A bird's-eye view of the town of Tacubaya, taken from above the Toluca road

Casimiro Castro studied under the Italian-born view painter Pedro Gualdi at the Academy of San Carlos in Mexico, and the present subject, though credited to Castro and Campillo in the lithographed plate, may more likely derive from Gualdi, to whom Pablo Diener has suggested the attribution. Castro's album of lithographed views of Mexico published in 1855-56 includes many plates credited to Castro but which in fact follow works by other artists. There is a watercolour of the same view by Castro, taken a little further down the Toluca road ('Tacubaya, Cartagena') for which see C. Monsiváis (i.a.), Casimiro Castro y su taller, Mexico City, 1996, pp.22-3. Mexican views were proliferating at the time of the Mexican-American War, and being copied in the process: 'The growing number of guides, illustrated travel albums and memoirs on Mexico that were being published in Europe and America, by foreign artists and diplomats, such as Karl Nebel, Fredrick de Waldeck, John Phillips, and Pietro Gualdi, and which had gained a wider currency in Mexico through reproductions and local editions, as well as through circulation of the originals and the presence of the artists themselves, prompted a creative riposte from Mexican artists, writers, and publishers intent on emancipatory self-definition. Undoubtedly, Pietro Gualdi’s architectural vistas with genre details contributed disproportionately to the prominence that such elements acquired in the development of nationalist iconography during this period; although it could also be argued that his work inserted itself seamlessly in an already existing pictorial tradition in Mexico, dating back to the seventeenth century, which employed topographical vistas of Mexico City as theatrical allegories of viceregal power. In a not dissimilar vein, panoramic vistas of the republican capital tended to idealise the degree of symmetry and order of its layout precisely during the period in which its citizens were subject to the effects and daily spectacle of crisis and degradation. Gualdi’s collection of urban scenes Monumentos de Méjico, first published in Mexico City by Massé and Decaen in 1839-41, proved so popular that a revised edition was published in 1841-42. The depiction of the administrative heart of the republic seen from rooftops or bell towers served to reinforce an image of orderly government during the calamitous dictatorship of General Santa Anna, a period which saw the occupation of those same consecrated spaces by the victorious U.S. Army.' (E.P. Salas, Costumbrismo y litografía en México: Un nuevo modo de ver, Mexico City, 2005, p.153).