Potosí global

In four brief chapters, renowned historian of the colonial Andes Rossana Barragán takes us around the world in a dozen pictures, explaining along the way how the silver mountain known as the Cerro Rico de Potosí became a global icon.Chapter 1 begins with the iconic 1553 image of the Cerro Rico published in Seville by Pedro de Cieza de León and its afterlife in the work of Agustín de Zárate (1555) and then in the various versions of the Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi produced between 1580 and the late nineteenth century in Istanbul, at first as manuscripts and later as printed books. Drawing from a great well of sources, Barragán focuses on the significance of early publishing houses and the key role of Antwerp in disseminating New World chronicles. She sets Cieza de León's rather precisely labeled Cerro Rico, which matches his rich textual description, alongside Zárate's less detailed copy, which was reproduced in London and elsewhere as Zárate's work moved around Europe (Cieza de León's somewhat less so). Either way, the iconic image was picked up by Ottoman artists illustrating translations of Zárate and by other chroniclers to compose the Tarih-i Hind-i Garbi, the best image appearing in a colored miniature from circa 1600 (Barragán's choice cover illustration). Building on the pioneering work of Thomas Goodrich, Barragán offers a fine comparison of the various Ottoman Potosís in images and text, the latter revealing shifting interimperial political rivalries. Many a sultan would have liked a piece of Potosí.Chapter 2 takes us inside the inferno with Theodor de Bry, whose equally iconic 1601 image of Indigenous mita workers laboring inside the Cerro Rico was widely distributed and tied to the so-called Black Legend. As this image was not so frequently altered along the way, as happened with Cieza de León's Cerro Rico (although some circa 1660 variations are left out of the book), Barragán turns instead to the earlier German tradition of illustrating mining scenes, especially in Georgius Agricola's De re metallica (1556). But Barragán also reminds us of how de Bry used José de Acosta's popular Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1590) as the basis for his engraving, which despite its oddness and physical impossibility hews pretty closely to the original.Chapter 3 focuses on the Indigenous artist Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and his symbolic rendering of the Cerro Rico in his own great epistle, the Nueva corónica, and in Martín de Murúa's unpublished works. Barragán gives some potential credence to the Laura Laurencich Minelli documents regarding Guaman Poma de Ayala, but Barragán's interest is mostly in the interplay between iconography and text. The circa 1590 Galvin Murúa manuscript image of the Cerro Rico, with its giant Inca looming over the mountain, seems like a precursor. The point that Guaman Poma de Ayala wished to make was that Peru, and more specifically its Cerro Rico, was the “support for your columns,” a reminder to the king of Spain that Native Andeans were what made empire possible (p.52). For this they at least deserved good government. Barragán ends with a word on the still less known image of the Cerro Rico drawn by Hieronymite friar Diego de Ocaña circa 1600, which looks like a perforated version of Cieza de León's representation. Ocaña called it “the eighth wonder of the world” (p.54).Chapter 4 treats the curious pair of arches designed by Peter Paul Rubens for the 1635 grand reopening of the Antwerp mint, which coined a great share of Potosí silver, much of it to pay troops in the losing war with the United Provinces of the Netherlands. This is the book's most richly illustrated chapter and also the most novel. A few art historians have examined Rubens's designs, which were numerous—mostly watercolors—and popularly reproduced in engravings. But they have been mostly examined as parts of Rubens's great oeuvre, not as links to the global phenomenon that was Potosí's Cerro Rico (an exception is Christine Göttler). As Barragán points out, the arches were intended to celebrate the arrival of a new governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Ferdinand of Austria, and also the 1634 Battle of Nördlingen, but the allegorical imagery on display was sharply focused on the seemingly limitless output of the Cerro Rico (a gift of God to the Hapsburg defenders of global Catholicism) and also on the Antwerp guild of coiners, who banged out millions of patagones each year inside the mint structure.Barragán ends with a brief reflection on her surprise at finding the image of Potosí's Cerro Rico so widespread so early. The mineral riches of Peru were known in China as they were in India, in Turkey, and throughout Europe. And with this knowledge came judgment, especially in the indelible image of de Bry, unmasking the brutal labor conditions that made Potosí silver along with global commerce and interimperial war possible, at least on a much larger scale than seen before. Barragán is right to ask what such sacrifices might have meant to an ordinary Antwerper watching the entrance of the new governor-prince in 1635. One might say that the curse of Potosí silver, or the curse of the inimitable Cerro Rico, killed Peter Paul Rubens

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