N A T I V E A R T I S T S A N D P A T R O N S IN C O L O N I A L L A T I N A M E R I C A CONTRIBUTORS Ellen T.Baird University of Illinois at Chicago Tom Cummins University of Chicago Carolyn S. Dean University of California, Santa Cruz Carlos Espinosa FLACSO, Quito, Ecuador Jeanette Favrot Peterson University of California, Santa Barbara NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA Edited by Emily Umberger and Tom Cummins VOLUME SEVEN PH0EBUS - A JOURNAL OF ART HISTORY ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY General Editors Ju Hsi Chou and Emily Umberger Design Thomas Detrie Printed in the United States Copyright 1995 Arizona Board of Regents All Rights Reserved Arizona State University Vigorously Pursues Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity In memory of our friend and colleague Donald Rabiner He laid before us the light, the torch, the model, the measure, the wide mirror. CONTENTS Preface 9 Synthesis and Survival JEANETTE FAVROT PETERSON 14 Adaptation and Accommodation ELLEN T. BAIRD 36 The Madonna and the Horse TOM CUMMINS 52 Colonial Visions CARLOS ESPINOSA 84 Who's Naughty and Nice CAROLYN S. DEAN 107 PREFACE THIS VOLUME FOCUSES on art sponsored or produced by native Latin Americans during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in areas formerly controlled by the Aztec and Inca empires. The authors are among a growing number of scholars who view the cultural productions of the Spanish colonies as resulting not from an unbalanced binary opposition between Europeans and Amerindians, but from a more complex situation of historical dynamics involving the contestations of power. This view runs contrary to more traditional approaches that see native societies at the time of the Conquest as an undifferentiated unity, historically unresponsive and incapable of change, and as passive recipients of European 'influences/ Here, in contrast, native artists and patrons emerge as active and conscious co-shapers of colonial culture, who manipulate visual forms to create sites of self-representation; and no single or essential form of native participation is seen as dominant. With the increasing numbers of examples brought forth in recent years, it is becoming obvious that native productions varied greatly and that this variety was a function of a multitude of factors. Most salient among these are differences in the sequences of historical events in particular places, in Spanish imposition of cultural norms, in the specifics of native traditions, and in individual choices. The volume begins with two articles on the artists of central Mexico in the Viceroyalty of New Spain during the second half of the sixteenth century, some of whom conceivably might have been trained in the last years before the fall of the Aztec empire in 1521. Jeanette Favrot Peterson focuses on the inclusion of preHispanic motifs in church murals, while Ellen T. Baird studies the illustrations of Fray Bernardino de Sahagun's great encyclopedic work on the Aztecs - both cases in which native artists were working under the close supervision of European humanists. In the church murals, Peterson investigates to what extent obvious and less obvious native motifs may have retained pre-Hispanic meanings and how these supplemented or subverted the Christian messages intended by the friar-patrons. For Peterson (as for other authors in this volume) the question of audience reception is as important as artists' and patrons' intentions. How were different motifs read by Spaniards and natives of different social and educational 9 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA levels? Especially interesting are murals, like those at Ixmiquilpan, which reveal the intellectual collaboration of native artists educated by the friars, and the complexity of the resulting syntheses of ideas.1 In contrast to Peterson, Baird's questions deal with the meaning of style itself. She questions a scholarly tradition that conceives of changes from pre-Hispanic to European modes as a gradual progression over time based solely on degree of native acculturation and skill. Recent studies reveal a more complex situation, with conscious choice being an important factor. Here Baird speculates on Sahagun's reasons for having his artists illustrate the Florentine Codex with obviously Europeanized drawings as opposed to the more native style of his first work, the Primeros Memoriales. She suggests that it was not a matter of evolution but rather of intended audience. While Baird concentrates on the early colonial period and the non-native patron who directed the project (the input of Sahagun's informant-collaborators being difficult to determine), other recent studies reveal that native patrons and artists might choose styles appropriate to their own agendas, as in the late seventeenth-century Techialoyan manuscripts, which are in an archaizing native style.2 Brought out also in Baird's discussion are symbolic aspects of Renaissance mathematical perspective and the complex of ideas that accompanied it - ideas that Americanists sometimes forget were new in Europe as well and the subject of much theoretical speculation. In the third article, Tom Cummins bridges the gap between Mexico and South America by comparing sixteenth-century colonial images from both areas. He focuses on two examples in which Europeanate depictions (the Virgin Mary and an equestrian figure) were inserted into traditional Mexican and Andean contexts, respectively. Cummins uses accompanying documents in the Mexican case and analogies from ethnohistoric evidence in the Peruvian case to ascertain how these images would have been read. In addition to illustrating their new contextualization, his comparison points out some essential differences between the two areas of study in both pre- and post-Hispanic times. In South America preConquest Inca art tended to represent concepts through abstract symbols, and even natural motifs took the form of non-narrative emblems alluding to a complex of ideas through metaphor. The Inca did not have recordation systems besides bundles of knotted strings called quipus. In contrast, pre-Columbian Mexicans had documents and 'books' in which they recorded information in pictographs of natural motifs and hieroglyphic writing. Narrative readings of sequential images were not unusual; most notable are the historical manuscripts. The Mexican codex that Cummins studies here is an early colonial transformation of the native manuscript tradition, examples of which continued to appear until 10 PREFACE the nineteenth century (for instance, the Techialoyans mentioned above). In contrast, Cummins' second object, a gold bracelet, is exemplary of the type of materials remaining from the colonial Andean area, where native leaders commissioned a range of hybrid works making visible their liminal position between native and European societies. These include Europeanate oil portraits of Andeans in traditional costumes, ceremonial drinking cups (keros) decorated with narrative scenes, and textiles and costumes with mixed native, European, and Asian imagery.3 In Mexico, few examples of this type of hybrid object remain, although documents and paintings indicate the continued use of archaic costumes and other traditional paraphernalia throughout the colonial period.4 The final two articles by Carlos Espinosa and Carolyn S. Dean deal with seventeenth-century South American native elites in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Carlos Espinosa focuses not on the reading of particular objects, but rather on the historical and ceremonial contexts in which genealogical paintings and archaizing paraphernalia were used, as well as the deeper intellectual structures behind their manipulation. Utilizing court records from near Quito (Ecuador) at the northern end of the former Inca empire, he presents the readings of both natives and Spaniards of a sequence of events in a power play between an Inca descendant and the colonial authorities. Among other things, Espinosa argues that ceremonies featuring figures wearing Inca costumes (termed 'dances of the Conquest') were sponsored by Spanish administrators to justify and validate the colonial political structure and, in addition, that native elites were co-producers of the ceremonies. In the case he examines, the Inca 'pretender' subverts these ceremonies and their pre-Conquest imagery. In the last article, Carolyn Dean studies a set of paintings from Cuzco, the former Inca capital, recording a Christian religious procession with Andean participants, including figures in Incaic costumes. Commissioned by native elite patrons to decorate a parish church, their creation was an act of devotion directed toward colonial administrators. Like Espinosa, Dean has argued elsewhere that these types of ceremonies incorporating indigenous elements did not represent a veiled version of a pre-Conquest harvest ceremony, as usually supposed, but rather the purposeful evocation of the indigenous ceremony in the context of European, here Christian, triumph.5 In this article, Dean focuses on the depicted spectators of the procession, among them Spaniards and both upper and lower class natives. Significant for Dean is the depiction of some lower class Andean adults as misbehaving like children represented in both groups, while native elite and Spanish adults do not. Dean uses this as a basis for contrasting European and traditional Inca attitudes toward childhood and for pointing out the European ii NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA view of unacculturated Andeans as being like children.6 Telling too is the fact that this negative depiction of Andeans reveals native acceptance of European prejudicial ideas, or more accurately, elite acceptance of ideas about the lower class, less acculturated 'other/ As noted at the outset, these essays represent a relatively recent approach, and as such they only begin to reveal the varied textures of colonial experience as manifested in art. For the most part, the native viewpoints represented here are those of elites, whether emanating from artists working for (or collaborating with) the regular clergy of New Spain or those in the employ of native Andeans. We cannot pretend that they are the only forms of representation from these particular groups. Ethnic, racial, and class differences invariably involved different sites of contestation and led to competing and contradictory statements. In addition, some natives enjoyed greater isolation and their productions do not manifest the same motivations as those of natives operating in and near urban centers. Only with the further progress of such material and cultural studies will w e be able to map the patterns of native production in greater detail and integrate the results into broader discussions of colonial contestations - whether political, economic, social, or sexual. Jeanette Peterson's article is an outgrowth of a paper delivered at the 1985 International Congress of Americanists in Bogota, Colombia. Ellen Baird's article was first given as a paper at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference inTempe, Arizona, in 1987. Tom Cummins' article developed from a paper given at the College Art Association in Houston, Texas, in 1988. Carlos Espinosa's article derives from his dissertation research on colonial cultural institutions and has not been presented previously. Carolyn Dean's article was delivered as a paper at the Association of Latin American Art session at the 1987 Houston College Art Association meeting. We are grateful to Seymour Rosen, former Dean of the ASU College of Fine Arts, and Robert Barnhill, Vice-president for Research and Strategic Initiatives, for additional publication funds. We also thank Anne Gully for editorial help. EMILY UMBERGER AND TOM CUMMINS 12 PREFACE Notes 1. For example, in the murals at Ixmiquilpan, depicting a struggle between good and evil as a type of just war' between Christianized and pagan Indians, native artists reinterpreted the pre-Conquest concept of'sacred warfare' between civilized (Aztec) and uncivilized (enemy) groups. For Aztec 'sacred warfare,' see Alfonso Caso, El Teocalli de la Guerra Sagrada (Mexico, 1927); for representations, see Emily Umberger, Art and Imperial Strategy inTenochtitlan,' in Aztec Imperial Strategies, by Frances F. Berdan and others (Washington DC, in press). For Spanish ideas on 'just warfare,' see John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World, second edition (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970); Carlos Espinosa, this volume. Narration: Kero Imagery of Peru and the Colonial Alteration ofNative Identity, PhD dissertation (University of California, Los Angeles, 1988), and'We are the Other: Peruvian Portraits of Colonial Karakakuna,' in Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno (Los Angeles and Berkeley, 1991), 203-31. 4. For example, an unusual painting of a colonial Indian village depicting traditional objects and archaic garb in ceremonial use, in the Museo de America, Madrid (Teresa Castello Yturbide and Marita Martinez del Rio de Redo, Biombos mexicanos [Mexico, 1970], 133-37). Of such traditional objects only wooden drums and sherds of utilitarian ceramics remain. 5. Carolyn S. Dean, Painted Images ofCuzco's 2. For these, see H. R. Harvey, 'Techialoyan Corpus Christi: Social Conflict and Cultural Codices: Seventeenth-century Indian Land Strategy in Viceregal Peru, PhD dissertation Titles in Central Mexico,' in Handbook of (University of California, Los Angeles, 1990), Middle American Indians, Supplement 4: 12-13 and chapter 8. Ethnohistory, editedby Victoria Reifler Bricker, 6. The depiction of children as exemplars of Ronald Spores, and Patricia A.Andrews adult behavior is part of a broader trend in (Austin, 1986), 153-64; and Stephanie seventeenth-century Hispanic art. See espeG.Wood, 'Don Diego Garcia de Mendoza cially the art of the Spanish painter Murillo Moctezuma: A Techialoyan Mastermind?' (Diego Angulo Iniguez and others, Bartolome Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl, XIX (1989), 245-68. Esteban Murillo 1617-1682, exhibition catalog 3. See Thomas B. F. Cummins, Abstraction to [London, 1982]). 13 Synthesis and Survival The Native Presence in Sixteenth-century Murals of New Spain JEANETTE FAVROT PETERSON IN THE AFTERMATH of the Conquest of New Spain (now Mexico) much of elite native culture was destroyed. That not all vestiges of pre-Hispanic civilization were eradicated has been the subject of recent scholarship that examines trends within the rich matrix of colonial society at the ' sub-imperial' level, to use George Collier's term.1 In spite of the overwhelming imposition of European institutions, native traditions in language, socio-political organization, and religion persisted. The tenacity of indigenous cultures is now becoming better recognized, and native components are being interpreted as having affected and at times having reformulated Euro-Christian concepts and values. Less attention, however, has been paid to acculturation in works of art, notably those created in the sixteenth century under the supervision of the three mendicant orders, the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians. Early scholars in the field of colonial Mexican art were interested mainly in validating its European ancestry, and, for the most part, they either ignored or disparaged native features. In 1942, in an attempt to reintegrate colonial art under the rubric of Mexican studies, Jose Moreno Villa called for an end to its evaluation solely by analogy with European standards; and he set out to emphasize the unique aspects of el arte mexicano, coining the term tequitqui ('tributary' in Nahuatl, the Aztec language) for art created by native artisans under Spanish rule.2 Several decades elapsed before serious attention was directed at the native components of early colonial architecture and monastic sculpture and painting.3 This paper briefly examines some of the pre-Hispanic expressive forms and accompanying beliefs that survived as viable entities in sixteenth-century mural painting. I draw from four mural cycles executed by teams of native muralists in Augustinian monasteries of central Mexico. My purpose is first to determine the degree to which pre-Columbian motifs in wall painting were meaningful, and thus, presumably purposeful, and second to understand the motivations of the Augustinian friars who allowed and even exploited the pre-Conquest features they recognized in the murals. Although identifying and describing native style features in mendicant art are 14 S Y N T H E S I S AND SURVIVAL necessary first steps (that is, questions of what was represented and where), more intriguing questions are those addressing issues of meaning and function (or how and why). In other words, did these native features serve a purpose? If so, for whom? Further, if they were recognized as indigenous, that is, potentially pagan, why were they permitted by the same friars who were intent on extirpating all that posed a threat to Christianity? Only in analyzing the mechanisms of continuity and transformation can we understand the dynamics of the interchange between native and European. Granted that a collaborative effort was required to produce the great corpus of mendicant art, the native artist emerges as an active participant with some degree of autonomy and creative freedom. The Native Muralists The importance of visual aids to the mendicants' ambitious program of indoctrination and conversion needs to be emphasized. Like the painted cloths used by the friars to illustrate doctrinal concepts, monastic wall paintings were primarily didactic. Since murals with public access were used as billboard-sized proclamations, they helped to communicate Christian doctrine and impart the required code of behavior. However, the ornate churches and oversized cloisters, the settings of the mendicant program, were built, decorated, and maintained primarily by native labor and with native tribute monies.4 In their construction and decoration, the friars relied on the sheer numbers and 'innate' ability of the Indians. They took particular pride in the quantity and quality of indigenous painting - the result of skills already evident in the rich pre-Conquest tradition of manuscript and wall painting. Of native talent, the friar-teacher, Diego Valades, wrote, 'They also learn to paint and to draw in colors the images of things, and they arrive at doing it delicately.'5 The success of these native artists can be measured by the ordinances of the painters' guild issued first in 1557, then again in 1586, to protect European professionals from their competition.6 To train their artists in Renaissance canons and Christian iconography, there were several options available to the regular clergy. In addition to using students trained in the curriculum of the well-known monastic arts and crafts schools, the Augustinians brought master artisans from Mexico City to their more rural houses or, alternatively, sent more promising Indian students to the capital to be trained 'under craft masters' (maestros).7 Muralists worked in teams ranked according to skill. The more highly trained members travelled from monastery to monastery, where local native artists served as assistants. The varied exposures of the muralists to the newly imported Euro-Christian styles is manifest in the unorthodox interpretations and hybrid traits of some monastic murals. 15 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN A M E R I C A Figure i. Drawing of'bee' and song scroll. Note glyph-like symbols in the scroll (see inset, from left to right): ilhuitl, shell, and flower. Detail of vault frescoes (south side), lower cloister, Malinalco, Mexico. Apparently, the affiliation between certain of the mural painters and the profession of scribe-painter, tlacuilo, persisted into the colonial period. Tlacuiloa means both to paint and to write in Nahuatl, and tlacuilo, if not modified, means painter or scribe, that is, painter on paper. Style and iconographic evidence from the lower cloister murals in the Augustinian monastery of Malinalco (State of Mexico) confirm the familiarity of the muralists with the pre-Conquest conventions followed by the tlacuilos. The vault frescoes, for example, are characterized by stylistic features common to native style pictorial manuscripts, such as the even distribution of isolated motifs and their relative flatness against a solid background. Further, some symbols incorporated into the vault designs would have been known only to native tlacuilos well versed in the pre-Hispanic hieroglyphic or picture-writing system of central Mexico. These abstract, glyph-like elements include flanged song scrolls, trilobed symbols that refer metaphorically to 'preciousness,' and celestial symbols (figure i). One of the so-called celestial symbols is in fact an ilhuitl, a symbol that identifies the profession of tlacuilo in several manuscripts where the ilhuitl is inscribed within the block of writing on which the scribe is working. 8 In the sixteenth-century Historia 16 S Y N T H E S I S AND SURVIVAL Figure 2. Tlacuilotecatl, 'Place of the Painter.' After Paul Kirchhoff, Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (Mexico, 1976), folios 54-58. Tolteca-Chichimeca a similar compartmentalized scroll containing ilhuitl symbols is used together with a man's head as a toponym for the place Tlacuilotecatl, 'Place of the Painter' (figure 2).9 At Malinalco I have interpreted the painted ilhuitl as a 'signature' of the tlacuilo-artisan. Further stylistic and iconographic evidence for the affiliation of muralists and scribes is evident in other Augustinian murals, as will be seen. Processes of Acculturation Painting, as the art that best approximates representation of the visible world and, therefore, the most vulnerable to error, was diligently supervised by the friars. However, because the chroniclers inflate the mendicant contribution, crediting themselves with an inordinate amount of the building and decorating of the monasteries, it is not always clear to what degree, if at all, they were directly responsible for the work itself. Although the residing prior of each monastery probably dictated the general compositional format, style, and themes of monastic murals, the contribution of the native artisans was substantial, clearly going beyond that of mere technicians and copyists. An examination of the processes of acculturation in murals reveals that the preponderant process 17 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN A M E R I C A was the wholesale adoption of Euro-Christian imagery. At times, imported artistic traditions were imitated so closely that wall paintings are merely monumentalized versions of European sources. In particular, the scenes from the Passion of Christ, which were intended for the meditation and prayers of the friars in the more private sectors of the monastery, reproduce with great fidelity their graphic prototypes.10 The focus here will be on the survivals of pre-contact imagery that did occur in mural painting, both co-existing and fusing with European conventions. The inclusion of these indigenous elements was in some cases covert (executed without the knowledge of the friars), and in others, fully sanctioned. A broad range of acculturative solutions can be loosely organized into two categories, those of juxtaposition and convergence or syncretism. Juxtaposition Juxtaposition implies that the indigenous motifs were allowed to co-exist side by side with Euro-Christian subjects, with both left relatively unaltered. However, when native style features are isolated within an otherwise European artistic context, it is often not possible to assess whether there was a continuity or disjunction of meaning. For instance, symbols for chalchihuitl (jade) that are depicted as concentric circles are frequently included in sixteenth-century murals; studied alone, we are unable to determine whether these symbols held any value beyond that of ornamental devices. These fragmentary pre-Columbian motifs' have led some art historians to dismiss the survival phenomenon in colonial art as rare and insignificant. 11 Yet, many painted toponymic glyphs rendered in the pre-Hispanic manner are recognized as intact in form and meaning, as legible to the modern-day viewer as to the colonial one. At the Augustinian monastery of Malinalco, Mexico, for example, the town's preHispanic place sign is prominently included around an eagle-pelican image used as a christological emblem (figure 3). Within the circular frame are the interlaced strands for the glyphic sign of malinalli, 'twisted grass,' the Nahuatl root for the toponym of Malinalco, 'Place of Twisted Grass.' 12 Convergence or Syncretism When assimilated into Euro-Christian imagery, pre-Hispanic visual conventions display a complex range of acculturative solutions, often producing synthetic new statements. In a limited, but significant, number of cases native traits retained their original form and meaning, particularly when that meaning did not, at least overtly, conflict with Catholic ideology. The frequent inclusion in colonial mural painting of speech scrolls, comma-like glyphs emanating from the 18 S Y N T H E S I S AND SURVIVAL Figure 3. Drawing of medallion fresco with eagle-pelican motif in center. Note malinalli, 'twisted grass,' glyph as toponym for Malinalco within inner frame. Cloister stairwell ceiling mural, Malinalco. mouths of humans or animals, is instructive. At times, pre-Hispanic speech scrolls are incorporated into an ornamental border where they lose an identifiable meaning. In other instances, speech scrolls are used in a manner that coincides with the European tradition of phylacteries or inscribed scrolls, emerging from the mouths of evangelists or friars, and thereby maintaining their original function in both traditions. The retention of native meaning and function can only be firmly established when speech scrolls are incorporated into a complex of imagery known to have pre-Conquest importance. 19 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN A M E R I C A Figure 4. Drawing of two heraldic jaguars and an eagle. Note pre-Hispanic speech scrolls in upper right. South wall mural in narthex of the Augustinian monastery of Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo. After Constantino Reyes-Valerio, Arte indocristiano (Mexico, 1978), color photograph after 222. Such is the case in the lunette mural on the south wall of the Ixmiquilpan church narthex, where an eagle and a jaguar flank a coat of arms and a second jaguar on the upper right holds a bow and arrow; feathered headdresses are indications of the prominence of these animals as Aztec emblems of warrior orders and symbols of the celestial and underworld spheres (figure 4). This eagle and jaguar pair would have recalled to the native viewer traditional aristocratic prestige and supernatural powers. The glyph-like speech scrolls over the heads of the jaguars, two of which are topped with the concentric circle symbols of jade or preciousness, emphasize the importance and wisdom of pronouncements made by these venerable metaphoric animals. At the same time, the parallelism with Old World symbols of royalty, the eagle and the lion, also facilitated the convergence of heraldic meanings in the colonial period.13 In the end, enough of the mural must remain intact to reconstruct the composition and theme of the entire wall painting and, thereby, reconstitute the meaning of the component survival. For this reason four complete mural cycles in Augustinian establishments best illustrate native survivals and syntheses those at Ixmiquilpan, Actopan, Santa Maria Xoxoteco, and Malinalco. 20 S Y N T H E S I S AND SURVIVAL Ixmiquilpan As was the case with all native artists working under the Augustinians, the muralists at Ixmiquilpan were permitted and, I believe, encouraged to draw from their own heritage. In order to make the Christian faith and the Spanish way of life more relevant, the regular clergy sought to relate their teachings to many facets of the lives of local congregations. The well-known battle scene murals on the church walls of Ixmiquilpan depict, on one level, a moral struggle between the forces of good and evil.14 On another level, as Elena Estrada Gerlero has suggested, they depict one in a series of historical conflicts known as the Chichimec Wars (about 1569-72).15 Donna Pierce has identified the figures and beasts, through their distinct pre-Hispanic dress and weaponry, as two local sixteenth-century Indian groups living in the Hidalgo region.16 The centaurs and the native warriors w h o wear little clothing and carry bows and arrows are identified as the hostile, pagan Chichimecs. In contrast, those natives who wear elaborate warrior dress and wield macanas (obsidian-edged 'swords' associated with the Aztecs), are the more pacific, Christianized Otomi. While the allegorical allusions of the battle scene painted on the Ixmiquilpan church walls may have escaped the native, whose own world view was not dominated by the Christian dichotomy of good and evil, the recasting of the moral in the guise of the longstanding animosity between Chichimecs and Otomi would have sent a clear message. The victory of the civilized Otomi over the barbarian Chichimec served to dramatize the benefits of living in a Christian, Hispanicized state. Actopan and Santa Maria Xoxoteco A second example of syncretic imagery, using native images for Christian purposes, is evident in two cognate mural cycles in the State of Hidalgo: in the open chapel at the monastery of Actopan and at Santa Maria Xoxoteco, a visita of Metztitlan. In her iconographic study of these murals, Gerlero concludes that both Actopan and Xoxoteco depict the Seven Deadly Sins set against a background of the Last Judgment. 17 On the east or apse wall of both chapels are portrayed the Genesis stories of Creation and the Fall of Man, with the devouring maw of Hell given a prominent position. On the side walls of both chapels are panels representing the seven sins or temptations and their consequences in terrifying forms of corporeal punishment. I will discuss only one of these panels, best preserved at Xoxoteco, the panel representing the transgression of drunkenness as portrayed by a pulque-drinking scene (figure 5). Pulque, octli in Nahuatl, is the native alcoholic drink obtained by fermenting the sap of the maguey. In the mural, a native woman in a wrap-around skirt and huipilli (tunic with decorated neck panel) is shown in a traditional 21 NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA Figure 5. Drawing of mural panel depicting pulque drinking. C h u r c h wall painting, Augustinian visita of Santa Maria X o x o t e c o , Hidalgo. A f t e r J u a n B. Artigas, La piel de la arquitectura (Mexico, 1979), figures 39 and 44. 22 S Y N T H E S I S AND SURVIVAL kneeling pose, drinking pulque from a dish. On the left a man who is barefoot and wearing a common man's tilmatli (cape knotted at the shoulder) is bringing another bowl of pulque to a more Hispanicized Indian wearing Spanish shoes, shirt, and pants and the longer tilmatli of the elite. The three horned devils behind the drinkers, as traditional Christian symbols for temptation and sin, leave no doubt as to the friars' intent to sermonize on the overeating and excessive drinking that constituted the sin of gluttony. However, a far more ambivalent meaning is conveyed by the two pre-Conquest objects in the foreground. T o the left is visible a portion of a large earthen jar, tinajon, used to store pulque and at the center is a vertical drum, huehuetl. Sixteenth-century accounts of Aztec rituals at which pulque was served describe the large open jars over-flowing with pulque as well as the song and dance accompanied by musical instruments, such as the drum.18 Similar pulque-drinking scenes can be found in sixteenth-century manuscripts such as the Codex Mendoza (figure 6), in which the reader is warned that 'the vice of drunkenness sometimes leads people to become thieves.' 19 The figural composition as well as the ritual drum and jar suggest that the source for the frescoes was a native style pictorial manuscript, or that the muralists and illustrators were one and the same, or both.20 The fans and smoking cane held by the Xoxoteco drinkers, as well as the cape of the man, identify them as members of the upper class. It was the native aristocracy that was singled out by the friars to set examples of good conduct. Yet in Aztec society it was precisely the Aztec lords, seasoned warriors, and old men and women who had been allowed to drink pulque at certain ritual and social occasions. According to pre-Conquest proscriptions, drinking was prohibited to some and allowed, even in excess, to these others. Thus the very imagery the Spanish friars permitted at Xoxoteco in their campaign against alcoholism effectively neutralized and even subverted the message for the native viewer; the depiction of a traditional ritual drinking scene would have condoned acceptable limits to imbibing rather than condemning it altogether. In addition, although both Christian and Nahua cultures viewed drunkenness as disruptive and dangerous, as Burkhart points out, drinking had its place in Aztec society as one of life's pleasures and, although punishable if abused, excess did not affect an individual's destiny in the afterlife.21 Only the Catholic church censured drunkenness as a sin of the flesh leading to eternal damnation. Both in the imagery selected as well as in the meaning, therefore, this mural scene is a composite of native and Euro-Christian conventions. Ironically and tragically, one of the consequences of the Conquest was to disrupt pre-Hispanic proscriptions against excessive drinking. 