ABSTRACT
The Casa de Montejo’s front is a densely sculpted façade, rich with icons, fragments, and materials that represent multiple cultures. The building is well suited for a multilayered discussion of the facade’s iconography. The building and its facade also became cultural icons of Merida, thus accessible to all colonial peoples. The relevance of early modern era concepts such as Renaissance aesthetics and humanistic philosophies relating to art, architecture, and urbanism invite further contemplation as well as Morrill’s work on the Casa de Dean has illustrated. The Casa de Montejo remained a site accessible for cultural appropriation into the late colonial era, as attested to by the Yucatecan Coat of Arms. The Plateresque’s roots in larger Renaissance traditions also assisted with fostering ideas of Spanish cultural order. In the Americas, the Plateresque was used to convey culturally encoded messages, particularly regarding Spanish claims to dominance.
