For much of the last half-century, the few North Americans interested in the extraordinary ecclesiastical architecture erected during the 1500s south of the U.S. border had to depend on just two monumental tomes in English: George Kubler’s Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948) and John McAndrew’s The Open-Air Churches of Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965). Perhaps because the scholarship of these works was so weighty, gringo aficionados didn’t deem it necessary to add anything further. Moreover, the colonial arts of Latin America were receiving little attention in general after World War II, when educational emphasis was largely concentrated on the reviving cultures of Western Europe. North American publishers, not sensing a market for what was then considered second-rate provincial Hispanic art crudely imposed on even cruder, “primitive” Indian art, were hardly encouraging. But recently a rash of new books and new ideas on this neglected subject have begun to appear, stimulated initially perhaps by Elizabeth Wilder Weismann’s uncommonly beautiful black-and-white photographs of sixteenth-century Mexican architecture and sculpture published in a number of collections in the 1970s and 1980s (far exceeding in quality the grainy, small-size illustrations in Kubler and McAndrew). Valerie...