During the seventeenth century is when painting was practised with greatest brilliancy and the schools of Mexico and Puebla were formed, which, although decadent, were maintained in the following century.
On the contrary, this eighteenth century, is the period of greatest lustre for architecture; during it, ancient edifices, begun long before, were carried to completion, many others were rebuilt, and new ones were erected, and there appears in houses, palaces, and churches, a style in which symmetry is but laxly observed and ornamentation is profuse or lavish.
Sculpture, long confined to imperfect wooden statues and crude bas-reliefs in stone, acquires an actual existence only near the close of the past century, with the famous Valencian1, author of one of the most famous of equestrian statues; with him also architecture assumed correctness, simplicity and proportions in harmony with the classical canon.
The fine arts in Mexico, without having arrived, in general, to the perfection to which the Spaniards carried them, ... cannot, for that reason, be considered unworthy of esteem and