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[AUDIO LOGO] ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: Good morning, everyone. It's such a pleasure to see all of you here bright and early at the museum. Thank you for coming to our symposium. And also thank you to those of you who are tuning in to our live stream.
So the way that the schedule and the run show for today will work is we're going to be starting with our first session, framing the divine, visualizing devotion in the Spanish Americas. And we have three speakers, and we will have each of our speakers come and give the presentation. And at the conclusion of the three talks, we'll set aside time for Q&A.
So please do hold your questions for the end. We're really looking forward to an amazing set of papers and a really fruitful discussion. We will also make sure, for those of you who tuning in to the live stream, that we will account for your questions as well. So please do put them into the Q&A section of the live stream.
So I will be introducing our very first speaker to kick off our symposium this morning, Cristina Cruz González. Cristina Cruz González is an art historian, curator, and educator, a specialist in the visual culture of Latin America, including topics like early modern female piety and visual culture and Franciscan image theory in colonial Mexico. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Chicago, and she is currently an associate professor of art history at Oklahoma State University.
Her work has appeared in the art bulletin and in Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics, among others, and her scholarship has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the College Art Association, and the Oklahoma Humanities Council. Most recently, Cristina Cruz González curated and authored the scholarly catalog for Saints and Santos, Picturing the Holy in New Spain, currently on view at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe from July 2024 until January 2025. So there's still some time to catch it.
I think it was so fortuitous that the opening of both Saints and Santos and Colonial Crossings was the same day. So it was just meant to be. So I am so pleased to introduce our very first speaker. So please join me in welcoming Cristina Cruz González.
CRISTINA CRUZ GONZÁLEZ: Thank you, Nandi. Let me get set up here. I want to extend my gratitude to the Johnson Museum director, Jessica Levin Martinez, for supporting Colonial Crossings and its related symposium. I would also like to recognize the co-curators doctor Andrew Weislogel and Nandi Cohen, good friend and all of the students involved in organizing this spectacular show. Congratulations, Felicidades.
Lastly, I am grateful to Nandi for the invitation to speak today.
On July 20 of this year, a large crowd gathered just outside this door, catching their first glimpse of Colonial Crossing's, Art Identity, Belief in Spanish America. And I realized I need to-- oops, there we go.
Unfortunately, I was not among those attending the show, as I was tending to the opening of my own exhibition in Santa Fe on that very same day, Saints and Santos, Picturing the Holy in New Spain on view at the New Mexico Museum of Art currently and until January 5. My exhibition is focused on the post-Tridentine construction of sanctity in the Spanish world from the vantage point of the Mexican viceroyalty that is New Spain.
It's a curious subject, not least of all because the region did not see the canonization of one of it's-- excuse me, of one of its own in its 300 year history. The same cannot be said for the viceroyalty of Peru, of course, as it had the honor and privilege of raising racing Santa Rosa to the altar in 1671.
The importance of sanctity throughout the Americas and the importance of Spanish America in the construction of sanctity clearly cannot be measured by the number of successful causes brought forth. My talk today will emphasize the following, one, the papal power to both direct and suppress devotion on a global stage following the Council of Trent, two, the role of numinous materials as aesthetic inflections and cultural performance in transforming peninsular devotions.
In a sense, despite the wish of Vatican control, a cult of Saints, like any other aspect of early modern Catholicism, was not only exported to the Americas but was shaped by the viceroyalties, and three, I want to emphasize Trent's limited power when seen by local communities an ocean away.
Peter Brown opened his landmark study, the cult of the Saints, the rise and function in Latin Christianity, with the announcement, quote, "this book is about the joining of heaven and Earth and the role in this joining of dead human beings," end quote. Brown is focused on an early Christian landscape and the remarkable changes that took place between 300 and 600 when charismatics emerged as holy men and women, and the faithful expressed a desire for material piety in the form of relics and healing objects and organized pilgrimages to achieve their goals.