23 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA Figure 6. Pulque-drinking scene. From Codex Mendoza, commentary by Kurt Ross (Fribourg, 1978), 115. The difficult task of instilling foreign concepts of reward and punishment necessitated that the mendicant clergy forcefully recreate Heaven and Hell in words, theater, and art.22 Among the forms of demonic punishment graphically illustrated in the Actopan and Xoxoteco murals are some modes of death that were unique to native American cultures, as suggested by Gerlero.23 A reference to Aztec ritual cannibalism is made through the depiction of a butcher's shop where devils behead, dismember, and disembowel their victims. Another hellish 'punishment' includes a figure being positioned spread-eagle against a wooden scaffolding as in the pre-Conquest arrow or scaffold sacrifice (tlacacaliztli). All sacrificial practices were so abhorrent to the friars that these acts were meant to connote the fearful tortures of Hell. Adopting these indigenous images, however, may have failed to instill the same degree of horror in the native viewer. Prior to the C o n q u e s t , n e i t h e r ritual c a n n i b a l i s m n o r sacrificial d e a t h in g e n e r a l h a d punitive connotations;24 sacrifice, in fact, was one of the modes of death rewarded by Aztec society with the promise of a positive celestial afterlife. The message conveyed by the 'hellish' imagery to the native viewer then may have subverted its intended function of deterrence. 24 S Y N T H E S I S AND SURVIVAL Figure 7. Detail of Paradise Garden murals. Lower cloister wall (east side), Malinalco. Malinalco The positive alternative, the rewards of a Paradise Garden, is the message conveyed by the monastic murals of Malinalco.25 The central register of the garden murals on the lower cloister walls recreates a luxuriant array of flora and fauna with three medallions that enclose the sacred monograms of Jesus Christ and Mary as Queen of Heaven and the Augustinian emblem (figure 7). The sources for the garden frescoes are predominantly European, most likely a combination of graphic and tapestry designs. However, despite a degree of stylization, I have identified as native twenty-four plants, thirteen of the forty-eight birds, and all but one of the twenty-one animals represented. The symbolic importance of a particular species to either the European or indigenous cultures is determinable on the basis of its geographical distribution at time of contact. Some of the plants and animals carry traditional Christian symbolism associated with the church, the Passion of Christ, or Marian iconography. Such specimens are the domesticated grape vine, acanthus, thistle, and certain birds, including the heron, sparrow, and dove. The pomegranate and rose, unknown in Mexico prior to contact, cannot have held any meaning for native Americans; they were symbols 25 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA of the 'New Life' in Christianity with paradisiacal implications. Similarly, the dolphin, without argument, is traced to its European source, where it was important as 'King of Fishes' and, frequently, as a christological symbol. Yet, within the over-all Renaissance design scheme the muralists who worked at Malinalco were given the freedom to select native flora and fauna that had continuing importance in post-Conquest Mexico. Among the twenty-four native plants identified (including five tentative possibilities) nineteen were endemic only to the Americas in the year 1519. Many of the native flora depicted in the murals, such as the huacalxochitl, 'basket flower,' were held in high esteem by the Aztec culture as prestige and ceremonial items. Most are documented as having medicinal value in the sixteenth century and continue in use to the present-day, like the hallucinogenic ololiuhqui, morning glory. Some were selected for their resemblance to other critical elements of native life, as was true of the xiloxochitl, 'corn-silk flower.' The yolloxochitl, 'heart flower' (figure 8), is an excellent example with multiple associations: it was one of the most important flowers offered to the Aztec patron deity by the ruler Motecuhzoma II, and it was also a classic example of the correspondence between therapeutic plants and the body parts they resemble. The yolloxochitl is still considered a potent medicine, stemming in part from its resemblance to both an egg and the heart. Flowers such as these, which alluded metaphorically to power and lifesustaining functions, were often appropriated by the ruler and upper classes in Aztec society. There are also species of fauna depicted in the garden frescoes indigenous only to the Americas, such as the coyote, the chachalaca (a pheasant-like bird), and the tree opossum or tlacuache. Like the plant life depicted, many of the animals related to some aspect of the political hierarchy, supernatural beliefs, or pharmacopoeia of the Aztecs. Certain of these represented aspects of the cosmos and the deities that controlled natural forces and were adopted by the Aztec ruling hierarchy. The snake became associated with both the fertile and fatal aspects of the earth, the hummingbird with renewal and birth, and the tlacuache, that indispensable component of the native curer's medicine chest, with the female principle of fertility. Where certain flora and fauna were common to both continents, they often shared a bicultural importance that can be traced to pre-Conquest as well as to Euro-Christian sources. The owl's nocturnal lifestyle, for example, made it a feared omen of death in both native American and European cultures. Where each culture brought a different set of associations to the painted image, we can speculate that the sixteenth-century native viewer, whether aware or not of the European meaning, retained an interpretation derived from his heritage. In both 26 S Y N T H E S I S AND SURVIVAL Figure 8. Yolloxochitl, 'heart flower.' Detail of the garden murals. Lower cloister wall (south side), Malinalco, Mexico. 27 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA cultures the falcon and eagle-hawk were birds associated with kingship and the highest deity; interesting in the murals is the fact that they are represented eating their prey. Here the falcon's consumption of blood was probably being compared to the Aztec tribal god Huitzilopochtli's need for blood sacrifice.26 The emphasis on the rapacious aspect of the birds as hunters in the murals appears to underscore pre-Hispanic more than European connections. Thus, while important species in the native cultures were used to convey Christian themes, they must have also retained their older meanings of longestablished usage. In his study of persistent Nahua practices and concepts, Lockhart has called the resulting mutual miscomprehension by native and European viewers of such motifs 'double mistaken identity.'27 Other examples are found in plant representations. The white sapote tree painted on Malinalco's east wall played a central role in Aztec ritual life and was prized for the narcotic capabilities of its leaves, branches, and fruit. Sixteenth-century accounts, however, stress the resemblance of the fruit of the sapote to that of the apple tree.28 And this sapote-apple tree functioned within the overall Augustinian mural program as the Tree of Life or Knowledge located to the east in the Garden of Eden. 29 Yet, the use of a native fruit tree with narcotic properties instead of an apple tree could not have been accidental; it would be naive to assume that the sapote ceased to hold its older, indigenous importance even after decades of Christianization. The monkey's role in the frescoes, as interpreted here, is another example of divergent meanings dependent on associations brought to the motif by different viewers. Although for both cultures the monkey symbolized overindulgence in physical appetites (sexual excess and drunkenness), the positive, valued connotations of the monkey for the Nahuas is underscored by its pictorial context (figure 9). T w o monkeys are seated in and dangling from tree branches situated on the east wall (the upper monkey is only partially visible due to the deterioration of the mural). The placement of the monkeys in a cacao tree linked two exotic and prized Aztec tribute items, the cacao (or chocolate) pod having been used as both currency and an elitist beverage. This conjunction would have had little relevance for the Augustinian friar. Instead, according to prevailing Christian iconography, the monkey signified devilish vices, and particularly, original sin.30 Although a single apple-eating ape was the most commonly used metaphor for the temptation of Adam, a variant using paired monkeys appears in a 1533 engraving by the German artist Erhard Altdorfer, where two monkeys are seated in the tree behind Adam and Eve. 31 One monkey is reaching for an apple being offered by the other while Eve points to this exemplar of man's temptation and fall. 28 S Y N T H E S I S AND SURVIVAL Figure 9. Monkeys and cacao (chocolate) pods. Detail of the garden murals. Lower cloister wall (east side). Malinalco, Mexico. At Malinalco the Christian Paradise theme reflected the mendicants' broader Utopian aspirations in their New World mission. The message of the Paradise Garden was also reinforced by parallels with the Aztec celestial 'House of the Sun,' a convergence that enhanced the promise of an anticipated afterlife for the native population. But why were the muralists allowed to select specific plants and animals from their own environment that had continuing associations with ancient cults, the elite class, and curing? Did the friars not suspect their enduring relationship with the older way of life? These questions can be answered on two levels, the clandestine and the authorized. On one level, the friars were simply not conscious of the degree to which some of the species in the garden frescoes were still affiliated with the ancient civil and supernatural structure. This was not always strictly a function of mendicant ignorance, but rather a form of selfdeception. Even those friars who were aware of the important roles of certain flora and fauna denied this knowledge, along with that of many other persisting practices that were almost impossible to control.32 29 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN A M E R I C A On another level, perhaps the official level, mendicant friars and Spanish authorities in general felt that the depiction of flora and fauna was 'safe' subject matter for native artisans. In the hierarchy of sacrilegious possibilities, the painting of plants and animals was considered relatively harmless compared to the potential irreverence of misrepresenting holy figures.33 Although these reasons help to explain native intrusions into Malinalco's imagery, what of the figural work at Ixmiquilpan, Actopan, and Xoxoteco? The fact remains that native muralists were prominently involved with every type of mural painting including the depiction of holy figures, and the various edicts prohibiting figural work and intended to placate anxious European painters, in actuality were never enforceable.34 More importantly, the use of figures in the murals dressed in pre-Hispanic garments, using pre-Conquest ritual paraphernalia and weaponry, and at times even involved in activities associated with their ancient society, was not only self-consciously selected by the native artist but also eminently useful to the Spanish patrons. It is best understood in light of the entire mendicant program to Hispanicize as well as evangelize the native peoples. Conclusions In spite of the divergent imagery, the mural programs that we have examined have many aspects in common. 1. All four programs have irrefutable evidence of Indian workmanship closely tied to sixteenth-century manuscript paintings. 2. They are all located in the public or semi-public areas of the monasteries, accessible to, and primarily intended for, the neophyte Christians and native community (the open chapel or capilla abierta, the church nave walls, and the lower cloister walls). 3. They are propagandists in intent, as their subject matter makes obvious. The four cycles are related, directly or indirectly, to eschatological themes, including the Last Judgment, Hell, and the Paradise Garden. These themes set in the context of the mendicant program were to inculcate a Christian and distinctly Spanish way of life. At Ixmiquilpan, the battle to win over the pagan segment of the native population painted in large-scale murals was intended not only to save souls, but also to promote the stability and success of the new Spanish colony. Pierce has hypothesized that a Last Judgment scene, similar to those at Actopan and Xoxoteco, may have been found in the apse of Ixmiquilpan, endowing the battle scene with an eschatological imperative.35 An essential part of the mendicant program included the reinforcement of behavioral patterns with forceful demonstrations of the wages 30 S Y N T H E S I S AND SURVIVAL of sin. The murals of Actopan and Xoxoteco re-enacted, with grotesque vividness, the demonic punishment awaiting transgressors, just as the rewards of a celestial heaven were recreated in the appealing garden scenes of Malinalco. 4. These four murals represent a range of acculturative solutions. Elements that were strongly pre-Hispanic in flavor persisted undetected or were allowed because they were not recognized as impinging on the Christian belief system. Convergence of meaning, and occasionally of form, occurred where interpretations by native and European cultures coincided. There were also examples of co-existence, or of 'double mistaken identity,' where each culture brought its own interpretation to the image. Although appropriated for Christian duty, the very use of ancient pictorial forms recast and thus reformulated the Christian message in a distinctly native mode. 5. Finally, almost all murals with overt native features have been uncovered in Augustinian monasteries. This reflects, in part, the Order's liberality, their confidence in the spiritual capacity of the native population, and their broad exposure to humanist thought. Although they maintained strict paternalistic control, the Augustinians, more than the other orders, trusted the Indians' ability to absorb religious instruction and were the most liberal in allowing their participation in all the sacraments.36 Thus, they permitted greater flexibility in choice of subject matter. The Augustinians, for example, allowed classical themes, as in the wall paintings of the ancient Greek philosophers at Atotonilco el Grande, Hidalgo. It was this more tolerant outlook that gave the native muralist working under the Augustinians the leeway to draw from his own artistic idiom and cultural experience. Given this freedom, artists fulfilled their own hidden agendas, which at times opposed or, at the very least, neutralized the Christian intent. Certain Augustinian murals offer the strongest evidence for the active involvement of the native in choices that sustained pre-Conquest patterns into the last decades of the sixteenth century. 3i NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA 86; Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of 1. 'In the Shadow of Empire: New Directions Mexico, 1519-1810 (Stanford, 1964), 122-27, 2.24, in Mesoamerican and Andean Ethnohistory,' 246; Reyes-Valerio, Arte indocristiano; in The Inca and Aztec States, 1400-1800, editedJeanette F. Peterson, The Paradise Garden by George A. Collier, Renato I. Rosaldo, and Murals ofMalinalco: Utopia and Imperial Policy John D. Wirth (London, 1982), 1-20. A few of in Sixteenth-century Mexico (Austin, 1993), the most recent studies on the persistence of chapters 2 and 3. Notes native customs, institutions, and ideas in six5. Quoted from Diego Valades, in Esteban teenth-century Mexico are James Lockhart's J. Palomera, Fray Diego Valades, OFM: Su obra 'Views of Corporate Self and History in Some (Mexico, 1962), 276. Positive evaluations of Valley Towns, Late Seventeenth and Eigh- native painting abilities can also be found in teenth Centuries,' in Collier and others, Inca Toribio de Benavente or Motolinia, Memoriales and Aztec States, 367-93; Lockhart's 'Some e historia de los indios de la Nueva Espana Nahua Concepts in Postconquest Guise,' (Madrid, 1970), 104; Geronimo de Mendieta, History of European Ideas, VI (1985), 465-82; Historia eclesidstica indiana, III (Mexico, 1945), J.Jorge Klor de Alva's 'Spiritual Conflict and 75; Alonso de Zorita, Life and Labor in Ancient Accommodation in New Spain: Toward a Mexico: The Briefand Summary Relation of the Typology ofAztec Responses to Christianity,' Lords of New Spain, translated by Benjamin in Collier and others, Inca and Aztec States, Keen (London, 1963), 173. 345-66; Louise M. Burkhart's 'Moral Deviance 6. Francisco del Barrio Lorenzot, Ordenanzas in Sixteenth-century Nahua and Christian de gremios de la Nueva Espana (Mexico, 1921), Thought: The Rabbit and the Deer,'Journal of 21-25. Although the ordinances ostensibly Latin American Lore, XII (1986), 107-39; and closed the advanced ranks of the craft guilds Burkhart's The Slippery Earth: Nahuato non-Spaniards, these discriminatory Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-centurypolicies were unenforceable. See Francisco Mexico (Tucson, 1989). S. Cruz, Las artes y los gremios en la Nueva 2. La escultura colonial mexicana (Mexico, Espana (Mexico, i960), 36; Gibson, Aztecs Under Spanish Rule, 397-402. Documented 1942). 3. John McAndrew, The Open-Air Churches of references to native muralists in the colonial Sixteenth-century Mexico (Cambridge, 1965); period are limited; historical records have Constantino Reyes-Valerio, Arte indocristiano substantiated by name only one native (Mexico, 1978); and Reyes-Valerio,ElPintorde muralist, Juan Gerson (Rosa Camelo Arredondo, Jorge Gurn'a Lacroix, and conventos: Los murales del siglo XVI en la Nueva C o n s t a n t i n o R e y e s - V a l e r i o , Juan Espana (Mexico, 1989). Gerson, tlacuilo deTecamachalco [Mexico, 1964], 13-35). 4. For a discussion of the native contribu7. The best known art schools were estabtions to the mendicant building program, see George Kubler, Mexican Architecture of the lished by the Franciscans in the capital of Sixteenth Century, I (New Haven, 1948), 134- Mexico City at San Jose de los Naturales and 32 SYNTHESIS AND SURVIVAL Mexico, PhD dissertation [University of New Santiago Tlatelolco. The Augustinians also had a well-developed arts curriculum at their Mexico, 1987], chapter 5). The Crucifixion monastery ofTiripetio, Michoacan. See P. scene painted in Malinalco's upper cloister Diego Basalenque, Historia de la Provincia de is visually close to the woodcut of the San Nicolas de Tolentino de Michoacan (Mexico, Crucifixion found in a widely distributed 1963), 68; Marias Escobar, Americana tebaida, Spanish theological text of 1535 titled Epistolas second edition (Morelia, 1970), 75; EstebanJ. i evangelios (Peterson, Garden Murals of Palomera, Fray Diego Valades, OFM: El hombre Malinalco, chapter 4). y su epoca (Mexico, 1963), 57-72; McAndrew, 11. See George Kubler, 'On the Colonial Open-Air Churches, 368-74. The Augustinian Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-Columbian chronicler Escobar (109-10) stresses that Art,' in Essays in Pre-Columbian Art and painters, unlike stone masons, were trained Archaeology, edited by Samuel K. Lothrop in Mexico City where there was a concentra- and others (Cambridge, 1961), 14-34. Although tion of talent; on this, see Basalenque, Historia, negating the significance of native survivals 60; Juan de Grijalva, Cronica de la Orden de NPS in art, Kubler was the first to systematically Agustin en las provincias de la Nueva Espana, characterize different types of survivals 1533-1592 [1624], second edition (Mexico, 1924), (convergences, juxtapositions, fragments, 223;Toribio de Benavente or Motolinia,History and so forth). of the Indians ofNew Spain, translated by E. A. 12. On the form and function of the malinalli Foster (Westport, 1950), 241. glyph, seejeanette F.Peterson, 'Sacrificial Earth: The Iconography and Function of 8. Ilhuitl is a Nahuatl word meaning 'day,' ceremonial day,' or 'sun's orb.' Although it Malinalli Grass in Aztec Culture,' in Flora and may have astronomical significance, H.B. Fauna Imagery in Precolumbian Cultures: Nicholson ('TheTemalacatl ofTehuacan,' El Iconography and Function, edited by Jeanette Mexico Antiguo, VIII [1955], 95-132) also relates F. Peterson (Oxford, 1983), 113-48. Other the ilhuitl to the painter-scribe or tlacuilo. On toponyms in sixteenth-century sculpture the glyph-like symbols in the Malinalco and painting are discussed by Reyes-Valerio murals, see Peterson, Garden Murals of (Arte indocristiano). Malinalco, chapters 3 and 6. 13. Pierce (Frescoes of Ixmiquilpan, 106-13) 9. Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, commentary identifies the origin and local bearer of the coat of arms; she further suggests that the by Paul Kirchhoff (Mexico, 1976), 129. 10. Ideas about the reliance of colonial speech scrolls may indicate a discussion muralists on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century related to the Chichimec war campaign European graphics have been refined in between the eagle, as symbol of the Spanish, recent studies, as in Camelo Arredondo and and the jaguar, representative of the Otomi, others (Juan Gerson) onTecamachalco, and with the second jaguar with bow and arrow, Donna L. Pierce on Ixmiquilpan (The Six- signifying the Chichimecs. teenth-century Nave Frescoes in the Augustinian 14. Abelardo Carrillo y Gariel, Ixmiquilpan (Mexico, 1961). Mission Church of Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, 33 NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA 15. 'El friso monumental de Ixmiquilpan,' Acts of the XLII International Congress of Americanists, Paris, 1974, X (1976), 9-19. ever, suggests that shooting victims with arrows was a pre-Columbian form ofpunishment for moral deviance, in which case arrow sacrifice would have been jointly 16. Donna L. Pierce, 'Identification of the viewed by Christian and Nahua as punitive Warriors in the Frescoes of Ixmiquilpan,' Research Centerfor the Arts Review, number 4 and appropriate to Hell. (1981), 1-8; and Pierce, Frescoes of Ixmiquilpan. 25. The subsequent information on Malinalco's lower cloister Paradise Garden mu17. The murals of Xoxoteco were first described by Juan B. Artigas (La piel de la ar- rals is derived from the author's analysis of quitectura: Murales de Santa Maria Xoxoteco the iconography, meaning, and function of the frescoes within their historical context [Mexico, 1979]) and analyzed by Elena (Peterson, Garden Murals of Malinalco). Estrada Gerlero ('Los temas escatologicos en la pintura mural novohispana del siglo XVI,' TrazayBaza, VII [1978], 71-88). 26. Sahagun, Florentine Codex, Book XI, 44. 27. 'Double mistaken identity' occurs when 18. For ritual drinking, see Bernardino de a group thinks a 'given form or concept is Sahagun, Florentine Codex: General History of operating in the way familiar within its own the Things ofNew Spain, translated by Arthur tradition and is unaware of or unimpressed J.O.Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, Santa by the other side's interpretation' (Lockhart, Fe, 1950-82, Book I, 33,35, 48-49; Book II, 36, 'Some Nahua Concepts,' 477). 148,153-54; Book IV, 17. On the Aztec denun- 28. Francisco Hernandez, Historia natural ciation of drunkenness which is compared to de Nueva Espana, I/ill of Obras completas over-eating, the taking of hallucinogens, and (Mexico, 1959), 92. indiscriminate sexual activity, see Sahagun, 29. Genesis 2:8-10. The apple came to be Book I, 26; Book VI, 68-71; Book X, 16, 20,37, favored as the tree with the forbidden fruit 46,49,56. because of the Latin etymology of apple from 19. CodexMendoza, commentary by Kurt Ross malum, meaning both apple and evil. (Fribourg, 1978X114-15. 30. H.W.Janson, Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London, 20. For a similar view, see Gerlero,'Temas 1952), 107-44. escatologicos,' 83. 21. Burkhart, Slippery Earth, 159-69. 22. Heaven and Hell were also reenacted for the natives through edifying morality plays and street theater; on this, see Grijalva, Cronica, 229, 322,333; Motolinia, History, 10309,119; Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest ofMexico, translated by Lesley B. Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966), 104. 23. 'Temas escatologicos,'80-82. 24. Burkhart ('Moral Deviance/ 120), how34 31. Engraving titled 'Adam and Eve,' illustrated injanson, Apes and Ape Lore, plate XlXa. 32. The friar-chronicler Diego Duran (Book ofthe Gods and Rites and The Ancient Calendar, translated and edited by Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden [Norman, 1971], 121) shows himself vulnerable to this form of 'wishful thinking,' describing the practice of decorating the churches with 'bouquets, flowers, and grass,' which is 'now permitted SYNTHESIS AND SURVIVAL 'flowers, animals, birds, romanos [that is, 'grotesque' designs] and other such things to avoid the problems caused by bad painters of saints (Barrio Lorenzot, Ordenanzas de gremios, 23). since it is not a superstition but simply an ancient custom.'Yet Duran (238-39, 290) himself also warns the reader of the Indians' 'ancient blindness' or pagan reverence for all plants and animals. 35. Pierce, Frescos ofIxmiquilpan, 170-71. 33. Native depictions of flowers, animals, and other design elements always drew unreserved praise from the friars. 'There were good artists who painted from nature, especially birds, animals, trees, greenery, and such things... But people they did not paint beautifully' (Mendieta, Historia, III, 55). The mendicants' reservations about native figurative work were colored by their moralistic stance and paranoia concerning heretical beliefs (Juan de Torquemada, Monarquia Indiana, V [Mexico, 1975], 313). 36. On this, see RichardE. Greenleaf, Zumarraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536-1543 (Washington, 1961), 28-29; Ricard, Spiritual Conquest, 107-08,125-27. The writings of St Augustine were used in support of the spiritual capabilities of all men (Grijalva, Cronica, 113). The chronicler Escobar (Americana tebaida, 355) implies that Augustinians allowed native believers to be initiated into the contemplative life. On the humanist education of the regular orders, see Peggy K. Liss, Mexico Under Spain, 1521-1556 (Chicago 34. According to the guild ordinances of 1557, native painters were allowed to paint and L o n d o n , 1975), 15-17. 35 Adaptation and Accommodation The Transformation of the Pictorial Text in Sahaguns Manuscripts ELLEN T.BAIRD It is very difficult to get a notion of what it was to be a person ofa certain kind at a certain time and place. It is here that pictorial style is helpful. A society develops its distinctive skills and habits, which have a visual aspect, since the visual sense is the main organ of experience, and these visual skills and habits become part ofthe medium of the painter: correspondingly, a pictorial style gives access to the visual skilb and habits, and, through these, to the distinctive social experience. An old picture is the record ofvisual activity. One has to learn to read it, just as one has to learn to read a textfrom a different culture, even when one knows, in a limited sense, the language: both language and pictorial representation are conventional activities (Michael Baxandall).' Introduction THE WORKS OF the Spanish Franciscan friar, Bernardino de Sahagun, are best known today as records of pre-Conquest central Mexican religion, culture, and language. Yet, they are post-Conquest documents and are equally useful as records of the dramatic changes occurring in Mexico (New Spain) in the sixteenth century. Some of these are readily apparent to scholar and non-scholar alike in the illustrations of Sahagun's two profusely illustrated manuscripts: the Primeros Memoriales, completed in 1561, and the Florentine Codex, completed between 1578 and 1580.2 The illustrations provide us with primary evidence of the change in pictorial style, those distinctive visual skills and habits that give us access to the social experience of sixteenth-century Mexico. Because the 'texts' in pre-Conquest manuscripts were exclusively pictorial, Sahagun's illustrations take on added importance. Illustrations and written texts derive from information Sahagun and his assistants gathered orally from native informants and pictorially from the indigenous manuscripts the informants showed Sahagun.3 In 1557 Sahagun was ordered by his Franciscan provincial to compile information on the Indian religion and culture for use in converting them to Christianity. 36 A D A P T A T I O N AND A C C O M M O D A T I O N In his work, Sahagun was assisted by four young native men who were fluent in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl (the Aztec language) and who had been his students at the Indian school of Santa Cruz, Tlatelolco, where they were given a humanistic education. Sahagun approached his task systematically and objectively: he interviewed elderly informants, studied pre-Conquest pictorial manuscripts, studied the Nahuatl language, spoke of laying the groundwork for a dictionary, and presented the information he gathered in an orderly fashion.4 In previous work, I have presented an overview of the extent to which European style, format, and function are present in the drawings of Sahagun's two illustrated manuscripts. 5 In the present brief study, I am initiating an examination of the significance of those Europeanizations with regard to the manuscripts' artists, their perception of the world in which they lived, and the audience for which each manuscript was created. Pre-Conquest Mexican and Sixteenth-century European Pictorial Styles It is fairly easy to recognize the basic differences between pre-Conquest Mexican and sixteenth-century European pictorial styles. Pre-Conquest style has been described most simply as 'conceptual' (figure i). The two-dimensionality of the image and the surface on which it is painted are asserted. Human figures are composed of separable units and are often posed unnaturalistically in order to present the significantly informative elements of the figures or their accoutrements as clearly and unambiguously as possible. Architectural and geographical forms are conventionally represented as signs. Two-dimensional space is often used to convey the passage of time, as in a sequence of actions, the intervals between generations, or elapsed travel time between geographical locations.6 In contrast, sixteenth-century European painting is characterized as perceptual' (figure 2). Human figures and architectural and geographic forms are represented in a naturalistic and convincingly illusionistic manner. Artists use devices such as contour line, modeling, and hatching to create the illusion of three dimensions. The two-dimensionality of the surface is denied through techniques that create the illusion of depth of space: overlapped images, diminution in size, relative placement of the figure on the pictorial plane (figures that are smaller and higher are read as more distant than those that are larger and lower on the picture plane), and aerial (or atmospheric) and linear perspective. Indeed, artistic creation of illusionistic space is one of the hallmarks of Renaissance art. Developed by the fifteenth-century Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi, linear perspective was a 'new geometric construction which could give a sense of unity and consistency to any illusionary picture.'7 Scenes are focused and unified both in space and time. 37 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Figure i. Codex Borbonicus, folio 12. From George C.Valliant, A Sacred Almanac of the Aztecs (Tonalamatl of the Codex Borbonicus) (New York, 1940), plate 33. The role of pictures in books was also different in Europe and pre-Conquest Mexico. The pictures are the text in pre-Conquest 'books.' The most common formats are the screen-fold and the tira, both of long, relatively narrow strips of paper or animal skin. The pictorial text is read as a continuous narrative spread out across many pages that unfold or unroll, respectively. In sixteenth-century European books, an alphabetic text conveys information and the illustrations may serve a secondary, even purely decorative, role. Predominant is the codex form, in which leaves of paper are sewn together and the pages are read front and back in singular, sequential order. 38 A D A P T A T I O N AND A C C O M M O D A T I O N Figure 2. Albrecht Diirer, Saint Jerome in His Study, 1514, engraving. Clarence Buckingham Collection, ©1990, The Art Institute of Chicago, All Rights Reserved. 39 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA After the Conquest of Mexico, European influence soon began to be evident in Mexican manuscripts. By copying, Indian artists learned the forms of European art; through both observation and formal education they assimilated European style, iconography, and an increasingly perceptual form of representation. However, the post-Conquest Indian artists cannot be characterized as merely imitative, for they often changed things; imitation was often tempered by innovation.8 Primeros Memoriales The Primeros Memoriales, the first of Sahagun s extensively illustrated manuscripts, is a codex with a Nahuatl text. The pages are most commonly laid out in two columns with the text on the left and the pictures on the right (figure 3); however, there are numerous exceptions to this pattern. Although the format of the book is European, the drawings are predominantly native in subject matter, motifs, and style. Very few indications of European style are present and European influence is primarily limited to conventionalized representations: a European crescent moon is juxtaposed with a pre-Conquest type sun; conventionalized European clouds are used; and the melancholy chin-in-hand pose (with its origins in classical antiquity) is also employed for several figures. Although these do not look pre-Conquest, they too are all conventions: regularized, simplified ways of representing things that in nature are complex forms. In addition, the drawings often convey information that is not in the text and therefore retain their pre-Conquest function as pictorial texts. Elsewhere I have hypothesized that the artists of the Primeros Memoriales were Sahagun's Europeanized native assistants,9 who were well-schooled in the humanistic tradition. The sixteenth-century library of the school at Tlatelolco contained the works of such classical authors as Pliny, Quintilian, Plutarch, and Cicero. Vocabularies, grammatical and rhetorical treatises, and works on natural philosophy and history are also listed in the inventory of 1572.10 Irving Leonard points out that 'contrary to beliefs still prevailing, sixteenth-century Spanish America was able to acquire the finest products of European as well as Spanish book manufacturers.' 