniture

Furniture became more sophisticated concomitant with changes in material lifestyle: new inventions, commercial forces, and political consolidation contributed to the conditions that brought about specialization of furniture and craftsmen. The approach to furniture prior to the Renaissance and the Late Middle Ages was limited by lacking materials and skills, but also well-suited to the mobility of the itinerant court and the openness of the manorial great hall. The bargueño, and much elite storage and writing furniture, would emerge with the conclusion of itinerance, the beginning of household privacy (a phenomenon interwoven with class stratification), and competition between urban guilds as the ‘generalist carpenter’ lost his portfolio.

Itinerant Administration

During the Middle Ages, it was common for Western European landowners to both live and govern under the conditions of itinerance. Cultural and administrative life was characterized by travel between the different fortress-manors dotting one’s domain. Rivalry between landowners meant that most revenues were channeled into defense, with remaining wealth distributed among various estates. Beyond elite competition, rural instability provided another impetus for landowners to travel between estates with their valuables - a behavior also necessary to govern all corners of their holding when administration was not yet the task of a domain-spanning bureaucracy.

Constantly moving between estates also made it easier to supply landowners and their retinues with food: as opposed to shipping food from peripheries to a central point, the whole household moved to locations with better supply²³. Medieval manorial nomadism facilitated surveillance of large landed estates. Itinerant administration created a demand for mobility as the chief feature of storage furniture. Mobile furniture allowed landowners to take valuables along with them during their nomadic lifestyles. The need to keep an eye on territories meshed with the logistical preference for moving to bountiful food sources, creating a matrix between estate security and alimentary reproduction from which arose the character of the medieval chest.

From the nomadic security-reproduction matrix emerged several other motivating factors which fed into the development of storage furniture. The medieval chest had some degree of modularity, improving ease of transport and allowing multiple chests to fit neatly around the edges of the great hall, where they would not “dominate the open space of the room” and impede “the multitude of activities happening within the medieval manor”²⁴. Notably, medieval tradition saw chests passed down through generations until failure, which stunted the spread of stylistic innovations and preserved the chest’s primacy until the early 16th century²⁵. This compounded the stress on function over form, resulting in rugged chests covered in canvas or leather for durability during transit. This was in contrast to the general culture of visual rhetoric that existed in the Middle Ages, which may have otherwise compelled craftsmen to transform furniture into another vector of artistic splendor. We will touch on heraldry later, but in general because “the context was neither secure nor permanent,” mobility remained the chief driver of furniture. Furthermore, exotic woods (often used by Romans) were no longer frequently employed because of the difficulty of long-distance transportation: medieval commerce was germane to lighter materials, like silks, which supported the emergence of visual rhetoric in tapestry, instead of ornate furniture²⁶. Itinerance was first obsoleted in Venice and the low countries, where stability was so dramatically improved that furniture would be built into room panelling²⁷. The drawer likely first emerged in the Netherlands, where stability created the slack necessary to begin thinking more intentionally about convenience, culminating in the division of space into discrete compartments.

The chest was undifferentiated: it had to be dug through in order to retrieve certain items. In this sense, “specific, well protected areas” within storage furniture were a breakthrough²⁸. In general, the security and stability of walled towns drew new populations and thickened urban marketplaces, allowing craftsmen to leave mostly monastic patrons and begin specializing and innovating. Bourgeois patrons entered the game of visual rhetoric - seeking to compete with aristocratic incumbents - and improved communication and commerce introduced foreign fashions that made it possible to depart from the “functional simplicity of medieval designs”²⁹. Medieval nomadism was also eroded as landowners transitioned from practices of military administration to a state of legally-buttressed comfort, which also permitted more spending on luxury - channeling financing to newly-specializing craftsmen³⁰. Sedentary nobility built more rooms, and the medieval great hall (a large, multi-function room), saw its function get dispersed across these new, specialized spaces. This in turn produced a demand for more, nicer furniture. The standing chest, originally developed in the monastic context where mobility was not particularly important, became more common among the nobility. The legs of the standing chest would begin to distinguish themselves, become more ornate, and form the start of a “new generation of specialized, immobile, and more convenient furniture”³¹.

The stylistic tenor of this “new generation” came from several sources. Italian Renaissance furniture held Classically-inspired architectonic qualities that pushed craftsmen further in the direction of “the building in miniature”³². Renaissance chests, departing from their medieval counterparts, sometimes had removable trays as organizational aides. However, the structure of the chest - top-opening - was a fundamental inhibition to superior organization through discretization; multiple layers could not be examined at the same time. For this reason, Renaissance chests moved away from function (as other furniture forms fulfilled the role of storage in post-itinerance, urbanizing Europe) and became increasingly decorative. Some were even dismantled and their well-painted panels hung as paintings. Catalan wedding chests (hembras and machos) would be more representative of the chest in the Renaissance than any medieval holdover³³.

Before the Renaissance, churches and monasteries were repositories of stylistic elaboration. Gothic architecture premised furniture, and it is possible that those who planned churches also planned pieces of furniture. Sedentary furniture finds its origin in religious spaces, where a demand for elaborate wood carving tempted craftsmen into specialization. With the departure from itinerance, these styles could become adapted for sedentary, secular contexts. The low countries provided a friendly environment for the spread of the “secular drawer,” but drawers had likely been in ecclesiastical use for storing religious garments beforehand. The same could be said for many forms of later storage furniture, like cabinets. Furthering the religious role in storage furniture, monastery libraries may have been early drivers of furniture specialization (especially writing furniture) owing to their particular, assigned purpose. Shelves were likely simple, but early monastic writing desks would be another crucial injection into the stylistic and specializing current of Renaissance furniture³⁴.

The writing box - the first instance of writing furniture - maintained its mobile character beyond the Middle Ages, seeing widespread use in scholastic (noble and monastic) and merchant environments³⁵. Writing boxes had been convenient under late itinerant administration, but it was with the multiplication and specialization of rooms in the sedentary, legalistic manorial estate that they could develop into a tool supporting the incipient interest in private scholarship and fulfilling the demands of the Renaissance’s increasingly complex business environment³⁶. In spite of the influx of Italian design, Spanish furniture maintained the massiveness and durability found in medieval chests. This was reflected in the bargueño’s rough, plainer exterior, which clearly indicated its roots in medieval conventions surrounding storage furniture³⁷.

The medieval Spanish milieu of itinerant administration metamorphosed into the globalizing Renaissance milieu of early Empire. This is the context that birthed the bargueño, where sophisticated discretization and nomadic customs shaped the tools that facilitated the work of imperial bureaucrats moving between the Spanish domains of the New World. As the furniture underpinning imperial administration was globalized and compartmentalized, so too was itinerance.

The bargueño embodied growing commerce and communication - emblematized by its uncertain but cosmopolitan provenance - and demonstrated the growing specialization and sophistication of the European administrative apparatus. Individual imperial bureaucrats, armed with bargueños, linked themselves into global epistolary circuits and began to shape the way the world was understood, inextricable from the form and function of the bargueño itself.

Privacy and Class

While general elements of the bargueño - rough exterior, ornate interior, drawers discretizing space - can be partially explained through the decline of itinerant administration and the growth of commercial intercourse, the presence of secret compartments in most specimens requires a more particular story. One focused on the formation and elaboration of class distinctions in the Middle Ages, whose influence on furniture design would extend beyond the household drive toward privacy and secrecy. An important caveat is that this subsection does not even approach an exhaustive explanation of class in the Western European Middle Ages. I only touch on those factors influencing developments in class that emerge from and influence changes in the use and shape of household space and the position and form of furniture within that space. The first set of these factors is based on changes in the medieval manor’s great hall, the multifunctional central room where landowners, peasants, and other members of the manorial retinue congregated together to sleep, eat, perform certain types of labor, and gather in case of some sort of threat - the manor’s thick walls testified to its principal function as a kind of fortress. In its initial, simple configuration, the great hall evinced fewer sharp social divisions - though inhabitants each had their “own rank and function” - and had a flexibility supported by mobile, medieval furniture that allowed simple movement between dining room to bedroom to courthouse and so on. Growing medieval affluence translated to manorial improvements that moved certain functions out of the great hall (stables, storerooms) and into their own adjoined rooms, but also manifested in the addition of a dais, which physically and socially raised the landowner and his family above the peasantry around them. Prior to the dais, everyone had gathered around an open-hearth fire - now, the landowning family was situated “furthest from the drafts of the entrance” not just through custom, but through the character of the built environment³⁸.

It was with changes in manorial heating, however, that physical separation by landowning status would become most pronounced. Between the 9th and 11th centuries, the mantled chimney was introduced to the manor and allowed smoke to be captured before it traveled up through a designated passage, instead of wafting into a room and then traveling up through ceiling vents. This precise control of heat and smoke allowed for the creation of private chambers, where a mantled chimney provided warmth without the drawbacks of an open fire in a small space. With the private chamber came the withdrawal of the landowner and his lady from the public, intermingling life of the great hall’s open-hearth fire. Class distinctions, sharpened by the visual and physical rhetoric of the dais, were now supremely pronounced as the wealthiest members of medieval society spent much of their time in individual privacy. The dais was soon “used only for ceremonial occasions” and private chambers blossomed into larger and more lavish apartments where landowners could conduct much of their life separated from the community. The great hall continued to see its functions parceled away into specialized rooms, resulting in specialized furniture, but also the increasing vestigiality of communal space³⁹. Renaissance palazzi pushed social differentiation through physical distance even further, devoting a mezzanine to storage or servants above which sat a private floor for the family⁴⁰. The stacked floors of the palazzi were, of course, mimicked in some of the architectonic characteristics of Renaissance furniture, which had become more intense since the beginning of the 16th century. “Columns and cornices” appeared on furniture evincing base-middle-top configurations such that many pieces began to look like “a small building.” Sometimes, smaller writing furniture would even be stacked on top of larger writing furniture in a pyramidal fashion⁴¹.

