2022 Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Book Prize, Bard Graduate Center
A landmark study of ancient Peruvian Moche mural art.
Moche murals of northern Peru represent one of the great, yet still largely unknown, artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Created in an era without written scripts, these murals are key to understandings of Moche history, society, and culture. In this first comprehensive study on the subject, Lisa Trever develops an interdisciplinary methodology of “archaeo art history” to examine how ancient histories of art can be written without texts, boldly inverting the typical relationship of art to archaeology.
Trever argues that early coastal artistic traditions cannot be reduced uncritically to interpretations based in much later Inca histories of the Andean highlands. Instead, the author seeks the origins of Moche mural art, and its emphasis on figuration, in the deep past of the Pacific coast of South America. Image Encounters shows how formal transformations in Moche mural art, before and after the seventh century, were part of broader changes to the work that images were made to perform at Huacas de Moche, El Brujo, Pañamarca, and elsewhere in an increasingly complex social and political world. In doing so, this book reveals alternative evidentiary foundations for histories of art and visual experience.
[Image Encounters] offers a vibrant and compelling study of Andean mural painting, especially for the Moche (or Mochica) culture. It revels in the complexity that the subject demands...as a highly original study of the medium in Moche culture, not to mention its innovative theoretical apparatus to consider the logic, understandings, and experience of Andean mural painting more broadly, Trever’s volume is absolutely essential and there is much to recommend...Image Encounters affords a breath-taking tour of this least studied of Andean monumental arts, and extends guidance to consider Moche imagery, image-making, and society anew. Demanding, eclectic, and thoughtful throughout.
Image Encounters is an exceedingly thoughtful and carefully crafted book . . . It will not only serve as the defining study of Moche murals for years to come but also substantially reframe scholarly understandings of the origins of wall art—and perhaps even art generally—in the ancient Andes.
Trever emphasizes that which survives: what Moche artisans created and the visual and somatic effects of their sculpture, painting, and architecture. These convictions set Trever’s work apart from a significant swath of scholarship on the Moche; they also introduce an experimental air to her book, for art historians too rarely write about ancient cultures by so fully cordoning off alphabetic writing that dates from the colonial (and even modern) period. Image Encounters reshapes prevailing understandings of Moche culture on many registers.
Moche murals are among the most spectacular monumental works known from the ancient Americas, yet until now they have been woefully understudied. Based on a thorough and thoughtful examination of the corpus, including newly revealed mural paintings and reliefs, Trever’s study integrates a variety of approaches to reveal new understandings of this aspect of ancient Andean art and culture. Bridging art history and archaeology, this volume is essential reading for both disciplines, as well as allied fields of architectural history and the history of religion.
Image Encounters is a joy to read. It heralds a new era in our understanding of ancient South America in several ways: through the innovative use of multimodal methods; through a novel contextual analysis that situates the Moche broadly and deeply in time and space; and through a firm and authoritative rejection of reading the Indigenous past through a colonial lens. This book promises to be a discipline-changing work for not only South Americanists but also scholars of Mesoamerica and Native North America.
Image Encounters gives birth to what the author calls archaeo art history, a well-balanced perspective in which she approaches the best practices of two fields of study. Using a splendid and straightforward narrative, the book explores the foundations and trajectories of mural art in ancient Andean monumental architecture. Writing with the soul of an artist and the heart of an archaeologist, Trever chronicles the transition to the mural paintings that covered Pañamarca and other contemporaneous monuments.
Image Encounters is a magisterial account of mural art on the coast of Peru. Trever makes a compelling case that a capacious understanding of mural art—encompassing painting, modeled clay, petroglyphs, and graffiti—best allows us to understand a millennia-long coastal tradition in many ways distinct from the more familiar highland Andean tradition that has often shaped our understanding of coastal art.
Introduction: Image Encounters
Chapter 1. Mural Origins and Coastal Corporealities
Chapter 2. Ancestral Divinities, Norcosteño Design, and the Aesthetics of Replication in Moche Mural Art (200–650 CE)
Chapter 3. Siting Narratives: Moche Mural Painting and the Condensation of a Medium (650–850 CE)
Chapter 4. Archaeo-Iconology: An Archaeology of Image Experience and Response
Conclusions. On the Huaca
Notes
Bibliography
Index
