The studies on American artistic production in viceregal times have revolved since their beginnings around the problem of style, meaning, or attribution, among others. In recent years, hand in hand with a look more attentive to social and cultural issues and to interdisciplinary intersections, an inquiry into the materiality of these objects has appeared as unavoidable. In this sense, Materia Americana is a book that, for the first time, brings together the research of leading art historians, chemists, physicists, curators, and museologists concerned with Spanish-American art, and purports to become a reference book for future works on the subject. "Materia Americana is the corollary of an ambitious project that we began to imagine in 2010 when, thanks to the Getty Foundation's Connecting Art Histories programme, we set out to weave a large network of exchanges covering the entire American continent and part of the European continent in order to promote and strengthen a frank dialogue between those who, from different disciplinary, theoretical and methodological perspectives , are interested in the material dimension of the images and objects produced in the Spanish-American viceroyalties." --(HKB Translation) --Page 9.