Object and Apparition

The subject of this book is the relationship between three- and two-dimensional divine images—that is, religious statues and paintings—in the colonial central Andes. It focuses as case studies on three statues of Christ and the Virgin and the representations of those statues in paintings: the Virgin of the Rosary in Pomata, the Virgin of the Purification in Copacabana, and the Lord of the Earthquakes in Cuzco. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi shows that statues were privileged conduits to the divine, at times verging on autonomous deities in their own right, while paintings documented and amplified those statues' power. In the end, it was the statue, not the painting, that granted worshippers' prayers and protected their communities.While the author's discipline is art history and the book includes some formal analysis, it focuses especially on the cultural history of religion, both elite and popular. Communities did not select their Christs or Virgins by chance. The dominant order in Pomata was the Dominicans, for whom the Rosary was a signature devotion; she offers a fascinating account of the historical interconnections between prayer beads, roses, the Virgin, and the religious orders, all of which underlay the Virgin of the Rosary's importance in Pomata. Augustinians, who controlled evangelization in Copacabana, identified their order with the faculty of vision and so embraced the Virgin of the Purification, who held a candle in her hand. Mary in her many manifestations was the most prominent sacred figure in the sixteenth-century Andes, but she was overtaken in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by manifestations of Christ, partly due to the emphasis placed on him in Jesuit devotions. The Lord of the Earthquakes was one of several forms of Christ competing for centrality in Cuzco; some archival detective work reveals a rather complicated relationship between this form of Christ and Cuzco's 1650 earthquake. One genre of painting celebrated the miracles that these statues of Christ and Mary accomplished, while another portrayed the individual statues, usually commissioned by a worshipper for her or his home. The reader takes away a vivid sense of the various statues and paintings as objects and personalities.It would be helpful to have a bit more theological background. The word advocation, referring to the different devotional forms of Christ and the Virgin (e.g., the Virgin of Sorrows, of the Immaculate Conception, or of the Rosary), is key to the argument; it appears often but is never defined. Different advocations of the same divine person were treated as distinct agencies, and so, to some extent, were individual statues of the same advocation, to which believers channeled their devotion individually or in confraternities. Paintings, meanwhile, were not autonomous agents but representations of the power of statues. A bit more background about these nested yet distinct devotional objects would enrich the book.How did the Andean experience fit into its larger context? Stanfield-Mazzi frames the book with the assertion that her images form “a uniquely Andean pantheon” (p. 183), one that was “forged uniquely in the Andes” (p. 8). But this assertion implies comparisons with the larger Hispanic and Catholic world, which the book does not supply enough of. Interestingly, when she addresses specific claims of Andean uniqueness, it is sometimes in order to rebut them. An example is the common claim that images of the Virgin that seem to resemble mountains (such as the Virgin of Potosí) reflect indigenous mountain huacas; in fact, she shows, European images of Mary often portrayed her in a similar, heavily draped and visually abstracted form, with her head seemingly perched on a mountain-like triangle. The chapter that most directly addresses the “uniquely Andean” side of the story is the first one, about the use of two- and three-dimensional sacred images by Andeans before the Spanish conquest. Based on archaeology and imaginative close readings of Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and the Huarochirí manuscript, she finds pre-Hispanic precedents for the supremacy of statues as well as the central role of the goddess-like Mary in the mid- and late sixteenth century. This chapter is among the most successful in the book.Still, the pre-Hispanic background does not seem to fully explain why statues were primary in colonial religion while paintings were secondary. One factor was the importance of confraternities and their processions, which carried statues (not paintings) through the streets and back to the church. Confraternities, the subject of a 2007 article by Stanfield-Mazzi, might have been worth exploring more fully here. But it is a sign of a successful book if the reader's only criticism is a desire for more information and broader coverage. Object and Apparition offers a fascinating exploration of the careers of different manifestations of Christ and Mary and a compelling argument about the relationship between two- and three-dimensional objects of devotion. And it includes abundant and beautiful reproductions of the images discussed

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Elite · Object (grammar) · Order (exchange) · Painting · Politics · Prayer · Statue · Subject (documents) · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy · Religious studies