11 Exposure to and understanding of European pictorial motifs from books and prints is clearly indicated by the European conventions that are used in the Primeros Memoriales. The adherence to pre-Conquest style and format in the Primeros Memoriales is then, I think, related to the function of the manuscript, as will be seen. The information for the Primeros Memoriales came from Sahagun's interviews with elderly native informants. They answered his questions 'by means of pictures, which was [sic] the writing they had used of old, and the assistants explained them in their language, writing the explanation at the foot of the picture.' Sahagun went on to say, 'Even now I have these originals.'12 The textual function and indigenous 40 ADAPTATION AND ACCOMMODATION C p e if. ipm nutoa ymfinlh»itth»u*r« jfoMWlltAt * » dhaiqwriiUU** „wik ^ijtfn&uatl inm*e*aaftt tmr* «f«i;mwyn v WtfTiyili'f*^ IftKCKIVlli, mamM«| rmtfuMi,^atuVr*1^ * ' rrmmd*, waTHafacvh', toifftmhrt ttma&uac yumauttyiy t ,.0rtm «t»nm AabfttttuvapPawtrW,^ mcjhmhn ^l^mUya " vafUUfoJ^ /In.y mcap.* , v W a f l . tWiirmwIin^ MAMfem** 'WuhActh Tine maMvavA -. ftttu 4 ***** \ Mfntik* • s ^irtM^HHC t.t.j.nW „ Vtllpl f ^ M i ^ ctftflUfii in^Mr — ^ ^ ^ Figure 3. Primeros Memoriales, folio 250, Palacio del Oriente. From Bernardino de Sahagun, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espafia por Fr. Bernardino de Sahagun, VI (Madrid, 1905), 1. NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA appearance of the Primeros Memoriales drawings reflect these sources (native informants and native manuscripts) and the way the information was gathered. One wonders then why European motifs, however limited, appear at all. They may have been used when there were no pre-Conquest prototypes to fulfill the pictorial need; they may suggest a deliberate introduction of 'Europeanisms' in an effort to please and meet the expectations of the Spanish friar for whom the manuscript was made; or they may reflect the humanistic education of the artists and their inclination to use models with which they were most familiar. Florentine Codex In sharp contrast to the Primeros Memoriales drawings are the highly Europeanized drawings of the Florentine Codex, created some twenty years later (figure 4). The transformation is unmistakable. Both the scribes and artists were Indian; the scribes were Sahagun's former students, but the identity of the artists is uncertain. In the Florentine Codex many of the drawings are in European style, and European motifs, objects, and pictorial models are clearly discernable. The Florentine Codex is much more ambitious than the Primeros Memoriales. It is divided into twelve books, follows the organizational pattern of a medieval encyclopedia, is itself encyclopedic in scope, is in two languages - Spanish and Nahuatl (with some Latin) - and contains approximately 1,846 drawings. 13 European exports to Mexico are depicted, as in the scene of a tailor shown using scissors, a European tool. The true arch and other European architectural features unknown in preConquest Mexico are frequently illustrated. Classical and biblical references are found throughout. In the text of Book I, the pre-Conquest Mexican deities are referred to as being like classical deities. In the Spanish text the god Huitzilopochtli is said to be another Hercules, Tezcatlipoca another Jupiter, Xiuhtecuhtli another Vulcan, and the goddesses Chicomecoatl, Chalchiuhtlicue, and Tlazolteotl are likened to Ceres, Juno, and Venus, respectively. 14 According to John Keber, 'Sahagun's paralleling of GrecoRoman to Aztec deities has deep roots in tradition.' 15 The drawings of the deities do not, however, reflect the classical references of the text. In Book IV (Soothsayers, Book of Days) the topic is the names and significance of days and the naming of children according to the days on which they were born. Although calendrical manuscripts, tonalamatl, were common in preConquest Mexico (for example, Codex Borbonicus, an early Colonial native style example; figure 1), they were deliberately rejected as models for the illustrations of Book IV. The 'diabolical' nature of the pre-Conquest calendar led to this rejection, as is clearly indicated in Sahagun's prologue to the book. 42 ADAPTATION AND ACCOMMODATION Figure 4. Goldworker, Florentine Codex, Book IX, folio 53. From Sahagun, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana, Codice Florentino, II (Florence and Mexico, 1979). Sahagun says of the Mexican 260-day ceremonial calendar, This manner of soothsaying can in no way be valid, because it is based neither on the influence of the stars, nor on any natural thing. Neither is its cycle in accordance with the year cycle, as it contains only two hundred and sixty days; which ended, begin again. This trick of reckoning is either a necromantic craft or a pact and invention of the devil which should be uprooted with all diligence.16 It is thus not surprising that the scenes that depict the naming of children are based on the Christian Nativity which would have been familiar and recognizable to a European audience and considered'safe/ 17 43 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN A M E R I C A At the same time, in other sections of the manuscript, there are drawings that are clearly pre-Conquest in style and form even though pre-Conquest prototypes probably did not exist. Donald Robertson has suggested that these illustrations are examples of a conscious revival movement which he has termed the 'Aztec Revival' style.18 He goes on to note that although the subject matter and motifs of these drawings are pre-Conquest, the use of perspective to imply three dimensions is also present. In describing a drawing of musicians from Book IX, Robertson points out that, the legs of the drum are pre-Conquest with no suggestion of perspective, but the head of the drum is drawn in European perspective. In this one object the new artistic knowledge conflicts with the older, traditional forms in a manner indicative of a revival movement. 19 The Florentine Codex, unlike the Primeros Memoriales, was designed to be read and used by Europeans, particularly those who were charged with converting the Indians to Christianity. The text and pictures are often set within European frames of reference with their allusions to biblical and classical figures and narratives. During the 1570s, when he began working on this project, Sahagun's manuscripts came under increasingly critical scrutiny. In 1570, they were dispersed for examination and not returned to him until 1575. In 1572 a royal decree ordered that all books concerning native religion be confiscated, saying, 'you will be advised not to permit anyone, for any reason, in any language, to write concerning the superstitions and way of life these Indians had. Thus it is best for God our Lord's service and for our own.' 20 Considering this atmosphere, the Europeanizations present in the Florentine's illustrations cannot be considered as just the result of artistic acculturation, nor are they just the result of the expectations of the European friar who employed the artists. They also reflect, I think, the necessity of the times to put the illustrative material in a form that would be more understandable and more acceptable to the Europeans for whom the manuscript was intended, not to mention the censors. The difference in pictorial attitudes between the Primeros Memoriales and the Florentine Codex can be seen clearly in comparing the same subject in both manuscripts: a monthly ceremony to honor the god Xipe Totec. The ceremony, Tlacaxipehualiztli, 'Flaying of Men,' features a captive tied to a circular stone, the temalacatl, and forced to fight well-armed warriors with an ineffective weapon. Heart sacrifice is then performed and the victim is flayed. In the Primeros Memoriales scene, several actions take place within the same framed area (figure 5). The actions are read in a zig-zag direction going from the bottom of the scene to the top. This type of reading pattern is commonly found in pre44 A D A P T A T I O N AND A C C O M M O D A T I O N Figure 5. Tlacaxipehualiztli, Primeros Memoriales, folio 250, Palacio del Oriente (detail). From Sahagun, Historia general, VI (1905), 1. 45 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Conquest manuscripts and the spaces that separate the activities on the page are to be read as time between the actions. Space and time occupy the same continuum and each action is visually tied and thematically related to the next. In the Florentine Codex the visual continuity is broken and the episodes of the ceremony are presented as discrete units following European notions of unity of time, place, and action. Tlacaxipehualiztli is depicted in two places: in Book II (Ceremonies) and Book IX (Merchants and Craftsmen, where Xipe is the patron of goldworkers). In Book IX, the first illustration of the mock battle is in 'Aztec Revival' style (figure 6). The double view of the temalacatl (both from the side and the top), the overlapping of the warriors on the right, and the use of the frame to cut off part of a warrior to suggest that his body exists beyond the frame are all European spatial devices revealing the artist's knowledge of European style, even though most of the other elements are quite native in appearance. In the second scene, where the flayed victim's body is presented to the ruler (figure 7), the figures stand or sit on a tiled floor that is rendered in perspective. A European arched doorway forms part of the background and the building on the left is depicted in isometric view as though seen at an angle. Depth of space is used, however awkwardly. The last illustration associated with Tlacaxipehualiztli is, to me, quite revealing. Depicting 'Offerings to Totec,' a landscape has been introduced (figure 8), but the figures and building, rather than being part of the landscape, are apart from it; they float on the surface of the scene seemingly suspended in space in front of the rolling green hills. Although there are scenes in which the artists have quite successfully incorporated figures and things into spatial views, this scene accurately reflects the discontinuity between pre-Conquest and sixteenth-century European conceptions of pictorial space. In many ways, I think it also reflects, metaphorically, the native artists' cultural suspension in space and time between their own cultural heritage and the imported European culture. The Implications of Illusionistic Space The treatment of space is one of the most obvious differences between pre- and post-Conquest central Mexican pictorial art. As indicated above, changes in this respect are evident in comparing the Primeros Memoriales and the Florentine Codex. Only occasionally do the figures in the Primeros Memoriales appear to penetrate or emerge from the surface. In sharp contrast, in the Florentine Codex the illusionism of sixteenth-century European art is frequently found, and attempts at creating the illusion of three-dimensional objects within a measurable volumetric space sometimes occur, although, strictly speaking, linear perspective is not used. 46 ADAPTATION AND ACCOMMODATION Figure 6. Mock battle, Tlacaxipehualiztli, Florentine Codex, Book IX, folio 7. From Sahagun, Historia general, II (1979). Figure 7. Flayed victim, Tlacaxipehualiztli, Florentine C o d e x , B o o k IX, folio 6 verso. F r o m Sahagun, Historia general, II (1979). 47 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Figure 8. Offerings toTotec, Tlacaxipehualiztli, Florentine Codex, Book IX, folio 49 verso. From Sahagun, Historia general, II (1979). What significance did the importation and imposition of Western pictorial spatial traditions have in the New World? The use of illusionistic space in postConquest Mexican art was, I think, related to the audience for which the art was intended and was a means of systematically ordering the way 'reality' was represented in order to be best understood by that audience. In addition, there were philosophical and religious implications. Franciscan interest in optics, vision, and geometry extends back to the thirteenth-century monk, Roger Bacon. According to Samuel Edgerton, in his Opus majus, Bacon included a section on optics, whose geometric laws - he wished to show - reflected God's manner of spreading His Grace throughout the universe ... Bacon wanted to demonstrate in his section on mathematics proper that painters should also become skilled in geometry. With this knowledge, Bacon argued, they could truly 'make literal the spiritual sense.'21 48 A D A P T A T I O N AND A C C O M M O D A T I O N This link between geometry, illusionism, and the revelation of the divine continues into the sixteenth century. In his study of the Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective, Edgerton also says, Linear perspective, then, with its dependence on optical principles, seemed to symbolize a harmonious relationship between mathematical tidiness and nothing less than God's will. The picture, as constructed according to the laws of perspective, was to set an example for moral order and human perfection.22 The link between mathematical order and God's will has implications for other forms of spatial order and control imposed by the Spaniards, such as the forced relocation of Indians into new towns (with grid plans), as decreed by the First Mexican Church Council.23 Conclusion In the Primeros Memoriales drawings, the sequential actions depicted in twodimensional space artistically and conceptually imply continuity with the preConquest past and its rich, complex heritage. In the Florentine Codex, discontinuity with the native past is suggested in both the Europeanization of the images and, quite specifically, in the introduction of illusionistic depth of space with its Christian, moralizing overtones. Furthermore, individual actions are isolated and presented as discrete units rather than as part of a continuum. The subject matter of the Florentine drawings then was adapted to accommodate the changing circumstances of post-Conquest sixteenth-century Mexico. The transformation of style from the Primeros Memoriales to the Florentine Codex reflects not only the acculturation of the artists and the sources available to them, but also the different (that is, European) audience for whom the Florentine was intended. For Europeans (and especially Franciscans), the introduction of a systematically derived illusionistic space had religious significance, revealing 'the complexity of God's master plan for the universe.'24 49 NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA Readings, edited by Alana Cordy-Collins (Palo Alto, 1982). Baird (Sahagun's 'Primeros 1. On the connection between pictorial style Memoriales,' 39-48) provides a brief comand social history, from Painting and Experi- parison of European and pre-Conquest picence in Fifteenth-century Italy (Oxford, 1974), 152.torial styles. 2. For the Primeros Memoriales and its 7. Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr, The Renaissance drawings, see Ellen Taylor Baird, Sahagun's Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (New York, 'Primeros Memoriales:'A Structural and Stylistic 1975), 129. Analysis of the Drawings, PhD dissertation 8. Donald Robertson, 'The Pinturas (Maps) (University of New Mexico, 1979). A transof the Relaciones Geograficas, with a Catalation of the Nahuatl text and reproductions log,' in Handbook ofMiddle American Indians, of the illustrations of the Florentine Codex XII, editedby Robert Wauchope andHoward can be found in Bernardino de Sahagun, F. Cline (Austin, 1972), 261-62. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things9. Baird, Sahagun's 'Primeros Memoriales,' of New Spain, translated by Arthur J.O. 219-20; Baird,'The Artists of Sahagun's PriAnderson and Charles E. Dibble (Santa Fe meros Memoriales: A Question of Identity,' and Salt Lake City, 1950-82). An excellent fac- in The Work of Bernardino de Sahagun, Piosimile of the Florentine Codex has also been neer Ethnographer of Sixteenth-century Aztec published: Bernardino de Sahagun, Historia Mexico, edited by J. Jorge Klor de Alva, H.B. general de las cosas de Nueva Espana, Codice Nicholson, and Eloise Quinones Keber Florentino, (Florence and Mexico, 1979). (Albany, 1988), 212-20. Notes 6. For more detailed descriptions of central Mexican and related pre-Conquest pictorial styles, see, for example, Donald Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early 10. Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, Nueva coleccion de documentos para la historia de Mexico, V (Mexico, 1941), 254-57. 11. Books ofthe Brave (Cambridge, 1949), 205. 12. Sahagun, Florentine Codex, Book 1,54. 13. Robertson, Mexican Manuscript Painting, 169-72. 14. Sahagun, Historia general, I (1979), Book I, folios 1,1 verso, 3,5,6 verso, 10. 15. 'Sahagun and Hermeneutics: A Christian Ethnographer's Understanding of Aztec Culture,' in Klor de Alva and others, Work of Sahagun,58. Colonial 16. Sahagun, Florentine Codex, B o o k I, 61. 3. Sahagun, Florentine Codex, 1,54, 82. 4. Sahagun, Florentine Codex, 1,50,53-56,82. 5. EllenT. Baird, 'Sahagun's Primeros Memoriales and Codex Florentino: European Elements in the Illustrations,' in Smoke and Mist, Mesoamerican Studies in Memory of Thelma D.Sullivan, edited by J. Kathryn Josserand and Karen Dakin (Oxford, 1988), 15-40. Period ( N e w H a v e n , 1959), 12-24; 17. EllenT Baird, 'Nativity Scenes in the and Elizabeth H. Boone, 'Towards a More Codex Florentino,' manuscript in author's Precise Definition of the Aztec Painting possession; and Baird, 'Sahagun's Primeros Style,' in Pre-Columbian Art History: Selected 50 ADAPTATION AND ACCOMMODATION Memoriales and Codex Florentino,' 17-20. 18. Mexican Manuscript Painting, 176-78. and Character,'in Sahagun, Florentine Codex, 1,36-37. 19. Jeanette F. Peterson, however, argues for the uninterrupted continuation of native style and suggests that the artists' 'decision to use native style sources was very conscious... [and] was dictated by the textual material and facilitated by the retention of the practices and iconography associated with the tlacuilo profession' ('The Florentine Codex Imagery and the Colonial Tlacuilo,' in Klor de Alva and others, Work ofSahagun, 290). 21. Renaissance Rediscovery, 16. 22. Renaissance Rediscovery, 24. 23. John McAndrew, The Open-Air Churches of Sixteenth-century Mexico (Cambridge, 1965), 91-120. 24. Samuel Y. EdgertonJr/TheArt of Renaissance Picture-Making and the Great Western Age of Discovery,' in Essays Presented to Myron Gilmore (History of Art, History of Music, II), edited by Sergio Bertelli and Gloria Ramakus (Florence, 1978), 140. 20. Arthur J. O.Anderson, 'Sahagun: Career 51 The Madonna and the Horse Becoming Colonial in New Spain and Peru TOM CUMMINS AMONG THE MARVELS praised by Europeans in the New World, in N e w Spain (Mexico) and Peru in particular, was the artistic ability of its native inhabitants. T h e y not only made marvelous things for themselves before the Spanish invasion, 1 but also, in less than a generation, were able to produce Europeanstyle images as pleasing to the eye as anything created in Europe. In fact, the retraining of native artists to create such images was interpreted as a sign of the success of the Spanish mission. Thus one finds the inveterate conquistador, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, writing in a chapter entitled 'How We Instructed The Indians Of New Spain In The Holy Doctrine... And H o w We Taught Them The Crafts Used In Spain...' that 'before this could be accomplished the Spaniards first had to extirpate the idolatry of the Indians/ 2 He then goes on to state that after this success native artists learned to paint the Passion of Christ so well that if one did not see them do it, it would be impossible to believe that a native had made such images; and these in his judgement made the work of three Mexican artists, Andres de Aquino, Juan de la Cruz, and el Crespillo, comparable in stature to that of the ancient Apelles, the modern Berruguete, Michelangelo, and the most recent master from Burgos. High praise for their craft surely, but there is more to Diaz's words than mere praise. The transformation of the makers of idols for idolatry into makers of images for Christian contemplation was an essential step in the transformative acculturation of native Americans. In the eyes of sixteenth-century Spaniards, you became what you made. One can see the ideology of this transformation perhaps no more clearly than in the different representations of artists in one of the great colonial Mexican manuscripts, the Florentine Codex produced by the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagun with the aid of Aztec artists and scribes trained by him. In one section where an Aztec sculptor in w o o d is depicted making idols for the ancient religion, the image is composed of just Mexican elements set against a flat, empty background (figure i). In another section where the ability of native artists is addressed (rather than what they once produced), their representation 52 T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E Figure i. Construction of an idol, Florentine Codex, Book I, appendix, folio 26. From Benardino de Sahagun, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana, Codice Florentino (Florence and Mexico, 1979), I. 53 NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA Figure 2. Gathering nacazcolotl, dyeing with it, writing with it, Florentine Codex, Book XI, folio 218 verso. From Sahagun, Historia general (1979), III. is based on European woodblock prints and set within an illusionistic background (figures 2 and 3). Here, the depiction of native craftsmen has been infused with a sense of status commensurable with their European counterparts; they have been distanced from their idolatrous connections through the use of a European prototype. 3 The status and function of native colonial artists and what they produced, however, was defined in cases like these first through writing. That is, these examples all occur within a European context that ultimately gives precedence to the written word, and we tend to lose sight of the fact that such techniques of 54 T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E Figure 3. Jost Amman, Der Brieffmaler, woodcut, in Harmann Schopper, Panoplion (Frankfourt, 1568). inscription are a part of the complex strategy of conquest.4 In this paper I want to move away from such self-conscious colonial works in which the European symbolic technology of writing ultimately dominates. Writing is presumed too often by modern scholars to control the epistemological discourse of'the other;' and, since they study mostly writings by Europeans, what is revealed is only what Europeans thought, knew, or loved. 5 There is thus only one other:' the nonEuropean. Natives remain captured in the written word as objects of European self-reflection.6 T o move beyond the bonds of writing, I wish to turn to native forms of symbolic technology, visual images that frame and record knowledge 55 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA within the native world. Many forms produced by native artists in the colonial period in and of themselves were not new or unusual to native expression before the Conquest, but they were fundamentally altered in meaning because they were produced after the Conquest, bringing up issues that can arise only from a European experience and a colonial context. In contrast, I will concentrate on two examples of European forms found in traditional contexts - one, an image found in a 1531 manuscript from Mexico, and the other, an image found on a gold embossed band from Peru (figures 4 and 5) - that I will treat as case studies in which we cannot ascribe the shifts and disjunctions in visual forms to purposeful European agendas. Here, native artists themselves have taken up certain European pictorial conventions to communicate about things which are 'new' to them and must be addressed because they have impinged directly on their lives. I am not so concerned with Aztec or Inca constructions of the European as 'the other' as much as with the internal native dialogue that comes about because of the European 'other.' This distinction is important because, as a concept, the 'New World' is more a matter of time than place; it is a time in which two ancient world cultures collided through the aggressive act of invasion, to begin a process of continuing dialectical permutations where native participation was neither as passive, reactive, or silent as is so often believed. In addition, colonial art is not a single entity but multiple phenomena, and native artists were from the very beginning capable of producing works that expressed a colonial content in their own terms and for their own needs. Native artists therefore cannot simply be enclosed between the poles implied by the terms 'makers of idols' and 'imitators of Apelles or Michelangelo.' Rather, in the very early colonial period before the so-called 'extinction' of preColumbian motifs,7 the crisis provoked by the European invasion involved not only destruction but also dynamic change in native forms of representation. In the case of the Mexican document the motif in question is a representation of the Virgin and Child and in the Peruvian gold piece it is a man riding a horse. These new images are placed within a context of traditional native forms, however, and, although as European-style images they may appear intrusive and awkward, they operate as part of native expression. Their deployment is not as much about contestation between two cultures, as it is about the taking-on of new forms and their becoming something different. In both examples, the native artist's ability to improvise comes in response to a need to renegotiate formal conventions within new systems of power in the colonial world without abdicating the capacity of traditional forms to signify in that world as well.8 Nonetheless, the result of artistic improvisation is not simply the inclusion of new formal and iconographic elements, it is about what the new images mean in the native world. 56 T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E Figure 4. Painting Number 5, Huejotzingo Codex, 1531. Harkness Collection, Library of Congress. Figure 5. Sixteenth-century gold band from South Coast of Peru, 10 x 2 7/16 inches. The Art Institute of Chicago, number 55.2608. 57 NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA Figure 6. The Spaniards making boats for the assault onTenochtitlan. From Diego Duran, Historia de las indias de Nueva Espaiia, chapter LXXVII, about 1579-81. It can be argued that there is an internal dialogue within such 'images about images' that references and juxtaposes the two worlds. Moreover, the dialogue generated is not the same in the cases of the two works discussed, because they were produced in two very different colonial situations. Imagery operated at a variety of levels in the Americas before the Conquest and to reduce it and its place in the colonial world to the single arena of concerns about idolatry and religious icons overlooks the dynamic capacity of native expression. The examples I have chosen are truly New World images that reveal in one manner or another such dynamism. They are different from the European-derived illustrations in the works of Guaman Poma de Ayala, Sahagun, and Duran (figure 6), which are descriptive images of the New World, because they represent a particularly native construction of the 'newness' of the New World as a colonial entity. The Madonna The Mexican image comes from a thoroughly colonial context. It is one of eight native paintings (figures 4 and 7) interspersed in a larger manuscript, now called the Huejotzingo Codex, of seventy-nine folios written in Spanish.9 Some of the paintings are on fig-based paper and some are on maguey-based paper, 10 and they are painted, for the most part, in the style of Aztec tribute lists, which are composed of series of pictographs. The paintings survive among the documents 58 T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E in a lawsuit brought by Hernan Cortes against the members of the first Audiencia of Mexico, Nuno de Guzman, Juan Ortiz de Matienzo, and Diego Delgadillo, who had taken advantage of Cortes' return to Spain in 1528 to gain control of lands and resources granted to him. Their survival as evidence in the case does not mean, however, that the eight paintings were produced for the trial. Rather it is more likely that they were produced during the period of Nuno de Guzman's control of Huejotzingo as a native record of events of that period. First of all, it is clear that they were not made all at once by the same person, because of the variety of paper types and stylistic differences that reveal the work of at least three different tlacuilos (scribes). Moreover, the paintings were not originally part of the case but were presented only after the plaintiff became aware of their existence: I, Garcia de Llerena, in the name of the Marques del Valle [Cortes] in the lawsuit which I am conducting with the Licentiates Juan Ortiz de Matienzo and Diego Delgadillo concerning the interests of the town of Huejotzingo, say that it has come to my notice that in this city there are certain leading men of the said town who have paintings of what the said town gave to the said licentiates. I beseech Your Majesty that you command and compel them to give the paintings to the secretary because I make presentation of them; and I ask that their statements be taken by means of the paintings and by the questionnaire which I have presented in the case and for this I ask an extension of time if necessary... (emphasis mine) 11 The paintings represent an additional form of evidence called to be presented by the Indians of Huejotzingo to document their (and by extension Cortes') costs for the enforced aid to Nuno de Guzman and the other members of the Audiencia during their military expeditions and building campaigns. 12 The other form of evidence, the written document with which the paintings were included, was recorded by a Spanish scribe from the translated oral testimony of three native witnesses. The written document, of course, is more comprehensive, covering the full extent of Cortes' charges against Nuno de Guzman and the others, and includes the testimony of many Spanish witnesses. The paintings record only the material costs of forced tribute, labor, and purchases which are testified to in the written document. But unlike later colonial tribute lists, such as the Codex Mendoza or the Pintura de los Tributos de Coyoacan, the paintings are not glossed with Spanish or Nahuatl (Aztec) text (with one minor exception). 