The Iconography of Audience in the Cuzco Corpus Christi Paintings Barbara H. Jaye and William P. Mitchell Drama audiences appear in a number of well-known medieval and renaissance art works. 1 Two manuscript illustrations, the Jerusalem entremet (1378) and Jean Fouquet's Martyrdom of St. Apollonia (c.1460), show courtly audiences.2 The Arsenal Terence frontispiece,3 paintings of two Louvain pageant wagons of 1594, Daniel van Alsloot's illustrations of the Brussels pageant of 1615,4 and at least two seventeentii-century paintings by Jan Steen5 feature audiences of townspeople. A sixteenth-century painting by Pieter Balten after Peter Breughel the Eidero and a Flemish drawing of 15427 showing comic scenes on outdoor platform stages portray peasant audiences. The audiences in the manuscript illustrations are idealized, showing little portraiture . The painter-producer Fouquet's courtly audience at the miracle play of St. Apollonia and die nobles of the Jerusalem entremet behave themselves too decorously; these subdued and attentive audiences seem to flatter the courtly readership for whom the minatures were painted. The audiences of townspeople and peasants are also decorous although they gesture and show active interest. As supposed records of actual audiences, there are no signs here of misbehavior of the kinds for which we know fines were levied,8 nor are there any traces of problems with crowd control and rowdyism, both of which are revealed by extant municipal records. More realistic and varied audiences appear in sixteen littleknown paintings from Cuzco, Peru, a mountain city that was the capital of the Inca empire before the Spanish conquest of South America. These seventeenth-century paintings, which depict Corpus Christi celebrations in Cuzco, are an important source of information about community drama. They are large panels (most are at least two meters in height and breadth), 94 Barbara H. Jaye and William P. Mitchell95 heavily influenced by Spanish and Flemish fifteenth- and sixteenth -century works, and some of them show over a hundred participants and spectators. Although the paintings reflect the colonial social context, our preliminary study indicates that most of the fiesta events and some of the depictions of audience follow European precedents.9 The paintings, twelve in the Museum of Religious Art in Cuzco, four in private collections in Santiago, Chile,10 include a Last Supper on a raised platform, processions of dignitaries and religious orders, pageant wagons, and shoulder-borne floats or andas like those still carried in the Corpus Christi fiestas in modern Cuzco. H The audiences are numerous, specific, and varied. They include peasants and nobles, churchmen and merchants , nuns, laywomen, and children. Because of careful portraiture as well as both devotion and inattention by people of different classes, these paintings are especially valuable as records of the iconography of audience. In our discussion of the paintings we have retained Mariátegui 's numbering of the paintings for scholarly consistency even though the basis for his numbering system is open to question . Although he acknowledges tiiat at least two different artists worked on the series, he assumes tiiat the paintings portray a single procession which follows a route from the cathedral around the main plaza to the municipal building (the cabildo) and back.12 Although diese paintings are all from Cuzco and portray aspects of the Corpus Christi celebrations, there is, however, no reason to suppose that they were painted in the same year or that they represent one particular celebration . The paintings have been dated c.1680 by their style and the incorporation of portraits of Carlos II and Bishop Mollineda (Bishop of Cuzco, 1673-99).13 The saints shown in the paintings have traditional European attributes—e.g., St. Jerome has his lion, St. Peter has his keys. However, die European iconography is modified by the indigenous American culture. 14 The accompanying table (see p. 96) summarizes the subjects of each of the paintings. The anonymous painters were followers of Diego Tito Quispe, a leading artist of the Cuzco school. The works of Quispe and other seventeenth-century Cuzco painters reflect the circulation in Peru of European woodcuts.15 Quispe is known tiirough his signed copies of Flemish engravings as well as for his independent paintings. The Corpus Christi paintings...
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Nov 1, 2023
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