Private chambers also commingled with the specialization permitted by the end of itinerance to produce pieces of furniture like the small aumbry, a kind of ventilated cabinet meant for food storage. While the large aumbries were placed in the great hall, the emergence of a small aumbry was owed to the needs of private and secluded members of the estate. The small aumbry presaged the beginning of specialized furniture produced for secular patrons. As this came about due to the spatial differentiation of classes, it could be said that furniture likewise began to obtain a kind of class affiliation - just as it did in the case of pieces commissioned by urban merchants⁴². Another immediate outcome of the chimney was also the viability of polished and inlaid wood as a building material because lingering smoke from open-hearth fires was no longer present to degrade such finely-decorated surfaces⁴³. The opening of this aesthetic frontier dovetailed with medieval concerns about visual rhetoric in furniture. While the functional priorities of furniture lingered into the 16th century, embodiment and expression of social hierarchy were potent desires fulfilled by the artistic opportunities offered by specialization. Heraldic imagery, which was widely understood and began as a tool for identification in mostly-illiterate society,

“developed into a highly decorative legible language for proclaiming status or ownership, that was used not only by royal and noble families, but by such collective bodies as guilds, trade associations, and city governments. […] a great graphic glossary was built up."⁴⁴

Visual rhetoric communicated social standing not just through ostentatious splendor, but also through an increasingly sophisticated symbolic system that relied on the longevity of tinctures and other decoration, which would have required constant reapplication or refinishing under the constant barrage of open-hearth smoke. The manteled chimney likely contributed to these developments by eliminating an environmental hazard to artistic flourish.

The causal reverberations of the mantled chimney do not end with the class character of flamboyant furniture. Private scholarship, mentioned in the previous section, was one of the largest developmental factors accentuated by the emergence of manorial privacy brought about mantling. This was perhaps the most consequential influence of privacy on the bargueño, because of the way that private scholarship impinged specifically on the development of writing furniture. Spreading from the core of the Italian Renaissance, ideas about private scholarship became increasingly fashionable across Europe. This meant not only the creation and consumption of texts, but also the collection of natural curiosities, tomes, and samples of antiquity: it was this environment of erudite analysis, categorization, and production that allowed developments like the drawer and architectonic furniture principles to become embodied in practical, yet ostentatious, pieces that would be used for secular scholarly activities under the conditions of privacy. Few Greek or Roman precedents meant that writing furniture may have taken longer to emerge, but when it did it was particularly well-adapted and representative of the social and artistic context (lacking the same amount of design hysteresis as other cases may have evinced). The “growing enthusiasm among the nobility and the emerging class of wealthy financiers for literary scholarship” did not stop at writing furniture - it was also responsible for the refinement and specialization of the private chamber, resulting in “elaborate ‘studios’” that resembled the function and form of monastic libraries. Storage, organization, examination, and commentary were increasingly facilitated by the tools provided by revolutions in the design of rooms and furniture⁴⁵. It was through growing mastery of ‘technologies of comfort’ - like the mantel - that impediments to privacy and artisanry were slowly overcome in the wealthiest households. The viability of the private chamber, concomitant with social stratification, created a key impetus for the writing furniture that would feed into the tendency we are anachronistically calling the bargueño - but it was the bargueño (and its siblings across Europe) that would make viable the refinement of privacy into deep, personal secrecy through the introduction of hidden compartments. This function was the final extremity of Renaissance privacy - the point where the bargueño and its ilk could begin shaping how their owners understood the world, instead of merely embodying worldviews and social structures.

Guild Conflict

At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the generalist carpenter worked with wood in all contexts. This is likely the origin of the relatively free flow of ideas between architecture and furniture in this period, which allowed for pieces like the bargueño to incorporate Classical architectonics. However, by the late Middle Ages and moving into the Renaissance, the generalist carpenter was slowly specialized out of existence. Architectural carpentry remained an important trade, but in the same way shipbuilding was delegated to shipwrights, furniture was delegated to joiners, woodcarvers, and other, specific craftsmen. Painters or gilders took on the task of decoration, further splitting apart the process of furniture making. Growing competition among urban craftsmen pushed generalist carpentry out of existence - “patrons were beginning to associate the prestige of a piece of furniture with the reputation of the artist who had made it,” and these patrons were increasingly secular. A new source of finance would have increased the gains for deep specialization, especially as the demand for elaborately decorated pieces was growing.

Generalist carpenters (or revanchist carpenters) tried to claim that these new trades were merely branches of carpentry, but to no avail. In England for instance, the revolution was complete by the early 17th century. Carpentry was never able to recapture its dissident descendants through legal means. Joiners would go on to add drawers to their portfolio, making their craft increasingly central to the production of complex, functional furniture⁴⁶. The conflict emerging in the wake of the collapse of generalist carpentry “led to an elaboration of the guild system, with frontiers being drawn between qualifications and skills which had previously been lumped together […] guild ordinances became increasingly elaborate” and spread to budding colonial empires, including the Americas. This conflict was intensified as immigrant craftsmen would introduce new styles and techniques, enhancing competition. In Europe, “joiners were almost invariably triumphant in inter-guild conflicts,” which “helped to establish joinery as the standard method of making furniture”. The joiner too, however, would only enjoy his dominance temporarily. An interest in the “natural color and marking of wood was aroused by the rediscovery of veneering” - which had been known in antiquity - in the mid-17th century. The natural potentiality of wood was brought to the forefront, and specialization in this task increasingly fell under the remit of cabinet-makers. By the 18th century, the task of the furniture-oriented joiner had been replaced with the cabinet-maker. Joiners had previously branched between furniture and “the permanent woodwork of households, such as stairs.” More intense specialization came with more particular techniques that were more readily applicable to specific products. So the joiner, to whom the carpenter had fallen, fell in turn to the cabinet maker⁴⁷.

In Spain, the pathway of furniture was similar to much of the rest of Europe. During the 15th century, all forms of woodworking remained under the umbrella of a strong carpenters guild, but over the next century many of these specialists would break off and form their own guilds. As described earlier, colonial guilds were modeled off of peninsular counterparts, and similar conflicts were likely present across the Empire. Joiners also enjoyed an ascendancy, but were challenged with the independence of cabinet makers at the end of the 17th century - similar to what had happened to joiners elsewhere. Throughout this tumult, the Spanish monarchy sought to

“unify the guilds by determining design, material, method of work, and price. As a result, tradition was maintained, quality was good, but individual creative ability was stifled.”

In spite of these efforts, inter-guild rivalry was intense enough to cut across not only trades, but also cities - regulations were sometimes imposed to prohibit furniture originating from competing cities, with unclear success⁴⁸.

In general, competition between urban craftsmen - facilitated partially by new patrons and other factors regarding specialization in trades - created the background for inter-guild conflict that allowed joiners to first obtain preeminence and then conflict with one another throughout the 16th and 17th centuries (both across and within polities). This conflict likely contributed to tremendous breakthroughs in both function and form that allowed for innovative and particularly well-adapted pieces to be produced and shipped around the world for use at the far frontiers of the Spanish Empire. One such piece - embodying joinery in its mudéjar-inspired small bits of wood - was the bargueño, an item that communicated status and underpinned elite, bureaucratic labor across Spanish America.

Bargueño Materialism

Itinerance, class formation, and guild competition represent a rich collection of stories whose interplay explains a great deal of the decline of certain forms of furniture and the rise of others, but uncertainty mediated by the passage of time ensures that the true story of the bargueño - composed of uncountable causal threads - will never be woven into a contiguous tapestry. The three stories described in this section are not exhaustive, merely well-documented. We did not touch on the role of the printing press, which made stylistic guides and examples of Classical architectonics readily available to craftsmen across Europe and the world - thus accelerating the adoption of a certain aesthetic current. We did not touch on how this same aesthetic current was also made more dominant in Spain after Habsburg influence grew in Italy during the early 16th century, after the Battle of Pavia, which augmented the social, political, and artistic circulation between the two peninsulas. This in particular helped carry over the furniture outcomes of small-state domestic stability in Italy, which diluted the influence of itinerant administration on furniture design. More could have been said about the particularities of the mudéjar style, and how it may have meshed well with the rise of joinery - something mentioned in passing. The changing character of commerce allowed for high-quality furniture to be a safer and more financially-viable trade good - patrons could obtain pieces from around the world⁴⁹. All these contributors, and more, made something like the bargueño possible at the crossroads of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. My goal was to focus in particular on the interplay of factors that revolved around elite attitudes, patrons, and behaviors as these are the most important to understand the purpose and nature of the bargueño’s functional and visual characteristics, which will be discussed in the next section.

In some ways, the relationship that the bargueño had to its owners was similar to the relationship we have to computers. But it was brought into existence by factors that should dramatically caveat this comparison. The relationship is similar in that the computer facilitates private, intellectual action - but private, intellectual action in modernity is underpinned by different motives and systematized in different ways. Those differences are what I hope to highlight in order to demonstrate the way that the bargueño played a central role in a crucial, but alien, intellectual life.