13 Rather, the two sources of evidence appear together equally as Mexican and Spanish traditional forms of documentation. In fact, during the recording of the oral statements, one 59 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA /- A Figure 7. Painting number 6, Huejotzingo Codex. of the three native witnesses from Huejotzingo, Estevan, asked to be shown several of the paintings, including the painting with the image of the Madonna, and after viewing them he related the specifics of his testimony.14 It is at this juncture in Estevan's testimony, however, that the context in which the Mexican paintings functioned shifts from a native one, in which they are used as mnemonic devices, to a European one, in which the truth of their contents becomes more important. After having been commented on by Estevan, the paintings are further identified by the scribe, who interjects the authority of his presence into the testimony by writing that 'all that has been stated is painted on the said paper on which is depicted the said image of Our Lady and which is 60 T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E signed with my sign.'15 The paintings, all of which bear the scribe's rubric, thus enter into the written testimony as material evidence establishing for any future European audience, as the case moves to higher courts, that what has been said is true.16 Moreover, while the paintings are not glossed, the scribe's rubric, which is an ambiguous sign standing between the universality of the written word and the unique sign of an individual, signifies here the cross-over from the written testimony to the paintings.17 That is, the scribe's rubric both appears and is stated in the testimony to appear on the back of each painting, to assure that this is the painting referred to. The paintings are, as it were, 'tagged and entered.' One sees here how neatly the 'content' of the native signs is transformed into the signs of the written word. They have become evidence of an act, illustrations of a text. But, whereas the nature of the image as sign changes through a contextual shift, this is not a shift controlled by the native artists. It takes place through the institution of '"he Spanish legal system and all eight paintings are equally subject to the power of this discursive transformation. Our concern here is the original native context of the images, however. From this perspective, one finds that the capturing of what is 'new' within the discursive strategy of ancient Mexico takes place in only one of the paintings, the one which includes the image of the Virgin Mary. And I mean capture quite literally. The image of the Virgin Mary is taken over through native representation to be something 'other' than what it is in a European context. It is changed from a Christian devotional image to a material object through the artistic conventions of ancient Mexico. The style and organization of this painting, like the others, follow the basic pre-Hispanic formal conventions of a tribute list, the most 'standardized of any form of Aztec art' (for example, figure 8).18 Systematically arranged in horizontal rows against the neutral or empty space of the page, the pictographs of figures and objects are schematic and repetitive. They are indicated by only a black ink outline forming the contours of most of the figures, with the exception of one row in which the interior areas of the human figures are filled by cross hatching or concentric squares in order to indicate the textile designs of their garments. If the painting is divided vertically more or less in half and then only the left side is read from left to right, top to bottom, as is the normal pattern of reading a written text, then one sees a pictorial list of the items that the Indians were forced to contribute arranged in horizontal rows and depicted in abstracted glyphic and pictographic forms as in other tribute lists.19 Following the identifications made by Lucas, the second witness from Huejotzingo,20 there is, first, a tied bundle of grass with a jar at the top.21 The grass bundle is the glyph for the Nahuatl word centzontli,22 four hundred, which with the jar above it signifies the 61 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA fr^nSmS ftf Figure 8. Codex Mendoza, 1541-42, folio 20. From Codex Mendoza, commentary by Kurt Ross (Fribourg, 1978), 37. T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E four hundred jars of liquidambar that were supplied. This is followed by a similar glyph and pictograph representing four hundred mantles. Sixteen hundred pairs of sandals are indicated next by four bundles with feet at the top. The last object in this row is a banner with ten outlined squares, indicating ten painted banners that had to be contributed to Nuno de Guzman.23 The next row down shows ten bundles with arrows on top, tallying up the four thousand arrows given to the Spaniards. Below the arrows are ten glyphs each representing twenty loads of twenty mantles or four thousand in total. Except for the image of the banner, these glyphs and pictographs represent objects that were common tribute items prior to the European invasion, and, although the colonial legality of the tribute is at issue in both the native and Spanish documents, the manner in which these specific traditional items are represented is not problematic. It is not problematic because, as has been pointed out, such tribute books focused pictorially on things rather than actions.24 So, although here it is the colonial action of illegal tribute that is at stake rather than the tribute itself, it is the objects (their pre-Hispanic glyphs) that stand as evidence. As such their visual appearance coincides with their written appearance in the Spanish text as it was taken from oral testimony; that is, the objects and quantities are simply listed sequentially in the same order as they are ordered in the painting. The major difference is that from the written testimony one discovers that, according to one witness at least, most of these things were used to supply the thousand warriors forced to accompany Nuno de Guzman to war, and thus they were not given directly to Nuno de Guzman himself. I have described the order of the images as if they were to be read from left to right according to what is considered to be a standardized pattern by Europeans.25 But this is not the sequential order of this painting if one takes into account Lucas' oral testimony, as transcribed into the document. And his testimony is crucial because it is only through him that any of the paintings can be read through the written document in a coherent manner. The other two native witnesses ask to see the paintings while testifying, but they do not systematically replicate the order and composition of the painting in the narrative pattern of their oral testimony.26 What is significant is that, unlike the other two native witnesses, Lucas does not actually refer to the painting as he testifies, although he, in fact, describes it. Lucas probably had the painting placed before him as he gave his testimony (he mentions papers [paintings] that record the tributes and things given to Nuno de Guzman at the beginning of his testimony), but he always couches the validity of his testimony in terms of whether he was an eyewitness to the events. Truth here 63 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN A M E R I C A is established by statements of what Lucas does or does not know from personal experience and not by his reading and recalling of information from the paintings. The authority of his testimony is based solely on his status as an eyewitness. Although Lucas insists on this status, the fact that his testimony follows the painting is important, because it indicates that he too is using it as a mnemonic device to order his recollections.27 He does not ask that the paintings be entered into the legal dialogue, as Estevan does, because they are not the standard of proof by which he corroborates his narrative. In Lucas5 testimony the paintings remain solely within the context of a pre-Hispanic use and do not enter as a physical form of evidence. Estevan's use of the manuscripts as evidence, in contrast, changes the nature of his testimony, because he enters into a dialogue with the scribe through the paintings. That is, once Estevan asks to see the paintings, the scribe inserts himself into the record by confirming that he too has seen the paintings and has marked them. Such a dialogue does not appear in Lucas' testimony, and, if one reads the narrative as a linear sequence and compares it to the spatial arrangement of the objects in the painting, they do not match. Whereas one reads the text from left to right, one must read the images from right to left with a dramatic break in the center where the image of the Virgin Mary appears. Thus while the facts in each form of document (the Spanish written and Mexican pictorial forms) are almost identical, the order in which they are laid out seems to be disjunctive. The written testimony is a transcription of an oral narrative, and its temporal order, of course, acquires European spatial characteristics through transcription. But preserved for us here is a reading of the images that belongs to the oral traditions of before the Conquest. That is, the Mexican glyphic representations in this document are not reordered according to Western ideas, even though the oral narrative has such an order in the Spanish translation.28 Lucas' oral testimony not only reveals the order of his viewing of the images but indicates what that viewing meant in a native context, and, most important for this essay, the significance of the image of the Madonna. Lucas begins to read the painting from the right where there are twenty-one solid gold disks arranged in four vertical rows of five with the odd disk at the bottom. The disks represent the twenty-one measurements of gold that were spent to equip Don Tome, Senor de Huejotzingo, with a horse so that he could accompany Nuno de Guzman to war. A depiction of the horse itself would certainly have been new,' but the horse is here represented by the glyphs that stand for its value, staying within the conventions of Mexican notation. It is the section to which Lucas refers next in his testimony where one sees the striking image of the Virgin and Child implanted in the composition. to/; T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E Handled unlike any of the other images, the three-quarter length frontal view of the haloed Virgin holding the Christ child is startling (perhaps wondrous' in Greenblatt's sense of the term) and out of scale. The figures have the same hard dark outline as the others but the interiors are filled with color with various tonal gradations to indicate the volume and folds of their garments, according to European conventions. They are set against a dark blue background which is surrounded by a frame of three bands of color. The frame, the solid-colored background, and the frontality of the figures isolate this image from the rest. These and its distinctive formal qualities are based on the uniqueness of the object that this image is meant to represent. Glyph, cipher, and stereotype cannot be used here; this becomes a mimetic representation of a unique image. But the distinctive nature of the representation, its not being signified by a general cipher, does not mean that its signification stands apart from the rest of the painting. The ontological character of the image of the Virgin Mary is transformed by its placement in the context of the tribute list with the figures above and below it. Only here in relation to the Virgin's image are the order and pattern of discrete objects on the page broken. Lucas first mentions the two rows of human figures below. And in this ordering, one finds that the pictorial narrative focuses on the production of the referent, which is actually a standard with the depiction of the Virgin Mary. The images in this part of the document are not simply isolated ciphers tallying tribute; they also relate to each other in a temporal sequence of actions. As Lucas notes, Nuno de Guzman requested an image of the Virgin Mary made of gold and feathers to take to war with him, and because the villagers did not have either the gold or the feathers to make the image, they were forced to sell twenty slaves to Indian merchants. These are the twenty figures shown, eight men in one row and twelve women in the other. At this point, one is still in the realm of the expenditures to which all the other pictographs refer. Except for gender differentiation and clothing, the slaves are stereotypical and have no identity other than as ciphers for objects of commerce. But unlike the other objects, such as the twenty-one disks of gold, their purchase value and purpose are not left to an oral narrative (which in this instance takes on a written form in the legal testimony). Rather the value of the slaves is represented by what they purchased. Their exchange value is represented above the image of the Virgin by nine glyphs of feather bundles each of which contained twenty feathers, and to the right of the Virgin by three disks representing the amount of gold required. Value here is still represented by Mexican glyphs and pictographs of objects, but the action of market exchange is implied by the representation of two different sets of objects of equal exchange value. The value is represented a third 65 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA time by the image of the Madonna which is the transformation of that exchange value into representation. Lucas narrates the transformation: And from the said ingots of gold the said image of Santa Maria was made and it was made as broad and as long as more than half an arm. And the said nine bundles of plumage were of the long and rich kind which the said Indians value very highly, and they placed the said feathers all around the said image after the manner of an enclosure. And when it had been made after this fashion, the said lord and leading men of the said town, and this witness with them, brought it to the said Nuno de Guzman with said overseer who is named Gibaja. And they gave it to the said Nuno de Guzman in the presence of this witness, and he received it.29 The image in the painting refers to the Christian religious icon that the leaders of Huejotzingo had produced and given to Nuno de Guzman to be carried to war by him. But in this tribute list, the Christian icon has entered into the native semiotic system through its representation. The seemingly blank, neutral spaces between the three related images thus allow for the telling of their histories as they are viewed. Of course the image derives from a European prototype, and Mexican familiarity with the image was probably dependent upon two sources: the image of the Virgin on the standard that Cortes himself carried into Huejotzingo and the image that was certainly later displayed to the community in the Franciscan monastery established there.30 The image of the Virgin and Child in the context of the manuscript painting, however, is not simply a matter of a copy of a sacred image from a European source. That production was the task already performed by the native artisans who made the feather standard for Nuno de Guzman. Unlike the standard, with its votive and protective aura, this representation of the Virgin and Child seems emptied of its Christian meaning, demythologized as it were. Although it is represented through an analogic image and thus appears unique, its uniqueness is not based on the supernatural power of the image within a Christian context; rather it is unique because it refers to a particular object produced in Huejotzingo. Its presentation, of course, appears awkward because what is recorded is new, outside the standards of Mexican representation. It is a presentation of an alien image that by its likeness and, certainly, its reproduction and its size in relation to the other figures on the page indicates a sense of wonder and display of artistic virtuosity. Nevertheless, the likeness, first of all, is reproduced here to signify material value within the mode of Mexican production and exchange. Thus the sequential order of Lucas5 testimony regarding the Virgin and the images related to it is the pictorial representation of a narrative of economic to/; T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E transformations. This then is not a Christian image but an image of an object that happens to be a Christian image. The Madonna has been transformed, metamorphosed through its careful surrounding by other figures, to having the semiotic status of a cipher, a glyph. It comes to have the value of a trope within the Mexican system. To accomplish this act of becoming something else meant departing from the traditional conventions used throughout the manuscript. But how was the native artist to make his image not be read as a religious icon when that is what the mimetic image refers to?31 He (all recorded native tlacuilos are males) does not surround it with native images merely to frame the foreign image. As simple framing devices, these Mexican images could be read as contingent or competing ones, in which case the artist's tactic might be seen as accidental and perhaps as an index of his incapacity to maintain the highly structured composition of the rest of the images in dealing with the foreign image. But this is a highly structured composition that, I believe, maintains consistent standards of representation. The norms are broken only so that the artist can contextualize the new image through a narrative relationship with the surrounding figures. Nor is their narrative relationship to be read apart from the rest of the painting (and by narrative I mean that one image relates to the next in a temporal sequence of actions). The narrative linking of this particular group of images therefore also serves an intratextual purpose. The objectifying of the representation of a sacred Catholic icon through a narrative relationship between Mexican and European images creates a relationship of equivalence among all images in the painting. What is therefore important about this painting is not so much that it contains one of the earliest surviving Nahua illustrations of the Madonna and Child, a fact that no author discussing these paintings fails to mention (after all, once the Conquest took place, there had to be a first or earliest image). What is more important is that the image is not just a Catholic icon but is, first of all, a Mexican image recording its production. Whatever the residents of Huejotzingo had learned about Christian doctrine or the veneration of Christian icons is not at issue here. Rather, the tlacuilo has improvised on the canons of Mexican representation to convey the material cost of tribute as it took new forms. Moreover, it is interesting to note what the Nahuatl artists chose to depict or not depict. The horse, a new symbol of status and power, is not represented by its likeness, but rather a manufactured object of European representation is signified by similitude. And that similitude is not meant to reproduce the aura of the sacredness of the Christian icon as taught in the new monastery at Huejotzingo. It instead divests the image of its Christian iconic power and, thus, opens it to different sorts of inquiry. One should not necessarily read this representation as 67 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA a purposeful act of resistance, but most surely as an act of observation and the result of dialogue about new imagery as seen through the eyes of the people of Huejotzingo. At the very least, we see here in microcosm a contested view of the 'spiritual conquest' of the New World. Because native artists were retrained to produce liturgical objects and sacred images, as Bernal Diaz del Castillo and others remarked, many scholars fall too quickly into seeing their productions and the post-Conquest N e w World as a matter of syncretism. This affirmative view, unfortunately, implies a monolithic colonial being and disavows continued differences in relation to power - the real stuff of a colonial society - and individual negotiations. The Horse The horse that is absent in the Mexican painting is the subject of representation in one of the earliest examples of change in traditional Andean imagery toward a colonial content. It appears as an embossed design on an early colonial gold band (figure 5) often identified as a chipana (bracelet) because of its shape and length as well as the two holes at the end to bind it.32 Again there is a juxtaposition between traditional and new forms in an indigenous object, but unlike the Mexican painting just discussed this imagery does not articulate specific colonial interactions between native and Spanish cultures. The Peruvian image is based on a similar transformational operation that brings the outside world of Spanish representation into the semiotic practice of native expression. However, the transformational operation serves to situate the image within an Andean metaphoric context.33 The referent is not to a specific image and act, but to general social categories and associations. This contextual difference between Mexican and Andean examples is not just a matter of historical chance. One cannot find a Peruvian counterpart to the image of the Madonna; for, whereas Mexican traditional forms, such as the Huejotzingo Codex, entered into the official sphere of colonial culture as specific evidence of facts (of genealogy, land boundaries, tribute, history), Andean forms did not.34 Thus one must look to objects that were made to operate solely within native Andean society to see how images of new' things were improvised and 'naturalized.' For this reason, one can rarely attach the names of specific individuals to Andean images or find written texts to (con)textualize them. There are no Lucases or Estevans whose recorded words allow us a seemingly more approximate understanding of the images of the Huejotzingo Codex. In some ways Andean cultural practices remained more hermeneutic in the colonial period than Mexican practices. Thus, the approximations that can be suggested for this decontextualized Andean image are different, being, of necessity, based on broader analogies drawn from a wider context of recorded Andean practices and colonial institutions. 68 T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E The bracelet was a traditional piece of jewelry, which when made of gold was worn by elite members of Andean society.35 From its design and form, it was probably produced on the coast. The precious material and the traditional motifs on the colonial example indicate that it belonged to a curaca or at least someone who pretended to that rank. Curacas were the traditional leaders of Andean communities, called ayllu, which were organized by moieties called hanan and hurin. The curacas under the Inca provided the intermediate leadership between the imperial state and the individual ethnic groups that comprised the empire. The Spaniards recognized the value of these ethnic leaders and they too counted on the curacas' authority in their communities to organize corvee labor and collect taxes for the colonial state. However, the status of curacas as natural lords' (senores naturales), as termed by the Spaniards, changed in the colonial period and they had to be legally recognized through the Spanish power structure. Some of the traditional signs of their 'natural' status also changed with this new legal recognition, and I shall suggest that the indigenous design on the gold band was altered to represent this new colonial status. The formal change was from a hieratic and symmetrical design that metaphorically referred to Andean socio-political concerns, to a design that incorporated a European-style image that pictorially illustrated aspects of the curaca's colonial role. Yet, just as the image of the Madonna and Child was transformed, 'captured,' to operate within a Mexican system, so too the image of the man on a horse is drawn into the metaphorical system of Andean representation. In both cases this capturing and transformation must be seen as an act of appropriation. But whereas the Mexican image (re)presents a European symbol as an object of tribute, the Peruvian image introduces a Western object into the syntigmatic chain of Andean metaphor. The primary compositional structure of the band is predicated on a bilaterally symmetrical design, but the symmetry is not fully carried out. Only the left side of the composition is as it should be. It is composed of two horizontal rows of alternating monkeys and felines, eight animals altogether, facing toward the center of the composition. The monkeys are in full profile and oriented vertically while the felines are horizontal with their bodies in profile and heads turned to the viewer. Each vertical row of animals is composed of a male and female member of the species, as indicated by either the presence or lack of the phallus and testicles. In the case of the monkeys this sexual difference is accentuated by the type of fruit each one eats. The female eats what appears to be a guama, a fruit that has a decidedly phallic shape, and the male eats a chirimoya, a fruit that may have female sexual connotations. The figures are metaphoric images that pertain to a pre-Hispanic symbolic code and presumably refer to the social and political status of whoever wore the band.36 69 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA These metaphors may concern the symbolic values of the moiety division of an Andean community, or the principles of social balance that the moieties represent. Hanan and hurin signify a number of complementary attributes through which the moieties were classified and, at one level of social complexity and symbolic language, they anchor the syntagmatic chain to which further metaphors are linked. 37 These social values may be represented by both the figures and their compositional disposition. Hanan is considered male and hurin is considered female, and this dichotomy is clearly expressed by the sexual differences between members of the same species. At the same time, hanan and hurin can be expressed in terms of high and low. This concept may be represented by the difference between the two species of the animals. The felines appear to be pumas which are native to the highlands while monkeys are native to the jungle. That is, the felines signify hanan's attribute of high and the monkeys signify hurin's attribute of low. One can carry this line of interpretation further by looking at the relationship between the two sets of animals. If these animals do express moiety values, then there are two representations of hanan and hurin: one by members of the same species but of the opposite sex and one by different species from different geographical locations. Seen together they may represent a third quality of hanan and hurin known as yanatin. Yanatin is a concept that recognizes at once the distinction between the two moieties as well as their complementarity. Yanatin expresses the notion of one's social identity as having a complementary mirror image or moiety counterpart, one's needed social and sexual opposite. This aspect of moiety identity has been studied by Tristan Piatt, w h o cites as an example the ritual battles that take place in Andean communities between moieties. 38 These battles not only act out the distinction between the two moieties but they are also considered to represent symbolic coitus between the two combatants, even though such battles are fought between members of the same sex. It is therefore possible that the complementarity aspect of yanatin is expressed by the sexual difference between members of the same species, while the oppositional character of yanatin is expressed by the two different species, the felines and monkeys. 39 A specific iconographic interpretation of the animals' symbolic values within the community in which the chipana was produced is impossible to reconstruct. The general point, however, is that one can find close parallels between the metaphoric language of Andean social structure and the way these animals are represented and compositionally organized.40 What I wish to stress is that this part of the band's design reveals the rich metaphoric values that were embedded to/; T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E in traditional Andean figural imagery, which still operate to express the transitional states of social status in Andean communities.41 Moreover, although I cannot give a precise reading for the images on the gold band, there is clear evidence that such animal imagery could be very specific in its references. Garcilaso de la Vega records that there was a monumental rock painting just outside Cuzco, consisting of two contrasting images of condors. One was depicted as a bird trying to hide itself with wings closed and head tucked beneath one of them. The bird faced south with its back to Cuzco. The second condor was quite different. Its head was boldly turned toward the city and its wings were open as if in flight and ready to swoop down on its prey. According to Garcilaso, the composition commemorated the events surrounding the defeat of the Chanca, a victory paramount in the mytho-historic rise of the Inca empire. The first condor with its head under its wing represented the Inca king who had shamefully fled Cuzco when the Chanca attacked the city. The second bird symbolized his son who successfully defended the city against the enemy.42 Garcilaso's description reveals that even specific 'historical' events were represented in a broad metaphorical manner. Here 'historical' personages are subordinated to a single animal figure type whose instinctual habits stand for cultural values; that is, the image of a sleeping bird is equated with shame and the image of flight is equated with valor. Garcilaso's text can also be used to introduce the right side of the design on the gold band, where such pure metaphoric language gives way to a Europeanstyle descriptive image. In describing the rock painting he says that when he left Peru it was in good repair, but in 1592 when he asked a priest just returning from Peru about it, he was told that it and other images like it could hardly be seen because they were neglected. In both literal and figurative senses, traditional imagery was fading in importance and slowly being replaced by Western forms of representation, and it is this replacement that can be seen on the right side of the gold band. The far right side begins by mirroring the left with a pair of felines (presumably it originally began with two monkeys which are now missing). The second set of four animals seen on the left side, however, is replaced by an intrusive figure that breaks the overall symmetry of the conventionalized composition. It is recognized at first glance as a descriptive image of a man riding a horse, a representation that identifies the piece as obviously colonial. The horse by itself could have been unobtrusively integrated into the composition by being replicated on the other side, or at the very least the horse could have been centered rather than confronting the left half of the image. The human figure shown on 7i NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA top of the horse indicates another distinction of this part of the design. That is, the horse is not integrated into the composition as another metaphoric element in a purely 'natural' sense because it is combined with a human figure; it is a man riding a horse. Only the two birds, one above the rider the other below, signal an Andean representational context. By placing the human figure astride the horse and controlling it by the reins held in his hand, a physical relationship is depicted and a form of narrative is suggested based upon a temporal and spatial interaction between two pictorial elements. Moreover, the narrative that is suggested derives from observations only possible in the colonial world. This figure is thus a representation of contemporary experience and at the immediate signifying pictorial level does not connote the kind of metaphoric values that the other animals do. But why the need to image contemporary cultural experience within a traditional composition based on animal metaphors? Its inclusion disrupts the harmony of the composition, and the two pictorial codes, one metaphoric the other mimetic, are awkwardly juxtaposed and seem to make little sense in relation to one another. Yet if one heeds Ricoeur's sense of metaphor in relation to imagination as the process of 'seeing' that affects the logical distance between entities or categories being connected, then one sees here the beginning of the metaphoric process in which the horse and rider lose reportive mimetic value, and the semantic, cultural distance is reduced between this image and the others.43 The process however does not take place simply within a closed arena of symbolic language, but within the social and political sphere of early colonial practice. If one presumes that the gold band through its material and form still signified the hierarchic status of the wearer, then the two types of image do relate because they draw the connection between the ancient privileges accorded to the curaca by his community and the new privileges granted to the curaca by the Spaniards in order that he be able to carry out his traditional duties.44 As indicated above, the metaphoric images refer in some manner to the traditional social position of the wearer. The associations of these symbols had been generated and internalized through generations of lived experience. The metaphoric images were a shared cultural language comprised of multifold associations that rendered natural' and autochthonous the overt socio-political relations of the community. 