Page 306 - Perú indígena y virreinal

INAUGURATION OF TEMPLES
Another kind of celebration of a religious nature are the inauguration of temples in the City of Kings, that motivated processions and ephemeral architecture in arches and altars. We have a first example in the 17th Century, with a big celebration in honour of the newly finished Desamparados church in 1672. A book was planned to explain it in great detail, with illustrations, altars, allegorical chariots and arches, but unfortunately, with the viceroy count Lemos’death, the project never came to pass.
Already in the 18th Century we find an example in Francisco Ruiz Cano’s book Júbilos de Lima, published in 1755, where he explains the festivities organised for the re- inauguration of the Metropolitana Cathedral after the damages suffered in the 1746 earthquake were repaired. The author stops to describe the ephemeral alters built in the streets where the procession went by and which were financed by different religious orders and guilds in the city. They explained that, while the structure of the altarpiece—usually three sections high—was ephemeral, the sculptures and the liturgical silver and gold objects adorning it were brought from the temples. We will only stand out some of the altars found during the procession’s route, such as the Franciscans’ altar on Pescadería street, that bears the image of the Immaculate and several of the Order’s saints; the one belonging to the cajoneros de la Ribera guild that includes spiral columns as a novelty, along with saints and allegories of the theological virtues; the Dominicans’ altar, four sections high, that included a silver throne with the statue of their foundational saint and other Dominican saints, angels with ovals that included paintbrush or pen motifs, as the author points out. One of the richest altars is the one on Mantas street, made possible by the merchants’ guild, and covered in silver and gold, in three sections with Our Lady of the Rosary in the centre and in the last section, the apostle Saint James surrounded by the four evangelists and in a first section, the cenacle. Another one of the altars bearing jewels was placed on the side of the Augustinian cemetery, which featured a rich monstrance, a piece of the Christ’s cross inside a glass heart. Apart from the altars, there were also triumphal arches like the one created by rector Manuel de Silva y la Vanda in the surroundings of his home, and fireworks machines that represented the marvels of the world such as the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Colossus of Rhodes, the statue of Jupiter at Olympia and the pyramids in Egypt.
In 1771 Felipe Colmenares publishes his book entitled El día deseado... (The desired day), a bibliographic jewel of the 18th Century that describes the festivities held for the inauguration of the Nazarene church in Lima on January the 20th of that same year. In it, we can read about the origin and progress of the effigy of the Santo Cristo de los Milagros (Our Lord of the Miracles) that raises so much devotion in Peru even today. Apart from the description of the new temple, an illustration by José Vázquez was included in the book, representing a magnificent view of the interior.
In conclusion we can state, based on the examples selected in these few lines, that the symphony of cultural expressions of European and American origins intertwine in every celebration, whether it be religious or profane, in the City of Kings, blending in a melting pot that created a new culture.
utopia and achievements in the lima of the 18th century
Leonardo Mattos-Cárdenas
URBAN DEVELOPMENT UP TO 1760
Throughout the 18th Century, the opulence and ostentation that had characterised Peru’s capital were clearly on the decline, making it somewhat unusual to celebrate events by paving the city’s main street with silver, as they had to welcome the new Viceroy, the Duke of Palata in 1681. During the 17th Century, Lima had taken baroque to its heart; in 1685 its
adobe city walls and bulwarks were built—almost threatening if the etchings of the period are to be believed—whilst other buildings were adorned with elaborate facades, especially after the earthquake of 1687. The city also had a heavily fortified port, Callao, with its numerous houses, churches and public and private establishments.
The Count of Monclova, Viceroy of Peru from 1689 to 1705, began the century by commissioning the stone arches that line two sides of the Plaza Mayor and improvements to the Viceroy’s Palace. These works were continued under the auspices of the Government of the Audiencia (1705–1707), declaring that “for the embellishment of the palaces of Lima and Callao, the necessary portions of distribution, perfection and beauty have been released in accordance with what has been done on other occasions”.
Lima, however, for both its layout and palace—“that had nothing magnificent about it” according to the Jesuit, J. Nyel, who visited it in 1705—was never a baroque city in the European sense of the world, and even less a sort of Tropical Versailles, as a print from the period, produced in Amsterdam, tried to suggest.
The fantasy, nevertheless, continued to be propagated, and the interest of pirates and corsairs, from which, the city’s cosmographer don Pedro de Peralta wrote, was not well defended. During the reign of Fernando VI, Peralta presented a project for a pentagonal citadel to the Viceroy Marquis de Villagarcia (1736–1745), which he had planned to be built on the road to the port, at Chacra Rios—“like those of Milan, in Lombardy, of Santangel in Rome, of Saint Julian in Lisbon and of Pamplona in Navarre”. His proposals were not acted upon, although interest in them did re-emerge with the new monarch, Carlos III, in 1781.
During the rule of Viceroy Manso de Velasco (1745–1761) the city suffered its worst ever earthquake on the night of the 28th of October, 1746, destroying a large part of the city and claiming more tan 10,000 lives—a fifth of Lima’s population. On the coast, it was “the agent of an elevation of the waves (as Velasco wrote in his Memoirs), flattening Callao and penetrating many miles inland. The Viceroy, the Audiencia and the Ecclesiastical Council all attended to the effects of the tragedy and helped in the reconstruction process, analysing proposals and carrying out public works.
The idea of moving the capital was discussed to within a parallelogram bordered on one side by the river and on two others by the Del Pino and La Polvora haciendas, or estates (today known as Agustino and La Parada). A new Viceroy’s Palace was proposed, to be built at Chacra Rios as well as a fort on the San Bartolome hill (currently named Agustino), in order to defend the city from attacks from both outside and from the indigenous population. These proposals were rejected, as many properties were mortgaged and abandoning them in favour of a newly built city would have caused great losses, principally to the religious orders that had originally lent the money.
Professor Luis Godin, of San Marcos University, put forward other alternatives. His first idea was to widen existing streets, building octagonal blocks with walls measuring only 4 varas—the Hispanic yard, measuring 2.8 feet—and in order to recuperate the terrain lost from widening the streets, he proposed demolishing the city walls. The Viceroy and the Audiencia considered the idea to be “beautiful, yet it would suppose the funding of a city as an imitation of Palermo, obliging us to flatten all that is standing in order to construct on these ruins a new city, a project that is recognised as being insurmountably difficult. Palermo did indeed have an octagonal central square, built in the 17th Century during the Spanish Viceroyalty.
They finally opted to conserve the city and its layout, rebuilding under guidelines established by Godin, such as constructing only low buildings in adobe, and only very occasionally higher ones using quincha, a special kind of dried mud brick. Roofs and vaulted ceilings were to be built from wood, thatch, mud or plaster. Godin’s proposals concerning building lower facades and columns, avoiding balconies or bay windows, substituting high bell towers for lower belfries were largely left to one side, although, as Vargas Ugarte S.J. explains, these new, smaller belfries were added to various churches including Jesus and Mary, Mercedarias, Carmen, Copacabana as well as to others that have since disappeared such as Saint Theresa, Desamparados and Guadalupe.
The Viceroy, Manso de Velasco, was offered the title of Count, an honour he accepted, taking the name of Superunda, not because he felt himself to be “above the waves”, as the translation from Latin and some writers have suggested, but rather we feel, in memory
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