Page 303 - Perú indígena y virreinal

Many exceptional pieces were wrought for the cult and the religious ceremonies throughout Peru, but we should highlight the altar fronts and the monstrance. The fronts allow us to discover the role they play in transforming the internal space of the temples thanks to the contrasts in lights and the rich ways with which they persuade the faithful. But their large size—bigger than any other decorative piece—also permits the display of a wide, rich and varied iconographic and decorative selection that, during the 17th and 18th Centuries, responded to a vocabulary filled with fantastic elements, heirs of mannerist shapes and motives with European roots and re-elaborated and adapted to suit local tastes and mentalities. Along with the monstrous beings and motives, leaves and foliage also invade the spaces creating an ornamental tapestry of great effect where horror vacui takes a hold of the compositions. Many and very good fronts were wrought in Peru during viceroyal times, but undoubtedly it was the inhabitants of Cusco during bishop Mollinedo’s (1673–1699) time who were the most recognised in this field. They established the guidelines at least in a large area along the Inca Camino Real (Royal Road) from Cusco to Puno, Arequipa and surrounding areas of Lake Titicaca.
The hand-held monstrances are the other examples to highlight and the reason is the importance they achieved during the Corpus Christi celebrations to worship Jesus Christ’s presence in Sacred Form inside and out of the temple. His processions became one of the most baroque expressions in Peru; the streets would be all pomp and opulence for the triumphant Catholicism in combination with the exotic ways and customs of the natives. The anonymous series of twelve paintings known as the “Corpus del templo de Santa Ana” (“Corpus of Saint Anne’s Temple”), today preserved in the Archbishop’s Palace Museum in Cusco, is a precious graphic testimony of how this festivity was experienced and what social and cultural meaning it had. But there is also other literary information that describes the way this procession was celebrated in other places throughout the Viceroyalty, and in every case, we find it was extraordinarily festive and it praised the Joy and Triumph for the Eucharist that was imposed after Trent (1545–1563).
This festivity became the centre of all the religious celebrations. This explains the fact that monstrances grew in number and that we now study them, in their sizes and shapes and in their ornamentation, often prone to use pearls and precious stones, especially emeralds (of generous sizes), rubies and diamonds. They also used cabochons enamel (champlevé), that along with the pearls, also helped emphasise the chromatic aspect thanks to the variety of colours used (green, honey and navy blue preferably). The growing number of little figurative handles (angels-sirens) that transform and adapt their silhouettes giving them a more baroque style, as well as the use of leafy legs in its base in Lima silver crafts, or the use of winged cherubs in the Sierra and High Planes, the increase and superposition of figures on the handles and the peculiar way of representing the sun based on the use of many rectilinear rays (with no cross at the top), all of these will become identification codes for these Peruvian monstrances versus monstrances in the rest of the Hispanic world (peninsular and American).
The Church of Peru always tried to boost the majesty of the premises and the grandness of the divine cult through the use of spaces and objects, especially during the second half of the 17th Century and throughout the 18th Century. That is why the temple is decorated in the inside with total opulence with fronts, steps, sacrariums, tabernacles, oil lamps, votive lamps and a long list of objects related with the cult, along with others which are exclusively ornamental such as the mayas and the mariolas, plaques of different shapes, sizes and motives made in Peru and made to be exposed in the altar steps. They will contribute to obtain not only a greater decoration and highlighting of the altar, but also to create effects and contrasts with the lights thanks to the reflection of the candles on their surface, turning these altars into a game of lights and shadows that will undoubtedly thrill the faithful.
At a profane level, the use of silver and gold to adorn was used in all artistic expressions in such a way that both the city and the homes became the perfect stage to exhibit the precious metals, sometimes already turned into rich works of art and other times still only as ingots destined to pave the streets in a disproportionate display of ostentation. Famous are the occasions in which such a display was made, especially during the welcoming ceremonies of the viceroys of Lima. A very special example is the festivity for the arrival in 1682 of the Teruel-born Duke of la Palata; the streets were “from
top to bottom, from the inside to the outside, filled with fountains, washbasins and salvers, all made of white and gold silver (...) and emperors with silver bars, the most expensive of which cost two hundred marcs and there were four hundred ingots.”
