In 1706 Cristóbal de Villalpando signed a painting with an unusual, intensive calligraphic flourish, and sent it from Mexico City far to the north. This essay describes Villalpando's decision to invest so much pictorial energy in letterforms against this geographic backdrop. Doing so reveals several social registers in which writing had taken on particular professional charge, and opens on to a yet broader artistic sensitivity to writing: its forms and modes of production. The Spanish Empire's extensive bureaucracy of paper made imperial subjects highly sensitive to script's visual and material qualities, such that Villalpando and his fellow artists could capitalize upon them both to produce meaning within their pictures, and to engineer particular constructions of self. In juxtaposing distinct domains of writing – notarial, educational, performative – with paintings, this essay stakes a methodological claim for considering the archive, broadly conceived, as a place just as important for looking as for reading and transcription.

中文翻译：

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越界：Cristóbal de Villalpando 和剧本的过剩

1706 年，克里斯托瓦尔·德·维拉尔潘多（Cristóbal de Villalpando）在一幅具有不同寻常的、密集的书法风格的画作上签名，并将其从遥远的墨西哥城送到了北方。这篇文章描述了 Villalpando 决定在这种地理背景下在字体中投入如此多的图形能量。这样做揭示了写作在其中承担了特殊的专业责任的几个社会领域，并开启了对写作更广泛的艺术敏感性：它的形式和生产方式。西班牙帝国庞大的纸质官僚机构使帝国臣民对剧本的视觉和材料质量高度敏感，因此比利亚尔潘多和他的艺术家同事们可以利用它们在他们的照片中产生意义，并设计出特定的自我结构。在并列不同的写作领域——公证，