The process of saint-making and a codified measure for saintliness had not yet arrived. Only with the Council of Trent from 1545 through 1563 was the groundwork laid for the rigorous regulation of sanctity. On the heels of Trent, in 1588, Pope Sixtus V established the sacred congregation for rites under the Roman Curia to regulate divine worship and manage the causes of Saints.
The papal flex, as I call it, was a bold move meant to consolidate power. The issue of sanctity was no longer to be negotiated at a local level but would be determined at the seat of the universal church. This was both a making and breaking process, as legendary Saints, lacking sufficient documentation, were purged from the liturgical calendar.
Canonization became an ordered and multi-step system, evidentiary records, extensive testimonies, the approval of miracles and Vatican support were all necessary for a cause to proceed. Beatification would become a required step before canonization, a postulator, usually a member of a mendicant order, was tasked with forming, strengthening, and financing causes put before the congregation of rites.
Rome's efforts to both regulate and centralize sanctity spurred Spain's own attempts to formalize devotion. Years were spent and significant capital was raised just for an inquiry to proceed. Spain quickly adapted to the stricter measures of the post-reformation era. The nation's new saint-making course reached its milestone in 1622 with the quintuple canonization that included Teresa of Avila, Francis Xavier, Ignatius Loyola, Isidore the Farmer, and Felipe Neri.
With the exception of the Italian Felipe Neri, all were born and formed in Iberia. The Italians like to say that the lot was made up of four Spaniards and one Saint. Apart from Saint Isidore, these were all modern saints, Baroque saints who were instrumental in reforming or founding new orders for a global church. So the new world is kind of written into the program from the get go.
Spain's greatest counter-reformation achievement was immortalized in text and image, as we could see on the screen. In 1622, Paolo Guidotti Borghese helped design the theater in Saint Peter's Basilica and produced a drawing of the installation. This, in turn, served as the model for a monumental engraving by Greuter.
The engraving center captures the papal ceremony, while the surrounding biographical vignettes celebrate each newly canonized saint. The makings of Spanish piety and pride were on vivid display. While the engraving evidently did not travel-- indeed, it seems likely few were printed given its enormous dimensions-- it did serve as a model from which individual devotions could be extracted.
In New Spain, the quintuple canonization led to the creation of illustrated biographies, sermons, broadsides, paintings, sculptures, altars, reliquaries, et cetera. The medieval farmer, Saint Isidore, especially revered in his hometown of Madrid, emerged as the most important agricultural saint in Spanish America, his devotion often incorporating aspects of Native agrarian traditions. Visual productions often showcase the numinous quality of both local and imported materials.
An assemblage of Saint Isidore was crafted, for example, from colorful feathers, and a portrait of Saint Teresa in ecstasy was not only framed with tortoiseshell and ivory, but was pierced at the heart to accommodate the insertion of a reliquary case and a portrait of Saint Francis Xavier derived from a European print was transformed into a sacred image through the use of iridescent mother of pearl.
My endeavor to understand how the global was expressed, conceived, and valued at a local level has benefited enormously from path breaking insights in material studies. This work, for example, crafted for a Creole patron in Mexico City, derives its iconography from a Flemish print made for an Italian publication.
Personifications of Africa, Asia, America, and Europe accompany a fifth figure, who unfurls a map of Asia and points to China. Two servants prepare the ship for sale, while the Jesuit in the foreground clutches a crucifix. The scene is enclosed with an oval festooned with garlands, flowers, and four putti.
The adornment is further embellished by a painted frame, showcasing identifiable bird species and a greater variety of flora. The work is distinguished by its elaborate pictorial iconography and physically by its materiality and construction. In addition to the mother of pearl, Clara Bargellini has noted the presence of bas relief.
The artist's attention to surface texture and material substance-- this is also something I noticed in a few of the works in your exhibition-- transformed the image into an object of art. The vibrant frame, distinctive fast relief and carefully positioned shell fragments conferred the status of exotic luxury item and reasserted the global dimension conveyed by the iconography.