45 The 'grammar' that functioned at a deep level and gave specificity to these associations was the structure of that society. These meanings, now lost to us, were embedded within the society as a whole and were 'intuitively' understood. In other words, these metaphors were successful and unquestioned because they operated within an ideology that was completely coherent and fully accepted as true.46 to/; T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E The figure of the man on a horse represents aspects of the Andean socius for which there was no autochthonous image, no shared symbol, no cluster of associations. It refers, of course, to an aspect of European power for which there was no traditional precedent. But power as represented by a mounted horse was not just the force of military advantage but also the privilege within colonial society of access to a horse. And it is as much the power of privilege as the power of force that marks the presence of the horse on the gold band.47 As discussed, the curaca in the colonial period took a mediating position between his traditional culture and Spanish society. For this role he was accorded a number of new privileges by law so that he could fulfill his duties. In particular, a curaca was allowed to own a horse with saddle and reins for his government functions.48 This privilege compensated for the fact that a curaca could no longer be carried about on a litter.49 That is, a traditional right was supplanted by a new one, granted in order for the curaca to carry out his new duties. The horse, bridle, and saddle were of course symbolic of the European recognition of the curaca7s authority within his community,50 but as symbols from an alien society, there was no way for these new objects to signify within Andean society other than through their physical presence or literal representation. The intrusive figure on the gold band clearly illustrates the objects of the curaca's new role. A man is astride the horse and grasps the reins in one hand and holds either a whip or, more probably, a sword in the other (the artist's technical abilities perhaps restrict him here, as he shows the man's torso above the horse and his feet directly below the belly).51 The imaginary space between culture and nature in which many Andean metaphors are generated is reduced to domestication and mastery in a prosaic and even profane sense of power. The only domesticated animal that served as a beast of burden in the Andes was the llama and it is perhaps this quality of the llama that the strange 'hooves' of the horse recall. Thus an Andean metaphoric image could not be used here because the relationship that was being expressed was entirely new and out of the realm of Andean experience. Here the image seems to express the new relations only at the level of literal illustration.52 That is, the privileges that codified the curaca's position in colonial society had to be depicted because those privileges did not extend beyond the immediate present in a diachronic fashion nor originate from within the structure of Andean culture. There was no synchronic tradition that accompanied them because they were imposed from without. The image of the rider therefore borrows not only the Western formula of illustration but uses its factual content to assert the right to privilege in much the same way that paintings were introduced in Spanish courts of law. 73 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Here, however, the image is used within an Andean context rather than a Spanish colonial one, and to operate within Andean society such images cannot remain external to it. They must, at the very least, be seen in relation to those symbolic elements that constitute the representation of culture, if that culture is to retain, in any sense, the power to imagine itself. That relationship is here established through a visual language of metaphor. The simple denial in the depiction of the feet of anatomical observation of the crucial natural sign distinguishing the equine from the camelid creates an ambivalence which cannot be dismissed as just the unmanaged persistence of Andean artistic convention. Conventions serve to allow recognition of the familiar; here the mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar establishes not only ambivalence but an equivalence in which all figures operate beyond the distinctions of natural and cultural and as metaphors for culture, or in the case of the horse and rider as a sign for becoming a metaphor. It is a European-style equestrian on an Andean horse. It is an ambivalence of being neither and becoming something else. There is a dialectic, then, within the juxtaposition of two artistic systems. The object and a part of the image harken to traditional meaning but the intrusive Western image brings both the object and the autochthonous image into the world of colonial reality, just as the image of the horse and rider is brought into the signifying context of Andean expression by its inclusion on a traditional Andean object. It stands within an Andean context and is a part of the signifying unity of the composition, replacing while becoming an Andean metaphor. The juxtaposition articulates the contradictions of native colonial existence and tries to reconcile the new with the old. That is, by coupling the literal image of the curaca's colonial position with traditional expressions of his 'natural' position there is an attempt to draw an equivalence between the two.53 Such an equivalence conforms to a new colonial identity not only for the curaca but the entire community. Social and political relationships are not only determined by the ayllu structure but also by the Spanish colonial power structure as well, something that is certainly associated with the image of a horse. Moreover, this new colonial power structure invested curacas with advantages which began to create a social and economic division between them and their communities. The image of the man riding the horse is only the beginning of the colonial positioning of curacas within the world of Spanish power and economy. But as in the Huejotzingo Codex that position is not uncontested in terms of representation, nor in reality. It does not mean simply the mimicking of Michelangelo by native artists. The image of slaves turned into Madonnas or horses into nabobs is, in fact, the history of colonization. That it can be expressed on the other side of writing, non-writing, and within terms established by native to/; T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E Americans recognizes that colonial history was not epistemologically controlled solely by Europeans. These images do not stand outside of the colonialization of the Americas; they, in fact, participate in it, but they are not our images of it. Nor are they the melancholic Vision of the vanquished/ They stand instead as the capacity to (re) articulate 'newness' as becoming something else. And if there seems an ambivalence in these sixteenth-century images as we look at them today, it is not based on the Hegelian notion of the inherent ambiguity of the symbolic image.54 It is because there was, I believe, an ambivalence then about that becoming, an ambivalence that was certainly justified as the New World became a thoroughly colonial world. Yet, the transformative act in both examples, at the very least, turns these representations of things European into either Mexican or Andean tropes and thereby reveals the 'other' side of colonial discourse.55 Such revelations, I would suggest, are not isolated but are a constant exercise in a colonial dialectical struggle which makes a colonial project always and everywhere incomplete.56 75 NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA Moralisee,' in Word and Image, V, number 1 Notes [1989], 128); but even so there is almost an 1. For example, Ludovico Bertonio defines obsessive need to represent books and writ- the abstract geometric forms on Inca tex- ing in the New World in both Spanish and tiles as 'Tocapu isi: vestido, o ropa del Inca native imagery. For example, one finds it in hecha a las mil marauillas...' in Vocabulario Spanish generated imagery such as the de la lengua aymara [1612] (La Paz, 1984), 357- murals at Actopan, the sculptures on the 2. Historia verdadera de la conquista de la facade of Yuririapundaro, Mexico, or La Merced in Ayacucho, Peru, and in illus- Nueva Espana, II (1984), 455-62. 3. Jennefer Spreitzer, 'Idolatry and the Aztec trations such as the frontispiece to Diego Artisan in the Florentine Codex,'unpub- Valades' Rhetorica Christiana. It is equally lished manuscript; and Jeanette F. Peterson, important in native generated imagery such 'The Florentine Codex Imagery and the as that found in Guaman Poma de Ayala's Colonial Tlacuilo,' in The Work ofBernardino Nueva coronica i buengobierno or the Codice de de Sahagun, Pioneer Ethnographer ofSixteenth- Cuetlaxcohuapan. Finally, it often has been century Mexico, edited by J.Jorge Klor de noted to what extent early colonial church Alva, H.B.Nicholson, and Eloise Quinones decoration is taken from book designs, and Keber (Austin, 1988), 273-93. this relation is more than just a matter of trac- 4. The importance of writing and books in ing sources. Books and buildings are meta- the conquest and settlement of the New phorically intertwined. How else are we to World has been pointed out by many mod- understand the increasingly architectonic ern scholars; see most recently Walter structures of the frontispiece of books that Mignolo, 'On Colonization of Amerindian give the appearance of the portals of the Language and Memories: Renaissance Theo- great sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ries of Writing and the Discontinuity of the churches? This appearance betrays the seem- Classical Tradition,' Comparative Studies in ingly ambiguous use of the Spanish term Society and History, XXXIV, number 2 (1992), 'portada' to designate facades of structures, 301-30. However, the significance of books ephemeral triumphal entrance arches into and writing goes beyond their use to inscribe cities, and frontispieces. They are all liminal the colonial process. The act and object passages and openings into European worlds become iconic signifiers of the presence of and words. SeeTom Cummins, 'Books, Bibles the Europeans in America. It is, after all, the and "Portadas,"' unpublished manuscript. bringing of a book, the Bible, through which 5. These are the categories of Tzvetan legal cause was given to the Conquest. As a Todorov's extremely influential book The s y m b o l o f p o w e r and k n o w l e d g e , the Bible Conquest of America ( N e w Y o r k , 1984). Stephen had long been used as an image since the Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions (Chicago, Middle Ages (see Michael Camille, 'Visual 1991) also casts knowledge of the New World Signs of the Sacred Page: Books in the Bible in terms of written texts which tell of only to/; T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E European views. Both are literary scholars, 9. The document is now in the Manuscript so it is no surprise that writing is not only Division of the Library of Congress and is privileged but also the only source of repre- currently known as 'The Harkness 1531 sentation. Thus Greenblatt can reduce the Huejotzingo Codex.' The entire manuscript initial European response to the New World has been transcribed and translated by to an essentialist argument through what he J. Benedict Warren. See Howard Cline, 'The reads: 'Wonder is, I shall argue, the central Harkness r53r Huejotzingo Codex,' in The figure in the initial European response to the Harkness Collection in the Library of Congress New World, the decisive emotional and intel- (Washington, 1974), 9-210. It has previously lectual experience in the presence of radical been called Document 1 of the Harkness difference.. .' (page 14). Collection (see Howard Cline, 'Oztoticpac Lands Map of Texcoco 1540,'The Quarterly 6. RolenaAdorno's Guaman Poma: Writing as Resistance in Colonial Peru (Austin, 1986) is Journal of the Library of Congress, XXIII, number 2 [1966], 78-79) and also the Codex one of an increasing number of studies by literary historians that address the capabili- Monteleone by the first modern author to ty of a native to use European literary tech- take note of the manuscript (see Alfonso niques to form the image of the European as Toro, 'Codice del Archivo de los Duques de the 'other.' Moreover, she recognizes the Monteleone,' Anales del Museo Nacional de equal importance of the non-literary, visual Arqueologia,Vl [1925], 60-66). elements to such a task. See also her dis- 10. For a description and material analysis cussion through native texts of Todorov and of the paintings, see Silvia Rodgers Albro de Certeau's work ('Arms, Letters and the and Thomas C. Albro,'The Examination Native Historian in Early Colonial Mexico,'in and Conservation Treatment of the Library 1492-1992, Re/Discovering Colonial Writing, of Congress Harkness 1531 Huejotzingo edited by Rene Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini Codex,'JAJC, XXIX (1990), 97-115. [Minneapolis, 1989], 201-24). 11. All translations are by Benedict Warren (in Cline'Huejotzingo Codex,' 85). 7. George Kubler, 'On the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-Columbian Art,' in 12. There is internal evidence in the docu- Essays in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology, ment that further suggests that the paintings edited by Samuel K. Lothrop and others were not part of the original construction of (Cambridge, 1964), 14-34. the case against Nuno de Guzman and the 8. By focusing on this moment of crisis, or others. The series of questions, or question- even rupture in Foucault's sense of the term, naire, are referred to by Garcia de Llerena as I will suggest thatTodorov's thesis about the already presented to the court. The order inability of Native Americans to improvise, and composition of this questionnaire and hence the inevitability of the European (pages 91-95) does not conform to the order conquest, is not true, at least not in terms of or specific information in the paintings. If visual communication. the questionnaire had been prepared in 77 NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA 17. The equivalence between iconic image relation to the paintings, one would expect a and written word is already understood much closer correlation between the two. within such legal documents in which one The native notion of recording the costs of swears to the truth both in word and image, aiding the Europeans for some future 'sobre todo lo cual pido me sea echo entero reference is not altogether unusual in the conplimento de justicia tjuro a Dios y a esta early colonial period. For example, the + que lo pido no es de malicia,' (Cline, 'HuejotWanka of Peru also kept record by quipu zingo Codex,' 74, emphasis mine). (knotted colored string) of the amount of material aid they had supplied to their 18. Esther Pasztory, Aztec Art (New York, European allies. The information from the 1983), 206. quipu was admitted as evidence in a later 19. Pasztory, Aztec Art, 206. litigation against the Spaniards in order to 20. Lucas gives the most thorough identirecover the Wanka's expenditures. See John fication of the objects and quantities in the Murra, 'Las etnocategorias de un khipu painting (Cline, 'Huejotzingo Codex,' 105estatal/ in Formaciones economicas y politicas en15). Where other witnesses substantially el mundo andino (Lima, 1975). differ from his identifications will be noted 13. The sixth painting has the words 'honze casas principals' with the scribe's rubric written along the numerical and house glyphs in the upper right hand comer (pages 64-65).They are all numbered on the back and include the scribe's rubric; Paintings 1,7, and 8 have annotations also on the back. 14. The number of native witnesses called to testify is not an arbitrary number. Three native witnesses were the minimum number needed to verify a statement. 15. Cline,'Huejotzingo Codex,' 119. 16. European style portraits and paintings of historical events were also entered as evidence in court testimony in New World cases, and their visual content was attested to by the scribe. See Tom Cummins, 'We are the Other: Peruvian Portraits of Colonial Karakakuna,' in Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, edited by Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adomo (Los Angeles and Berkeley, I99i),2i7. in footnotes. 21. Cline, 'Huejotzingo Codex,' 105. 22. For example, in the 1570 dictionary of Molina the term centzontli is translated as 'quatrocientos, o una mata de ortaliza, o de yerba' (Fray Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario en lengua castellana y mexicana y mexicana y castellana [Mexico, 1977], 18). 23. The image of the banner and the ten squares is interpreted differently in the testimony of Estevan: 'and in order to make a banner which he says is painted in the said painting, so that the Indians could carry it, they spent ten loads of little blankets for covering, with twenty blankets in each load. He then corrected himself to say that Don Tome carried said banner' (Cline, 'Huejotzingo Codex,' 119). 24. Pasztory, Aztec Art, 206. 25. The standardized left to right reading of tribute lists is used on another later tribute/census list from Huejotzingo (see to/; THE MADONNA AND THE H O R S E Hanns Prem, Matricula de Huexotzinco [Graz, 1974]). The left to right order is also the one used by modern scholars to orient a viewer in relation to a listing of the objects depicted in the painting (see Cline, 'Huejotzingo Codex,' 62; and Toro,'Codice del Archivo'). 26. For example, Estevan first mentions the gold spent to buy a horse for the cacique and then asks for the painting in which the gold as well as the image of the Virgin Mary appear (also already described) to be shown: 'And he asked to be shown another paper where they have them [gold ingots] painted, on which is said image and painting of Saint Mary which he has mentioned.. / (Cline, 'Huejotzingo Codex,5119). It is the voice of the scribe which here described the appearance of the painting as a piece of evidence. This type of collaboration between the scribe and a particular witness occurs whenever the paintings are produced. 205). The distinct order of this very early document therefore may represent the original organization of such tribute lists, at least from the area of Huejotzingo. 29. Cline, 'Huejotzingo Codex,' 100. 30. The image of the Virgin and Child and the symbol of the cross were the first two Christian images that were distributed to native communities by Cortes. See Richard Trexler, 'Aztec Priests for Christian Altars,' in Church and Community, 1200-1600 (Rome, 1987), 469-92. 31. Of course the artist cannot control the reading of the image especially once it appears in a bicultural context, such as the lawsuit. Hence, when the scribe records what he sees, he recontextualizes it through his written commentary: 'All this that has been said is painted on the said paper on which is depicted the said image of Our Lady' (Cline, 'Huejotzingo Codex,' 119, emphasis mine). Here it becomes again an image of the Virgin Mary rather than being an image of an image of the Virgin Mary. 27. Often the order of components of the question asked structures the order of the information in the answer. This is not the case here (question 4 and response). 32. The identification of the piece as a bracelet was made by Pal Keleman (Art ofthe Americas, Ancient and Hispanic [New York, 28. It maybe that the presumed standardized organization of reading from left to right and top to bottom of tribute lists is actually the consequence of an early adaptation to European patterns. By conforming the pictorial organization of colonially produced tribute lists to the structure of a written page, a standardization was achieved that permitted easy comparison between the two forms. This would explain, in part, why these types of documents are, of all Mexican pictographic material, 'most frequently described 1969], 175). 33. Other than the basic quality of metaphor as the substitution of one image (verbal or visual) for another to express a concept, I do not assign a fixed meaning to metaphor as I use it in this discussion. Fixing meaning to such an elusive concept is an academic and philosophical exercise. Metaphors, I would suggest, can be situated without specificity to ego. It is the engagement in play that is important because it permits alternatives as " w r i t i n g s y s t e m s " ' ( P a s z t o r y , Aztec Art, 79 NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA even as it employs categories of definitions. I thus have employed a variety of different modern comments about metaphor in relation to my discussion of this piece, not in order to build up a single or unitary definition ofmetaphor, but rather to suggest the various possibilities of the play among images. 39. See,for example, Gary Urton, 'Animal Metaphors and the Life Cycle in an Andean Community,' in AnimalMyths and Metaphors, 251-84. 40. This kind of social identity of difference and complementarity certainly conditioned ritual behavior imposed by sacred architecture on the central coast well into the colo34. For differences in Spanish reactions to and uses of native imagery in the viceroy - nial period. Felipe de Medina described in 1650 a temple complex in use near Huacho alties of New Spain and Peru, see Tom that must have been very similar to the Cummins, 'Representation in the Sixteenth ancient pre-Hispanic temple at Chavin de Century: The Colonial Image of the Inca,' Huantar. It was a U-shaped structure with Dispositio, forthcoming. underground chambers that led to a central 35. The material of an object in Andean culimage £de piedra muy extraordinaria ture was part of the symbolic content ex...traido de muy lejos/The figure was over pressing rank and status; see Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva cordnica i buen gobierno, nine feet tall and carved in relief with deep spiralling channels that emanated from the edited byjohn Murra and Rolena Adorno eyes and through which ran blood and chi(Mexico, 1980), 464-65. cha sacrificed to the image. All those who 36. For the Incaic use of animal imagery in relation to symmetry as a political and social sacrificed came together in this central chamber; however, their paths to it were metaphor, seeTom Zuidema/The Lion in the City/ in Animal Myths and Metaphors in conditioned by opposing ethnic and sexual identities. There were four separate stoneSouth America, edited by Gary Urton (Salt lined underground passages, two for peoLake City, 1985), 89-95. ple from the coast and two for people from 37. The importance of the social categories of hanan and hurin as generating some of the the sierra. Men from the sierra entered through one and women from the sierra central metaphors of Andean expression entered through the other; the same diviwas first introduced in a significant manner by Tom Zuidema (The Ceque System of Cuzco sion was made for people from the coast. Thus, one finds the same divisions imaged [Leiden, 1967]) and has been used as an exthrough animal metaphors on the chipana planatory model for a number of studies of as operating in ritual performance, where Andean representation. See, for example, opposites became reunited in a single cenRolena Adorno's discussion of Guaman tral space. See Felipe de Medina, 'Relacion P o m a ' s d r a w i n g s in Guaman Poma: Writing del ...Visitador General de las idolatrias del and Resistance. 38. My discussion ofyanatin in general is de- Arzobispado de Lima...in Coleccion de libros rived from his work (Espejos y maiz: Temas de y documentos referentes a la historia del Peru la estructura simbolica andina [La Paz, 1976]). [1650], second series, III (Lima, 1920), 89-91. to/; THE MADONNA AND THE H O R S E The compositional use of male and female as symmetrical elements with both complementary and antithetical metaphoric associations has an extremely long history in Andean representation beginning in the Early Horizon. See Patricia Lyon, 'Female Supernaturals in AncientPeru,' Nawpa Pacha, XVI (1978), 98-103. representation," which specifically consists in the belief that the social phenomena in question are nonsocial or "natural" in origin or essence' ('Animal Symbolism, Totemism, and Structure,' in Animal Myths and Metaphors, 50). 45. Social facts are made 'natural' through the representation of animals or other natural phenomena as symbols. That is, as TerranceTurner in rephrasing Mclennan's 1870 concept of fetishism writes:'the representation of social or cultural phenomena in animal form involves an element of "mis- a crisis for the cultural priority given to the metaphoric, as the process of repression and substitution which negotiates the difference between paradigmatic systems and classifications. In mimicry, the representation of 46. For a detailed study of the manner in which symbols work within a native society at both a surface and deep level and the 41. See, Urton, 'Animal Metaphors.' 42. Los comentarios reales de los Incas (Barce- process by which the two levels are fully related and understood, see Gerardo Reichellona, 1968), Book IV, chapter 23. Dolmatoff, Amazonian Cosmos (Chicago and 43. Billie Jean Isbell, 'The Metaphorical London, 1974). Nonetheless, the representaProcess: "From Culture to Nature and Back Again,"' in Animal Myths and Metaphors, 301; tion of the social order as a 'natural' order through the use of metaphoric images is the Paul Ricoeur, 'The Metaphorical Process as obfuscation of reality in order that a society Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling,'in On Metaphor, edited by Sheldon Sacks (Chicago may operate to overcome contradictions that might otherwise destabilize social relationand London, 1979). 44. That chipanas or bracelets continued to ships. SeeTurner, 'Animal Symbolism,' 49-54. have significance for curacas is evidenced by 47. This mimicking is what Homi Bhabha their being listed by their Quechua (Inca) calls the 'metonymy of presence' in his disname in wills. For example, in the 'testacussion of early modern Western colonial mento de DonPedroArapa, cacique [curaca] discourse. Although discussing British texprincipal de la parcialidad de los Indios Coltual examples of the nineteenth century, I las deste pueblo de Pocona' (Jurisdiction of would suggest that his process operates in Mizque), are listed 'dos chipanas de oro many colonial situations including the examgrandes,' 'dos chipanas de oro chiquitos,' and ple discussed here. These instances of me'una chipana de plata' (Archivo Municipal tonymy are the nonrepressive productions de Cochabamba/Ramo Mizque, volume of the culture of enunciation through a strate1561-90, Expediente number 3). I would like gic confusion of the meaning. For each of to thank Lolita Gutierrez Brockington for these instances of 'a difference that is almost sharing this document. the same but not quite' inadvertently creates identity and m e a n i n g is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy. As Lacan reminds us, ST NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA 'mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmo- Provincia de Quispicancha,' folios 735-41 nization or repression of difference, but a verso; and 'Inventario de Cajamarca 15-VII- form of resemblance that differs/defends 1647,' folios 12-15, cited in Waldemar Espi- presence by displaying it in part metonymi- nosa Soriano, 'Los Senorios etnicos del Valle cally' (Homi Bhabha, 'Of Mimicry and Man: de Condebambay Provincia de Cajabamba,' The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,' Anodes cientificos, III (1974), 133. October, XXVIII [1984], 130-31). 51. The right to carry arms was another priv- 48. This law was repeatedly stipulated in ilege accorded only to curacas (Espinosa, varying forms in the ordenanzas of Fran- 'Senorios etnicos,' 131) and was often stip- cisco de Toledo. See Francisco de Toledo dis- ulated in the cedulas granting a coat-of-arms positions gubernativas para el Virreinato del to a curaca, such as the one granted in 1598 to Peru 1576-1580, II (Seville, 1989), 242-45. Juan Ayaviri: 'Que se de cedulapara que tenga 49. Gregorio Gonzales de Cuenca, 'Orde- armas de pasados y pueda traer espada y nanzas de los Yndios, 1566,' HistoriayCultura, daga y lo mismo pueden hacer sus descen- IX (1975), i45.The image of a figure carried on dientes...' ('Memorial de Charcas,' cited in a litterbecomes a sixteenth and seventeenth- Silvia Arze and Ximena Medinaceli, Imagenes century motif to represent the despotic pow- ypresagios, el escudo de los Ayaviri, Mallkus de er of the non-European ruler (both Asian and Charcas [La Paz, 1991], 12). In the 'testamento American) who greets and then often is de don Pedro Arapa, cacique principal de la justly overthrown by Europeans. The earli- parcialidad de los Indios Collas' (cited in est image ofan Andean offered to Europeans note 44) not only are chipanas listed but also was Atahualpa carried on a litter in the act 'dos espadas con guarnacion de atauxia.' of receiving the Bible from Fray Vicente 52. There is a direct correlation here between Valverde(in Cristobal de Mena's La conquista indigenous imagery and mythology. The del Peru [Seville, 1534]). The image imme- same native thought that employs myth diately precedes Atahualpa's act of refusal and creates image is based on the concrete of the book which gives the Spaniards just and not abstraction (Claude Levi-Strauss, cause to pull him from the litter and to seize The Savage Mind [Chicago and London, 1966], the empire. Ultimately, as a trope, the image 22-30). Metaphor is used here to express a of the litter becomes a site of critique, as it is fixed relationship. The metaphoric symbol used by Montaigne in his essay, 'Des coches.' may change from one myth to another, but SeeTomConley, 'Montaigne and the Indies: the relationships that are expressed in the Cartographies of the New World in the Es- myth do not. In other words, there is an sais, 1580-88,' in 1492-1992: Re/Discovering underlying structure in mythology, like Colonial Writing. grammar, so that symbols in myths have no 50. For examples of the prestige of passing intrinsic significance but are dependent on such objects, see Protocolo 2/ 228, Escri- upon their context (Levi-Strauss, The Raw bano Gregorio Vasquez Serrano,' Testimonio and the Cooked [New York, 1975], 56). The de Don Joseph Aocatinco de Quiqijana, Spanish Conquest brought an entirely new to/; T H E MADONNA AND T H E H O R S E also the critique byjohannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York, 1983), 123-31. 55. Although speaking about language, I 53. The same difficulties arise in native liter- think Ricoeur's statement that 'by providing a kind of figurability to the message, the ature in which Andean and European tratropes make discourse appear' can apply to ditions are brought together. See Frank the images discussed here ('The MetaphorSalomon, 'Chronicles of the Impossible,' in From Oral to WrittenExpression: Native Andean ical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period (Syra- Feeling,' in On Metaphor, 142). 56.1 would like to thank Simon O'Meara for cuse, 1982), 9-12. a close reading of the draft of this paper. 54. Georg Hegel, Lectures on Aesthetics. See set of relations for which there was no form for expression other than concrete representation at a surface level. 83 Colonial Visions Drama, Art, and Legitimation in Peru and Ecuador CARLOS ESPINOSA THE VISUAL DISPLAY OF POWER is viewed as a major feature of political domination by scholars of early modern Europe; underscored, in particular, is the use from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries of dramatic and artistic representations in absolutist monarchies. In Hapsburg Spain, John Elliott and Jonathan Brown have highlighted the link between monarchical power and painting and drama in the environs of the court,1 and Jose Antonio Maravall has placed the development of these arts, geared as they were toward social control, within the context of the growing urbanization of the era.2 In contrast, the role of visual imagery in the legitimation of power in the Spanish colonies of the New World has received little attention. Yet as offshoots of the Spanish monarchy, colonial governments in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere must also have resorted to art and drama to impose values facilitating control and exploitation. There is, however, an immediate objection to the idea that such artistic legitimations abounded in the colonies. Did not the colonies lack large urban masses to be subjected to social control, audiences for the visual display of power? There are two answers to this objection: first, the colonies were surprisingly urbanized, and second, town and country were so tightly integrated that rural dwellers too were compelled to witness the productions of urban culture. Hence, even the native Indians actively participated in artistic legitimations of power. This article explores the role that visual imagery played in the legitimation of colonial power in the Viceroyalty of Peru, and it examines native response to the art and ceremonial dramas sponsored by the colonial state. The ideal foci for this study are productions dealing with the Conquest itself, as the ethical status of the Conquest and of the order it overthrew were themes that were especially relevant to the crown's native subjects. This article addresses the interaction of the art of power with popular culture through a study of a specific incident in the seventeenth century, in which native actors manipulated and responded to official representations. A distinctive feature of the Viceroyalty of Peru is that the state established its legitimacy with reference to the pre-colonial past. That past was the Incaic 84 COLONIAL VISIONS 'empire,' a territorial state in which the ethnic group of the Inca ruled over a plethora of other polities. The Inca state was dismembered after the Spanish Conquest in the 1530s. In its place arose the political and economic frameworks of the Viceroyalty of Peru. As an appendage of the Spanish monarchy, the viceregal state drew its moral authority from metropolitan legitimations, which is to say, dynastic lineage, consent of the people, and divine providence. Yet it also founded its legitimacy on both the rejection and assimilation of the rights and norms of the pre-Hispanic era. The administrative elite of the Viceroyalty justified a highly stratified order, in which the native population was subject to special obligations in the form of tribute and labor services through a variety of theological and juridical assertions relating to the pre-Hispanic past. Colonial authorities claimed that Spanish preeminence in the colonial context derived from three historically related sources: from the conquerors' military rout of Indian forces; from the native lords' voluntary transfer of sovereignty at the time of the Conquest; and from the colonists' labors to alter pre-Conquest beliefs and perfect social norms. These historically oriented claims were depicted in public ceremony and pictorial art in Peru from the decades after the Conquest until the end of Spanish colonialism in the early nineteenth century. Dramatic representations of theological and juridical justifications of colonial society took the form of outdoor plays, or autos, performed in the plazas of the administrative centers of the Viceroyalty. These were staged during fiestas reales (royal festivities), which were the local celebrations for the birth of an infante (heir to the Spanish throne) or the coronation of a new king. Claims for the legitimacy of colonial society that made reference to a pre-Conquest universe were also communicated through pictorial means. Paintings devoted to this theme were commissioned for and displayed in the course of royal festivities. Viceregal dramas relating to the past are a standard subject of the extensive anthropological literature on the Andes, where they are termed 'dances of the Conquest.'3 This is a useful shorthand for the plays that concern us, although too narrow, since the plays portray the transition from pre-Hispanic to colonial society not only as a military contest but also as a transfer of sovereignty or a process of conversion. Anthropologists and art historians have generally viewed these colonial dramas as highly critical of colonial society. According to classic studies on the subject, the 'dances of the Conquest' deny the legitimacy of the colonial order and hold up the past as a Utopian alternative to colonial society. As dramas of resistance, they are assumed to stem from popular initiative, driven in turn by trauma over the disruption and violence of the Conquest or a desire to reinstate the Incaic cosmos.4 This standard explication is, however, in 85 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA need of drastic revision for both empirical and theoretical reasons. I conceive of the 'dances of the Conquest' as originating as validations of colonial power sanctioned by the colonial state, rather than as subversive visions. This view of dramatic and pictorial depictions of the pre-Conquest past as outgrowths of the colonial power structure departs from the thesis that the colonial state vigorously rejected any manifestation of the pre-Columbian world. It stands closer to the idea of the dances as an 'invention of tradition' within a colonial context than to the prevailing scheme in which native Andeans strove to conserve