Overview

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.

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9781477309551

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Reviews

[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. * Hispanic American Historical Review * [A] well-written and amply illustrated contribution to Andean colonial history. * The Americas * 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. * Bulletin of Latin American Research * 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. * Ethnohistory * 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. * CAA Reviews *

[A] well-written and amply illustrated contribution to Andean colonial history. * The Americas * [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. * Hispanic American Historical Review *

[T]his is an important book that makes a valuable contribution to a dynamic filled. It fills in many lacunae in our understanding of Andean mural culture. * Hispanic American Historical Review *

Author Information

Ananda Cohen Suarez is an assistant professor of history of art at Cornell University. She coauthored Handbook to Life in the Inca World.

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