Page 275 - Perú indígena y virreinal

The size of the collection of works that were sent to Peru during the rule of the Viceroys can be judged by analysing the shipping records of the time. The number of pieces and the status of their creators leave no doubt as to the extent of the influence that they had on the evolution of the arts in the Americas. From the point of view of the art historian’s research, the problem arises with the attempts on the part of erudite locals to constantly attribute pieces to artists considerable repute without any documental basis for doing so. The loss of an important part of this heritage and the confusion arising from questionable authorship (an unfortunate constant in the country’s history) sometimes impedes the careful analysis of the various artistic currents in each cultural centre.
Through documentation we know, for example, that Zurbarán arranged for a consignment of thirty-four canvases for the Convent of Our Lady of the Incarnation in Lima. This painter also sent works to the capital which were not commissioned but rather for direct sale in Peru’s art market. There is evidence, for example, of a collection of twelve portraits of Julius Caesar on horseback, a popular subject matter at the time. Neither should we overlook the series of painting sent over by the Madrid artist, Bartolomé Román, entitled The Seven Angels of Palermo (another common theme) for the Church of Saint Peter or the Life of Saint Ignatius collection by Juan de Valdés Leal for the same church.
Peruvian painting took characteristics typical of Spanish painting of the time very much to heart. The definite naturalistic bent of Andean art, still something of an epithet today, is a reflection of the profoundly symbolic nature of baroque painting. This is typified by the perception of the transcendental as being yet another facet of everyday life, blurring conventional time—space borders and allowing, for example, Saint Rosa of Lima to attend to the infant Christ child or the presence of nuns from the Convent of Saint Teresa in Ayacucho at The Last Supper. This painting, the work of Luis Carvajal and dating from 1707, depicted the biblical scene as an Andean banquet, with Roast Guinea Pig as the piece de resistance. This logic of normalising transcendence became even more characteristic of Peru with the rooting of religious devotion in local experience, distancing the depiction of saints and miracle workers far from the imagery that would have been familiar to the Catholic orthodoxy. The religious experience was therefore open to all, allowing for example, the Virgin of Cocharas—herself an Andean synthesis with the Spanish Virgin of the Candles— to acquire a historical and social value by being represented, in a clear allusion to the duality of her spiritual nature, at the head of a procession that had left her sanctuary in the province of Andahuaylas, on the 8th of September, the date that traditionally marked the commencement of sowing. These two processional images, known as La Reina Grande and La Reina Chica—“The Greater and Lesser Queens”—set off seeking alms in opposite directions, one toward the Southern Andes, the other heading for Ayacucho in the north. A further example would be Francisco Chihuantito’s representation of The Virgin of Montserrat, dating from 1693, in which he situated the Catalan saint in the village of Chincheros in the province of Urubamba near Cusco, of where she is also the patron saint. The other option open to local artist was the so-called copia fiel—the “true copy” in which paintings depict other figures from earlier paintings and sculpture. There are, for example, countless paintings that take as their subject matter The Christ of the Tremors, a well-known statue from the 17th Century to be found in a vaulted niche in the Cathedral in Cusco.
In a similar vein, we should mention here those sculptures that are considered to be sacred relics in their own right, allowing spiritual access to the saint without the need for intermediaries, regardless of the miracles that the original character had performed. Thus, in 1686, Archbishop Manuel de Mollinedo commissioned the indigenous sculptor, Tomás Tayru Tupac, to produce a statue of the Virgin of La Almudena, whilst, at the same time, sending for a splinter of the original figure in Madrid, which the sculptor duly incorporated into the head of the new piece.
This ability to work miracles, directly, and without filters, allowed the patron saints of each of Cusco’s parishes to participate as privileged spectators in the processions to the Cathedral, where they would be housed in the “sacred palace” during the festivities to celebrate Corpus Christi.
