Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between
Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between
Murals of the Colonial Andes
Examining the vivid, often apocalyptic church murals of Peru from the early colonial period through the nineteenth century, Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between explores the sociopolitical situation represented by the artists who generated these murals for rural parishes. Arguing that the murals were embedded in complex networks of trade, commerce, and the exchange of ideas between the Andes and Europe, Ananda Cohen-Aponte also considers the ways in which artists and viewers worked through difficult questions of envisioning sacredness.
This study brings to light the fact that, unlike the murals of New Spain, the murals of the Andes possess few direct visual connections to a pre-Columbian painting tradition; the Incas’ preference for abstracted motifs created a problem for visually translating Catholic doctrine to indigenous congregations, as the Spaniards were unable to read Inca visual culture. Nevertheless, as Cohen Suarez demonstrates, colonial murals of the Andes can be seen as a reformulation of a long-standing artistic practice of adorning architectural spaces with images that command power and contemplation. Drawing on extensive secondary and archival sources, including account books from the churches, as well as on colonial Spanish texts, Cohen Suarez urges us to see the murals not merely as decoration or as tools of missionaries but as visual archives of the complex negotiations among empire, communities, and individuals.
[T]his is an important book that makes a valuable contribution to a dynamic field. It fills in many lacunae in our understanding of Andean mural culture.
[A] well-written and amply illustrated contribution to Andean colonial history.
A clearly written, mostly jargon-free, and scholarly book, which manages at once to be rigorous and comprehensible to a wider audience…The story [Cohen-Aponte] tells, of murals progressing from being a locally mediated tool of evangelisation to a medium for social critique, is compelling and convincing.
The field should be grateful to have this book, both for the scholarly inroads it makes into this corpus and for its unusually readable and well-encapsulated chapters, which make it a wonderful teaching resource.
The author presents us with an all-encompassing view that covers over two hundred years. She takes excellent art historical interpretations of Christian iconography into new territories of social discourse to offer a description of the murals within the context of sacred architectural space.
An insightful, thorough, and well-presented book that adds significant new scholarship to the study of mural painting in the Andean region. Cohen Suarez urges the reader to regard the murals she studies as visual archives capable of revealing the complex ways that artists and viewers negotiated a conceptual space in the world they inhabited and created. She masterfully demonstrates the advantages of her approach, revealing a world of negotiated meanings that are not readily apparent.
Beautifully written and very well argued. With unique interpretations and several original archival discoveries, the book highlights the potential of murals as an art form, applied to a relatively little-known mural tradition.
Chapter One: The Painted Walls of the Andes: Chronology, Techniques, and Meanings
Chapter Two: The Road to Hell is Paved with Flowers: Journeys to the Afterlife at the Church of Andahuaylillas
Chapter Three: Clothing the Architectonic Body: Textile Murals of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
Chapter Four: Turning the Jordan River into a Pacarina: Murals of the Baptism of Christ at the Churches of Urcos and Pitumarca
Chapter Five: Earthly Violence/Divine Justice: Tadeo Escalante’s Murals at the Church of Huaro
Conclusion
Abbreviations
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