Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christine Divine in the Colonial Andes. By Maya Stanfield-Mazzi. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013. xv + 241 pp. $50.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christine Divine in the Colonial Andes . By Maya Stanfield-Mazzi . Tucson : University of Arizona Press , 2013. xv + 241 pp. $50.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn her monograph regarding the colonial Andean transition from three-dimensional statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary to two-dimensional imagery, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi argues that Andean beliefs became interwoven with Christian religiosity starting in the sixteenth century. Based on the idea that all Andean deities were given a physical form, the author asserts that Christian divine imagery stepped into a vacuum created by the colonial evangelical destruction of mummies and huacas (Andean sacred figures). Catholic imagery, such as the Christ of the Earthquakes credited with stopping tremors, grew even in the former Inca capital of Cusco. As a result, Stanfield-Mazzi concludes, is nearly impossible to isolate any purely non-Christian Andean beliefs, just as it is difficult to find Christian practices not informed by the Andean (177).The strength of Stanfield-Mazzi's book lies in her meticulous approach to material transformation. She asserts that with Spanish colonization, a new, independent artistic tradition sprung up in the Andes under the imperative of visualizing the Christian religion (2). By analyzing images, bultos (statues), and miracle narratives Stanfield-Mazzi explains how Christian imagery became rooted in Andean realities. Painting and other visual imagery was useful to Andean parishioners who must have memorized prayers phonetically, but was based, as was the Virgin of Pomata, on Spanish sculpture of the late Renaissance (67) as well as the inspirations of regional Spanish-trained artists. Stanfield-Mazzi argues that less-accomplished Spanish or mestizo artists trained in the peninsular style (such as those active in mining city of Potosi) may have created the statue. In contrast, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, a descendant of Inca colonists around Lake Titicaca, created the Virgin of Copacabana statute and supposedly engaged in Christian religious instruction. Like other native men who became sculptors by the late sixteenth century, Tito Yupanqui was a central participant in transforming the Christian Andes. Illustrating the integration of European aesthetic into Andean religiosity, Stanfield-Mazzi explains how Andeans donated European textiles to the saint in exchange for miracle work in a process of re-sacralization of the landscape, deepening scholarly knowledge of the Andeans who participated in the evangelization of the Americas.Proving the popularity of Andean Catholicism, Stanfield-Mazzi points to the survival, even to the present, of cults to colonial statues such as Christ of the Earthquakes, and other regionally specific images. By the late sixteenth century, the statues were working local miracles such as bringing back the dead, lighting their own lamps, and changing their facial expressions (119). The relationship between the viewers and the deity drew on European ideas of loyalty and worship as well as Andean reciprocity, with the practice of miracle painting as a form of the devoted's gratitude. In painting, created as early as the 1670s in Cusco and into the eighteenth century in Bolivia and Ecuador, rather than looking up to a statue, these works usually show a beneficiary looking up at a vision of the statue (139). …