Functionality and Visuality

The bargueño is difficult to totally understand from a contemporary perspective. While it hosts many familiar features - cabinets and drawers for storing, surfaces for writing - the uses affiliated with these features were imbricated in a more complex intellectual world and were also enhanced or modified by artistic, decorative elements. The particularities of the world - and particularly the New World - were both understood through and created by tools like the bargueño, whose aesthetic and structural qualities were instrumental in the elite, epistemic process. The bargueño functioned both as a machine and a piece of visual rhetoric. Unlike many contemporary cases of ornate, functional objects, however, the bargueño’s mechanical functions held rhetorical qualities and its rhetorical qualities held mechanical functions. This holism was crucial to its academic and bureaucratic roles, which, under the Empire, collapsed into one practice.

The Bargueño Machine

A great deal of the bargueño’s functionality arose from its relative complexity - the huge array of drawers and cupboards enmeshed in an architectonic facade created the organizational schematic used by Spanish elites to protect and order documents, letters, and small objects of pecuniary or scholastic value. Burr identifies a 17th century painting in which the bargueño is used as a bookcase and a story from the same century where it operates as a treasure chest “guarding more than eight thousand ducats worth of doubloons and jewels.” The bargueño’s function was angled toward the protection and cultivation of economic and academic value - the map in The Mask of Zorro, the books necessary to facilitate private, secular scholasticism, a hidden treasure. An intense obsession with secrecy manifested itself in the various hidden compartments ingeniously and inconspicuously nestled within the bargueño’s micro-architecture. This quality - originating from the broad portfolio of the generalist carpenter and developing through the propagation of Renaissance Classicism’s stylistic ruleset - was crucial for integrating compartmental secrecy into the bargueño’s structure⁵⁰. Privacy, class, and secular ideas about scholarship conspired to produce the spear’s tip of an elite organizational phenomenon in architectonic hiddenness. The function of the bargueño was precisely to facilitate the creation of an administrative and academic sphere totally segregated from a lower-classed “public” that threatened cloistered aristocrats and bureaucrats with snooping servants.

The intellectual context into which the bargueño emerged further illuminates how it was a participant in the Spanish imperial episteme. Throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, the collecting tendency of private, secular scholasticism manifested itself in the European “curiosity cabinet,” which “were meant to represent a ‘totality’ or ‘microcosm’ of the universe.” Curiosity cabinets were the receptacles of the subjects of elite European wonder⁵¹. But in the 18th century, “collections became more ‘naturalized,’ scientific,’ and ‘utilitarian.'” Strict principles of utility superseded curiosity, which was related to “the stuff of popular culture, the focus of the amateur.” In Spain, however, collection followed a different trajectory. By the 18th century, the monarchy sought to “display the riches and rarities of its empire” - a concern still bound up in ideas of curiosity and wonder that were disparaged elsewhere. Prior to this, “the focus […] had been almost exclusively on the collection of economically useful items and in this way was part of a long tradition of utilitarianism within the empire.” Imperial Spanish utilitarianism - thought by some to have even inspired Francis Bacon - began as “early as the late fifteenth century.” While it is true that “treasures and fine art streamed into Europe” from the New World,

“[…] the crown’s chief interest early on was in gathering cosmographic, demographic, and geographic information that would serve to solidify its knowledge and thus its hold over the indies, and when information about New World natural history was sought, it was usually with the intent of exploring its possible commodification.”

When Spanish furniture began to approach the form of the bargueño, it was contemporaneous with Spain bucking the trend in the European, elite relationship with utilitarian collection. In this period, information was about commerce and governance⁵².

Particularly emblematic of the imperial trade in and treatment of information was the way that natural history operated in Spanish America. As a discipline, natural history unmoored its subjects from their local contexts and transformed them into portable images that could be recontextualized within the utilitarian epistemic web of the Empire. Artists - draughtsmen, painters - were sometimes more important than naturalists during botanical expeditions penetrating American hinterlands. Botanical illustrations had to maintain a certain standard of quality relative to European counterparts in order to hold “value as material evidence.” In this sense, “the colonial machine was a visual apparatus.” Three centuries into the colonization of the Americas, “natural history was a fundamentally visual discipline that used images in all its practices and spaces.” The natural world was replicated and understood through frameworks like botanical art, which allowed it to be circulated throughout the discursive channels of the Empire and subjected to analytic scrutiny for commercial or administrative utility to Spain. Continuous expeditions were crucial to build and renew this world:

“Educated as observers and representers, naturalists and artists constructed a visual culture of natural history based on standardized ways of viewing nature and on pictorial conventions guiding its depiction. Naturalists moved constantly between the world of objects “out there” in the field and the world of objects “in here” in collections. Images bridged the gap between exterior and interior, the field and the collection, by offering a hybrid domesticated space, a paper nature that was always and perfectly available for virtual exploration."⁵³

Only with a sufficiently sophisticated organization of information would it have been possible to peruse the simulated natural world through “virtual exploration,” which is where the bargueño was most efficacious⁵⁴. This is not to say that the bargueño operated as a kind of imperial cabinet of curiosities, but rather that in order to categorize and order an exoticized frontier, certain ways of understanding the world were necessary. And the bargueño, with its well-ordered grid of drawers and cabinets, would have been an instantiation of this sort of elite, imperial thought. This strand of thought - echoed in scientific, administrative, and economic practices throughout the Empire - eroded the particularity of a confusing, chaotic world in favor of the comfortable familiarity of Spanish imperial universality:

“By defining nature as a series of transportable objects whose identity and importance were divorced from the environment where they grew or the culture of its inhabitants, illustrated natural histories rejected the local as contingent, subjective, and translatable. Instead, they favored the dislocated global as objective, truthful, and permanent. The natural history illustration, with its flower always in bloom, its fruit permanently ripe, its animal caught in clarity and perpetuity, was at once the instrument, the technique, and the result of natural history as a field of study."⁵⁵

As mentioned earlier, the bargueño was a participant in the cycle of acquisition, representation, organization, and administration that characterized the Spanish Empire’s activities in the Americas. The collection of private scholasticism was magnified to a global level where bureaucrats, naturalists, artists, and nobles circulated information that had been processed and packaged for commercial and governmental use. The bargueño was a type of node in this circulatory network, and reinforced a way of understanding that not only discretized the world into readily understandable compartments, but associated that very process of storage and discretization with value. For the natural world to be worth anything, it first had to be plucked from its context so it could be instrumentalized and squirreled away in an abstract, international universe of pigeonholes.

Visual Rhetoric

The symbolic repertoire of Late Middle Ages furniture was expanded during the Renaissance: “scenes from classical mythology, and allegories, such as representations of elements, seasons, months, the cardinal virtues, or the battle scenes and triumphal processions of earlier times” were added to the “lives of saints” and subjects of “metrical romance[s]” that had predominated design⁵⁶. The Classicist symbolic-mythological vocabulary of the Renaissance allowed for richer allusion, and these references were swiftly related to contemporary values - one 17th-century Peruvian bargueño is decorated with centaurs and the profiles of warriors alluding to ‘protection,’ which was a priority mirrored in the bargueño’s structure⁵⁷. It is important to note that this vocabulary was deployed with a great deal of intentionality, and was not merely or exclusively the product of following aesthetic trends without consideration:

“The purchaser commissioning the cabinet was usually free to choose the subjects he wished to have illustrated in the painting […] The particular erudite allusion selected by the purchaser was an important element which was not wasted on contemporary academic connoisseurs."⁵⁸

By the 17th century, the bargueño was a piece that would have shown up in the household of anyone “with a pretension to wealth, as writing cabinets are mentioned so often in household inventories, and so many are still in existence”⁵⁹. Given the elite inclination for “erudite allusion” and the widespread adoption of the bargueño in elite households, one can begin to perceive the outline of a referential lexicon that pervaded elite space and made furniture intelligible to an audience through more than just the vocabulary of structure and function. This symbolic language or game was a visual rhetoric, a way of communicating function, status, and ideas about how elite affairs should be organized.

None of this is to say that the visual rhetoric of the Renaissance somehow displaced that of the Late Middle Ages - in all respects it was syncretic. For example, one piece shows Saint Peter, the Virgin Mary, and Saint Paul nestled inside of small temples evincing Classicist architectonics⁶⁰. In general, while mythological figures like unicorns (which could refer to “lust or propensity for carnal delights” or be “associated with purity and chastity,” but always moralizing and feminine) were common on furniture. Alongside the Bible and Classical myth, a collection of bestiaries - many of ancient provenance - formed the referential canon that was among the most memorized by both religious and secular scholars until the 17th century. “Dogs, lions, monkeys, bears, deers, eagles, fish, insects, and hybrid beings” were all part of the Renaissance’s visual rhetoric - a vast, memorized, referential code - that had a didactic role in explaining and reinforcing various “models of life”⁶¹. One such text was the Physiologus, an Alexandrian bestiary written between the 2nd and 4th centuries before being translated into Latin about 1-3 centuries later. It was republished in 1587, and adapted to the “symbolic and emblematic literature” of the century, containing animals described in “rich moral allegory”⁶². These comparisons were enabled by “the conviction that there is a single substrate that connects the animal and human worlds”⁶³. Physical resemblance was understood as a source of moral and practical knowledge, in the world of animals this could be readily applied - belonging to a certain species was sufficient to ascertain moral character - but in the human world it required the development of a science of physiology, well detailed by Lina Bolzoni in The Gallery of Memory. As put by another author, “The material features of creation, in short, were signs which pointed beyond themselves to another world of transcendental truths.” During the preeminence of the bargueño, these sorts of ideas remained widely popular⁶⁴.

