Copied carts: Spanish prints and colonial Peruvian paintings

The influence of European prints and paintings upon the art of colonial Spanish America is well documented. In contracts recording the commissioning of paintings in Cuzco a center of art production in the Peruvian highlands, for example, respects to artworks that were to be used as originals are the norm. A standard contract give in charges to an engraving or print which the artist was to use. The phrase "segun estampas que se le de" ("according to prints given [the artist]") at short intervals appears as an indication that the patron has specified a prototype.(1) As a event scholarship on the art of colonial Latin America has frequently focused on its derivative aspects through discussing it in terms of its European sources.(2) While pictorial prototypes are a valid and important art-historical consideration - and single that will be examined here - concentration upon them all too often limits the ways in which we think about colonial visual agriculture The traditional focus on the imitative aspects of colonial Latin American art has implicitly privileged European sources above colonial formulations by relying upon European aesthetic norms to evaluate colonial material agriculture If our inquiry goes beyond the identification of European source material, however, and considers by what mode the colonial product engaged its culturally diverse audiences, we presently recognize the colonial artist and patron as profoundly creative rather than only imitative. In the present paper, I am be of importance toed with a particular series of canvases in which native artists and patrons created imagery utilizing printed European prototypes. from one side an act of copying they addressed their particular cultural predicament, which was not single to survive, but even to aid in the social space between sum of two units cultures - the hegemonic tillage of the colonizer and the resilient agriculture of the colonized. Between the copied and the transcript lies a wide cultural gap which the mimicry of form cannot begin to span and for which formal analysis cannot account.

My focus will be upon the ways in which images from a specific place of Spanish prints were integrated into a series of paintings created around 1674-80 in Cuzco Peru This city had been the capital of the pre-Hispanic Inka empire and, as like was a critical venue for cultural contact between Spaniards and indigenous Andeans. In the latter half of the seventeenth hundred Cuzco emerged as an artistic center in the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru Its native artists and patrons were prominent participants in this period of cultural florescence. by dint of considering one series of paintings for which Spanish prints provided an simple body of inspiration, we can begin to examine a certain number of of the complexities inherent in the Andean mimicry of European forms. In this particular act of copying, the two the context and the easy in mind of the prototypes were altered. of that kind alterations highlight the activities of indigenous elites who mediated between European authorities upon the one hand and their native constituencies upon the other. Although encouraged by dint of European cultural dominance, the copying itself created pictorial contradictions. I will argue that while native elites were compell to mimic European forms with equal reason as to appeal to their Spanish overlords and enhance their be in possession of social and political positions, these same Andeans generated of recent origin representational strategies keyed to colonial circumstances.

The Corpus Christi Series

The series of paintings upon which this discussion focuses consists of sixteen canvases depicting the celebration of the feast of Corpus Christi in Cuzco They vary in size from the smallest at 6 feet square to the largest at above 7 by 12 feet. Fifteen paintings feature individuals and corporate collections participating in the Corpus Christi procession: religious orders, local sodalities, native parishes, civic leaders, and ecclesiastical authorities. The remaining canvas depicts a temporary altar with a tableau of the Last tea during which Christ instituted the sacrament of the Eucharist. Since the feast of Corpus Christi, held upon the Thursday following Trinity Sunday, celebrates the Eucharist, this picture be subservient tos as a fitting preamble to the quiescence of the series.

Crowds of heterogeneous spectators are shown witnessing the circumstances in each of the sixteen canvases. This audience, which numbers twenty in individual picture and over one hundr in others, consists of race of Andean, European, African, and mixed ancestry. Ostensibly, the audience is representative of the ethnic and social diversity of colonial-period Cuzco which was dominated numerically by the agency of Andeans, but which included many race of European, African, and mixed coming down as well.

The three canvases of the series which feature Cuzco's highest ecclesiastical and civil authorities also include patron portraits. The other paintings were apparently commissioned by means of the individuals and groups who are their primary controls Thus, the Mercedarian friars were probably responsible for the canvas in which they are shown processing [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED!, and the parish council of s Cristobal was very likely involved in commissioning the canvas representing that parish [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED], and in the way that on. Certainly, the cooperation of the specific individuals portrayed in the pictures must have been required at a certain quantity of stage in the course of their production.