The uniqueness of this particular encontrado, as they're known, is further enhanced by its dedication, signature, and date. The use of the term effigie to describe the saint confers authority while imbuing the work with a numinous quality. According to Miguel Arisa, the golden brilliance of encontrados caused by the presence of reflective shell glazes and varnishes, not only expressed a global network and communicated Baroque concepts of the sacred, but also evoked a pre-Hispanic sense of religious authority and the miraculous.
Recently, microscopy, x radiography, chemical analysis, and non-invasive elemental imaging was applied to an encontrado at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exposing the use of shell dust in the ground preparation-- that is the shell's not only on the surface. It is the object-- the faint presence of underdrawing and the uniform application of perforated shells. Scholars suspect that the perforated shells were recycled from pre-Hispanic clothing.
This is shocking, right, if true, because we normally think of shells being coming into the viceroyalties during a colonial period for these kinds of objects. And here we may be dealing with a pre-Hispanic object that has been repurposed. The findings illuminate the ingenious, multivalent quality of these objects, and urged us to further explore the profound value of ancient forms in the hands of colonial Indigenous artists.
And it wasn't only materials or Indigenous craftsmen that impacted sanctity. Francis Xavier, Baptizing Peoples of the World, this is a painting from the Franz Mayer Museum. We know that Francis Xavier died in 1552 without having stepped foot on American soil.
Yet he came to be known as the Indies, stressing the saint's status as a global missionary and the Jesuits as a universal enterprise. Artists throughout the Catholic world often included figures that represented Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Accuracy, historical, cultural, or physiognomic, was beside the point.
In this composition, two figures representing Africa and Asia interact on the right. The colors of the Asian turban with its jeweled adornment are echoed in the American Native American headdress, gold diadem, elaborate belt, and feathered skirt. This is the earliest surviving portrait by this Mexican artist.
The painting echoes Jesuit propaganda and Eurocentric models but also merits study within its own Mexican context. [INAUDIBLE] has proposed that the Indigenous convert is none other than the monarch Moctezuma himself, a fair assertion, actually, especially considering the ruler's appearance in Juan [INAUDIBLE] Biyombo at the Museo Soumaya from about 1675.
Ilona Katzew has further noted the politics of the Rodriguez painting. The emphasis on Indigenous conversion both confirmed the success of the 16th century Iberian missionary project and rehearsed a Creole conceit.
A late colonial Mexican audience, additionally, might have made a connection between the community of converts in the painting and the realities of a multicultural viceroyalty. The Jesuit contribution to Native conversion is intentionally flaunted, but the scene is haunted by the order's relationship to an African population.
Although this history is only now really acknowledged, the fact remains that the Jesuits likely enslaved more Africans and Mexico than all the other orders combined. Indeed, the global mission not only participated in this abhorrent global enterprise. But according to one historian, William Chamberlain, quote, "was one of the largest institutional owners of enslaved Africans in the world, if not the largest," end quote.
This context, the portrait of Saint Francis Xavier, does more than toe the Jesuit party line. It opens the door to nuance and doubt. On closer inspection, the interaction between the African youth and the turbaned figure seems fraught. Are we looking at coercion rather than conversion?
If race was cautiously referenced through pictorial hagiography in the late 17th century, it was pushed to the surface just a few decades later. Rodriguez, same artist on the left, now hailed as the Mexican police, was busy trying to jumpstart an Art Academy that would convince the world of the nobility of Mexican painting.
His exuberant Creole pride and his role in the development and promotion of casta painting, a genre depicting Mexico's diverse society as a racialized taxonomy that included Spaniards or Hispaniola's, Native Americans or Indios, Africans or Negros and Asians, Chinos, intersected with his professional aspirations. For the artist, the racializing genre transformed stereotypes into complex subjects, generating a new and compelling artistic tradition in the process.
The Art Guild advanced the genre as a manifestation of patriotism wrapped up in exoticism. His composition at the Museo Franz Mayer anticipates the now problematic genre associated with the celebration of the Jesuit Saint-- oops, sorry. Um-- was the artist's wish to provide a truthful compendium of a multicultural society and his nascent desire to elevate the respectability of Mexican painting, to push it to a level of renown and superiority.
