Ilustración uruguaya

a tool of the modernization project in the nineteenth-century Uruguay

Abstract

This article aims to present Ilustración Uruguaya (Uruguayan enlightenment), a magazine published in Montevideo between 1883 and 1885, by the School of Arts and Crafts (EAyO), focusing on its pedagogical potential for the formation of the gaze. The EAyO was created by militarism (1876-1886), a regime that deepened the modernizing project that some sectors of Uruguayan society had been carrying out. The magazine, therefore, was at the service of that model. The focus is placed on analyzing the tools deployed, which tended to educate the gaze in relation to certain European parameters: how an allegory should be interpreted, what values a monument was expected to have, what were the modern image reproduction techniques, or what value the Fine Arts had, in a modern and civilized world. In Uruguay during the last quarter of the 19th century, there were no Fine Arts teaching institutions, no specialized publications, and no art criticism, nor was there a museum specifically dedicated to the visual arts, which is why we believe that the magazine deserves careful analysis.