local culture in opposition to the project of the colonial state to eradicate it. The natives of the major cities of the Viceroyalty and their hinterlands participated in these plays staging the claims of legitimacy of the colonial order, as both actors and 'entrepreneurs.' Hence, while the impetus for the 'dances of the Conquest' came from the colonial administrators, the visions of colonial society elaborated in these representations were coproduced by native participants. Colonial authorities secured native involvement in the plays with something beyond reprisals; what impelled their participation was that native leaders, the collaborators of Spanish colonial rule, validated their own power through this legitimation of the colonial order, the regime that they served. In fact, there was a subgenre of the dances that highlighted the claims of the native elite against an opaque background of a broader justification of colonial society. There was also a genre of painting that focused on the claims of native collaborators that included both portraits and genealogical representations.5 Yet, I also would emphasize that while visual imagery depicting the preHispanic past served to validate both the power of native functionaries of the colonial state and the colonial order, it also had a subversive edge. By thematizing legitimacy, highlighting native authority, and making reference to the preHispanic past, the plays and paintings that communicated the legitimacy of colonial power were potentially threatening to Spanish domination. Might not the stratum of native collaborators who resorted to such imagery to guarantee their assets within colonial society have turned that imagery against colonial society? Modern accounts of major Indian uprisings in colonial Peru have not adequately explored the incidence of dramas or paintings in the course of violent resistance movements, but, here and there, they have been suggested as remote sources of inspiration for rebellions seeking to revive pre-Hispanic conditions. In the following, I analyze such a case of resistance aimed at a kind of revival of Incaic power in which the dramas and paintings designed to legitimate colonial power did play a key role. Native intermediaries, whose political and economic stake in colonial society was always potentially threatened, seized upon the imagery of legitimation to turn its fiction into reality and thereby to/; COLONIAL VISIONS assailed the foundations of Spanish legitimacy. This little known event took place in the Audiencia of Quito, a northern district of the Viceroyalty of Peru lying in what today is Ecuador. The study of artistic legitimation in the Viceroy alty of Peru and the native response to it must be couched within a broader inquiry into how colonial society related to its pre-colonial past. Such an inquiry into the historical consciousness of colonial society extends beyond the formal claims of legitimacy to a more fluid medium of mentalities and comportments. The diverse visual imagery relating to the Conquest and the Inca past suggests that within colonial discourse and behavior there were conflicting understandings of the degree of continuity and discontinuity that should exist between pre-Hispanic and colonial society. Colonial authorities at once valued and suppressed the past: both religious and secular practices rooted in pre-Columbian times were seen as manifestations of idolatry; yet, framed entitlements to power and property and social norms were established with reference to the past, either as continuous with it or as in some sense derivative. The authority of native collaborators, for example, was construed as founded in the pre-Hispanic era. The positing of the past as the source of colonial power and property rights in turn produced a type of historical memory, since social actors had to prove that their entitlements derived from the pre-Conquest distribution of resources. It also stimulated the theatrical representation of a bygone era, as subjects elaborately replayed the past and the events of the Conquest on which their claims were grounded. Thus, by turns, the rejection, revival, and representation of the pre-Hispanic past coexisted at the heart of the colonial framework. Those strands of colonial discourse and behavior that denied legitimacy to survivals from the past lead to another dimension of the problem of imagery. Discourses on idolatry denounced pre-Columbian religious life as the demonically inspired worship of images. Thus, artistic images played a major role in the historical consciousness of colonial society, and, at the same time, anti-idolatry activity viewed artistic images as instrumental to the recovery of repressed modes of worship, in so far as they enabled the memory of things past. The Advent of the Inca On New Year's Day, 1667, as new authorities were selected throughout the Viceroyalty, Don Alonso Florencia Inca arrived at the boundary of the corregimiento (county) of Ibarra in the Audiencia of Quito. Riding on a mule along the royal highway, Alonso Inca was on his way to the villa (town) of Ibarra, the center of the corregimiento, where he was to assume the post of corregidor or royal magistrate, to which he had been duly appointed by the Viceroy at Lima.6 87 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA As his name implies, Don Alonso Florencia Inca was an unusual corregidor. He was an avowed descendant of the Incaic dynastic clans, clans organized around a historic or mythic Inca sovereign who occupied the role of progenitor. Alonso Inca claimed descent from Huaynacapac, the last Inca monarch before the Spanish arrival, and he was originally from Cuzco. Such descendants of the kin groups (panacas or casus) linked to the Inca sovereigns were recognized by the Spanish crown, but neither as local client rulers nor as heirs to a patrimony of goods.7 The crown viewed them as a group unhappily dispossessed of power, status, and wealth and deserving of compensation. This contrasted with the local native authorities, called curacas or caciques (the latter a Caribbean word used by the Spanish), whose jurisdiction was confirmed by the crown. Although seeking to compensate Incaic descendants for their misfortunes, it did not typically do so by granting them the sensitive and prized position of corregidor commonly reserved for peninsular Spaniards. Thus, the anomalous empowerment of an Incaic descendant set into play a social drama in which the tensions of the colonial polity came to the surface. As he approached the minuscule pueblo of San Pablo, near the limits that set off the city of Quito from the corregimiento of Ibarra, Alonso Inca met with triumphal arches and a boisterous procession of several hundred Indians, who had come to welcome him, bearing pantomime effigies of the Inca sovereign and a local princess. The pantomimic figures were richly adorned and seated on thrones and bore the distinctive headdress of the pre-Conquest reigning Incas, the llauto. This rite was referred to by witnesses as the sacada del Inca y la Palla, the parading of the Inca and the Palla/ Sweeping the ground before him with poles bearing flax at their ends (chasquis), the procession then led Alonso Inca into the plaza of the village. At a feast held at the home of the cacique of the village and attended by the other major caciques of the area, Alonso Inca proclaimed himself to be king of the Indians (rey de los indios).8A day later he entered the town of Ibarra in the same fashion. The cabildo, or town council (made up of members of the local Spanish elite of property owners), went out to meet Alonso Inca. Yet Alonso Inca eschewed their reception in favor of that of the Indians, who led him into the plaza dancing before him, naked, with their faces painted and swinging the poles mentioned above. Alonso Inca was the focus of other ceremonies in the course of his term as corregidor. These ceremonies not only featured ritual actions playing up his Incaic descent but also made use of symbolic objects, including paintings, heraldic blazons, and textiles. In Ibarra Alonso Inca prominently displayed two representations authorizing his identity before the caciques of his corregimiento, a heraldic blazon and a genealogical painting.9 The blazon featured the royal arms (armas to/; COLONIAL VISIONS reales), or emblem of the Spanish crown, probably modified with a reference to Alonso Inca's Incaic claims. The genealogical painting depicted a tree that arose from Huaynacapac's chest and bore portraits of his descendants, including, on one of the upper branches, Alonso Inca. In another rite taking place in Alonso Inca's home in Ibarra, an Indian noble (principal) who came to serve Alonso Inca divested himself of his cape and shoes, signs of status within the colonial system of authority, and called Alonso Inca his king. When Alonso Inca entered the pueblo of Urcuqui, near Ibarra, the Indian authorities of the village kissed his hands and feet.10 At a feast in the home of the prominent cacique of that pueblo, Sebastian Cabezas, Alonso Inca displayed a camiseta de cumbi (a fine Incaic textile) in his possession to his host, telling him that it was over one hundred years old and had belonged to the Inca. Sebastian Cabezas responded by throwing a pano de mano, or hand cloth, around the neck of Alonso Inca. Finally, at carnival (Carnestolendas) the Indians of Ibarra attacked the Spaniards with slings, claiming to act under the orders of the corregidor, Alonso Inca. The son of Sebastian Cabezas was overheard prophesying that 'soon the day would come when the Spaniards would have to ask for license to look into our eyes/ 11 A friend of Alonso Inca, Roque Ruiz, in the city of Quito, struck a similar note, foretelling that 'someday you will see many things only money for Spain is lacking/12 Ruler Worship and Idolatry Beginning in February 1667, only a month after the arrival of Alonso Inca, and ending in June of that year, the proceedings of his trial by Spanish authorities called on witnesses to give evidence of a range of threats posed by this figure's exercise of extra-juridical authority deriving from his Incaic descent. The witnesses made use of a variety of discourses that gave meaning to actions, either conceding or withdrawing positive legitimate value from behavior. The trial at first pursued violations of precedence, according to well established juridical conventions for treating that transgression.13 The emphasis on precedence as well as the availability of language in which to speak about its subversion reflect the significance of visual displays of status to the operation of colonial authority. The Compilation of the Laws of the Indies, indeed, contains a section on cortesias y precedencias that traces through symbols and ritual acts the vertical and horizontal boundaries that distinguished secular from ecclesiastical jurisdiction.14 Thus, Alonso Inca was accused of attending native authorities before Spanish colonists, taking into his service an Indian noble exempt from manual labor, setting a cacique next to him at a public gathering, and receiving ceremonies that were more sumptuous than those accorded to higher officials, including bishops and royal judges.15 89 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Yet the violation of precedence was more than a trope of repressive discourse. Alonso Inca no doubt was guilty of reemploying the signs of precedence of the colonial order to magnify his own authority along with that of the subjects from whom he sought recognition. By redistributing the access that members of the community had to him, he increased the prestige of 'the other'-the native authorities who alone were capable of viewing him as a royal person. By taking on and one-upping the signs of colonial higher offices, including those of the judges of the royal court (oidores) and the king, he could make visible the status to which he lay claim. Signs of precedence bound to a hierarchy of offices carried the potential of validating unregulated movements across the hierarchy, or shifts in the position of the offices themselves. They offered, in other words, a supple medium by which the social order could be redefined. Within a few days the trial shifted from charges of precedence to accusations of idolatry, presenting the behavior of Alonso Inca as a cycle of scenes of idolatrous ruler worship. Idolatry became one of the major themes ordering the proceedings against him, first in the corregimiento of Ibarra and later in the city of Quito. Its most general definition was the worship of that which was created, rather than the Creator. 16 Created things encompassed both entities of nature, including human beings, and artifacts, among them artistic representations. According to the Spaniards, native existence had been dominated by idolatry and the purpose of the Conquest was to repress idolatry and channel native desire from natural and artistic creations towards the Creator. The ascent from the productions to the producer was mediated by writing (scriptures) and the sacramentalized body (Christ). The type of idolatry invented by the proceedings was the worship of rulers, which raised the specter of a displacement not only of royal power, but also of Christianity. From the colonial histories of pre-Columbian monarchies to the extirpation of idolatry campaigns, Spanish writings placed monarchical power at the center of constructions of the native religion that Christianity had deposed. Hernan Cortes' account of the Mexican ruler Motecuhzoma's confession that he was not really a god, but a mortal made of flesh and blood - a scene of disenchantment - is a highlight of the 'figure of ruler worship' in Spanish writing. 17 The concept of ruler worship drew on two conventions. Ruler worship reflected the postulate that idolatry involved a cognitive error in which pagan peoples made God's creations the source of change (generation, transubstantiation, or locomotion), instead of God himself. It also drew its force from the proposition that outstanding mortals shared immortality with divine beings through the perpetuation of glory by means of memory. In a line of argument that joined the foundation of the polity to that of religion, monarchies were accredited with to/; COLONIAL VISIONS the invention and development of idolatrous cults, including myths and rituals directly glorifying themselves or serving to deceive and discipline the population.18 The 'figure of ruler worship' also included the claim that the worship of rulers involved artistic representations of the sacred king in both sculpture and painting. Indeed, the articulation of ruler worship with the 'figure of the adoration of idols' may be found in the very genealogy of idolatry. According to the discourse of idolatry, idolatry, which focused on art (ars) rather than on nature, began with the impulse to honor rulers at a distance, from afar and after their deaths. The first idols, according to this view, whether in painting or sculpture, substituted for absent rulers. Indeed rulers became deities only through their portraits. It was through representations that they attained immortality by remaining in the memory of men; and it was technical improvement in the arts that magnified the impact of rulers on their subjects' imaginations. Subjects then oriented their desires toward the body of the ruler through representations. In Peru, the Western mythology of royal statuary and portraiture as modes of idolatry proliferated in missionary and historiographical writing. An early example may be found in the soldier Francisco Xerez: 'Era tan temido y obedecido que le tenian casi por dios y en muchos pueblos le tenian hecho de bulto.'19 The witnesses at the trial of Alonso Inca invoked the paradigm of ruler worship in their efforts to discredit Alonso Inca, by making reference to rituals of adoration, royal portraits, and absolute power. These references made use of historical memory, as it was circulated in elite conversations and fixed by the chronicles, and of the extirpation of idolatry literature that parish priests were enjoined to possess. Witness after witness formulated the message that Alonso Inca renewed 'the figure of the sacred ruler,' engendering adoration and absolute obedience among his putative subjects. This raised the threat that the preHispanic mode of power with its religious overtones was on the verge of replacing those of the king and God. The witnesses multiplied the symptoms of the process of displacement: the Indians of Urcuqui 'kissed the feet and hands' of Alonso Inca, a 'ceremony of their rite and usage;'20 Alonso Inca displayed the vestment of the ancient monarch, asking the Indians to offer 'ceremonies of adoration' to it;21 he was received with 'ancient ceremonies' which in the time of their 'gentility' they had 'offered to the Inca;'22 and, finally, the genealogical painting or 'portrait of the Inca'23 served to refresh 'the memories of their ancestors.'24 All of this is dangerous - the witnesses assert - because the Indians, as is well known, are 'Christians by force.'25 The reference to the mnemonic character of Alonso Inca's painting is of considerable significance, for a regression to a repressed mode of rule and structure of desires naturally had to be mediated through submerged memories. 9i NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Thus painting and art in general not only sharpened the memories of the absent Inca, securing his immortality and through it his divinity, but also made possible the return of a repressed religion. Conversion was the process of forgetting pagan rituals and idols and inscribing Christian prayers and articles on the surface of memory. According to missionaries, this process was a laborious one, since the new memories did not easily adhere in the neophytes' minds and the old ones did not readily vanish from their souls. Thus, memories of the 'false religion' vanquished by Christianity remained logged in their interiors.26 In the aesthetics of colonial Christianity, as in the Counter-Reformation in general, there was an intimate bond between artistic representations and mnemonic images. Artistic representations rekindled memories of ancient images encoded with sacred facts, whether these had been experienced directly or acquired through the substitute of texts. In the case of idolatry, paintings, textiles, and rituals relating to the past, even if they were concocted in the present, could recreate the mental images of deposed deities.27 The renewed mental images then supposedly aroused desires among their viewers, and the actions of these viewers, in turn, stirred the memories of others. The reawakening of repressed memories, in other words, was believed to be contagious. What the Spaniards feared was that the presence of Alonso Inca as the sacred ruler along with his visual images would trigger a mass regression to idolatry. The theme of the resurgence of a repressed past was a major formula belonging to juridical and missionary discourses. It ordered accounts of both native rebellions and extirpation of idolatry campaigns. The scheme may be characterized as one in which a prohibition of idolatrous worship is followed by the transgression of that prohibition which takes on the form of a regression. The rupture between present and past underlying the scheme stems from the imperative that the new Christians cast off their prior personal and collective beings, and join a new body, that of Christ or its substitute, the corpus mysticum of the Church. In accusing Alonso Inca of effecting a revival of idolatry, the Creole proprietors of the colony constructed Alonso Inca's artistic and ritual allusions to the past as a sudden return of the illegitimate religious life repressed by the Conquest. Yet their reading of the rituals and of the functioning of symbolic objects is notable for what it repressed: the fact that within colonial society real or putative survivals from the past were pervasive and had a legitimate status. Also repressed was the fact that it was legitimate to represent the pre-Hispanic past in the form of a superseded or bygone world, as an absence. This time period set off from the present was called the 'time of the Inca.' There were, in other words, alternative ways of accounting for Alonso Inca's evocation of the pre-Hispanic past other to/; COLONIAL VISIONS than as an illegitimate revival of idolatry. It is not only that the events could be framed in conflicting narratives, but also that they flowed from logics of behavior at variance with those imputed to them by the discourse of idolatry. In actuality, Alonso Inca's flaunting of images of the pre-Hispanic world and his intimate relation with it can be demonstrated as having arisen from within the context of the 'traditional sector' of the colonial regime. His pictorial and ritual evocations of the 'time of the Inca' participated in condoned political behavior, which highlighted the living presence of the past among colonial subjects. Because of Western notions of custom and natural rights and the need to adapt to the local environment, colonial authorities had organized a network of local authority conceived as a continuation of pre-Hispanic power structures and effected a simulation of an intimate relation between contemporaries and their ancestors. There was a staging of the relations of indebtedness and inheritance that a people traditionally maintains with its past, along with a fabrication of the objects, or lieux de memoire, such as monuments, relics, and ruins that bind the living to the dead. Natural law theory established the entitlements preceding Christianity as binding rights, while the notion of custom gave validity to practices handed down from a founding event (ab initio).28 Local Indian caciques in the colonial polity were ancient authorities (antiguos senores) who derived their rights from the 'time of the Inca' and from the prestige of their ancestors, and key practices from the past, such as labor exchanges, were compulsory in the colonial present.29 Native communities (pueblos, parcialidades) had a right to their land (tierras) and were bound to it on the basis of having inhabited it since tiempos inmemoriales. 'Ancient ceremonies' punctuated the year. Yet the flow of cultural and political values from earlier generations crossed a divide radically distinguishing past from present, the 'time of the Inca' from Christianity. From genealogical paintings to portraits, art took on the role of guaranteeing social memory and the formulation of individual and collective identities that referred back to the dead. Alonso Inca's behavior also mirrored the continual re-presentation, as opposed to return, of the repressed 'time of the Inca,' or the imposing presence of tradition. This re-presentation occurred during formal legitimations in the royal festivities and also in writing. In historiography, the evocation of the Inca monarch as an absent past allowed readers to construct their identities by compelling them to glance back not only at what had been but also at what had been overcome. Public ceremonial in the colonial period shared this function of historiography. It staged a break between past and present, calling attention to a past through which the social actors were defined, but from which they had 93 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA ascended. This was an ascent from idolatry to direct communion with the divinity, or, alternatively, a passage from pagan bodies to the various visual substitutes for the absent body of Christ (the Sacrament, the Church). Painting, in so far as it made visible the narratives of historiography, also formulated the relationship that the present kept with the past and therefore contributed to the mode in which the group defined itself in relation to 'the other.' Reenacting the Founding Event While Alonso Inca projected images of the past into the space of the present, he was not engaging in an operation to return what had been repressed. The hypothesis that the cluster of visual and verbal representations enacted by Alonso Inca and his followers drew upon and derived meaning from the omnipresence of a past tolerated and even stimulated by the colonial regime is not difficult to bear out. In their testimonies, two witnesses to the reception of Alonso Inca observe that the 'parading of the Inca and the Palla,' the central rite involved in the performance of Alonso Inca, had been seen before in the fiestas reales,30 by which they mean, not the cycle of festivals that had organized clan and imperial relations in the Inca state that other witnesses referred to, but rather the contemporary coronation festivals for Spanish monarchs. The meaning they give to the ritual then does not come from historical writing, but from contemporary practice. Not surprisingly, these witnesses are Creoles of lower status with less access to disciplinary knowledge than the other witnesses, priests and land owners who stress the idolatrous character of the rites. Their slippages reveal the unexceptional character of Alonso Inca's evocation of the past which was silenced by the elite witnesses. In the Spanish monarchy, the general purpose of the fiestas reales for an ascension, or coronation, was for the new king's vassals to recognize him and to contemplate and praise his virtues. Fiestas reales were celebrated in cities throughout the Spanish 'empire.' In the major centers of Castile and Aragon the king personally attended the festivities.31 In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the royal portrait (retrato regio) or the enunciation of the 'royal name' compensated for the absent monarch, allowing his subjects to affirm their loyalty and to offer him recognition. The centerpiece of thefiestasreales was the jura or ceremonial pledge of vassalage in which the civic or viceregal authorities submitted to the new monarch on behalf of the administrative entities they presided over. The jura culminated with the raising of the royal banner (pendon real) before the royal portrait. This invested the king with the power of the locality, as the banners were the trappings of sovereignty.32 In addition to this ceremony, the diverse corporate groups to/; COLONIAL VISIONS of a city staged 'demonstrations of loyalty' to the new sovereign. Among the corporate groups were the noblemen (caballeros), the guilds (gremios), the confraternities (cofiadias), and the Indians. These particular festivities' took the form of plays - comedias or tragedias. In some cases the representations were allegories of submission, but in others the contents could be unrelated to the ascension. When there was no evident connection, the representations expressed loyalty through the expenditure of resources. While the jura was a constitutional ritual, these other performances were believed to be mimetic or allegorical, rather than having the status of real events. On the whole, the fiestas reales staged the imaginary ideal of the colonial order, a royal body bringing together disparate entities as 'members.' What then was the role of representations of the pre-Conquest past in the fiestas reales of the cities of the Viceroyalty of Peru? There were several genres of performances which exhibited the pre-Columbian monarch. At the outset, it should be pointed out that unlike the discourse of idolatry which multiplied the scandalous errors of the past, these theatrical performances valued the past in a positive way, as characterized by a legitimate authority that provided the basis for what the Spanish king later came to possess. Very common in the fiestas reales were scenes in which a pre-Columbian monarch, Motecuhzoma in Mexico or Atahualpa in Peru, turned over authority to the Spanish king either by verbal proclamation or a sign of submission. These scenes constructed the relation between the Indians and the crown at an intersection of diachronic and synchronic axes, at once commemorating the origin of that relation and renovating it. A typical scene of this kind was that enacted by the Indians of Lima in the fiestas reales for the birth of the Infante Charles II in 1661. In a pantomime, a 'figure of the Inca' presented keys to a portrait of the Infante.33 Taking place in festivities whose program elaborated on the loyalty that vassals owed to the new king, one of the messages of the scene was the love that Indians felt toward the young ruler. There was a strong allegorical thrust to the scene. The nation of the Indians was transposed onto a royal person, the Inca, and the colonial social structure was transposed toward an original contract. The Inca acted out the part of the nation of the Indians (la nacion indica) and the act of subordination was set in the past. Personifications of nations or geographic regions - from America, to Brazil, to Castille - were typical actors of propagandistic theater and pictorial art in the colonial era.34 However, the personification of the nation of Indians in the figure of the Inca also obeyed the principle that a collective actor arises through the medium of the human body. By means of the royal person of the Inca, the 95 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Indians could become a unified and willful collective subject, instead of dispersed individuals lacking a collective intentionality.35 Thus the personification was more than a substitute for the group; incorporation in the figure of the Inca was a mode of collective being. In addition, the figure of the Inca played the role of the natural spokesman of the Indian nation, its valentior pars, in which case representation took place without personification or the mechanism of incorporation. On a historical plane, the submission of the Inca to the Spanish sovereign was an allegorical development of the Indians' recognition of their new lord. Yet this 'founding scene' also staged one of the crown's claims to legitimate possession of the Indies, the contention that the pre-Columbian monarchs had voluntarily transferred their kingdoms to Charles V.36 Such initial contracts were believed to be binding upon following generations. The visual representation of an original contract between the Inca and the Spanish crown served to refresh the memory of the act of subjugation and to give evidence of it to those who were absent at the time. In addition to echoing philosophical casuistry, the 'figure of a founding contract' in public ceremony was closely connected to the charter of new societies, the requerimiento. The requerimiento was a legal text that was read aloud in a rite of conquest in the course of the initial engagements between the Spaniards and the Indians of the New World. It informed the Indians that they had been placed under the authority of the Spanish monarchy by the Papacy (through the Alexandrian Bulls) and that they were to undergo the process of conversion to Christianity.37 They were given two options with respect to these imperatives: they could either submit voluntarily to the king, in which case they would maintain their jurisdictional, personal, and property rights or suffer a 'just war' that would result in the loss of their goods. The requerimiento, in other words, allowed for two alternative foundings of colonial society, through just violence resulting in humiliation and dispossession or through a contract that confirmed original rights. The Peruvian conquest took the form of a just war with the Spaniards' violent capture of the Inca monarch Atahualpa in Cajamarca in 1531. In the early seventeenth century, however, the conquest of Peru was reinvented. While it was still framed in the terms of the requerimiento, it now assumed the form of a contract between the Inca and the Spanish monarch. The basis of legitimacy of the colonial order thus shifted from violence to consent. This is reflected not only in the contractual scenes of public spectacle described above, but also in the major native written text of the seventeenth century. In his polemical Nueva coronica y buen gobierno, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala - an Indian functionary of the colonial state - depicts and describes the emblematic scene of a contractual founding. In it his father, playing the role of 'viceroy' or to/; COLONIAL VISIONS ambassador of the Inca, welcomes Francisco Pizarro near Cajamarca with an embrace. Guaman Poma then goes on to argue that 'there was no conquest' because the Indians submitted voluntarily to the Spanish crown.38 The rationale for claiming a consensual founding within the colonial intellectual and legal context was that such a beginning ratified the Indians' rights and entitled them to accede to Christianity voluntarily rather than through coercion. This underwrote Guaman Poma's plea that colonial legislation be enforced and expanded in a way favorable to the Indians, guaranteeing native powers and land titles, the control by native men over their women, and an Indian-controlled Church. In the context of public spectacle in the mid-seventeenth century, the reworking of the founding scene emitted similar messages. But the messages of public spectacle were mimetic instead of transformative, or indicative rather than subjunctive. In public spectacle, the founding scene staged the crown's requirement that the Indians be consensual agents under its direct authority, and not the servile instruments of local colonists. Thus public ceremony advertised a conception of the Indian subject as endowed with intentionality by grounding that image in a decisive historical founding event. At the same time that it stressed the freedom of native subjects, the representation recalled the closure of a pagan past and initiation of the Christian symbolic order, establishing collective identities with a reference to 'the other.' Either as an allegory of the jura or as a depiction of a founding event, the scene of the Inca's transferral of signs of sovereignty to the Spanish crown reflected manifold interests. In addition to strengthening the authority of the crown vis-avis particular interests, the scene also enacted claims in favor of individual native authorities or caciques, formulating their identities. This becomes clear when we take into account the prologue that introduced these scenes in public spectacle, the mock battle between the Inca and rival native lords or the depiction of the dynastic line of the Incas. In the 1659 comedia that the Indians of Lima staged to offer recognition to the Infante Charles II, a pantomimic 'figure of the Inca' led an attack upon a fortress defended by two rival lords. Once he had captured the stronghold, he joined his two opponents in transferring keys to a royal portrait. By sponsoring comedias on the occasion of the ascension of a new monarch, which constituted 'royal service,' Indian nobles or authorities augmented their power within the colonial order. It was through royal service or the exercise of leadership in favor of royal interests, as tabulated in administrative documents, that local powers secured their confirmation by colonial authorities. The Inca's concession of his newly acquired domains to the Spanish crown functioned as an allegory of royal service, transforming the native lords' mundane services to the colonial state into epic history. 