It is important to indicate that the Physiologus was not an alternative to Christian moral teachings, but instead understood its animal subjects through Christian moral pedagogy - the referential alphabet of animal allegory had been circulating for most of Christianity’s lifespan, though it was periodically updated in order to cohere better with the contemporary artistic tenor. Other reference texts - combining animal symbology with moral lesson - were the Oxford Bestiary, containing illustrations demonstrating animal temperaments, the Ashmole Bestiary (12th-13th centuries), Saint Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae (which was strongly influenced by the Physiologus), and the Libellus de natura animalium (compiled in the 14th-15th centuries and amended in the 16th). There was a rich symbolic repertoire that artists and patrons could draw on in order to shape the pieces they designed and commissioned. Many bestiaries (like the Etymologiae) drew on the Physiologus, making the catalog of reference continuous and incestuous. However, drawing on the Physiologus did not necessarily mean solely copying: many followers added extensive moral commentary and brought greater sophistication and depth to the bestiary system, like William the Clerk of Normandy with a Physiologus-inspired bestiary in 1210 (the Bestiaire divin). Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, many “bestiaries [we]re reissued [and] new compilations appear[ed]” like the Iconologia by Cesara Ripa in 1593, which was a “systematized discourse of text and images on allegories, emblems, attributes, and symbols that personified passions, virtues, vices, and all the different states of human life.” Texts like the Iconologia or updated versions of the Physiologus were used extensively by “theologians, jurists, moral philosophers, literati, [and] heads of state,” but also “painters and sculptors.” They were crucial references for furniture makers of all varieties, including “folding screens, writing boxes, writing desks, and headboards for beds” - the bargueño was included in this domain⁶⁵.

In her paper “El escritorio de El Bestiario,” María del Pilar López Pérez examines a bargueño of the 17th century, well-decorated with religious, mythological, and animal iconography, housed in the Colonial Museum of Bogotá. She suggests that some of the animals may represent vices and (or) virtues - for instance, she writes that the animals representing vices “remind [the desk’s user], in a very didactic manner, the temptations man is exposed to and how he can supersede them following the examples of Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Joseph” (who also appear on the piece). In opposition to the ‘all vices’ interpretation of the piece’s animal iconography, she offers another explanation - which I find more compelling - where one might “highlight positive as well as negative values, referring to their relative position on the piece of furniture” - right-side drawers with virtues and left-side drawers with vices⁶⁶. While animal interpretations could not be generalized to every bargueño - del Pilar López Pérez shows how each instance could map to positive or negative meanings - it seems likely that the owner of a particular bargueño would have an associative system in mind that helped them to sort information based on their opinion of the content or sender. This is, certainly, speculation and would require intensive archival work to properly demonstrate, but it nevertheless seems plausible, given the care put into selecting specific references and their layout on a given piece. Visual rhetoric could merely map on to well-understood functions and purposes, but it could also deepen and complicate those functions. Imagery can be machinery as well, in that it performs a technical, functional task for the user. In the same paper, del Pilar López Pérez describes the moralistic imagery of visual rhetoric “essential in the life and use of the writing desk” which operated almost like a “small symbolic text” intelligible to religious scholars or secular elites of scholarly inclination⁶⁷. In the Spanish imperial milieu, visual rhetoric in furniture came to be just as deep and functional as the sophisticated heraldic language of the Middle Ages - perhaps even more so.

Embodiedness and the Biombo

Before concluding with a synthesis between the functional and visual aspects of the bargueño, I will take a brief detour to discuss biombos (folding screens) in Spanish America. The biombo in the imperial context also operated on functional and visually rhetorical levels, but in a way that is perhaps clearer and more well-documented than the bargueño. Biombos in the Spanish Empire evince an intentionality and clarity of use that reflects the general elite approach to household order.

To begin with, the biombo, like the bargueño, embodies globalization: in the 18th century, there was a “strong Chinese influence in the practical arts of Mexico,” brought about through “importation of goods from the East” and “a number of Chinese and Philippine artisans [who] were employed in Mexican workshops”⁶⁸. Even the biombo’s name was of Japanese origin:

“From the Japanese byo, protection, and bu, wind, the name well defines the use, for in the colonial homes, with their rooms opening onto spacious patios, biombos were a necessity, providing protection as well as privacy. They were of two types: the low, many-paneled screens that were arranged in the drawing room, converting it into a kind of stage set; and the so-called bedroom screens of greater height and fewer panels. Fine examples of the civil painting that was so rare during the colonial era, the many well-preserved biombos are also ingenuous imitations of their Oriental models. In some, the background is painted vermillion to simulate lacquer; and the land scapes are figured with strange animals, birds, and pagodas."⁶⁹

The bargueño also drew on mudéjar stylistic notes, Italian Renaissance Classicism, Asian designs by way of Manila galleons, and, in Spanish America, the incorporation of indigenous materials to produce a similar embodiment of early globalization⁷⁰. Furthermore, just like the bargueño, the biombo placed an emphasis on household and personal privacy.

While the excerpt above mentions that much biombo decoration was mere replication, there are many divergences from this tendency which reflected the beliefs and values of the Empire. For example, a biombo titled Las cuatro partes del mundo decorated by the Mexican painter Juan Correa depicts personifications of the 4 continents using the “iconography of continental allegories,” as discussed in the earlier section on the aesthetic sympathies between Imperial Spain and Napoleon’s France⁷¹. Las cuatro partes del mundo, like its Empire Style counterparts, divides and essentializes the world into areas defined by resources and temperament - and this was not unique to Correa’s work. The “allegorical representations of the parts of the world” was found in biombos in both Asia and Spanish America⁷². This instance of visual rhetoric is paralleled in the biombo’s use as a divider of household space in order to regulate privacy. It could be compared to the bargueño decorated with a protective centaur, whose function (to guard small objects of value or important missives) is mirrored by the centaur’s symbolic reference to protection. In the 18th century, the biombo was used with greater frequency and, like the bargueños of the time, was adorned with biblical and mythological scenes that were part of the moralizing pedagogy of furniture iconography⁷³.

In order to demonstrate the flexibility and strength of the biombo as a medium for visual rhetoric, I will turn to analysis by Michael J. Schreffler of a magisterial, 10-frame piece titled Conquest of Mexico/The Very Noble and Loyal City of Mexico from the late 17th century. The two halves - depicting, respectively, the conquest of Mexico and the Spanish imperial city replacing Tenochtitlan - work together to, firstly, situate the Spanish Crown relative to New Spain, and secondly, to explain the nature and history of the Spanish Empire relative to its Aztec antecedent. On the second half of the biombo - The Very Noble and Loyal City of Mexico - the image converges on the royal palace, which “emerges from the landscape as an important and controlling entity […] the structure around which all other structures and institutions are arranged.” Schreffler writes that this piece is situated in a “visual discourse” that describes the relationship between the city and the Crown as one “of political allegiance and obedience rendered here in terms of surveillance and panoramic spectatorship”⁷⁴. In contrast to the violence and disorder of the reverse side, Conquest of Mexico - described by Schreffler as “compositionally chaotic and nearly illegible to the casual viewer” - The Very Noble and Loyal City of Mexico is a “civic space that is orderly and geometric as well as ‘noble’ and ‘loyal’"⁷⁵. This biombo, whose purpose was to divide, discretize, and further specialize an elite household, reinforces a historical narrative of the Spanish Empire that afford it the role of an organizational and almost scientific force that imposed a legible schematic over a savage chaos that had wracked Mexico before the arrival of imperial heroes like Hernán Cortés. Conquest of Mexico legitimizes Cortés’ expedition by depicting it with “the numerous standards of Castile and León […] emphasizing that their enterprise was one undertaken in the name of the king”⁷⁶. The Crown is credited, an uncertain operation valorized and validated, and the entire affair historicized as a glorious step in the inexorable advance of Siglo de Oro Spain.

Beyond reproducing the legitimacy of the Empire, Schreffler explains how

“the nobility’s apparent embrace of an official, imperial retelling of the Conquest narrative suggests the degree to which a shared history, presented on these biombos as collective memory (Halbwachs 1992), constituted a common point of identification for a geographically scattered community of imperial subjects."⁷⁷

The Empire, in reproducing an official history of order and progress on behalf of the Crown, created the bedrock for nascent identities across the viceroyalties of Spanish America. This reproduction may have been increasingly crucial as the 17th century came to a close and “Spanish imperial fortunes were fading, boundaries were shrinking, and the continuity of the Crown itself was in question.” Under these circumstances, “the narrative of the Conquest of Mexico may have emerged as a convincing alternative to reality” - that is to say, the aesthetic and historical repertoire employed to decorate elite space across the Empire was an episteme in which these same elites found refuge as these same schematics and symbolic lexicons lost their relation to the state of affairs they purported to represent. As Schreffler writes, this is an aesthetic and political world that may have “ultimately served as a convenient vehicle for the redirection of the nobility’s fears and anxieties”⁷⁸.

Although the bargueño and the biombo did not operate in exactly the same way, both types of furniture played a concrete role in the reproduction of Empire as an ordering, discretizing force that proposed and imposed an alternative to indigenous epistemes. In the case of the biombo, this function is simple (the folding screen is well-understood, and has survived with some continuity) and the aesthetic principles at work particularly clear, perhaps because the available space afforded painters more opportunity to express the specific demands of a patron. Bargueños likewise held specific, deep meanings - but many of these are lost or difficult to proclaim with confidence because of the complexity of the visual rhetoric applied to this sort of furniture. Animals can be vices or virtues, position may matter or may not, the specific intentions of specific patrons can be hard to divine, even if it can be said with confidence that intentionality and engagement with the symbolic lexicon was a widespread denominator among Spanish imperial elites. Overall, whether bargueño or biombo, the aesthetic principles underlying elite space and its accouterments should be understood as a holistic system commenting on and deepening the circulation of Spanish imperial power.

