Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between

Any scholar who has visited remote Andean parish churches has likely marveled at the intricate polychrome painted murals adorning their walls, porticoes, and even ceilings. As befits their sacred locations, these murals, usually painted by indigenous artists, often portray religious scenes that were meant to inspire devotion—and discourage heresy—among those who viewed them. Yet a carefully trained eye can simultaneously detect details of pre-Hispanic culture, artistic traditions, and even religious beliefs—a tantalizing reminder of how, particularly in the colonial Andes, visual and material artifacts can offer the most promising avenues to seeing and understanding the colonial Andean peoples who in so many cases created no documentary records of their own.Since the early 2000s, scholars like Carolyn Dean and Barbara Mundy have combined the techniques of cultural history and art history, suggesting fresh methodologies for scholars wishing to study indigenous agency in colonial Spanish America through the visual and material record. By combining the methods of trained art historians with broader questions about identity, belonging, and resistance that so interest cultural historians, they have laid new ground in our ability to see or to understand the all-too-often-silenced indigenous voices in Latin America's colonial past. However, this vibrant field of study had yet to provide a comprehensive English-language overview of one of the most ubiquitous vernacular forms of colonial Andean art: mural paintings. Ananda Cohen Suarez's Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between does an admirable job of filling that void. By studying some of the most significant murals in the Andes, she shows how “murals converted the space of the church into a place of community and localized knowledge, envisioning not just heaven and hell but, most importantly, all that lay in between” (p. 187).Although the murals in question were created throughout the course of the colonial period, Cohen Suarez shows how they were linked to pre-Hispanic visual traditions, particularly the abstract geometric patterns that adorned Inca buildings, ceramics, and fabrics; the use of tierras de colores and local minerals for paint; and the communal working patterns that explain why the overwhelming majority of these works give no certain clues about who created them. Cohen Suarez's painstaking analysis shows how a mural depicting the path to heaven and hell at the Andahuaylillas church (a structure celebrated, the reader learns, as “the ‘Sistine Chapel of the Americas’”) served as a visual aid accompanying fiery sermons about the afterlife (p. 52).The book also takes on the stylized “textile murals” that adorned many church walls and ceilings, featuring geometric or decorative patterns meant to replicate fine fabrics. Here the author makes the intriguing suggestion that Andean people were both complying with the instructions of their parish priests and celebrating their own traditions of pre-Hispanic worship, because when they painted symbolic fabric on the walls of their churches, they were echoing the Andean tradition of wrapping shrines and sacred objects in fine cloth. These patterns on church walls, Cohen Suarez argues, were positioning the church as the sacred object, adorning and protecting it with native cultural traditions encapsulated in the fabric itself. Similarly, when instructed to paint murals depicting Christian baptism, the Andeans composed visual connections between the baptismal waters and their own traditional pacarinas, or holy places in the landscape—often watery ones—from which they believed humans emerged and became linked to their ancestors on earth.In sum, this 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. Yet from the methodological perspective of history, the work might have benefited from deeper engagement with the sort of questions about identity, conflict, and representation that make the scholarship of Mundy, Dean, and others so productive and groundbreaking. Furthermore, although the author visited parish and archbishopric archives in Cuzco, searching through account books, inventories, and libros de fábrica for the (unsurprisingly) rare mentions of church mural paintings, this historian, for one, wonders if Cohen Suarez could have done a bit more with what little documentation was available to her, particularly in order to leave archival bread crumbs for the future scholars who may endeavor to build on her insightful work on this important subject

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Heaven · Indigenous · Literature · Mural · Painting · Sociology · Vernacular · Visual arts · Anthropology · History · Latin American history and culture