This exhibition, showcasing Mexican masterpieces for the first time at the Louvre, opens with the outstretched arms of the patron saint of Mexico City. The anonymous seventeenth-century polychrome of Saint Philippe de Jesus is a tour de force in brown and gold, its modelling sharp and meticulous, from the angular folds of the saint’s gilded habit to the bloodied and protruding veins on his wrists. Installed in the centre of the gallery against a dark partition, the statue’s open arms herald the beginning of an exhibition that promises to transform the viewer’s relationship with Mexican art.   

For Le Mexique au Louvre, eleven Mexican masterworks have been put on display for the first time alongside the museum’s permanent Spanish collection. The aim is to both illustrate and encourage the dialogue between the New World and the old, between Europe and the Americas. As Rafael Tovar y de Teresa, President of Mexico’s Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes , writes in the introduction to the catalogue, the exhibition sheds light on those artists who ‘were painting an American world with European brushes.’

Set at the heart of the Louvre’s permanent collection, amidst the busy, bustling Spanish gallery, the juxtapositions of the Mexican and Spanish canvases are, for the most part, productive and thought-provoking. Cristóbal de Villalpando’s monumental and mysterious Lactation of Saint Dominic (1684–95) hangs alongside Juan de Valdes Leal’s Immaculate Conception with Saint Philip and Saint James (1654) and the similarities are evident. Both Virgins wear golden crowns, from which emanate dazzling rays of light and around which crowds of cherubs and cherubs’ faces circle. Villalpando’s is the bolder work, with its intense palette, ornate costumes, massing armies and crowded pictorial space. If Villalpando’s figures owe a debt to Rubens, this debt is made more explicit further along the gallery in The Stigmatisation of Saint Francis (1650) by Sebastián López de Arteaga. López de Arteaga travelled to New Spain around 1640 and his work embodies the dichotomy between the influence of European models and the invention of a New World style. Although the composition derives from Rubens and particularly Lucas Vorsterman’s engravings after him, which had a global circulation, López de Arteaga’s faces and brightly coloured flora speak more to the sensibilities of his new home than his Flemish model.

Around the central gallery and in the accompanying side room, the Mexican canvases hold their own against their Spanish counterparts. Time and again it is their palettes that mark them out, whether in the rich draperies of the Louvre’s own Visitation (third quarter of the seventeenth century) by José Sánchez, the saturated tones and smooth modelling of Juan Rodríguez Juárez’s The Flight into Egypt (ca. 1720) or the celestial blue and gold semi-circle of Miguel Cabrera’s Virgin of the Assumption (1768). José Juárez’s The Apparition of the Virgin and Child to Saint Francis (seventeenth century) offers the exhibition’s most dramatic example of chiaroscuro. Amidst menacing skies, rays of sun and the halos of the two central figures illuminate Saint Francis and a host of angels in luxuriously coloured and minutely realised cloaks: the blushed cheeks and red knee of the angel in the right foreground are especially striking. Juárez depicts, amidst the strewn flowers of the foreground, a seated child. Holding an inscription that devotes the painting to his father, he is the only figure to meet the viewer’s gaze. While some of these religious paintings sit uneasily adjacent to the Goya portraits that line the hall’s far wall, the child’s serious expression and gilded costume make for pleasing, if anachronistic, parallels with Goya’s portrait of the two-year-old Luis Maria de Cistué y Martinez across the gallery.

However, for all the insightful juxtapositions put into play by the arrangement of these eleven works and their own intrinsic merit, this exhibition does not quite do justice to the history of Mexico and Mexican painting put forward in the sumptuously illustrated exhibition catalogue (available in French and Spanish). Consisting of one polychrome sculpture and ten religious paintings, the works assembled in the galleries lack the breadth of the illustrations that accompany them in the catalogue: a folding screen with a view of the red roofs of seventeenth-century Mexico City and the extraordinary mountain ranges beyond, Miguel and Juan González’s series of paintings on wood encrusted with shells depicting the Spanish Conquest, Miguel Cabrera’s exquisitely detailed portrait of a mixed-race mother and child are just some of the works that offer a tantalising glimpse into how diverse and exciting this exhibition could have been.

Le Mexique au Louvre serves an explicitly political purpose, intending to build on five hundred years of cultural dialogue and to make such exchanges contemporary as well as historic. It also marks the broader expansion of the Louvre’s collections, with the museum seeking to selectively expand its Latin American holdings. The catalogue acknowledges that the Mexican school is little known – and has been little esteemed – in France. Both the exhibition and catalogue seek to counter this, though the latter, with Jonathan Brown’s essay on painting in New Spain between 1550 and 1800 and Guillaume Kientz’s survey of Mexican painting in French public collections, succeeds to a much greater extent. Ultimately Le Mexique au Louvre falls a little short of its initial promise. However, if this is merely the opening gambit in a commitment to a more sustained and expansive engagement with Mexican art, the future does indeed look promising.

‘Le Mexique au Louvre: Chefs-d’oeuvre de la Nouvelle Espagne, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles’ is at the Musée du Louvre, Paris, from 7 March to 3 June 2013.