Rhetorical Machines

It is in the intersection of visual rhetoric and the bargueño-as-machine that the bargueño becomes properly illuminated as the kind of structural metaphor mentioned in the introduction. The form and function of the bargueño mediates engagement with the world, particularly the Spanish imperial world, but is also supported by a rich symbolic vernacular that augments the structure’s referential utility. Chaos in Spanish America - of the natural world, of indigenous empires - is sieved through neat, functional architectonics and the Bible-bestiary-myth lexicon that relates the world to an alphabet of moral lessons. Importantly, it is intentionality on behalf of ubiquitous patrons that likely cultivated a community of meaning through their aesthetic preferences. Once again, like the computer, functionality and visuality mesh with one another. The software tools chosen for their function today also designate users as members of particular communities, say something about their computer-related erudition and competence, and may even map on to broader principles about how one should live one’s life. While the medium of expression is incommensurable, some of these attitudes across centuries may be roughly comparable. The practice of visual rhetoric is also a functional one, and is deeply imbricated with the functional, structural characteristics of the bargueño - which themselves embody ideas and attitudes about social life and the as-yet unordered world. A brief detour on the biombo hopes to highlight the way that many household items were employed to similar ends, and to offer a simpler example meant to illuminate similar tendencies in the bargueño. Function and form of furniture during this period were carefully considered, tightly intertwined, and crucial to understanding the way that social mores were reproduced throughout a class to which specialized sorts of furniture pertained.

The Epistolary Control Panel

The epistolary practices of the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries were facilitated by pieces of furniture like the bargueño, which contained functions devoted to writing and storing letters and missives of various kinds. During his reign, Charles V sent and received at least 120,000 letters73. By the 12th century, this number had risen from 3 figures to 4 and by the 14th century, from 4 figures to 5. With the dawn of the 16th century, Maximilian I crested 6 figures, and Charles V continued to build on his growth⁷⁹. Writing had become increasingly crucial to imperial governance - within the Holy Roman and Spanish Empires alike. It was the Spanish, however, that may have had a closer relationship between letter-writing and the furniture supporting the practice.

In general, however, letter-writing played a crucial role in the mythology and foundation of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. It was Hernan Cortes’ letters to Charles V - written after Cortes had run out of resources and technically committed treason - that produced the rhetorical effects inaugurating the Empire in North America. As Viviana Díaz Balsera puts it, “Tenochtitlan is implicitly portrayed in the Second Letter as the embodiment of Europe’s most audacious dreams of faraway lands of unimaginable bounty.” It is with Cortes’ Third Letter, however, that his story obtains a dramatic, mythological narrative that inspired action on the part of Charles V:

“It tells the story of unbreakable Mexica resistance in the face of the cataclysmic fall of their city […] It conveys the horror of a mode of annihilation heretofore unknown to the Christian world […] only when the Second and Third letters are read together can the full impact of their double founding vision of the New World as the site of the marvelous and the horrific be disclosed […] the letters of Hernán Cortés produce tales of uncanny plenitude and terror, domination and resistance, pain, might, and utter loss at the limits of the European imagination."⁸⁰

Cortes was in the difficult position of having to demonstrate total fealty to Charles V - even though his imperial venture constituted “more than one insubordinate act” - and that Charles ought to “legitimize a controversial enterprise on the verge of failing.” These Second and Third letters represented a “brilliance and rhetorical force” meant to conjure an image of “the New World as a site where the off-limits of the marvelous and the horrific could be experienced.” Díaz Balsera continues by describing the letters as

“testimonial renditions of implausible events leading to an eschatological imposition of European domination […] monuments to the unbreakable, dreadful resistance of the masters of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, who resolved to perish in mass so they would never again see their city of cities possessed by an alien power […] the Second and Third letters ultimately convey sorrow for the fact that nothing would ever be able to summon the prodigious lost object of Mexico-Tenochtitlan back from its ashes."⁸¹

These letters operate as rhetorical masterworks, narrative tragedies, acts of monumental mythogenesis, and, retrospectively, inputs into a vast, imperial bureaucracy whose output would be a pivotal quantity of military force. Official histories of the conquest of Mexico drew on previous histories - beginning with conquistador accounts - such that the Historia de la conquista de México published by the royal chronicler Antonio de Solís y Rivadeneira in 1684, “contained a distillation of a century and a half of Conquest mythohistory”⁸². The beginning of this refined propaganda would have been in works like the letters of Cortes. It is with the concretization and expansion of the Empire and the use of bargueños by its bureaucratic class that the rhetorical and governmental weight of letter-writing would become formalized into an international circulation of commands written using codes, conventions, and even different paper mediums depending on the nature of the message. This system is what I am calling the epistolary control panel.

Bureaucratic messages generally took two forms: letters and billetes. The billete was a small paper containing a brief note, meant to be passed discreetly “between people who lived in the same town.” The billete was a tool of secrecy, never entrusted to a third party for delivery, without “the same textual formality as the letter,” “avoid[ing] protocols like the inclusion of a date,” and “written on half sheets, fragments, and scraps of paper”⁸³. The billete was a medium well-suited to the small, secret compartments or locked drawers of the bargueño, and was likely guarded among the other small objects of value populating its drawers and cupboards⁸⁴. In “Escribir en bronce, escribir en el polvo: atisbos en torno a un objeto de la escritura,” Milena Gallipoli describes the parallels between the secrecy embodied in the billete and the secrecy embodied in the bargueño. Movements of “opening and closing” are paralleled in the acts of writing, receiving, and reading, and the acts of storage and retrieval. This was a set of practices that governed the physicality of Spanish imperial secrecy. As Gallipoli writes:

“The letter is finished, folded, sealed, and sent. The letter is received, opened by removing the seal, read, closed along its original folds, and protected. The cover of the furniture is opened, a compartment is opened, the letter placed inside, the compartment closed, the cover closed and locked. Movements of opening and closing. Both in the letter and in the furniture there is a deployment of movements, the disposition of the furniture serves as a sort of mirror of the epistolary practice wherein both resemble each other in certain aspects."⁸⁵

While Gallipoli writes about letters here, she notes a similar physicality of secrecy applies to the billetes, which were likewise folded and circulated through locked or hidden compartments. For those messages that were not unmarked, person-to-person communications, the increasingly sophisticated practices surrounding letter-writing provided a welcome and rhetorically potent alternative. Compared to billetes “the structure of letters better accommodated epistolary rhetoric,” which became more sophisticated with the publication of letter-writing manuals like Erasmus’ 1522 De conscribendis epistolis. These would elevate a practice that prior manuals had fixed as a dry, bureaucratic duty of secretaries⁸⁶. Holography - the practice of writing letters entirely in the hand of the author, like a document-length autograph - also “strengthened the privacy of epistolary exchange” by avoiding reliance on any sort of mediator assuring the author’s identity and investment. Holographs, through technique alone, communicated information about health, the status of a relationship, and the level of trust between sender and recipient. The secrecy of diplomatic and political correspondence could be further buttressed by complex ciphers, some which had to be “accompanied […] by other letters containing the keys essential for deciphering.” Holography also mediated governance; annotations on documents left by officials, nobles, and royalty provided concrete, documentary evidence of approval or disapproval⁸⁷. In sum, letter-writing, annotation, and message-making took on increasingly complex rhetoric, ritual, and technique to communicate information above and beyond mere textualism. The collection of practices making up the epistolary tradition during the Siglo de Oro was partially mediated by furniture like the bargueño, whose role was to be a control panel that organized and hid away messages based on subject, sender, and secrecy.

McLuhan’s Bureaucrat: The Bargueño Man

A dialectic between architectonics and epistemology, driven decisively by discursive machines like the bargueño, sculpted the cast of Spanish bureaucrats, nobles, and scribes performing on the stage of Empire. These participants - our titular Bargueño Men - drew on an arsenal of technologies to systematize knowledge, but it is the bargueño that is both unusual and particularly emblematic of the Empire’s most prosperous period. From the 18th century, its influence wanes - but not necessarily in favor of furniture that was more holistically complex. It would be difficult to say that later furniture merely reacted against prior aesthetic phases - as Louis XVI’s Neo-Classicism did against Louis XV’s Rococo - simply because aesthetic reaction serves a real, informational purpose. The linkage between particular pieces of furniture and broader worlds of structural metaphor may be characterized by symbolic lexicons of differing richness - that of the bargueño was extraordinarily wealthy, but this ought not reduce later stylistic currents to mere trends. Just as architectonics are in conversation with epistemology, architectonics are in conversation with themselves, evincing an internal dialectic that touches on the relationship between architecture, furniture, and the political contexts inhabited by certain aesthetics. It is in this broiling tumult that, for brief moments, one can capture the image of a figure like the Bargueño Man - a personage firmly reflected in the era’s epistemic machinery. While anachronistic, this is where the term bargueño serves us: because contemporary academics have identified tendencies native to the Spanish imperial episteme, it becomes possible to assess these tendencies and the people they possessed. Hence, the Bargueño Man.