97 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Beyond pointing to the local authorities' commitment to royal service, the staging of the deeds (hazanas) of the Inca advertised the genealogical claims of local Indian authorities. Under the system of senorio natural or natural lordship, local native authority in the colonial order was constructed on a dynastic model. The native chief monopolized power, belonged to a dynastic lineage, and passed on his rights to his eldest son. Since the source of jurisdictional rights, and so dynastic title, were the entitlements (derechos) of the pre-Conquest era, claimants to the cacicazgo or office of local chief had to demonstrate that they belonged to a ruling lineage originating in pagan times. The written succession proceedings centering on the probanza de meritos that enumerated claims and had witnesses to vouch for their truth - formulated genealogies back to a progenitor who had been a ruler before the Conquest and underscored the magnitude of his domain. The claims of Incaic descendants took a similar cast. They set forth elaborate genealogies to acquire compensation for the goods from which they were deprived because of the Conquest. There was a crucial link between the genealogically based entitlement among Incaic descendants and that of local authorities. The latter sought to link up to the Incaic genealogies, giving themselves Incaic origins and thus adding to their prestige. In the colonial era, linkages to Inca origins among local rulers were important, as Incaic genealogies were better known and were considered more authoritative than local ones. Through this process, the Inca and 'things Inca' became symbols of power within the colonial framework. Thus the standard Incaic representations in public spectacle could make visible the genealogical claims of native authority in general. Springing from this genealogical model of authority was the staging of the 'deeds of the Incas.' The conquests and victories of the Inca underscored the extension of the domain and magnitude of the power on which a claimant to colonial office sought to found his authority. The 'figure of the Inca' acted either as progenitor to an Incaic claimant or as a supplementary ancestor to a non-Incaic claimant. Through the positing of an Incaic progenitor or notable forebear, the claimant depicted himself as an extension or representation of the Inca. In the 1631 festivities for the birth of the Infante Baltasar Carlos the representation of the conquest of the kingdom of Quito by Huaynacapac, for example, was sponsored by Carlos Atabalipa, a great-grandson of Atahualpa and at that time the major native authority of the Audiencia of Quito.39 Also involved was Francisco Garcia Ati, a prominent cacique from Latacunga, w h o had married into the Atabalipa family and thereby took on their prestige. 40 The representation featured a pitched battle in which the Inca impaled the queen of Cochasqui, a figure of local historical memory. Moreover, through the organization and direct enactment of to/; COLONIAL VISIONS such epic representations, the claimant established his prerogative to represent traditional authority in the space of the present. In addition to marking out the extension of the domain of the progenitor, the 'deeds of the Inca' contributed to the prestige of a lineage, a prestige that the claimant made his own. Deeds generated glory in the Spanish system of status recognition and formed the opinion that the public held of a ruler. The glory of a dynastic lineage accrued across generations, for the judgement rendered on past deeds by the community resonated in oral memory and new deeds multiplied glory. The representation of past deeds for those who were not present was indispensable to the accumulation of glory. It allowed for opinions regarding past deeds to crystallize in the present and attach to the heir. In this model, spectacle took on the role of a monument,' a representation that compensated for an absence through an image and a narrative.41 It is probable that pre-Columbian modes of legitimation were also operative in the staging of the 'deeds of the Inca' in seventeenth-century public spectacle. The recitation of the deeds of a ruling lineage was a major component of the mode of power of the pre-Columbian era. However, there is no need to counterpoise that mode of legitimation to colonial ones, since in public spectacle native genres were deployed within a Spanish dramatic framework. Moreover, in Spanish historiography the 'perpetuation' of the memory of deeds was a metahistoriographical postulate. This implies that writing ordered spectacle as much as oral tradition did, that the relation of Indians to their past operated as much through written history as through oral memory, and that it was the Spanish legal concept of senorio natural along with its practice of providing written genealogies that propelled the representation of past titles and deeds. Alonso Inca and the Royal Festivities Thus Alonso Inca and his followers were drawing on colonial ideologies and ritual scenes rather than 'repressed material' to constitute an extra-juridical authority. There was, in other words, a whole phantasmagoria of historical representations from which an invocation of pre-Columbian power could draw its meaning. The followers of Alonso Inca took over the 'parading of the Inca and the Palla,' which, as argued above, was in normal usage probably a ritual of subordination directed at the Spanish monarch. They performed it upon his entry into San Pablo and evidently again in Ibarra, where, perhaps just a few weeks before, the Indians of Otavalo had paraded the Inca and the Palla in the fiestas reales (this would have been sometime between October and December of 1666, when the Viceroyalty of Peru celebrated the ascension of Charles II). Thus upon the entry of Alonso Inca the Indians of Otavalo must have performed the 99 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA parading of the Inca and the Palla' a second time under the spell of the royal festivities, where the violent and chaotic colonial field became a unified entity marked by a conjunction of past and present around a powerful center, the crown. In the fiestas reales those who were soon to become followers of Alonso Inca experienced themselves as a unitary body invested in the character of the Inca. At the same time Alonso Inca, contemplating the theatrical parades of contractual scenes in Lima, in turn, identified with the Inca, the body of the collectivity. Subsequently, he and his followers sought to achieve an empowering unity through the medium of this individual body. Drawing on royal ceremony, they substituted Alonso Inca, or the true royal body, for the pantomimic one that prevailed in the fiestas reales. One element separates the construction of an Indian collectivity in the allegories of the fiestas reales from those that took place upon the entry of Alonso Inca. In the later event the collective being was real. Alonso Inca and his followers pressed an allegory of colonial relations into a putatively real correlation of forces. Or, alternatively, they transformed a historical representation into an actual presence in the here and now. This transition from fiction or past to present history was not plausible.42 Sooner or later it had to face the real distribution of force which militated against Alonso Inca's assuming the real power and status of a client monarch under indirect rule, which seems to be what he had in mind. Genealogy and Painting To give background to his pretensions, let us now turn to the painting that Alonso Inca displayed in his home in Ibarra to both Creole audiences and to the caciques of the corregimiento. The painting was described by the scribe of the cabildo in the following terms: ... in his living room I saw a canvas... at the foot of which are the ten Inca kings in a file and on top there is another Inca lying down across whose chest emerges a tree from which emerge many branches; on the right hand side there are many Spanish men and women and on the left there are many Indians.. .with different headdresses.. .43 Another witness established that Alonso Inca himself appeared in the painting: ... this witness saw the painting many times hanging in the living room of his house. And not only were the parents of the corregidor painted but also on the last branch on the left was the corregidor.. " The painting established the descent of Alonso Inca from the Inca monarchs and so made a claim regarding the identity of the corregidor. To reiterate the to/; COLONIAL VISIONS main thesis of this paper, although the painting establishes continuity with the past, it would be difficult to see it as a case of Andean iconography surviving through resistance or coming forth from the collective unconscious. Evidently, the relation that the past keeps with the present is the overt theme of the painting, not a subliminal undertow that undermines the surface play. It would not even be convincing to cast the genealogical painting as an expression of nostalgia for the past or of desire for its reconfiguration. A genealogy endows the present with meaning and determinations and channels the past into the present, rather than violently unleashing the past in a contemporary vacuum. Clearly, some other logic organizes the representation. Alonso Inca does not say when or why he commissioned his painting. The matrix of the painting, however, may be determined by reference to another text. Garcilaso de la Vega - the sixteenth-century historian of Incaic origin living in Spain - in a discussion of the descendants of the Inca dynasty, tells of a genealogical painting he received from Peru. The painting featured bust portraits of the line of the Incas ending with Huaynacapac and Paullo - a post-Conquest client of the Spaniards. Garcilaso recounted that the painting was implicated in the attempts by the descendencia del Inca (in Cuzco) to gain exemption from the obligation to pay royal tributes.45 The painting, in other words, was designed to validate claims regarding lineage pressed in writing for the purpose of acquiring colonial status. Before the events in question Alonso Inca had been a chronic seeker of compensation (mercedes) from the Spanish crown. In fact, in the 1650s his brother had travelled to Spain, where he secured for himself and Alonso Inca the right to use royal arms - the honorific blazon he hung on the walls of his home in Ibarra. Far from the idolater or figure returning to the past depicted by the trial, Alonso Inca was operating entirely within the colonial context. His hope was to journey to Spain for an audience with the king, in which he expected to obtain the alcaldia of the district of Quito.46 The alcaldia was an honorific office giving its occupant nominal authority over all of the crown's Indian subjects on the scale of the Audiencia. Yet, it might be amplified so as to become a client monarchy under the aegis of the Spanish king - an image reminiscent of that developed both historically and allegorically in the royal ceremonies. Through that office, the Inca might become a synecdoche of the Indians, giving them a collective will vis-a-vis the Spanish king. The genealogical painting partook in his project of acquiring the alcaldia. It advertised and authorized his claim to descent from Huaynacapac, a claim that he hoped would earn him compensation from the king. The painting, moreover, acted as a monument' (monumento) or mnemonic device preserving the memory of succession from amnesia. The mnemonic 101 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA character of the genealogy is evident in Alonso Inca's own account of the pictorial representation: l e oyo decir que lo habia hecho pintar con mucho cuidado para que siempre estuviesen las memorias vivas.'47 The plea for privileges from the crown was undoubtedly the original matrix of Alonso Inca's genealogical painting. However, in the course of his stay in Ibarra, the painting acquired a different function. In the original context of solicitation, it produced an identity stimulated by a redistributive order and did so before the scrutiny of an all-seeing king (que todo lo ve'). Projected towards the eyes of the caciques, the painting acquired a secondary function. It constructed an identity that served as the basis for a broad authority that threatened to modify the colonial order. By means of the painting Alonso Inca assumed the role of representative (synecdoche or spokesman) of the Indians. A more precise notion of the functioning of the painting, however, may be inferred from the archival records. Alonso Inca employed the painting in order to formulate genealogical ties with the caciques, telling them where they stood in relation to the Incas depicted in the genealogical tree.48 That use of the painting served to develop his authority over the locality through the idiom of kinship. It is tempting to see this as a regression to the strategy of the Incas to fabricate Incaic genealogies for local rulers by means of marriages between the Inca and local women, so as to give them a common ancestral deity and to stimulate their solidarity with the Inca, but it must be emphasized that linking up local authorities to Incaic genealogies was a common colonial practice too. What Alonso Inca contributed to the game was to reverse the flow of benefits. If normally caciques acquired prestige by claiming Incaic kinship, now an Incaic descendant attained power by claiming local lords as kin. Allegory and Reality Alonso Inca's performance as Incaic ruler was cut short by Spanish authority. By August 1667 he was on his way to stand trial in Lima under heavy guard on a ship called San Juan Bautista. Alonso Inca had moved from law to allegory, working out the empowering possibilities of the latter. His manipulation of allegory was unworkable, however, since the transposition of the nation of the Indians toward the Inca to create a collective actor required a massive degree of force to be achieved in reality. His taking up of the imaginary provoked the wrath of local Creole elites. They responded with their own metaphorical operation, turning his performance into an allegory of ruler worship and idolatry. Art and modes of signification thus crisscrossed the incident, at once making available possibilities for native empowerment by referring to the past and foreclosing to/; COLONIAL VISIONS a more intimate relation with it. The key lesson of the case study is the role of official impulses in the formulation of relations with the past and the plurality of those relations. This matrix of historical memory has not been well understood, as indicated by art historical and anthropological schemes of survival /irruption or the theory of historical utopianism. The historical strategies of the colonial order have to await fuller elaboration, but something of their complexity can be grasped through the examination of ideas about the return of the repressed, representation, and tradition. 103 NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA 12. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 72 verso. Notes 13. See Carlos Espinosa, The Portrait of the 1. A Palace for a King, The Buen Retiro and the Inca, Aesthetics and Politics in the Audiencia of Quito, PhD dissertation (University of Court ofPhilip IV (New Haven, 1980). 2. Culture of the Baroque, Analysis of a Histor- Chicago, 1989), 68-72. ical Structure (Minneapolis, 1986). 14. Recopilacion de las leyes de los reynos de indias, II (Madrid, 1774), 63-75. 3. Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished, The Spanish Conquest through Indian 15. Espinosa, Portrait ofthe Inca, 68-72. Eyes, translated by Ben Reynolds (Sussex, 1977). 16. One of the fullest examples of the dis- 4. Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished, and course on idolatry may be found in thejesuit Teresa Gisbert, 'Art and Resistance in the historian, Jose de Acosta, Historia natural y Andean World,' in Amerindian Images and the moral de las Indias (Madrid, 1954), 140-42. For Legacy of Columbus, edited by Renejara and a discussion of idolatry see also Carlos Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis, 1992), Espinosa,'The Fabrication of Andean Par- 629-77. ticularism,' Bulletin de Vlnstitut Frangais d'Etudes Andines, II (1989), 273-76. 5. Tom Cummins,'We are the Other: Peruvian Portraits of Colonial Kurakakuna,' in 17. Hernan Cortes, 'Second Letter,' in Hernan Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Cortes: Lettersfrom Mexico, translated and edit- Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, edited by ed by Anthony Pagden (New Haven, 1986), 86. Kenneth J. Andrien and Rolena Adorno (Los 18. For the role that rulers play in colonial Angeles and Berkeley, 1991), 203-31. constructions of idolatry, see Relacion de la descendencia, gobierno y conquista de los Incas 6. The details of the story come from a single archival source, documenting the trial of (Lima, 1974), 24-29; Hernando de Santillan, Alonso Inca, the'Autos de Oficio de Mandato Relacion del origen y gobierno de los Incas de los senores presidentesy oidores de la (Madrid, 1968); Bernabe Cobo, Historia del Real Audiencia de Quito sobre los Procedi- Nuevo Mundo, II (Madrid, 1956), 136, 146; mientos de Don Alonso de Arenas Florencia Acosta, Historia natural, II: 140-42. Inca Corregidor de la Villa de San Miguel: 19. Francisco de Xerez, Verdadera relacion de festejos que le han hecho los gobernadores y la conquista del Peru, edited by Concepcion caciques de esta provincia, ano 1667,'Rebeli- Bravo (Madrid, 1985), 118. See also Cobo, ones, Caja 1, Archivo Nacional, Quito. Historia, II, 162-63. 7. Udo Oberam, Notasy documentos sobre los 20. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 5. miembros de lafamilia del Inca Atahualpa en el 21. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 15. siglo XVI (Guayaquil, 1976). 22. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 4. 8. 'Autos sobre A l o n s o Inca,' folios 2-3 verso, 23. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 1. 19,27-28 verso, 38-38 verso, 43 verso. 24. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 15. 9. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folios 6,31. 25. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 15. 10. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folios 4,18. 26. Michael Taussig has in his own way 11. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 18 verso. underscored the continuation of memories to/; COLONIAL V I S I O N S tion could be provided from colonial and of pagan worship in missionary discourse. peninsular representations. A good examSee 'History as Sorcery,' Representations, VII ple may be found in a Jesuit comedia staged (1984), 97in Madrid. A description of a character in 27. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 31. one scene reads, 'La America: la cual venia 28. See Espinosa, 'Fabrication of Andean representar en una mujer con el trage indio.' Particularism,' 275,293-94. See Diaz,Relaciones Breves, 175. 29. For the simulated continuity of authority, see Martin de Murua, Historia general del 35. Incorporation is discussed in Keith Baker, Peru. (Madrid, 1986), 482. 'Representation Redefined,' in Inventing the 30. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folios 4 verso, French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990), 225: '... unity in multitude could inhere only in 27 verso. 31. For the coronation festivities in Spain, see the person of the monarch...' Henrique Cock, Relation de viaje de Felipe II 36. For the idea of a founding contract in (Madrid, 1876); and Relaciones breves de actos Spanish discourse, see Francisco Vitoria, De publicos celebrados en Madrid de 1541-1650, relectio de Indis, edited by L. Perena (Madrid, edited by Jose Simon Diaz (Madrid, 1982). 1967), 73; Bartolome de las Casas, Los tesoros del Peru, edited by Angel Losada (Madrid, 32. A number ofjuras are described by Jose de Mugaburu, Diario de Lima (Lima, 1935). 1958), 309. While Las Casas and Vitoria disSee also the English version, Diary of Lima, cussed the original contract as a title of occupation, they rejected it by both doubting translated by Ryal Miller (Norman, 1975). that it had taken place and pointing to the There are several colonial descriptions from Quito: 'Fiestas celebradas en Quito cuando la extenuating circumstances that impeded a Catolica Majestad de Carlos III paso del trono truly voluntary transaction. de Napoles al de Espana celebradas el ano de 37. The text and commentary of the reque1760,' Revista del Museo Historico, XVII, 126-48;rimiento are found in Silvio Zavala, Las insti'Certificacion de la Real Acclamation y Jura tutions juridicas de la conquista (Mexico, de Carlos III,' Actas del Cabildo de Quito, 1760, 1971), 487-97. Archivo Historico del Municipio de Quito. 38. See Rolena Adorno's lucid discussion of Guaman Poma's claim of a non-violent sub33. As far as I know the only description of this particular scene is in Mugaburu, Diary of mission to Spanish rule (Guaman Poma, Lima, 49-52. For analogous contractual scenes Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru [Austin, 1988], 28-30). from Lima, see the remarkable eighteenthcentury account of a royal festival by Esteban 39. 'Relation de las celebres y famosas fiestas de Teralla, Anofelizyjubilo particular con que la alegrias y demostraciones que hizo Quito al Nation Indica en esta Ciudad de Lima solemnizo dichisimo nacimiento del principe de Espana la exaltation al trono de Ntro. Augustisimo Don Baltasar Carlos por principio del ano Monarca el SenorDon Carlos IV en los dias 7, 8,1631,' 9, Actas del Cabildo de Quito, 1631, Archivo defebrero de 1790 (Lima, 1780). Historico del Municipio de Quito. See also 34. Innumerable examples of personificaFederico Gonzalez Suarez, Historia de la 105 NATIVE ARTISTS AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA Republica del Ecuador, IV (Quito, 1931), 467-68. 40. For the claims of Francisco Garcia Ati, see 'Lucia Ati Pusana contra Guillermo Ati,' Cacicazgos, Cotopaxi, Caja 3,1687, Archivo Nacional, Quito; and 'Guillermo contra Lucia Ati Pusana,' Cacicazgos, Cotopaxi, Caja 4,1687, Archivo Nacional, Quito. 42. See Michel de Certeau for the idea that fiction is separated from historiography not because of truth but because of the avowal that it is produced (Heterologies, translated by Brian Mussumi [Minneapolis, 1986]). 41. A remarkable discussion of'monuments' (often with reference to huacas) in the colonial context is in Las Casas, Tesoros del Peru, 333. See also Espinosa, 'Fabrication of Andean Particularism,' 277-78. 45. Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios Reales, II (Buenos Aires, 1943), 295-97. TO6 43. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 6. 44. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 31. 46. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 47. 47. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 31. 48. 'Autos sobre Alonso Inca,' folio 17 verso. Who's Naughty and Nice Childish Behavior in the Paintings of Cuzco7s Corpus Christi Procession C A R O L Y N S. D E A N A SERIES OF CANVASES by anonymous Andean artists depicting the Corpus Christi procession in Cuzco are among the best known works of viceregal Peru (1532-1825).1 Sixteen canvases, dating from 1674 to 1680, have been attributed to this series which originally decorated the walls of Cuzco's parish church of Santa Ana.2 Portrayed are members of the various racial, social, religious, and political groups that comprised Cuzcan society of this period as they participated in, or witnessed, the Corpus Christi procession. The series colorfully documents seventeenth-century Cuzco, the population of which was numerically dominated by indigenous Andeans but governed by a minority of European descent. Sponsored by native elites and oriented towards these Spanish authorities, the canvases depict adults of Cuzco's upper classes as differentiated from their lower class compatriots in appearance, demeanor, and behavior. In contrast, children of different classes, while distinguished by appearance, are not behaviorally differentiated. Whereas the adult elite respectfully attend the procession, a number of their children are disruptive; they behave like many commoners of all ages who are similarly disrespectful. This paper explores the behavioral linkage of misbehaving youngsters and members of the lower classes in terms of the multifaceted society for which these images were produced. The visual analogy of children and commoners was meant to encourage festive decorum in Andeans by equating rowdy adult behavior with childish misbehavior. Evidence suggests that the message behind this analogy, however, was confounded by the fact that the European conception of children' differed from that of the native Andean. While the European assessment of childhood as a state of mind as well as body allowed a symbolic pictorial linkage between children and adults whose behavior was deemed childish,' the traditional Andean evaluation of youngsters according to physical development, rather than mental state, muddied this analogy. It is likely that these differing notions of childhood created an interpretive chasm between Europeans / Europeanized Cuzcans and the culturally marginalized indigenous lower class majority. 107 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA to/; In the paintings Cuzcan society is organized into distinct horizontal planes which help the viewer differentiate between various social groups. Of the sixteen canvases, eleven are arranged in three planes.3 Those participating in the procession - the municipal council, the ecclesiastic council, various religious orders, and numerous local sodalities - occupy the center of the canvas. Because each canvas of the series focuses on a distinct segment of the procession, they can be referred to by naming the central parading group or groups (for example, the canvas of the Franciscan friars or that of the sodality of San Cristobal, and so forth). The majority of people situated above and behind the cortege are Cuzco's non-participating elite and their retainers; below and in front are viewers of the middle and lower economic sectors of Cuzcan society. These spatial planes contain a spectrum of ethnic types with people of Andean, African, and European descent clearly identifiable in all three zones. Each plane is characterized by behavioral similarities among its constituents that serve to relate these members of shared space, while segregating one plane from another. In general, those located in the upper plane respectfully watch the procession or discuss the proceedings with their neighbors. Their hands are folded over their waists or in gestures of prayer or rest on balcony railings or window sills; some men have removed their hats as the religious images pass. Heads incline toward one another to indicate quiet conversation; for the most part, gesturing remains subdued with hands kept close to the bodies. Their comportment matches that of the participants who occupy the central sector of the canvases, walking erect from right to left in a dignified manner. Some participants engage in conversation with co-participants. As in the upper plane, activity is restrained; facial expressions are serious. In contrast to the upper and middle zones, the lower plane, occupied primarily by Cuzcan commoners and dominated numerically by native Andeans, is characterized by more diversified behavior. While many individuals, their backs to us, watch the procession pass, numerous others engage in animated discussions. Many are inattentive, if not disrespectful. In this plane we find men smoking and eating; facial expressions are less restrained and activity more pronounced. In general, the figures are stacked one upon another in a way that suggests a crowd, if not a mob, in contrast to the more even spacing of the upper two sectors. A number of children found in the upper and middle spatial planes do not conform to the behavioral characteristics associated with their elders, however. In fact, misbehaving youngsters appear in all three sectors. In the foreground of the canvas featuring friars of the Mercedarian Order in procession, a child aims a pea shooter at a nearby celebrant (figures i and 2). Similarly, in the foreground of the canvas of the parading Dominican friars, two children with pea shooters W H O ' S N A U G H T Y AND N I C E Figure i. The Mercedarian friars in the Corpus Christi procession. Archbishop's Museum of Religious Art, Cuzco. Figure 2. Detail of child with a pea shooter in the foreground of the canvas of the Mercedarian friars. 109 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA molest a man of African descent while a third prepares to join in by pouring small projectiles into his mouth (figure 3). In another of the paintings a child, leaning over a balcony in the upper background, aims a pea shooter at a group of musicians who are riding in the processional cart of the Virgin of the Purification. A second child, located in another balcony, aims his shooter at the first child. In the canvas featuring Cuzco's magistrate (the corregidor) in procession, a child in the right background aims a pea shooter at some target off canvas. Because all those around him are kneeling, an action performed in the presence of the Holy Sacrament, his target is undoubtedly the approaching procession of the Bishop with the monstrance (the subject of another canvas). In the canvas of the parading Franciscans a child in indigenous dress, located at the far left, aims his pea shooter at the procession of friars (figure 4). Our final example can be found in the central zone of the canvas of the parish of San Sebastian where a child, possibly of African descent, attempts to catch a ride on the back of the processional cart (figures 5 and 6). Such misbehavior on the part of children runs contrary to the otherwise highly structured formal arrangement of these paintings, wherein people's actions are prescribed according to their location within the canvases. That children, as shown in the Corpus series, act according to age group rather than class affiliation echoes the prevailing European paradigm regarding the nature and behavior of youngsters. In Catholic Europe the notion that a child was naturally inclined to misbehave was articulated in the doctrine of infant depravity, which held that childhood folly was a manifestation of original sin. Children were thus as much, if not more, a product of their imperfect mental and spiritual states as of their immature physical condition. Children were seen to be capable of reason from age seven onward, but it had to be actively encouraged by both schoolmasters and parents.4 While scholars of the history of childhood disagree about when and why this abstract notion of childhood as a separate mental state developed in Europe, there is general agreement in the literature that, by the seventeenth century, European intellectuals were devoting considerable attention to the mental development of children and the positive impact of education on molding a wellbehaved, productive adult.5 One aspect of the European assessment of childhood was that childish' behavior, not acceptable in an adult, was acceptable and even expected in children. Consequently, the Corpus Christi children can be seen to behave /misbehave according to European expectations, and indeed, no adults move to correct the youngsters' disruptive activities. Misbehavior on the part of children is thus pictorially characterized as normal and customary. It is worth noting that while the intellectuals who helped forge this notion of the separateness of childhood referred to children in general, their observations were applied only to boys.6 Young girls remained in the home, receiving training no who's naughty and nice Figure 3. Detail of children with pea shooters in the foreground of the canvas of the Dominican friars in the Corpus Christi procession. Private collection, Santiago, Chile. in domestic tasks from their mothers. This andro-centrism has its corollary in the Corpus Christi paintings where we see only male children transgressing. Female children, where distinguishable, behave properly as do most female adults. While on one level the misbehaving children of the Corpus Christi series serve as an anecdotal acknowledgment of typical festive chaos, their prominent pictorial presence also addresses the desire to control that chaos. In addition, these children are behaviorally linked to all those of lower economic status, most of whom are indigenous, crowded into the foreground. Both children and Figure 4. Detail of child with a pea shooter at the far left of the canvas of the Franciscan friars in the Corpus Christi procession. Private collection, Santiago, Chile. hi NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Figure 5. The canvas of the patron of the parish of San Sebastian in the Corpus Christi procession. Archbishop's Museum of Religious Art, Cuzco. the lower classes, as portrayed in this series of canvases, are distinguished from society's elite by either their ignorance of correct behavior or their refusal to conduct themselves in a respectful manner when in the presence of religious and/or civic authority. In seventeenth-century Europe, those of low social status were commonly described as childlike. Moralists and pedagogues blamed the unacceptable behavior of both groups on their lack of education and inherent moral weakness. 