While New Spain was part of a global network and a key component of Spanish and Creole-- Spanish and Catholic hegemony, it was also distinctly local. So I want to talk about limits a bit. And a people's piety was often disinclined to wait on the dictates of a judge and jury an ocean away. Thus, the proliferation of unapproved Vera effigies and retratos verdaderos.
In Puebla, artists portrayed controversial beatas in the guise of canonized Saints, while charismatic archbishops like Juan de Palafox were sometimes shown donning razor thin halos. And I like this image of Palafox because you look at it, and you see someone at the center who is-- it's a celebration of that person, but officially it's not.
Officially, it's a celebration of the Avila in the upper right corner. And the reason why Palafox is in the center is that he's showcasing her letters or her writing and reminding people that he published her letters for the first time. And so you would never guess that just by looking at him.
So this material speaks to a colonial sanctity that was part of a larger global picture, that it all falls out of view the moment we restrict our research to official canonizations. So I want to get away from just repeating what the congregation for the cult of saints is doing. Because if we just follow that model, we won't actually study sanctity in the viceroyalty of New Spain.
Even an approved cult, in fact, might stray into heresy. Pope Alexander VIII canonized Pascual Baylón from Spain in 1690, and this is an engraving of that theater in Saint Peter's. The sculpture on the left is an exquisite estofado, and it was made in the mid-18th century, likely for a Franciscan church in the colonial city of Puebla.
With hands closed in reverent prayer, he dons a cowl neck habit. We know he was, according to his hagiography, born during Pentecost, and Torrehermosa, a border between Castile and Aragon. He tended sheep during his youth, a job that prohibited him from attending mass. Undeterred, he incessantly prayed in the direction of the nearest church throughout the day, a devoutness that was soon rewarded on multiple occasions. Angels delivered the blessed sacrament to him, as he labored on the hills.
While still a young man, he joined the Friars Minor, a reform order established by the Franciscan Pedro de Alcantara. Even amongst his discalced penitential brethren, the severity of Pascual's asceticism stood out.
According to this vitae, the friar courageously spread the gospel and valiantly defended the holy sacrament even when faced with violence by heretics. He was sent on official business to France and got beat up by advocating a cult of the holy sacraments. He was twice physically attacked by vicious Huguenots.
His life was punctuated by miracles. He witnessed the body of Christ in the host, caused water to spring from a rock, experienced ecstatic dance before Marian images, multiplied loaves of bread, possessed the gift of prophecy, and performed miraculous healings. He died during Pentecost, and miracles ascribed to him like the proverbial bread multiplied, thereafter.
In Spain, specters of the deceased friar were of the sonic sort. It reminds me of a conversation we had at dinner last night. His saintly presence was heard through strange knocks like that or tappings. Some witnesses testified that his portraits, especially emitted such sounds, and this is all to do with his cult in Spain. No new world hagiography emphasizes the sonic aspect.
The holy man was beatified in 1618 and canonized in 1690. His devotion was centered in Valencia, but it soon spread to Madrid. Early engravings, kind of, marginalize his devotion to the holy sacrament. It's not until after his canonization that it really becomes prominent, and the image on the right, perhaps, is the most prominent.
I'm going to skip ahead because I know I'm running out of time. In New Spain veneration to San Pascual first surfaced not in Mexico City or in Puebla, but in the southernmost region of the viceroyalty, in Chiapas and Guatemala. Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzman, who dies in 1699-- that's important because the guy canonized in 1690-- a Creole historian and descendant of the conqueror, he says, of Bernal Diaz del Castillo, attributed the saint's popularity in Guatemala to a miraculous apparition occurring in 1650.
According to the author, the Kaqchikel Maya in the region were braving a typhoid epidemic when a saintly figure miraculously appeared as a beautiful presence covered in "shining radiance", quote, unquote, and adorned in garments resembling the habit of Saint Francis, says our source. He encouraged the besieged el [? Maya, ?] to honor him with the creation and maintenance of images and portraits.
