The copy as original: the presence of the absent Spanish Habsburg king and colonial hybridity

The political culture that defined the Spanish empire was made up of elements that, borrowing from their different points of contact, travelled the world‐around being transformed in the process into a mixed style that defied a clear origin (or original). This political culture was based on sixteenth‐ and seventeenth‐century understandings of the copy as an original that not only made possible the dissemination in the empire of the figure and powers of the absent king by making him ‘present’, but also produced common understandings of his figure, powers, and genesis of the empire. By examining ceremonial deployments of royal simulacra in various cities of the vast Spanish monarchy, and coeval understandings of the copy, this article, argues that the cultural production of this empire cannot be best understood within ahistorical centre‐periphery frameworks of cultural production and/or as derivative colonial phenomena, as do notions of cultural hybridity and of ‘colonial’ art.