However, the Bargueño Man also serves as a foil against another theoretical construct: Marshall McLuhan’s Typographic Man. The Typographic Man, whose definitive technology is the printing press, seems to encapsulate nearly every revolution in thought since the Middle Ages. His epistemic patron - standardized, mechanical typography - makes possible “the translation of all the senses into the language of unified, continuous, pictorial space,” “foster[s] habits of private property, privacy, and many forms of ‘enclosure’,” and “taught men how to organize all other activities on a systematic lineal basis.” Typographic literacy even “produced the […] the special traits of American psychology and politics” and “showed men how to create markets and national armies”⁸⁸. While typography was certainly a decisive technological impetus for epistemic evolution, to attribute​​​​ what is, essentially, the totality of mental modernity to one culprit would seem to overdetermine. The role of the Bargueño Man is to drag focus to architectonics as one of many technical disciplines that conspired to revolutionize thought. The advent of epistemic modernity - or any other dramatic, historicized break - ought be particularized into an army of technological dialectics whose streams can then be examined jointly. The generalization of the Typographic Man is a torrent that drowns out or subsumes the disciplines focused on the creation and ornamentation of space. McLuhan may have even agreed with this as an account of typography’s dominant role. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, an extended quote from Lewis Mumford’s Sticks and Stones reads:

“The real misdemeanor of the printing-press, however, was not that it took literary values away from architecture, but that it caused architecture to derive its value from literature. With the Renaissance the great modern distinction between the literate and the illiterate extends even to building; the master mason who knew his stone and his workmen and his tools and the tradition of his art gave way to the architect who knew his Palladio and his Vignola and his Vitruvius. Architecture, instead of striving to leave the imprint of a happy spirit on the superficies of a building, became a mere matter of grammatical accuracy and pronunciation."⁸⁹

While it is certainly the case that the printing press made reference works more available and figures like Palladio pioneered ‘architectural grammars,’ the account still neglects the role played by space: where did grammars come from? How and why did they persist or decay? All of the epistemic technologies of the 15th and 16th centuries influenced one another and influenced thought directly in turn. Privileging one such technology - in spite of its admitted importance - creates unusual gaps in epistemic history. For instance, McLuhan characterizes Spain as “immunized […] against the visual quantifications of literacy” due to its contact with the Islamic world⁹⁰. However, many of the characteristics of Typographic Man are visible in the Bargueño Man, whose characteristic tool drew on Islamic artistic currents.

McLuhan places great emphasis on “the concept of homogeneity” as the idea most intensely propagated by typography. He writes that “the mere accustomation to the repetitive, lineal patterns of the printed page strongly disposed people to transfer such approaches to all kinds of problems,” which would begin “to invade the arts, the sciences, industry, and politics” in the 16th century. Even “Students processed by print technology in this way would be able to translate every kind of problem and experience into the new visual kind of lineal order”⁹¹. But in precisely the same way, the bargueño conditions certain epistolary practices and finds itself mirrored in the approach to the natural world taken by Spanish imperial expeditions. Architectonics are responsible for reproducing a similar ordered approach to the world, where each item was not just given a proper place, but actually understood and given concrete characteristics by virtue of its placement. The discretizing approach of the Bargueño Man is remarkably similar to the lineal approach of the Typographic Man, if only in that it represented an epistemic disposition that bled over to other disciplines. In this respect, the two Men bear some similarity, though the former is meant to dissolve the other, or at the very least force him into retreat. McLuhan also gives space to the role played by mass-produced texts reflecting the lineal mindset of Typographic Man, like King Lear, opening a path for a technological dialectic similar to the bargueño. Literary works - as well as any other products of the printing press - play the same role as items like holographs, autographs, billetes, and botanical sketches: they are physical instantiations of particular thoughts that furnish the material role in the dialectic between an epistemic machine and its output. The approach taken by McLuhan is appropriate to understand the dialectic between technology and epistemology, but overdetermines by outlining a typography that makes all other dialectics subservient.

A final and important point from McLuhan’s treatment of the Typographic Man is his note that “Computers can now be programmed for every possible variety of sense ratio,” meaning that while the explosion of typography emphasized some senses over others, and ultimately defined an entire episteme without necessarily a great deal of public consensus, technologies like the computer allow us to consciously make these decisions⁹². However, just as architectonics and typography are deeply path-dependent, the computer is likewise strongly determined by prior machines. What appears to be flexibility and autonomy is belied by a filing system derived from early-20th century offices, and other unusual choices dictated by epistemes of decades or centuries past. In order to properly obtain a ‘free reason,’ the barriers imposed by antecedents must be clearly understood in genealogical terms. Only then will it be possible to properly assess the nature of contemporary structural metaphor and the prospects for its replacement.

BACHELARD’S BARGUEÑO: DISMANTLING THE STRUCTURAL METAPHOR

Henri Bergson, writing critically in Creative Evolution, describes the moments perceived as defining memory as “the beats of the drum which break forth here and there in the symphony.” These beats - “stand[ing] out against the continuity of a background on which they are designed, and to which indeed they owe the intervals that separate them” - ought not be intrinsically elevated: “Our attention fixes on them because they interest it more, but each of them is borne by the fluid mass of our whole psychical existence.” That is to say, Bergson acknowledges the tendency to accord special status to ‘units’ of our recollection, that have been mysteriously distinguished from the totality of experience - but did not see, in this meaning-making practice, a concrete reason to reify the way we privilege certain, delimited segments of memory. Going further, Bergson outlines the proclivity to take these “psychic states […] set up as independent entities” and “reunite them by an artificial bond,” “set[ting them] side by side like the beads of a necklace; it must perforce then suppose a thread, also itself solid, to hold the beads together.” The tendency to discretize flows into the tendency to organize - rather than viewing experience as “a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other,” solid representations of particular moments are tied together into concrete, tangible forms. And it is this solid representation that acts as “a symbol intended to recall unceasingly to our consciousness the artificial character of the process by which the attention places clean-cut states side by side, where actually there is a continuity which unfolds”⁹³.

Bergson writes that “the human intellect feels at home among inanimate objects, more especially among solids” and that “our concepts have been formed on the model of solids; that our logic is, preeminently, the logic of solids; that consequently, our intellect triumphs in geometry.” Therefore, memory is not only cut up into distinct, particularly-sampled moments, but also organized into a pattern taking on a solid, geometric form. Bergson repudiated this practice, writing that “Memory […] is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register” - one of his favorite metaphors for attacking this approach to recollection was that of the drawer. This is the same sort of structural metaphor I have been discussing. In opposition to this favorite structural metaphor, Bergson describes the proceduralism of memory as follows:

“There is no register, no drawer; there is not even, properly speaking, a faculty, for a faculty works intermittently, when it will or when it can, whilst the piling up of the past upon the past goes on without relaxation. In reality, the past is preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at every instant; all that we have felt, thought and willed from our earliest infancy is there, leaning over the present which is about to join it, pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside."⁹⁴

Gaston Bachelard, noting the way that Bergson “disdainfully” employed the “controversial metaphor” of the drawer, summarizes his criticism as follows:

“Concepts are drawers in which knowledge may be classified; they are also ready-made garments which do away with the individuality of knowledge that has been experienced. The concept soon becomes lifeless thinking since, by definition, it is classified thinking."⁹⁵

In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard traces the persistence of the drawer metaphor across Bergson’s work, and ultimately derides it as “a crude instrument for polemical discussion.” In the pedagogical context, Bachelard finds that the drawer metaphor was so tired and predictable that one could, “when listening to certain lectures, […] foresee that the drawer metaphor [was] about to appear.” Bachelard writes that the drawer metaphor “[had] mechanized the debates that Bergsonians [carried] on with the philosophies of knowledge,” and he contrasts it to his idea of an image - a “product of absolute imagination”⁹⁶. What he meant by this is well-captured by James S. Hans, who writes:

“The metaphor refers to something real, so it is restricted to that point of reference. […] [it] constitutes or signifies some object or idea and is totally restricted to the orientation of that object or idea.

[…]

While the metaphor was real, the image is unreal (or irreal): it makes no claims upon conceptual reality and is in no way bound to it. While metaphors are intellectual, images are primal, both in that they come before thought and in that they relate to the realm of archetypes. Because they are not tied to reality, because they are primal, they are not static; instead, they are variational, reverberational, valuational, and dynamic. Rather than being constituted once and for all like a metaphor, the image is new each time it is apprehended […] This dynamic, qualitative, adjectival quality of images differentiates them from metaphors and has great significance for Bachelard."⁹⁷

Bergson’s metaphor is constrained by its formalistic link to something ‘real,’ but Bachelard’s image is freed from rote, mechanistic reference. Rather than the drawer representing a polemical point against a certain epistemology, it should be dwelt upon on its own terms - these compartmentalized spaces are what Bachelard calls “veritable organs of the secret psychological life.” While “Bergson d[oes] not want the faculty of memory to be taken for a wardrobe of recollections,” the wardrobe-as-image is entirely different from the strict, structural model Bergson takes as his foil⁹⁸. That is to say, compartmentalized space, independent of abstract, intellectual representation, psychologically resonates with us by reproducing associated images of homes, hiding places, and the nooks and crannies that constitute the secretive, private life. This is different from the metaphor of the drawer, whose reference is universal, strictly defined, and subservient to Bergsonian rhetoric.

The divergence between Bergson and Bachelard is reflected in the bargueño as a structural metaphor. Taken without the context that led to its emergence, the bargueño of the Siglo de Oro is the embodiment of a Bergsonian metaphor. The literal drawers, cupboards, and hidden compartments that facilitated and reproduced the discretization of the Spanish imperial world constituted an element of a particular, elite episteme that could actually be criticized by even the vulgar Bergsonism that Bachelard found distasteful. While Bachelard may have been correct about the stagnant drawer metaphor as an attack against all systematization of knowledge, it may be appropriate when applied to a narrow system of knowledge that is embodied by actual furniture. From a contemporary perspective, that the term bargueño is an anachronism only helps to further its abstraction into a Bergsonian structural metaphor. However, the goal of this section is not to speak of the bargueño exclusively on Bergsonian terms but rather to first take a Bergsonian approach to the bargueño and then to dissolve it as Bachelard dissolved the drawer metaphor. What would Bachelard have to say about the bargueño understood more as an image?