News of the miracle spread, and soon-- or apparition spread, and soon villagers were privy to the power of the saint and his cult. Lamenting their ignorance and confusion, our colonial Creole source describes the popular production of death sculptures with the title of San Pascual. So here's a legitimate saint, but our colonial source says they have it all wrong. They're associating him with death, and they're imaging him as a skeletal figure.
Quote, "they made so many sculptures that there was no Indian house where two or three large and small ones could not be found. Placed on their altars with offerings of flowers and perfume, believing in the sway, confusing the cause with the effect that they had the favor and protection of San Pascual, who, in their opinion, was death, which they consider a positive entity.
This corruption was so widespread that the public disorder of their ignorance and the public disorder of their ignorance so great that upon reaching the notice and understanding of the inquisition, it was decreed that the parish priests and vicars of the Indians should take those images out of their possession and the public squares, and in full view of the people, they should burn them in a bonfire, as was expediently done and executed. However, despite the diligence, their memory persists, and whenever they see such a painting, they reverently kneel and bow." end quote. Fascinating.
By the time the local church attempted to regulate devotion to the skeletal effigy, it was entrenched in the Holy Week rituals in Guatemala. Although authorities soon banned the display, devotion to the skeletal figure persisted and spread in the Mexican state of Chiapas. In Tuxtla Gutierrez, [INAUDIBLE] devotees established their own confraternity to San Pascualito and at least until 1902, kept their effigy in a coffin cart. Such a display mirrors the devotion of Dona Sebastiana in New Mexico.
The scene is not so kind of histrionic or dramatic in Mexico City or Puebla. Here, San Pascual Baylón is associated with the last rite, that is, with death and the taking of communion, the Vatican. And by association, he is associated with food, especially in Puebla. And so that's what you see on the left, typical image created in Puebla.
So instead, so here we have the saint praying before a monstrance, but not on a church altar, but rather the Poblano artists prefer to depict San Pascual before a kitchen stove, scattered with cabbage, garlic, pumpkin, tomatoes, and chillies at his side. In this painting on copper, the youthful friar tends to boiling pots while visualizing a monstrance.
Foodstuff is gathered in the foreground, while the background shows food cultivation in a garden. The recognizable setting of monastic orchards not in this painting, but in others monastic orchards and whatnot, really localized the saint, not just to the viceroyalty of New Spain but to Puebla specifically.
And what is super interesting is that he becomes a favored kitchen saint for convents in Puebla. We know from descriptions that they kept a special altar niche in their kitchens for the installation of San Pascual and were devoted to him. In fact, he becomes associated with the culinary tradition of Puebla with mole and its invention specifically.
So this painting here is by José Agustin Arrieta. And so it further emphasizes this charming saint, and he's hypnotized by the holy sacrament. And we as viewers are lured by the attractive fruit. With devotion so intense, ingredients so fresh recipes, so inspired, it's no wonder the humble friar levitates.
While Pascual's devotion served to. sacralize private and monastic kitchens, the saint was no Teresa de Avila. Histrionics of Baroque piety, even levitation, were drowned out by the clamor of a busy kitchen and the choreography of cooks in full swing. To add to the commotion, devotees adopted the practice of audibly calling upon the saint during meal preparation, a folksy custom still in use today.
A popular verse-- whoops-- a popular verse pronounced not by the priest in the pulpit but by Cooks in the kitchen, joyfully exclaims-- and I will leave you with this-- San Pascual Baylón dance for me on this fogón. You provide the seasoning, and I provide the song. And you could switch the lyrics any way you want and make them very contemporary. These colonial limericks continue to be sung in kitchens, valued for their improvisational character, ability to inspire laughter, and capacity to adapt to new voices. Thank you.
