Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes

Abstract

With the publication of Ananda Cohen Suarez’s book, Andean studies and colonial Latin American art history at last have an English-language treatment of mural painting in highland Peru, one of the most significant artistic genres of the colonial period. This book is guided less by one central claim or question than by an attempt to advance a general approach: Cohen Suarez urges us to contextualize murals within their architectonic settings and the historical moments of their production and reception. Seeing murals as “embedded” (an oft-repeated word) in social frames reveals overlapping registers in which murals could produce meaning for different audiences. Though focused on some of the most well-known and accessible cycles in churches on the route connecting Cuzco with Lake Titicaca, Cohen Suarez suggests her approach could be extended to any example in the broad territory, stretching into present-day Bolivia and Chile, in which mural painting has been was a central-colonial art form.While this methodological approach is not particularly novel—indeed, it characterizes a dominant art-historical paradigm—it represents a significant departure from earlier literature on this topic, which was primarily concerned with cataloguing, stylistic and temporal classification, and iconographic description. Moreover, these works, for which little direct written documentation exists, do not lend themselves to contextual history, and Cohen Suarez should be praised for the wide net she casts to resituate these works within the historical conditions of their making and viewing. Though libros de fábrica (records of church expenditures) constitute her main archival base, the author gains her chief traction through the recruitment of a kaleidoscopic array of sources including archaeological evidence, published sermons and plays, Spanish chronicles, conservation accounts, oral histories, and a large body of secondary historical literature.Four case studies follow an introductory survey of the mural tradition from the pre-conquest era through the colonial period, which touches on issues related to sources, labor, technique, and conservation history. The case studies span the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries and focus on six mural programs, introducing many others as comparanda. These chapters anchor mural programs within overlapping oral, visual, and performative registers of early seventeenth-century evangelization efforts, late seventeenth-century redecoration campaigns, eighteenth-century economic reforms, and struggles to reinstitute state and church control after the Tupac Amaru rebellion. Such colonial agendas are shown to be articulated through or unintentionally complicated by local conditions and indigenous ideologies, such that Inca adornment of sacred huacas, for example, becomes as critical to the legibility of “textile murals” as the Bourbon repartimiento de mercancías and highland cosmopolitanism, and the bodies of water in scenes of Christ’s baptism come to refer both to the river Jordan and to primordial Inca pacarinas. Cohen Suarez thus reveals how static artworks produce layers of dynamic and potentially contradictory meaning that proliferate and shift in changing social conditions. For some, the author’s provocative readings may occasionally tip to the speculative or the implausible: for instance, the proposal that a parrot (a common motif with engraved precedents) in Urco’s Baptism of Christ was meant to signify the Amazon, render St. John a chuncho, and underscore his unbaptized state vis-à-vis Christ.The reader would be well advised to focus a skeptical eye on issues of agency. When Cohen Suarez can pull a historical actor out of the quagmire of anonymity, she tends to ascribe to him—whether a priest, a bishop, or an artist—agency over decisions made about a mural program. She herself acknowledges, however, that commission dynamics and labor history are all but unknowable; there is thus a risk of over-assigning individual intention and responsibility into what were surely complex social negotiations. Moreover, the lack of quality (or entire absence of) reproductions often makes it impossible to follow the subtlety of the author’s visual arguments. Fortunately, the reader can seek out high-quality images that Cohen Suarez went to great lengths to make available online and in earlier publications. These matters aside, the field should be grateful to have this book, both for the scholarly inroads it makes into this corpus and for its unusually readable and well-encapsulated chapters, which make it a wonderful teaching resource.