"This unique volume illustrates and discusses in detail more than 160 extraordinary fine and decorative art works of the colonial Andes, including examples of the intricate Inca weavings and metalwork that preceded the colonial era as well as a few of the remarkably inventive forms this art took after independence from Spain. An international array of scholars and experts examines the cultural context, aesthetic preoccupations, and diverse themes of art from the viceregal period, particularly the florid patternings and the fanciful beasts and hybrid creatures that have come to characterize colonial Andean art."--Jacket.
A chronological overview of important art, sculpture, and architectural monuments of colonial Latin America within the economic and religious contexts of the era.
Reconstructs the history of the Virgin of Cuzco who, as a fusion of indigenous Andean and Spanish Christian beliefs and practices, represents both the Virgin Mary and Pachamama. Includes background chapters on Andean and Spanish beliefs and art. Major, mostly original work illuminates multiple aspe
This volume showcases dynamic developments in the field of manuscript research that go beyond traditional textual, iconographic, or codicological studies. Using state-of-the-art conservation technologies, scholars investigate how four manuscripts—the Galvin Murúa, the Getty Murúa, the Florentine Codex, and the Relación de Michoacán—were created and demonstrate why these objects must be studied in a comparative context. The forensic study of manuscripts provides art historians, anthropologists, curators, and conservators with effective methods for determining authorship, identifying technical innovations, and contextualizing illustrated histories. This information, in turn, allows for more nuanced arguments that transcend the information that the written texts and painted images themselves provide. The book encourages scholars to think broadly about the manuscripts of colonial Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and employ new techniques and methods of research.
The Andean Hybrid Baroque is the first comprehensive study of the architecture and architectural sculpture of Southern Peru in the late colonial period (1660s-1820s), an enduring and polemical subject in Latin American art history. In the southern Andes during the last century and a half of colonial rule, when the Spanish crown was losing its grip on the Americas and Amerindian groups began organizing into activist and increasingly violent political movements, a style of architectural sculpture emerged that remains one of the most vigorous and creative outcomes of the meeting of two cultures. The Andean Hybrid Baroque (also known as "Mestizo Style"), was a flourishing school of carving distinguished by its virtuoso combination of European late Renaissance and Baroque forms with Andean sacred and profane symbolism, some of it originating in the pre-Hispanic era. The Andean Hybrid Baroque found its genesis and most comprehensive iconographical expression in the architecture of Catholic churches, chapels, cloisters, and conventual buildings. Drawing on hundreds of primary documents and on ethno-historical and anthropological literature that has rarely been applied to an art-historical subject, Gauvin Alexander Bailey provides the most substantial study of colonial Peruvian architecture in decades. The product of five years of photographic surveys in Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina, as well as research in governmental and ecclesiastical archives in Latin America and Europe, Bailey's richly illustrated study examines the construction history and decoration of forty-four churches. It offers a fundamentally new understanding of the chronology, regional variations, and diffusion of the Andean Hybrid Baroque style, as well as a fresh interpretation of its relationship to indigenous Andean culture. "Gauvin Alexander Bailey's The Andean Hybrid Baroque is a magnificent and ambitious study that not only covers an important geographic area of the southern Andes but also encompasses, in an informative and ordered style, a complex and dense constellation of pre-Hispanic and European cultural references in constant change." --Ramon Mujica Pinilla, Universidad de San Marcos, Lima, Peru "Gauvin Alexander Bailey's new book will surely become a textbook and standard resource for Andean art and architecture. With exciting insights into the colonial period in the southern Andes for the avid reader, and with original archival research for the inquisitive scholar, The Andean Hybrid Baroque challenges many of the facile suppositions about the indigenous and European cultural encounter and religious worldview. The author examines church facades in Peru and Bolivia, dating and scrutinizing the detailed carving work of native artists and combining that visual information with the testimony of colonial historians, inquisition records, and the images on textiles and queros (drinking cups). The result is an original and nuanced contribution to Andean scholarship." --Jaime Lara, University of Notre Dame
Analysis of how a religious festival dramatized the subaltern status of indigenous converts and how these converts used this to construct positive colonial identities.
Writing has long been linked to power. For early modern people on both sides of the Atlantic, writing was also the province of notaries, men trained to cast other people’s words in official forms and make them legally true. Thus the first thing Columbus did on American shores in October 1492 was have a notary record his claim of territorial possession. It was the written, notarial word—backed by all the power of Castilian enforcement—that first constituted Spanish American empire. Even so, the Spaniards who invaded America in 1492 were not fond of their notaries, who had a dismal reputation for falsehood and greed. Yet Spaniards could not do without these men. Contemporary scholars also rely on the vast paper trail left by notaries to make sense of the Latin American past. How then to approach the question of notarial truth? Kathryn Burns argues that the archive itself must be historicized. Using the case of colonial Cuzco, she examines the practices that shaped document-making. Notaries were businessmen, selling clients a product that conformed to local “custom” as well as Spanish templates. Clients, for their part, were knowledgeable consumers, with strategies of their own for getting what they wanted. In this inside story of the early modern archive, Burns offers a wealth of possibilities for seeing sources in fresh perspective.
This title provides an in-depth and authoritative review of feeatherworking traditions in ancient Peru. The book includes a discussion of important recent discoveries, considerations of iconography, and basic technical characteristics of feather works.
Mark Thurner here offers a brilliant account of Peruvian historiography, one that makes a pioneering contribution not only to Latin American studies but also to the history of historical thought at large. He traces the contributions of key historians of Peru, from the colonial period through the present, and teases out the theoretical underpinnings of their approaches. He demonstrates how Peruvian historical thought critiques both European history and Anglophone postcolonial theory. And his deeply informed readings of Peru's most influential historians--from Inca Garcilaso de la Vega to Jorge Basadre--are among the most subtle and powerful available in English.
In Exquisite Slaves, Tamara J. Walker examines how slaves used elegant clothing as a language for expressing attitudes about gender and status in the wealthy urban center of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Lima, Peru. Drawing on traditional historical research methods, visual studies, feminist theory, and material culture scholarship, Walker argues that clothing was an emblem of not only the reach but also the limits of slaveholders' power and racial domination. Even as it acknowledges the significant limits imposed on slaves' access to elegant clothing, Exquisite Slaves also showcases the insistence and ingenuity with which slaves dressed to convey their own sense of humanity and dignity. Building on other scholars' work on slaves' agency and subjectivity in examining how they made use of myriad legal discourses and forums, Exquisite Slaves argues for the importance of understanding the body itself as a site of claims-making.