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: Thank you for a really wonderful talk to kick off our symposium, Cristina. I am pleased to introduce our next speaker, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi. Dr. Stanfield-Mazzi is a professor of art history at the University of Florida. She specializes in the art of colonial Latin America, especially the religious art in the Andes and Catholic Church textiles from regions colonized by Spain.
Her first book, Object and Apparition, Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes, addresses the ways in which images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, when materialized and ritually activated by local artists, helped Christianity take root in the Andes. Her second book is titled Clothing the New World Church, Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520 to 1820 and is the first broad study of church textiles with links to Indigenous traditions.
Her most recent book, co-edited with Margarita Vargas Betancourt, is an Anthology titled collective creativity and artistic agency in colonial Latin America. The book takes a decolonial approach and focuses on the ways in which artists acted as important agents in colonial society, and I should also note that Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, in collaboration with a co-editor Stephen Whiteman, will be the upcoming editor in chief of Art Bulletin. So send your works her way.
I'm so pleased to introduce Maya today, who will be giving a talk entitled Invisible Soldiers and Constant Servants, The pre-Hispanic Roots of the Andean Cult of Angels. Please join me in welcoming Maya Stanfield-Mazzi.
MAYA STANFIELD-MAZZI: Thank you, everyone. Good morning. Thank you so much, Nandi, for the invitation and, Andy, for the pleasure to get to meet you and see the beautiful show and Jessica also and all the students who are involved. Juliana, thank you. It's just been a wonderful experience so far.
So we're going to shift to South America and to the Southern Andes, especially the city of Potosi to start with. Let's see. The 16th century Church of San Martin de Tours in the populous and multiethnic mining city of Potosi Bolivia, was decorated with a complex program of paintings in the following century.
The upper walls of the presbytery, to either side of the main altar, are lined with five canvases depicting richly dressed youths with massive multicolored wings, figures that Christian viewers would call angels. Their bodies appear in 3/4 view to face the viewer and the altar, swinging silver censers and bearing stoles that repeat the word sanctus, suggesting a repeated bird like chant.
Facing the foremost angel on each side is a much smaller putto or winged infant bearing another silver vessel. The adult angel is arrayed in rows on individual canvases are representative of a genre that became popular in the 17th century Andes, featuring richly dressed angels with various attributes, including weapons. The most famous insitu series is that in calamarca, Bolivia, with rows of angels arrayed along the church's nave walls.
Some of the calamarca angels wear contemporary military finery and bear arms and others, like these two, wear less specific clothing and hold plant symbols. Documentary references attest that such series were popular in both churches and wealthy homes, and individual canvases, such as this one in the show, survive in many collections, presumably separated from their counterparts.
Scholars such as Ramon Mujica Pinilla have studied these angels and identified their likely sources in Hebrew and Greek apocrypha, reinterpreted by 17th century Spanish theologians. Others have pointed to the possible inspiration provided by the printed images from European military manuals, whose appearance Orlando Hernández Ying has recently connected to actual military companies in Peru, notably those that included Indigenous elites.
Full figure paintings of archangels in non-contemporary dress by Spanish painters were sent to Lima and may have been the most direct visual models. Clearly, the Andean series of angels were inspired by various old world traditions, as well as contemporary and colonial visual culture-- contemporary European and colonial visual culture.
Judeo-Christian tradition provided for the existence of angels, spiritual beings who bridge the earthly and heavenly realms. And visually, Greco-Roman sources inspired the figuration of angels as winged humans. In many ways, the act of visualizing angels described in the apocryphal literature, was a form of Renaissance classicism, but none of this fully explains the popularity of angelic imagery in the Southern Andes, in contrast to in other regions colonized by Spain, where the genre did not emerge.
It seems worthwhile to explore the idea that the ranks of angels populating Andean churches and homes may have also been indebted to Andean traditions. In my time today, I will trace some of the possible Andean roots of this cult of angels, or more neutrally, beliefs in supernatural-winged beings. My discussion also helps periodize the production of ostensibly Christian art by Andean artists.