If Bachelard had the opportunity to comment on the bargueño at all, he likely would have made note of its many characteristics devoted to the cultivation of secrecy. In describing “small boxes such as chests and caskets,” Bachelard writes that “These complex pieces […] are very evident witnesses of the need for secrecy, of an intuitive sense of hiding places” and that there is an apparent “homology between the geometry of the small box and the psychology of secrecy.” Bachelard further marvels at the “‘complexes’ [that] are attached to […] ornamented locks” - bringing to mind the devilish visages found adorning the locks on the bargueño of Juan de Vargas. On secret compartments and the trespassers seeking to uncover them, he writes that “The least important secrets are put in the first box, the idea being that they will suffice to satisfy his curiosity, which can also be fed on false secrets. In other words, there exists a type of cabinet work that is ‘complexualistic’"⁹⁹ Needless to say, the structural characteristics of the bargueño likely would have offered Bachelard a wealth of opportunities for comment and analysis, without even mentioning the visual stylings, their origins, and their presence in the artistic and architectural imagination of Spain.

A deeper Bachelardian approach, however, requires dwelling on the image before it can calcify into a Bergsonian metaphor, as I contend was likely to have happened with the bargueño. When we use or make reference to a space - a home, a drawer, a hidden compartment - rather than understanding this in terms of its relationship to a systematized array of concepts, Bachelard would have us consider what it calls upon in our imaginary repertoire. In this respect, the drawer or the house does not somehow exercise a referential, semantic force above and beyond experience, but instead works precisely within the remit of ordinary language: the house, for us, calls upon our archetypal home and this is what enriches ordinary use. When employed, these images are understood on their own terms, as opposed to within the framework of an external, metaphorical system. The bargueño, alongside its particular architectonic components, its particular mythological, scriptural, and bestial ornamentation, and its associated informational rituals, was used in such a way that made reference to an intellectual, abstract code of conduct and meaning. This is what made it a structural metaphor par excellence: in every aspect it was bound up in a tight, mechanical web of reference. The secrecy of the bargueño was entrapped in a metaphorical class discourse wherein privacy itself became equivalent to rote routine, and so the hidden compartments and trick drawers of the bargueño could not be dwelt upon in the way Bachelard would prefer. Secrecy, as opposed to a facilitator and mirror of personal, psychological reflection, became an abstracted element of a system of knowledge mediated by metaphor and routine. As described by Susan Stewart, “For Bachelard such pocketed spaces are necessary for dreaming and for the development of a certain withdrawn subjectivity and interiority”¹⁰⁰. What might it mean to take seriously the tendencies expressed in the bargueño without surrendering to the self-limiting metaphorical regime of the Empire? That is, how might we experience Bachelard’s bargueño?

Drawing on Karsten Harries, Stewart outlines the distinction between the ‘ideal homes’ of Bachelard and Frank Lloyd Wright. In contrast to Bachelard’s centering of “storage spaces like attics and cellars,” Wright understood a household’s hidden corners, passages, and rooms as “necessary ornaments, places that accumulate dust.” Representing these principles as “ideal space[s],” Stewart describes Bachelard’s as “centrifugal, deepening in significance at the peripheries, whereas the ideal space of Wright is centripetal, gathering significance around a hearth.” Wright’s approach drives the household backward through time, arriving in a Europe populated by manorial estates centered around great halls whose hearths invited laborers and landlords alike. Stewart describes what we might coyly call Wright’s neo-medievalism as “speak[ing] to a vision of space as made to order, already suited to universals that need not acknowledge the past” - in sharp contrast to Bacherlard’s centrifugal architectonics, an “oneiric architecture [that] gradually acquires significance in solitary, rather alienated, spaces”¹⁰¹. Harries expresses this dichotomy as a question about the “dream house” of each figure: ought it “have an attic and a cellar, corners and nooks where one can hide things and oneself?” Wright would “offer a broad, unified shelter, a simple space that was easily surveyed and gathered around a central hearth,” whereas Bachelard’s fractal, disorganized pitch “would seem to be a rather messy affair with many nooks and crannies”¹⁰². The comparison is useful because it emphasizes which features of experience and spatial interaction Bachelard highlights, and to what they ought be contrasted. Wright’s proposal - the centripetal, communal hearth - is continuous with the European great hall of the Middle Ages, whereas Bachelard’s proposal - the disorderly, segmented labyrinth of memory - is perhaps best understood as an exaggeration or acceleration of the tendencies that began in the Late Middle Ages and reached their peak in the Baroque. But, while in reality this style of space froze into an ecosystem of Bergsonian metaphors, Bachelard would have followed through on the thrust that began with the withdrawal of nobility into private chambers.

In the Preface to the 1954 edition of Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges provided a definition of the Baroque, which meshes well with the interior organization of Bachelard’s oneiric dwelling:

“I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. […] “Baroco” was a term used for one of the modes of syllogistic reasoning; the eighteenth century applied it to certain abuses in seventeenth-century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all in­tellectual labor is inherently humorous."¹⁰³

The Bachelardian Baroque, understood along Borgesian lines, proposes a household whose nooks contain further nooks, whose hidden chambers contain secret closets, whose cellars contain sub-cellars, and so on. It is to take the architectonic philosophy of studious withdrawal and privacy to its self-parodic pinnacle, where contemplation of the image of private space is most unmediated. This is where the “archetypal images of space” - our “first primal houses,” for instance - obtain their firmest realization¹⁰⁴. Space embodies psychological characteristics when dwelt upon for itself, without reliance on metaphorical reference. Bachelard stresses the universality of archetypes, which may be objectionable, but absent assumptions about these archetypes, Bachelard’s Baroque oneiric dwelling still furnishes space with meaning from itself. This matters because it prevents space from being instrumentalized, as in the elite, metaphorical game of the bargueño. The Spanish bargueño assists in the reproduction of an elite episteme, but Bachelard’s bargueño would fragment the world into oneiric, contemplative spaces that are - most importantly - intelligible to everyone. A particular, elite episteme may play a tremendous role in shaping and administering the world, and so its ancillary metaphors and codes merit a critical approach - but the Bachelardian Baroque promotes democratization of the nook and freedom of the cranny. The resultant spaces - in furniture, in households - may be structurally chaotic, but well-ordered with respect to the role they play in facilitating recollection and psychological reflection. In the same way ‘everything has its place’ on a messy desk, the Bachelardian Baroque may initially appear to promote visual nonsense. However, it really relies on the comedy of spatial elaboration to dispel metaphors of governance in favor of the unmediated memory and experience one conjures by contemplating space in itself.

Once more, I return to the now-overplayed computer comparison. Contemporarily, computers come closest to resembling or embodying the principles of the bargueño. However, for most, the computer floats between Bergsonian structural metaphor and Bachelardian Baroque oneirism. Of the mentioned organizational paradigms, it perhaps resembles more Wright’s functional approach. The computer is maybe treated like the medieval chest, but in truth contains too many presuppositions about the form and use of information - it is as if the bargueño were not the product of scholarly intentionality and its many features and inborn biases were taken for granted. The bargueño was intellectualized - that is, there was an “academic tradition” of furniture - but the computer, in most instances, is not. The organization of space and information - still joined at the hip even today - is neither the subject of deep, public reason, nor is it the subject of a democratic unraveling of the metaphorical network that governs in the background. While I do not believe intellectualization inherently reproduces the conditions of Empire, I do believe that a conscious approach in either direction ought be taken. As it stands, meditation on the metaphorical mediation of knowledge is undertaken by small, highly tech-literate populations. They are contrasted by powerful bureaucracies which propagate ‘ontologies’ and sketch out renovations to archaic filing systems - fighting battles against their antecedents. But this could be a public enterprise. The aesthetics of order could be a democratic, pluralistic question. A real ‘consciousness of space’ could exceed the hysteresis of ancient metaphors and culminate in an orientation toward a world of unmediated secret passages and hidden compartments; the Baroque of Bachelard and Borges, but as a feature of quotidian life. Ultimately, the bargueño - as anachronism, as tool, as art - produces a pole against which we can orient ourselves. The approach to space undertaken by any group in any era governs the approach to knowledge which governs the real character of the world. Careful investigation of prior systems of reason further illuminates the panoply of possibilities for alternative epistemologies. Bachelard’s bargueño is a model of escape, escape from the invisible world of sclerotic, metaphorical governance. The only way out is not, in this case, through, but in, in, in - into private and secretive spaces that eventually realize themselves as mirrors and, then, portals away from the ‘world.’ Finally, in a brilliant explosion, the whole state of affairs is consumed in a morass of twisting passageways and concentric chambers whose concatenation resembles nothing less than the ornate blossom of cathedral spires reaching toward the total knowledge of Heaven.

