An impressive and fascinating book about paintings and prints, atlases and travelers’ tales, Urban Images of the Hispanic World, 1493–1793 spans three hundred years and covers a vast geographic and visual landscape. It surveys civic spaces from the manicured parks in Mexico City and Lima to the Cerro Rico of Potosí and public works in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Richard Kagan’s perspective on urban forms differs from much of the traditional literature on Spanish American architecture. Urban Images says little about the daily experience of civic life, and even less about bricks and mortar or the planning and building of particular towns. Instead, and provocatively so, Kagan considers the cities of Spanish colonial enterprise as sites of visual description. How civic space takes form via paint on canvas and print on paper, what constitutes the image of a city: these are the book’s primary themes. Working in collaboration with the architectural historian Fernando Marías, Kagan draws explicit boundaries for this project. The volume privileges “public images,” works intended for publication or created to circulate beyond the dusty shelves of military and legal archives (vii). Beyond this, he identifies two principal categories of civic imagery: the “chorographic” and the “communicentric.” The...