In the homes, silver was present on the table through different pieces of tableware (plates, trays, salt shakers, cutlery, etc), as well as in objects related with wine (wine glasses, elongated cups [bernegales], coolers, ...), lighting (oil lamps and candlesticks), personal cleanliness (basins/shaving bowls, toothpicks, earcleaners) or washing of private parts (small chamberpots or syringes). In many occasions the richer classes in society ordered furniture be built in silver, like desks, coffee tables, writing cases, chests for personal belongings, braziers used for heating rooms, censers to perfume the air, etc.
But all this silverware, even though it followed formal and decorative guidelines transferred from Spain during its three century-long presence in Peru, still managed to “create” some prototypes, with a certain creative liberty, to cover their utilitarian needs and demonstrate their artistic taste. Native motives began to be noticeable in the 16th Century as some notable examples prove, such as the Potosí-style fountain in Siegen (Germany) dating from before 1586, or a bright Silver bathed [gallonado] plate found in the galleon “Nuestra Señora de Atocha” (sunk in 1622) and today preserved in the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society, in Key West (Florida).
Both cases are examples of the symbiosis between both worlds, for next to the Italian Renaissance vocabulary is another of a local nature, where lamas, tarucas (deer), vizcachas (rabbits), indigenous farmers dressed in traditional ways or an “iniatizado” cupid (with a feathered crest fastened on his head with a ribbon called llautu) reveal the incorporation of elements native of Peru, thus confirming the acculturation phenomenon which took place early on.
But among the wide production of profane silverwork wrought in colonial Peru, there are several pieces that deserve a special mention for being native to this Viceroyalty, answering the needs of its people, and therefore special to only this part of the Spanish America. We are referring to water-heaters (known as “pavas-hornillos”), some vessels with legs, spout, lid and handle destined to maintain the water hot to brew mate; mates and their bombillas (metal tube for drinking mate) in order to drink the hot Paraguayan yerba-mate infusion; and the boxes to keep the yerba-mate (that is why they are called “yerberas”) or the cocaine leaves (“coqueras”) that were chewed with small lime balls (“acullico” o “llipta”) in order to help the cocaine juices dissolve in the saliva; also the boxes destined to hold candy and sweets. They presented different shapes (a scallop shell—venera—or globular structure), sizes and styles (the ones made in silver correspond to the second half of the 18th Century) throughout the different times and centres where they were made, and their use was as firmly rooted in the society living in the Sierra and High Planes areas as in the capital of the viceroyalty. This is why travellers, like the well-known French engineer (and spy) Amadeo Frezier, who was in Lima at the beginning of the 18th Century, left proof, in an etching found in his book Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud (Amsterdam, 1717) of something that commanded his attention for being unknown to him but common in Peru and especially in Lima: the “mate drinking” ceremony celebrated in a room by three women accompanied by all these objects that are necessary for the ritual. Years later, a botanist named don Hipólito Ruíz y Pavón also spoke of it, in his Relación histórica del viaje...a los reinos de Peru y Chile (1777–1778), where he includes another etching of this ceremony, only this time it is a Creole woman from Lima who occupies the scene, always accompanied by the mate with the bombilla (metal tube for drinking mate) and the water-heater to brew the mate.
Varied and splendid was the selection of themes used to decorate the objects and offer a rich ornamentation that became more dense and “exotic” in times when ornaments took over surfaces, that is, during the second half of the 17th Century and onwards. All of Peru participated in a liking towards horror vacui, but while in Lima the artworks were more moderate and the ornamentation more in line with European heritage, the Andes region was known for its love for ambiguous and monstrous hybrid forms, where vegetation and animal motives combined together in a continuous metamorphosis. “Fantasy” played a decisive role and this is why its oneiric representations respond to an idealistic culture who insisted on evading from reality by trying to restore ambiguous forms that we link to
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