I will focus on a set of works from the late 16th century that points far back into the Andean past to the era of the first millennium, known as the Middle Horizon that was distinguished by a unique religion. Pause for a second to say these works that I'll discuss are in a private collection in the United States. I didn't add that to my slides.
Well, this religion of the Middle Horizon does not yet have a name, but its imagery is now termed the Southern Andean Iconographic Series, a very clunky long name. This Southern Andean Iconographic Series is shorthanded as essays, which I'll mention a couple of times.
The imagery is thought to represent ancestors-- the imagery of the SAIS, thought to represent ancestors who had taken on otherworldly non-human powers, perhaps, to the point of deification. I propose that we may find survivals of SAIS religion in the colonial Andean cult of angels. This continuity amounts to a sort of Andean classicism, in which surviving elements of what to Andeans would have been an ancient culture that predated the Inca were used to give form to unique Catholic orientations in the colonial period.
This analysis probably sounds quite conventional in pointing out the syncretic or hybrid nature of 17th century Andean religious art, but it relies on a great deal of recent research led by archaeologists, especially William Isbell, that has really clarified the wide dissemination of the SAIS and makes connections to it much more plausible and, I think, worth revisiting.
Well before Andean artists learned to render Christian themes in oil on canvas, Andean tapestry weavers were commissioned to create cloths woven with Christian iconography to adorn newly built churches in the Southern Andes. Both materially and technically, the cloths were the inheritance of the long tapestry making tradition of Southern Peru and Northwestern Bolivia, a tradition with especially solid roots in the Middle Horizon, the first millennium.
In this example, likely created shortly after the Spanish invasion to hang behind a missionary altar, a Christian cross was inserted into a typically Inca grid of geometric motifs known as Toqapu, thus building out of more recent Andean visual culture. At this stage, Andean weavers were neither trained nor empowered to render the human figure in their weavings, but seemingly a Christian cross and the small two skulls at the base were deemed appropriate.
Church inventories from the mid-16th to early 17th century testify that weavers produced items to adorn church altars, such as altar frontals, frontlets, and docelles. Whereas this cloth could seemingly have hung on its own, most of the time the cloths were surrounded panel paintings or sculptures of Christian Saints and the crucifixion imported from Europe, and that's how they're described in the documents.
The tapestries that are my focus slightly post-date that work and were also surely created to adorn a newly built Christian church in what is now Southern Peru or Bolivia. They feature a series of putti and angelic youths, two of which you see in detail, holding the instruments of Christ's passion, symbolic objects representative of Christ's suffering. The tapestry strips likely correspond to the period after 1560, since only by that time did weavers begin to represent the human figure.
They consist of five pieces that, based on some surviving interconnections, can conceivably be arranged into two columns, as shown in their entirety on the right. Each column or strip features nine panels, individual panels. Each panel displays its putto, or angelic youth, against a black background, holding one or two instruments of the passion. These include the cross, the ladder, pinchers, the hammer, and sets of three nails.
The 15 putti are nude and are shown with pink or reddish skin, while the three angelic youths wear yellow gowns that stream up behind them. None are explicitly gendered, and all have short yellow hair and wings with yellow, red, and pink feathers. Each figure appears in profile, holding an instrument in front of them, and each is framed by a rectangle of perpendicular white lines. Additional black and white lines run vertically along their sides and interconnect the distinct panels.
As suggested by the church inventories in terms of how Andean tapestries were displayed and with supporting information from European passion iconography, which I don't have time to go into today, I propose that the two strips were arranged to either side of an image of Christ crucified. Here's a hypothetical reconstruction using a 16th century European image of the crucifixion just blurred out because it's just an example with the reversible panels arranged so that the angels face toward Christ on either side. As divine attendants to the scene, they carry symbols that cue the wider passion narrative as well as increase its devotional potential.
Most crucial for my argument are the behavior of the angels and the ways they are rendered in two dimensions features that I think hark back to the SAIS. Of the 15 nude putti, two of which you see here, 11 or almost 75% present a distinct running posture, with the lifted back leg and back foot pointed towards the ground. I propose that in these ways, the angel's index, the mythic sacred geometry common to size, in which the divine realm was expressed as a two dimensional orthogonal grid.
