Unidentified artist
Folding Screen with Indian Wedding, Mitote, and Flying Pole (Biombo con desposorio indígena, mitote y palo volador)circa 1660-1690

On view:

Geffen Galleries, Spanish America at the Center of the World

Four-panel folding screen, oil on panel, depicting a crowded outdoor festival with European and indigenous figures, a pole ceremony, elaborate feathered dancers, adobe buildings, and a mountain landscape

Four-panel painted folding screen depicting a colonial outdoor festival scene with numerous figures in diverse dress; a volador pole with performers at center, procession of dancers in feathered regalia at right, crowd of onlookers at left near thatched buildings, landscape with mountains and sky in the background, a heraldic cartouche at top center.

Oil painting of multiple figures in elaborate ceremonial dress with red, white, and turquoise embroidered garments, feathered headdresses, and fringed textiles, gathered outdoors in a processional scene; one figure plays a guitar-like instrument while others carry palm fronds and staffs; background includes a rider on a donkey, a figure in a canoe, and a pale blue-grey sky.

Oil painting of multiple figures in elaborate embroidered costumes dancing outdoors, holding green fronds, with onlookers in decorated dress at right and a horseman visible in the upper left background; flat, detailed brushwork with agave plants in the foreground.

Oil painting depicting a group scene with figures in colonial-era dress; a man in a wide-brimmed hat plays a small guitar while another gestures toward a group of women wearing embroidered huipil-style garments in teal, orange, and white; muted ochre background with an arched doorway.

Oil painting detail of two standing figures in elaborate colonial-era dress; the figure at left wears a wide-brimmed hat and layered cape with red and dark patterned trim, while the figure at right wears an embroidered green and white dress with a head covering. A child's face appears in the lower left corner.

Oil painting detail of a figure in a blue and white garment lying on their back with legs raised, balancing a large wooden log with bare feet, surrounded by partial figures of other people on a sandy ground.

Artist or Maker: Unidentified artist
Title: Folding Screen with Indian Wedding, Mitote, and Flying Pole (Biombo con desposorio indígena, mitote y palo volador)
Place Made: Mexico
Date Made: circa 1660-1690
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: Overall (4 panels): 66 × 120 in. (167.6 × 304.8 cm)
Credit Line: Purchased with funds provided by the Bernard and Edith Lewin Collection of Mexican Art Deaccession Fund
Accession Number: M.2005.54a-d
Classification: Furnishings
Collecting Area: Latin American Art
Curatorial Notes: Folding screens, or biombos, were introduced in New Spain by the early seventeenth century. This example depicts an Indigenous wedding amid pre-Hispanic performances. On the right, the newlyweds leave the church, while participants on the left—including Spaniards in typical mid-seventeenth-century clothing—gather outside the bride’s house. Dancers in lavish costumes perform a mitote, a dance with a figure impersonating the Aztec emperor Moteuczoma. A juego de palo (in which a man tosses a log in the air) and an aerial palo volador (flying pole) also mark the festivities. The biombo was likely intended for export to Europe to provide a glimpse of local landmarks and traditions.

From exhibition Archive of the World, 2022 (for more information see the catalogue entry by Ilona Katzew in the accompanying publication, cat. no. 29, pp. 156–62)
Provenance: Possibly King Louis Philippe I of France, Duke of Orléans (r. 1830–48); as a wedding gift to his son François d’Orléans, Prince of Joinville (1818–1900), married to Princess Francisca of Brazil (1824–1898), daughter of Dom Pedro I (1798–1834), emperor of Brazil, c. 1843; by inheritance to François’s nephew Gastão d’Orléans, Count of Eu (1842–1922), married to Isabel Bragança, Princess Imperial of Brazil (1846–1921), niece of Francisca; by inheritance to their son Pedro de Alcântara de Orléans e Bragança, Prince of Grão-Pará (1875–1940), married to Countess Elisabeth Dobrezensky of Dobrzenicz (1875–1951); by inheritance to their son Pedro Gastão de Orléans e Bragança (1913–2007), married to Princess María de la Esperanza de Bourbon Dos Sicilias (1914–2005), Petrópolis, Brazil; by inheritance to their children Pedro Carlos de Orléans e Bragança (b. 1945), Manuel Álvaro de Orléans e Bragança (b. 1949), Cristina de Borbón de Orléans e Bragança (b. 1950), and Francisco de Orléans e Bragança (b. 1956), Rio de Janeiro; Rodrigo Rivero Lake Anticuario, 2002; LACMA, 2005.
Selected Bibliography: Katzew, Ilona, ed. Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800: Highlights from LACMA’s Collection. Exh. Cat. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: DelMonico Books/D.A.P., 2022.
Katzew, Ilona. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Selected Exhibition History: Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World. November 6, 2011 - January 29, 2012
Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World. November 6, 2011 - January 29, 2012
Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800. June 12, 2022 - October 30, 2022
Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800. June 12, 2022 - October 30, 2022
Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800. October 20, 2023 - January 28, 2024
Archive of the World: Art and Imagination in Spanish America, 1500–1800. October 20, 2023 - January 28, 2024
Inventing Race: Casta Painting and Eighteenth-Century Mexico; La invención del mestizaje. La pintura de castas y el siglo XVIII en México. June 22, 2024 - September 08, 2024
Inventing Race: Casta Painting and Eighteenth-Century Mexico; La invención del mestizaje. La pintura de castas y el siglo XVIII en México. June 22, 2024 - September 08, 2024

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