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1. “El Mueble del Siglo XVI y su Origen Español,” Antonio Francisco Garbana, p.8 ↩︎

2. “Casa de Juan de Vargas, Escribano del Rey, Tunja, Colombia,” https://www.losvargas.org/bricabra/bric0008.html ↩︎

3. The academic tradition of storage furniture: 1100-1800, John Seamster, p.1-3 ↩︎

4. “Furniture: A Concise History,” Edward Lucie-Smith, p.33; academic tradition, p.17; Hispanic Furniture, Grace Hardendondorff Burr, p.43 ↩︎

5. Hispanic Furniture ↩︎

6. Hispanic Furniture, p.32 ↩︎

7. Ibid. ↩︎

8. Ibid., p.33-4 ↩︎

9. Ibid., p.20, 41-45 ↩︎

10. Burr 37 ↩︎

11. “Bargueños, el mueble de los secretos,” https://www.revistadearte.com/2009/10/13/barguenos-el-mueble-de-los-secretos/ ; “El bargueño del salón de la Casa Sorolla”; academic tradition, p.35 ↩︎

12. Hispanic Furniture, p.34 ↩︎

13. Concise History, p.61: “The town with the most luxurious life-style (though decorative styles, by contrast, remained for a long time conservatively Gothic) was undoubtedly Venice, protected against all comers by her lagoon. Here a secure and stable domestic existence became possible from a very early date. Peter, the son of the King of Portugal, visiting Venice in 1425, wrote that the houses of the Venetian nobles who received him ‘were not private houses, but palaces of kings and crowned heads’.” ↩︎

14. Hispanic Furniture, p.115-118; Concise History, p.72 ↩︎

15. Hispanic Furniture p.104 ↩︎

16. “ESCRITORIO PERUANO VIRREINAL EN EL MUSEO DE AMÉRICA: UN ESTUDIO SOBRE UNA PIEZA DEL SIGLO XVII,” Tamara García Cuiñas, p.205; Hispanic Furniture, p.102 ↩︎

17. “ESCRITORIO PERUANO,” p.205 ↩︎

18. Hispanic Furniture, p.103’ En torno al estrado: Cajas de uso cotidiano en Santafé de Bogotá, siglos XVI a XVIII, María del Pilar López Pérez, p.4 ↩︎

19. Hispanic Furniture, p.108 ↩︎

20. Ibid., p.107 ↩︎

21. academic tradition, p.2; Concise History, p.36-37 ↩︎

22. “El escritorio de El Bestiario,” María del Pilar López Pérez ↩︎

23. Concise History, p.64 ↩︎

24. academic tradition, p.4 ↩︎

25. academic tradition, p.17 ↩︎

26. academic tradition, p.4; Concise History, p.50; Illustrated History of Furnituyre: From the Earliest to the present Time, Frederick Litchfield, p49 ↩︎

27. Concise History, p.64 ↩︎

28. academic tradition, p.19 ↩︎

29. Ibid., p.13 ↩︎

30. Ibid., p.14 ↩︎

31. Ibid., p.4, 15-18 ↩︎

32. An Illustratd Guide to Furniture History, Joclyn M. Oats, p.198; Hispanic Furniture, p.34 ↩︎

33. academic tradition, p.27 ↩︎

34. Illustrated History, p.39; Concise History, p.51; Hispanic Furniture, p.34; academic tradition, p.94 ↩︎

35. academic tradition, p.11-2 ↩︎

36. An Encyclopedia of Desks, Mark Bridge, p.9; academic tradition, p.33 ↩︎

37. Encyclopedia, p.14; Concise History, p.62 ↩︎

38. academic tradition, p1-3 ↩︎

39. academic tradition, p,3, 14-15; The Chimney, https://users.manchester.edu/facstaff/ssnaragon/kant/lp/Readings/Chimneys.html ↩︎

40. academic tradition, p.7 ↩︎

41. academic tradition, p.14-6; En torno al estrado, p.17-8 ↩︎

42. academic tradition, p.6 ↩︎

43. Ibid., p.5 ↩︎

44. academic tradition, p.5; A social history of furniture design from B.C. 1300 to A.D. 1960, John Gloag, p.79-80 ↩︎

45. Encyclopedia, p.9; academic tradition, p.33-4 ↩︎

46. academic tradition, p.15, 26; social history, p.13 ↩︎

47. social history, p.15-16; Concise History, p.56-7 ↩︎

48. Hispanic Furniture, p.1-3 ↩︎

49. Concise History, p.60-2 ↩︎

50. “El bargueño del salón de la Casa Sorolla”; En torno al estrado, p.87; Encyclopedia, p.9; Hispanic Furniture, p.43 ↩︎

51. academic tradition, p.61 ↩︎

52. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800,“The Rare, the Singular, and the Extraordinary: Natural History and the Collection of Curiosities in the Spanish Empire,” Paula De Vos ↩︎

53. Ibid., p.308 ↩︎

54. “El bargueño del salón de la Casa Sorolla,” p.16 ↩︎

55. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800,“The Rare, the Singular, and the Extraordinary: Natural History and the Collection of Curiosities in the Spanish Empire,” Paula De Vos, p.310 ↩︎

56. Illustrated History, p.70 ↩︎

57. “ESCRITORIO PERUANO VIRREINAL EN EL MUSEO DE AMÉRICA: UN ESTUDIO SOBRE UNA PIEZA DEL SIGLO XVII,” p.209 ↩︎

58. academic tradition, p.54 ↩︎

59. Hispanic Furniture, p.45 ↩︎

60. “Pieza al Detalle: Escritorio,” p.4 ↩︎

61. En torno al estrado, p.58; “El escritorio de El Bestiario,” p.79 ↩︎

62. “El escritorio de El Bestiario,” p.79-83; Books of Beasts in the British Library: the Medieval Bestiary and its context, https://www.bl.uk/catalogues/illuminatedmanuscripts/TourBestiaryOrigins.asp ↩︎

63. The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, Lina Bolzoni, p.167; “The Virtues of Animals in Seventeenth-Century Thought,” Peter Harrison, p.468 ↩︎

64. “The Virtues of Animals in Seventeenth-Century Thought,” p.465-7: “These allied notions-that the human being was a microcosm and that the beasts represented distinct virtues or vices-enjoyed wide currency to the end of the seventeenth century” ↩︎

65. “El escritorio de El Bestiario” ↩︎

66. Ibid., p.101 ↩︎

67. Ibid., p.100-1 ↩︎

68. Hispanic Furniture, p.110 ↩︎

69. “El Mueble del Siglo XVI y su Origen Español,” p.27 ↩︎

70. “ESCRITORIO PERUANO VIRREINAL EN EL MUSEO DE AMÉRICA: UN ESTUDIO SOBRE UNA PIEZA DEL SIGLO XVII,” p.211 ↩︎

71. “Escribir en bronce, escribir en el polvo: atisbos en torno a un objeto de la escritura,” Milena Gallipoli, p.66 ↩︎

72. Invasion and Transformation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico, “The Conquest of Mexico and the Representation of Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain,” Michael J. Schreffler, p.104 ↩︎

73. En torno al estrado, p.60 ↩︎

74. Invasion and Transformation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico, “The Conquest of Mexico and the Representation of Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain,” Michael J. Schreffler, p.106; see also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEejponmvqU ↩︎

75. Ibid., p.107 ↩︎

76. Ibid., p.108-9 ↩︎

77. Ibid., p.110 ↩︎

78. Ibid., p.119 ↩︎

79. Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire, Peter H. Wilson, p.323 ↩︎

80. Invasion and Transformation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico, “The Hero as Rhetor: Hernán Cortés’s Second and Third Letters to Charles V,” Viviana Díaz Balsera, p.58 ↩︎

81. Ibid., p.58-9, 71 ↩︎

82. Invasion and Transformation: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico, “Spanish Creation of the Conquest of Mexico,” Matthew Restall, p.94 ↩︎

83. “«EL MEJOR RETRATO DE CADA UNO» LA MATERIALIDAD DE LA ESCRITURA EPISTOLAR EN LA SOCIEDAD HISPANA DE LOS SIGLOS XVI Y XVII,” Antonio Castillo Gómez, p,852; “Escribir en bronce, escribir en el polvo: atisbos en torno a un objeto de la escritura,” p.65 ↩︎

84. “Escribir en bronce, escribir en el polvo: atisbos en torno a un objeto de la escritura,” p.65 ↩︎

85. Ibid. ↩︎

86. “«EL MEJOR RETRATO DE CADA UNO» LA MATERIALIDAD DE LA ESCRITURA EPISTOLAR EN LA SOCIEDAD HISPANA DE LOS SIGLOS XVI Y XVII,” p.854 ↩︎

87. Ibid., p.862-3 ↩︎

88. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man, Marshall McLuhan, p.7, 112, 131, 138 ↩︎

89. Sticks and stones: A study of American architecture and civilization, Lewis Mumford, p.41 -2 or The Gutenberg Galaxy, p.164 ↩︎

90. The Gutenberg Galaxy, p.226 ↩︎

91. Ibid., p.135, 146, 151 ↩︎

92. Ibid., p.183 ↩︎

93. Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson, p.3-4 ↩︎

94. Ibid., p.ix, 5 ↩︎

95. The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard, p.74-5 ↩︎

96. Ibid., p.74-6 ↩︎

97. “Gaston Bachelard and the Phenomenology of the Reading Consciousness,” James S. Hans, p.316-7 ↩︎

98. The Poetics of Space, p.78-9 ↩︎

99. Ibid., p.81-2 ↩︎

100. “Reading a Drawer,” Susan Stewart, p.18 ↩︎

101. Ibid. ↩︎

102. The Ethical Function of Architecture, Karsten Harries, p.208 ↩︎

103. Collected Fictions jorge luis borges & andrew hurley p4 ↩︎

104. “Gaston Bachelard and the Phenomenology of the Reading Consciousness,” p.318 ↩︎