Here we enter the social universe of the period. Through references and symbolism that were not as obscure or secondary as might be imagined, they soaked into the country’s psyche, into the day-to-day life and the moral values of the Viceroyalty. In this way we can
comprehend the series of paintings entitled Corpus de Cusco, possibly commissioned by Bishop Mollinedo (1673–1699) for the Church of Saint Anne, or those that depict the Good Friday processions in Lima, in the Church of the Soledad or the convent of Saint Francis of Lima, that depict a large number of everyday characters whose presence demonstrates the social hierarchy in place at the time. The characteristics of that society were once again present at key moments in the nation’s history, such as the Cusco earthquake of 1650 that inspired a procession to the Cathedral in honour of the Christ of the Miracles (today known as the Christ of the Tremors). Thus, tragedy made the ancient Inca capital the central player in the painting, relegating the procession to a supporting role. Cusco was seen to be the City of God, depicted in a chapel in the cathedral as a votive offering for the miracle that had occurred and the future security and protection against earthquakes, focusing the city’s spirituality on the figure of Taitacha Temblores—the Christ of the Tremors.
Nevertheless, Peru was also a land that symbolised Paradise. More specifically, this was true of the east of the country, the jungle where the sun rose and traditionally identified with Antisuyo (one of the four parts into which the Inca Tawantinsuyo was divided). This embodiment of Eden figures repeatedly in European literature of the time, in texts such as León Pinelo’s Paradise in the New World, written in the middle of the 17th Century and set in the Viceroyalty of New Castile. The idea of an idyllic, peaceful garden, full of flowers and docile animals offered various artistic options that became typical of Cuzcan painting. Bright colours depicting a vivid natural world populated with harmonious figures that stood outside the usual time—space conventions all typify this school of painting, accurately analysed by art historians such as Teresa Gisbert in her The Paradise of Talking Birds, written in 1999. We can therefore appreciate that whilst its composition and iconography owed much to influences that had come over from the Old Continent, a local aesthetic was emerging through representations of flora and fauna that was not limited to the Andean Puna or high plateau but took as its starting point the tropical heat of the Amazon Basin, the source of so much that was exotic and marvellous to both the newly-arrived Spaniards and the Inca cultural nucleus.
This was, however a journey with a return ticket. It wasn’t just gold and silver ingots that were being sent back home to Spain. Cultural influence were sometimes exported too, the fruit of the new religious sentiment that had flourished in the Americas, replete with its own iconography: Saint Rosa Lima, Saint Francisco Solano, Saint Toribio de Mogrovejo, Saint Martin de Porres y Saint Juan Masías, the last two of which, whilst beatified during the rule of the Viceroys, were not canonised until the 20th Century. These exports were often either presents and donations that were sent back home or the belongings of families and artists such as Angelino Medoro, heading for Seville in 1620, who were returning back to Spain.
Later, in the 18th Century, these consignments were often of exceptional artistic value as in the case of a collection of 20 mixed media paintings sent over by the Viceroy Amat for the Department of Natural History pertaining to the Prince of Asturias, the future King Carlos IV. These pieces are unquestionably of great scientific interest, the first the Court in Madrid and Spain in general had seen of the Viceroyalty of Peru’s ethnographic make-up. Whilst the nobility, be it Inca, Creole or Spanish, found themselves intermingled with religious subjects, a symbiosis typical of the Peruvian artistic aesthetic of the period, the common people had only previously appeared as extras in crowd scenes, most typically the paintings representing the Corpus Christi celebrations in Cusco. Amat’s collection, however, depicted the ordinary, anonymous Peruvian as a subject matter in his or her own right, defined only by their families, facial expressions and body language and attire. The absence of backgrounds helped to emphasise the figures themselves and the definition of their own personal artistic space. This emphasis on the family unit and the importance of mestizaje—racial mix—would be absent in other collections dedicated to ethnography, such as Bishop Trujillo Martínez Compañón’s drawings or those that appear in the Government Archives of Francisco Gil de Lemos y Taboada, clearly adding to the historic—artistic value of Amat’s pieces.
And yet these enlightened Viceroys did not only concern themselves with the geographic and human nature of their territories. They were also keen to create an atmosphere that reflected that of the Court in Madrid, with galleries full of numerous portraits of themselves which they would later take back to Spain with them in the
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