ABSTRACT
Although there exists a significant scholarly literature on fine arts academies and schools of drawing in Spain and its empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—actively promoted by Hispanic Enlightenment initiatives to improve drawing skills and design—our understanding about artisans’ engagement with the new educational opportunities to advance their training remains underdeveloped. A case study of the powerful silversmiths’ guild of Mexico City offers fresh insights into the Royal Academy of San Carlos’s impact on artisans’ lives and professional training. It requires us to reconsider the problems confronted by both the silversmiths and Spanish Bourbon officials in putting educational theory into practice and moves us beyond a simplistic “resistance” reading of artisans to the new academy’s requirements and conventional framings of guild-academy antipathies.
