"With over two hundred illustrations, including some of casta sets and other visual materials that have never been published before, the book draws on a variety of archival sources to provide the most comprehensive study of casta painting to date. Katzew considers how casta painting developed art historically, why race became the subject of a pictorial genre that spanned an entire century, who commissioned and collected the works, and what meanings the works held for contemporary audiences. The book sheds new light on racial dynamics of eighteenth-century Mexico and on the ways the colonial elite attempted to order an increasingly confusing society. While casta paintings can be placed within contemporary European concepts of the exotic and the impetus to classify, Katzew demonstrates that the genre also reveals aspects of the construction of identity and self-image unique to the colonial world."--BOOK JACKET.