A number of essays and articles published in the last decade have examined the relationship between paintings produced in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (also called “colonial Mexico”) and their counterparts in peninsular Spain in early modernity. Reacting against earlier characterizations of viceregal works as uninteresting or amateurish copies of contemporaneous European prints and canvases, the more recent literature makes a claim that is by now very familiar to historians of colonial art: New Spanish painting partakes of an “Old World” tradition, but ultimately it is an autonomous phenomenon with its own history. Creating the Cult of Saint Joseph offers a new perspective on this line of questioning. A study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings (and a few sculptures) of Saint Joseph from peninsular Spain and New Spain, it moves beyond the center-periphery model of stylistic analysis to explore other dimensions of visual imagery and cultural transformation in the early modern Hispanic world. In it, Charlene Villaseñor Black tracks the proliferation of several interrelated iconographic traditions in Europe and the Americas and, at the same time, considers visual imagery’s agency in the construction of gendered discourses on power and personhood. Each of the book’s five central chapters explores a different...