7 Children, for obvious reasons, are convenient symbols of the unsocialized or unacculturated elements of society and seventeenth-century Europeans are not the only people to have likened social groups, be they distinct by virtue of class, ethnicity, or gender, to children in order to justify paternalistic' control. to/; W H O ' S N A U G H T Y AND N I C E Figure 6. Detail of child attempting to ride the processional carriage of San Sebastian When Europeans encountered native Americans, they confronted cultures whose behavior was alien, incomprehensible to them, and therefore from a European perspective irrational. Despite the Papal Bull of 1537 which recognized the natives of the Americas as rational men, ensuing discourse about the nature of the 'Indian' revolved around his ability to reason. Indian 'irrationality' was frequently explained by analogy with other creatures already defined by Europeans as irrational-the most common being beasts, barbarians, and children. Indigenous Americans, at various times and for various reasons, were compared to all three groups. The notion that they possessed the temporarily irrational mental condition of European children was evoked in particular by many members of the 113 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA religious community who proposed that although neither 'Indians' nor children regulated their lives by the laws of reason, the behavior of both could be 'improved' through Christian education. Because priests and friars were the educators and protectors of the Indians, analogies of their native wards to children was a useful one. The familial language of the church, whose representatives were addressed as 'father,' predisposed the European to this line of reasoning. The writings of the mendicants include numerous comparisons of native Americans to children. The Jesuits were prominent proponents of this analogy in that they saw themselves as the religious order especially devoted to education. In the sixteenth century Jose de Acosta wrote, 'Such are the miseries that many Indians have lived in, and do to this day, for the devil abuses them like children, with many foolish illusions...' and adds that their 'childish behavior' (ninerias), which is how he describes various 'idolatrous' practices, ought not to be condemned but rather that the Andeans ought to be pitied, as such 'childishness' was the consequence of their lack of education.8 Bernabe Cobo tells us that native Americans 'are extremely puerile in their behavior' and compares them to Spanish children in their love of play and trickery.9 The seventeenth-century extirpator of idolatry, Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, wrote that priests should tell their native charges that their offenses against Christian teachings would be punished corporally for, like a mother, the Church would castigate her disobedient children.10 Indeed, punishment of American natives was similar to that of European schoolboys. The offender was first admonished; then, if the offense were repeated, corporal punishment was administered publicly. 11 Arriaga mandates that known sorcerers were to be taught doctrine in the church in the morning and afternoon 'as children are.' He also dictates that for the vice of drunkenness commoners ought to be admonished; if a second offense occurred, they were to be publicly flogged. For a third offense the hair was to be cropped.12 Andeans were acutely sensitive to this latter punishment, as short hair was characteristic of native children.13 Priests and friars thus made their native charges physically more like children to underscore the ideational equation and make clear that misbehavior on the part of adults was not acceptable. Festivals were another means of teaching 'rational' European behaviors. Ideally, religious processions would demonstrate not only who was in charge but also accepted ways of showing respect to that authority (hat doffed, head bowed, voice hushed, knees bent). The paintings of the Corpus Christi procession make permanent the desired ephemeral demonstration, allowing the lesson to be taught year-round through their location on parish church walls and with the sanctification of the Christian God. Aside from the indigenous elite, who were responsible for the parish's entry in the Corpus Christi procession, the Andean parishioners of Santa Ana - the audience 114 W H O ' S N A U G H T Y AND N I C E of these works - would have identified with those portrayed in the lower zone of the canvases. Consequently, these paintings informed their audience of their separateness from the Cuzcan elite by emphasizing not only the physical distance between the classes but differences in appearance, manner, and behavior. The link between misbehaving members of the lower plane and children encodes an encouragement to refrain from disrespectful or childish behavior/misbehavior and to emulate the elite and those associated with them. The artists of the series have employed a paradigm, familiar to Europeans and the Europeanized elements of Cuzcan society, that was thought to accurately characterize the mental state and consequential behavioral patterns of children, European lower classes, and unacculturated Andeans (most of whom, in urban Cuzco, were lower class as well). While children were expected to behave irrationally, that is, misbehave, and the Corpus series portrays many children doing just that, we also see children whose behavior is unremarkable as well as some who surpass adults in demonstrating respect. These respectful children, who display the instinctual spirituality which was also associated with youngsters, were undoubtedly meant to encourage emulative behavior on the part of the adult audience. In the canvas of Cuzco's Bishop (Don Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo), who carries the monstrance, a kneeling child serves as a model of religious devotion. The child is placed above, and separated from, the rest of the crowd, clearly serving as an example to all. In the canvas of the magistrate's procession, two well dressed Andean boys appear as patrons, hands folded in prayer. A number of male youth, old enough to have learned 'rational' behavior, have been incorporated into the ceremonial activity itself. Youth in white surplices bear the candles which flank the high cross in six of the canvases (see, for example, figure 5). In another canvas a native youth bears the traditional crown of the native leader of a Cathedral sodality. In this same canvas Charles II, the teen-age Spanish king, is present in the central scene of the altar in which he defends the Eucharist against the Turks (figure 7). The child Christ, wise beyond his years, is the subject of another processional altar constructed outside the Jesuit church.14 These exemplary children, though fewer in number, provide a counterpoint to their misbehaving fellows. By including children so prominently in this series of canvases, the exceptional nature of youth is underscored, and these youngsters are thus able to address the audience in a didactic and moralizing fashion. While few scholars have focused specifically on the meaning and function of images of children in art, it is clear that youngsters commonly served as symbolic referents to adult issues in seventeenth-century Europe. Mary Frances Durantini, in her exemplary study of images of children in Dutch art of this period, concludes that the artists of the seventeenth century consistently used images of children to address adult problems, vices, and concerns.15 While the Protestant Dutch and 115 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Figure 7. Detail of a processional altar from the Cuzco Corpus Christi series depicting the Spanish monarch Charles II defending the Eucharist. From the canvas of the sodalities of Santa Rosa and 'La Linda.' the Catholic Spaniards certainly differed in many regards, they shared the same notion of childhood as a distinct mental state which required substantial educational efforts. Given this notion, the innocence associated with children and their lack of conscious or calculated (that is, socialized) responses renders them ideal didactic pictorial devices. T o the European and Europeanized viewer the Corpus children, both naughty and nice, would have been easily apprehended visual metaphors for inappropriate (irrational) and appropriate (rational) adult behavior. It is likely that the artists of the Corpus Christi series deliberately featured children in the canvases, as the activities of youngsters are among the most remarkable and humorous elements in these crowded compositions. Their prominent presence can hardly be written off as a mere anecdotal diversion from the primary processional activity. The artist's intentionality can be seen most clearly in the canvas of the sodality of San Sebastian (figure 5). The processional carriage of the saint, representing the local parish of San Sebastian, was copied from engravings in a Valencian festivity book composed in 1663 by Juan Bautista Valda, as were all of the carriages in the Corpus Christi series.16 In Valda, the carriage belongs to the tailor's guild and the engraving is signed by Jose Caudi (figure 8).17 116 W H O ' S N A U G H T Y AND N I C E Figure 8. Processional carriage of the tailor's guild by Jose Caudi. From Juan Bautista de Valda, Solemnes fiestas (Valencia, 1663). 117 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Caudfs image has been reversed in the canvas of San Sebastian, its decoration has been simplified, and its pedestal cropped by the Cuzcan artist. The image of San Sebastian has replaced that of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, and the flying dragon (attached to the Valencian pedestal) has been eliminated in the painted version. Whereas the Valencian engraving shows the carriage to be occupied by five saints, these figures do not appear on the carriage of San Sebastian. Interestingly, while the Cuzcan artist simplified his prototype by eliminating much of the detail, he added the child who attempts to hitch a ride on the rear of the carriage. Apparently, this pictorial amendment was understood to enhance the meaning of the canvas as a whole, perhaps rendering this fictive carriage more relevant and believable to a parochial audience that had never seen such a contraption.18 What and how the misbehaving children signify within the Corpus Christi series is best understood by examining briefly festive behavior in late seventeenthcentury Cuzco. While no mention is found in available records of unruly children, there is considerable concern expressed over adult, and especially Andean, 'misbehavior.' As in European art, it would seem that the Corpus children address adult concerns. That the canvases ultimately focus on adult behavior during public festivals is logical, considering that this was an overweening concern of Cuzco's elite. From seventeenth-century civil records, we know that unruly behavior during public festivals preoccupied both Cuzco's civic and religious authorities. The Municipal Council, Ecclesiastic Council, and parish clerics all took steps to discourage public drunkenness, violence, and other manifestations of disrespect on the part of Andeans and the lower classes in general. Indigenous leaders were charged with controlling the drunkenness and unruly behavior of their constituents. The boisterous behavior shown in the Corpus series is mild compared to the actual brawls that often broke out in the midst of festivities. In fact, the artists of the Corpus Christi series restricted violent behavior to the annoying, but harmless, children armed with pea shooters. By showing only mildly unruly behavior and linking it to the irrational behavior of children, implications of serious social discord have been elided and disrespectful actions appear as isolated manifestations of childish minds. Further, featuring misbehaving children allowed the artists of the Corpus series to acknowledge the existence of rambunctious activity, which is a hallmark of most celebratory occasions, without sanctioning it. In fact, by linking the misbehaving children to disrespectful commoners, the parishioner is encouraged to behave reverentially, as noted earlier. The above interpretation pivots upon the European paradigm of the irrational child. The images of children in the Corpus Christi series could only have served to encourage good behavior if the same conception of the nature of childhood to/; W H O ' S N A U G H T Y AND N I C E was held by both colonist and colonized. This is so because child' is an ideational construct not firmly tied to physiology; children' and thus childishness' are, to a great extent, created by culture. The equation of naturally irrational children with improperly irrational adults depends upon the recognition of childhood as a separate state of both mental and physical being. Because the notion of what is childish' is culture specific, we may wonder how the images of misbehaving youngsters were interpreted by the largely unacculturated indigenous parishioners of the church of Santa Ana. In contrast to the European model of irrationality, evidence indicates that the pre-Hispanic Andean child was distinguished by physiological rather than mental capabilities. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, an Andean native author working at the beginning of the seventeenth century, drew pictures of Andean children and described their function in pre-Hispanic Inca society.19 He tells us that native children of less than one year of age, still in the cradle, had to be cared for by others, as did those under five years of age who could crawl but who were as yet unweaned. Small children of both sexes were, according to Guaman Poma, without purpose or usefulness in that they served no one and, in fact, had to be served by others. Inca children of ages five through nine, in contrast, were assigned certain tasks. Boys of this age aided their parents and community by watching younger siblings, performing various domestic chores, and helping to raise orphans. Guaman Poma contrasts the pre-Conquest usefulness of this age group to domestic organization with the post-Conquest practice of removing these boys from their homes to educate them. Girls from ages five to nine served as pages for important females; they also helped their parents by collecting firewood and straw as well as spinning, gathering edible wild plants, raising younger children, fetching water, cooking, and cleaning. According to Guaman Poma, from ages nine to twelve young males served both their parents and the cacique (native lord) by hunting small birds, herding, fetching firewood, spinning wool, and twisting rope. Girls of this same age served the community by collecting flowers, herbs, and leaves for dying cloth and cooking. They could also serve the government as human sacrifices. Male youth from ages twelve to eighteen guarded the herds and hunted birds. Females of this age group served their elders by spinning and weaving, shepherding, sowing and tending crops, and making chicha (an alcoholic beverage made from maize). They also helped around the house performing a number of tasks. Females over eighteen were eligible for marriage and therefore considered adults; young males, in contrast, from ages eighteen to twenty served in a special capacity as messengers of the community and lackeys to warriors and great lords. 119 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA Guaman Poma calls them Indians of half-tribute noting their status as 'not-quiteadults.' Each stage of life was thus characterized by what it could do for society in contrast to the European concept of the excusable irresponsibility of children. The individual's physical abilities and corresponding duties were the basis of the categories used by Inca census-takers. John H. Rowe's seminal study of the Inca census reveals that Andean age-grades were defined primarily by the individual's ability to contribute to the state economy. 20 In addition to those described by Guaman Poma, named age-grades are recorded by the Mercedarian friar Martin de Murua,21 the licenciado (lawyer) Fernando de Santillan,22 Father Cristobal de Castro,23 and an anonymous group of Andeans ( f los Senores') who served under Incan lords in pre-Hispanic times.24 Murua's list is so similar to that of Guaman Poma that Rowe suspects that he used Guaman Poma as a source.25 While differing from those recorded by Guaman Poma and Murua, the categories provided by Santillan, Castro, and 'los Senores' are close enough to each other that a common source is indicated. Rowe concludes that Father Castro was responsible for recording the testimony of 'los Senores' and that Santillan used Castro as his source. These three then will be designated as the Castro group in the discussion which follows. All sources list similar categories for adults, but differ in their divisions of the pre-adult years. In all lists, over half of the categories describe the pre-adult years, or the years before the individual bore full responsibility for producing tribute. Once adulthood was achieved (ages twenty to twenty-five), the Andean was not removed from this category until she/he was incapable of fulfilling the associated occupational and tributary functions. While Guaman Poma describes ten categories for males (six of which designate pre-adults) and ten for females (five of which designate pre-adults), the chronicles of the Castro group tell us that there were twelve age groupings without differentiating male and female.26 In the Castro group, the teen years are divided into two categories, which define the type of service expected. According to Santillan, ages sixteen to twenty were collectively called cocapalla (coca-harvester); he tells us that youth of this category were expected to reap the state-owned coca crop. Castro similarly terms ages twelve to sixteen cocapalla, and f los Senores' assign ages twelve to twenty to the category cocapallac. Santillan terms ages twenty to twenty-five imanguayna, which he translates as casi mozo ('almost a young adult'), and says these youth contribute to the work of their brothers and relatives. According to Castro, ages sixteen to twenty were called michoguayna; 'los Senores' term ages twenty to twenty-five michuguaina and say the category consists of those who aid their parents and relatives.27 to/; W H O ' S N A U G H T Y AND N I C E According to the Castro group, seven of the twelve age-groupings designate the growth stages of the pre-puberty years, although, unlike Guaman Poma, none of them lists specific duties of these ages.28 What is apparent in this categorization of the years in which the individual experiences rapid physical development is that, to the Andean, 'age' was not the sum of years but an evaluation of physical attributes, abilities, and dexterity. Cobo confirms this, saying that 'age was not counted in years, nor did any of them know how many years old they were. [For the census] they were accounted for on the basis of the duty and aptitude of each person ,./ 29 The two major ceremonies for Andean children marked weaning and puberty - the two most important stages of growth, which, significantly, commemorated the increasing independence of the young individual. Weaning, celebrated by the hair-cutting and first naming ceremony, marked the first stage of the child's physical independence. The puberty rites and second naming ceremony celebrated the age at which the child became a significant contributor to the local economy. The giving of a new name signaled an important re-classification of the individual and his or her significance to society. Garcilaso de la Vega, a mestizo writing at the turn of the seventeenth century, tells us that native children were expected to work from age six onward, but provides only scanty details.30 He describes harsh treatment of children enacted to encourage responsible behavior from a very early age. Apparently, in stark contrast to the Catholic notion of infant depravity, neither young age nor ignorance excused native children from contributing to the community. Indeed, children in pre-Conquest times were themselves often treated as products. We know they were given to the state as a form of tax payment. In addition, they were highly valued as the most propitious of sacrifices offered at critical junctures such as epidemics, war, and the coronation of new heads-of-state.31 It would appear that children were perceived as natural resources produced by the community and therefore expected to benefit that community. The phrasing of Guaman Poma, which emphasizes the usefulness of the child from the time it was weaned, underscores this interpretation. Evidence thus indicates that any equation of 'adult' to one of the stages of child' would make sense to the preConquest Andean only in terms of physical prowess and productivity rather than the rational/irrational dichotomy of the European paradigm. Because the pre-Hispanic pattern of child rearing continued into the viceregal period, it is likely that the common Andean did not quickly adopt the European concept of childhood irrationality. While most Spanish chroniclers paid little attention to how the Andean adults they were documenting treated native children, a few helpful references can be found. Pedro de Cieza de Leon, writing between 121 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA 1541 and 1550, commented on the early date, while the child was still in infancy and as yet unweaned, at which language instruction began; he also expressed surprise at the ability of 'little boys' to fashion fine metalcraft.32 Arriaga was impressed that indigenous children were expected to behave as adults in native religious ceremonies.33 Cobo, on the other hand, did not admire the character of native youth. He decried their lack of manners, virtue, orderliness, and praiseworthy habits. His statement that native children of the seventeenth century '...do not know what proper respect and courtesy are...' suggests, however, that he judged Andean behavior by European standards, interpreting different training as no training. Cobo did note that age groups were valued according to their ability to work, saying that 'as soon as the poor parents begin to grow weak with age, their ungrateful children forget the natural debt which they have to serve and respect them with even greater care, love, and compassion.'34 Such comments then indicate that the pre-Hispanic emphasis on work performance was maintained into the viceregal era. During the viceregal period, while the official transition to adulthood was set at twenty-one according to European custom, children of lower classes assumed adult roles and responsibilities at earlier ages. Age fifteen or sixteen seems to have been the age at which working youth were able to undertake professions. While little mention of children is made in documentary sources, there are records of arranged apprenticeships. According to these sources, boys were apprenticed at around eight to twelve years of age with the understanding that they would be fully trained and able to pursue their intended professions by age fifteen or sixteen.35 Thus although male youth were considered 'minors' until age twentyone, they functioned as adults prior to that time. The work patterns of the lower Spanish classes during the viceregal period then would not have conflicted with the native pattern of childrearing. Indeed, there is no evidence to suggest that the paradigmatic progression from irrational child to rational adult worked out by European intellectuals ever gained currency among indigenous commoners. The pre-Hispanic emphasis on the introduction to useful occupations early in life has persisted until today among the less acculturated. In the Andean highlands native children of ages five to ten are put to work herding - quite a responsibility considering that livestock is the family's major economic investment.36 In contrast, elite youth in viceregal Peru were educated for longer periods and took up adult occupations at later dates. Like children of European elite, the children of the native nobility were accorded differential treatment. They were taught Christianity, Latin, and the classical humanities - the same course of instruction received by noble youth in Spain. This emphasis on educating sons to/; W H O ' S N A U G H T Y AND N I C E of the indigenous nobility is common in the writings of mendicants. For example, Arriaga states, The only way to make the curacas and caciques [native lords] behave (and the fact that they do not is, as I have said, an important cause of idolatry) is to begin at the beginning and instruct their children so that from childhood they may learn the Christian discipline and doctrine.37 This special schooling increased the acculturation of the native elite, already more Hispanicized than natives of lower status by closer contact with Europeans. To the Andean noble who had himself been singled out as a child and whose male offspring were accorded special educational emphasis, the notion that children were legitimately ignorant of proper behavior was probably a familiar and accepted notion. The images of misbehaving children in the Corpus Christi series would have performed as intelligible signifiers encouraging him to watch out for his constituents as prone to childish behavior. Such images would underscore the socio-political position of the indigenous elite as responsible for the behavior of their constituency. However, to the common Andean - the primary audience of these paintings - the visually encoded equation of a child's irrationality to an adult's misbehavior is of doubtful significance. Considerable evidence indicates that the common Andean did not share the European concept of childhood. The significance of the exceptional images of misbehaving children within the behaviorally segregated world of the Corpus Christi canvases falters unless childish' misbehavior is thought to be a reflection of an irrational mind. While images of naughty and nice children undoubtedly evoked special meaning to their Europeanized audience, which included both artists and patrons, they surely failed to bridge the cultural gap that divided Cuzco's colonial society. 123 NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA Children: Parent-Child Relations from lyoo to 1900 [Cambridge, 1983]) and others have 1. 'Andean' is used here to designate indige- taken issue with this particular conclusion, nous peoples while' European' refers to peo- Pollock agrees that because Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries perple of European descent. 2. Twelve canvases of the Corpus Christi ceived children to be naturally sinful, educaseries are in the Archbishop's Museum of tion was seen to be of utmost importance Religious Art in Cuzco, Peru. Three addi- (see 113-16). Similarly, C.John Sommerville (The Rise and Fall ofChildhood, Sage Library of tional canvases recognized by Ricardo Mariategui (Pintura cuzquena del siglo XVII enSocial Research, CXL [Beverly Hills, 1982], 83Chile [Lima, 1954]) as belonging to the series, 84 and 97) dates the increase in concern for a are in a private collection in Santiago, Chile. proper education to the Renaissance, especially the sixteenth century; he concludes A sixteenth canvas, also in a private collection in Santiago, was identified three dec- that, owing to the religious turmoil which ades later by Mariategui (Nuevo lienzo characterized that century, education was reautentico del Corpus Cuzqueno [Lima, 1983]). cognized as a primary weapon in the war for For a discussion of the dating of these can- the minds of European youth. Notes vases, see Carolyn S. Dean, Painted Images of 6. Aries, Centuries ofChildhood, 60-61. Cuzco's Corpus Christi: Social Conflict and 7. Aries, Centuries ofChildhood, 102,262. Cultural Strategy in Viceregal Peru, PhD disser- 8. The Natural and Moral History ofthe Indies, tation (University of California, Los Angeles, translated by Edward Grimston [1604], edit1990), 65-67. 3. Three of the five remaining canvases lack one or two ofthese planes: two lack the lower sector and two lack the upper sector, while the fifth canvas, which features the culmination of the procession, consists only of festival participants. 4. Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, second edition, translated by Robert Baldick (New York, ed by Clements R.Markham (London, 1880), 309; Historia natural y moral de las Indias, second edition, edited by Edmundo O'Gorman (Mexico, 1985), 224-25. 9. See History of the Inca Empire, translated and edited by Roland Hamilton (Austin, 1983), 32. 10. The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru, translated and edited by L. Clark Keating (Lexington, 1968), 128. 5. Aries, who wrote the seminal work on the history of European childhood (Centuries of 11. Aries, Centuries ofChildhood, 262. 12. Arriaga, Extirpation of Idolatry, 101 and 172. 13. Cristobal de Molina,'The Fables and Rites Childhood), of the Yncas,' in Narratives ofthe Rites and Laws 1965), 102. claimed that prior to the seven- teenth century Europeans had no concept of ofthe Yncas, translated and edited by Clements childhood as a separate state of being. While R. Markham (New York, 1873), 53; Felipe recent research by Linda A. Pollock (Forgotten Guaman Poma de Ayala, El Primer nueva to/; WHO'S NAUGHTY AND NICE coronicay buengobierno, second edition, edited de su gobierno porJuan Santa Cruz Pachacuti y byjohn V. Murra and Rolena Adorno, trans- el Lie. Fernando de Santillan, Coleccion de Libros y Documentos Referentes a la Hislated byjorge L.Urioste (Mexico, 1988), 201. 14. It was the practice of the Jesuits to estab- toria del Peru, series 2, IX, annotated by Horacio H.Urteaga (Lima, 1927), 18-19. lish sodalities dedicated to the cult of the 23. Relacion ydeclaracion del modo que estevalle de Chinchaysus comarcanos segobernaban antes que hobiese ingas y despues que los hobo hasta que los cristianos entraron en esta tierra, Coleccion de Libros y Documentos Referentes a la Historia del Peru, series 2, X, annotated by Horacio H. Urteaga (Lima, 1934), 136-37. child Jesus in the communities they served. By singling out the special nature of childhood, they were emphasizing their role in educating youth. 15. The Child in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting (Ann Arbor, 1979/1983), 3,6,177,191. 16. Solemnes fiestas que celebro Valencia a la Inmaculada Concepcion de la Virgen Maria por el24. 'Los Senores,"Relacion del origen e supremo decreto de N. S. Pontifice Alexandro VIIgobierno que los ingas tuvieron y del que (Valencia, i663).Teresa Gisbert and Jose de habia antes que ellos senoreasen a los indios Mesa (Arquitectura andina: 1330-1830, historiaydeste reino, y de que tiempo, y de otras cosas analisis [La Paz, 1985], 234,242-43) first iden- que al gobierno convenia, declaradas por tified this festivity book as the pictorial source senores que sirvieron al inga Yupangui y a for two of the Corpus Christi carriages; Valda's Topainga Yupangui y a Guainacapac y a book was, in fact, the source of all of the car- Huascar Inga,' in La imprenta en Lima riages depicted in the series (Dean, Painted (1384-1824), edited by Jose Toribio Medina, I (Santiago, 1904), 202. Images, 91-97). 25. Guaman Poma and Murua were con- 17. Valda, Solemnesfiestas,534. temporaries. Guaman Poma defamed both 18. For a consideration of how these Active carriages both confound and supplement the Murua's deeds and character repeatedly in his chronicle (Primer nueva cordnica, 480,580, documentary mode of these canvases, see and 612-13). Rowe discusses aspects of their Dean, Painted Images, 97 and 358-60. problematic relationship ('Age Grades,' 514). 19. El Primer nueva cordnica, 179-89,201-09. 20. 'The Age Grades of the Inca Census,' in 26. Santillan's list actually includes only eleven Miscellanea Paul Rivet Octogenario Dicata, XXXIdesignations, as he skips number nine. International Congress of Americanists, 27. 'Los Senores' say michuguaina means series 1, number 50, II (Mexico, 1958), 499-522. 'almost a young man' (ya casi mozo). Neither 21. Historia del origeny genealogia real de los reyes incas del Peru, edited by Constantino Bayle (Madrid, 1946), 322-27; and Historia general del Peru, edited by Manuel Ballesteros (Madrid, 1987), 396-400. 22. 'Relacion,' in Historia de los Incas y relacion 125 their michuguaina nor Santillan's imanguayna literally means 'almost a young man,' however (Rowe, 'Age Grades,' 507). 28. Rowe doubts that the Inca census employed all seven of the categories listed in the Castro group because of the fact that pre- NATIVE A R T I S T S AND PATRONS IN C O L O N I A L LATIN AMERICA 35. Published contracts are found in Jorge pubescent children had little impact on the state economy ('Age Grades,' 517). What con- C ornej o Bouroncle' s Derro teros de arte cuzcerns us here is not the identification of offi- queno; datos para una historia del arte en el Peru cial Inca census age-grades, however,but how (Cuzco, i960). 36. This is not the case in contemporary urthe Andean perceived and defined childhood. ban Cuzco where child-rearing is admitted29. History ofthe Inca Empire, 194. 30. The Incas :The Royal Commentaries, translat- ly permissive. Interestingly, in twentiethcentury Corpus Christi celebrations Cuzcan ed by Mariajolas, edited by Alain Gheerbrant children are given considerable behavioral (New York, 1961), 245. latitude to the point that petty theft at pre31. Acosta, Natural and Moral History, 344; scribed processional junctures is sanctioned Molina, 'Fables and Rites,' 54-58. 32. The Incas, editedby Victor Wolfgang von (Carol Ann Fiedler, Corpus Christi in Cuzco: Hagen, translated by Harriet de Onis (Nor- Festival and Ethnic Identity in the Peruvian Andes, PhD dissertation [Tulane University, man, 1959), 169 and 176. 1985], 62 and 215). 33. Extirpation ofIdolatry, 23 and 47. 34. Cobo, History ofthelncaEmpire, 22 and35-38. 37. Extirpation ofIdolatry, 99. to/;