They also present, figuratively, a sort of kinesis or movement that seems to have been key to SAIS conceptions of the supernatural, specifically, in the case of the figures that appear as attendants to the central deity, which you'll see in a second. The repeated running or forward stepping position of attendant figures in SAIS art suggests that they are perpetually in motion in three dimensional space. The putty, in our case, are also attendants as figures subsidiary to a central Christian deity. In their running position, they conform to the way Southern Andean supernatural helpers should behave.
The best known example of this art is the sun gate at the site of Tiwanaku, Bolivia. As seen in this detail of the gates carved upper section. A central figure with a rayed head and a staff in each hand considered by most scholars to be a deity, they term the staff God, emerges in high relief.
To the sides, three rows of smaller figures carved in lower relief appear to converge on the central being. These part bird, part human beings are what scholars studying essays term the profile attendants.
The attendants stand upright and hold singular staffs in their hands, while large wings extend behind them. Each of the 48 figures on the sun gate seems to run forward, its front knee bent and front foot placed parallel to the ground and its back leg bent and back foot perpendicular to the ground. This position, which Isbell describes as running or genuflecting is a common characteristic of SAIS attendance.
William Conklin proposed that in the Southern Andes under SAIS, the divine realm was understood and presented in art as two dimensional space with a vanishing line form vanishing line format instead of the western vanishing point. So in that case, the figures at the top would be further in the distance.
The scene presented on the sun gate, with attendant figures arrayed to the sides of a larger frontal rayed head being, is now thought to be a relatively late manifestation in stone of a scene that was rendered in tapestry by the third century of the Common Era. SAIS iconography spread from the Bolivian Altiplano or an intermediate site to the Southern to-- there's an intermediate site in there that scholars can't figure out, but probably from Bolivian Altiplano or somewhere to the West. Then it spread to the Southern Peruvian region of Ayacucho to become prominent in the Wari state in the eighth century, where it was also predominantly displayed in tapestries.
Wari tapestries downplay the staff God, but multiply and abstract the imagery of profile attendants. In a common design of Wari tapestry tunics, like seen in this example, multiple attendant figures appear in squares or cells stacked in columns that alternate with columns of a solid color, ultimately, appearing as strips like our 16th century exemplar.
Dozens of tapestry tunics with a similar composition survive in museum collections today and are thought to have been worn by elite representatives of the warrior state. In this example, the columns of winged attendants are separated by columns of solid dark blue and narrower burgundy colored framing lines.
As seen in a detail when we look closer at that one that is there, it's seen this detail of one figure that faces to the right. Each holds a color blocked staff and runs to the right or left. So this one runs in that direction.
Their raised heads exhibit raptorial beaks, as pointed to here, and large wings with white upper-- white-tipped upper feathers extend behind them, though their bodies appear human. The stacked figures alternate direction in what is known as glide symmetry. And Mary Frame argues that they should be understood as moving through three dimensional space along snaking pathways.
She notes that the bent knee position supports this idea of movement. Here the front foot is parallel to the ground. Yeah, so I get this one. Whoops. I knew I would mess that up. Let's see.
Back here. Back here to the feet. The front foot is parallel to the ground and the enlarged back foot with only three toes, each with bright white rectangular toenails is perpendicular to it. The back feet take on an outsized role that likens them to the extension of white-tipped feathers in each wing. In fact, the upturned back foot seems to stand as an icon for the entire grid since in opposition to the front foot, it establishes the grid's most basic unit and starting point, two perpendicular intersecting lines.
This grid, to use Conklin's phrasing, was the sacred mythic geometry of the Southern Andes during the first Millennium. I contend that this mythical geometry continued to be present in the minds of the Andean designers of the 16th century tapestry strips.
SAIS religion is generally believed to have dissipated after the first millennium in the Andes, since SAIS art disappears from the artistic record. But if indeed the SAIS reflected an ancestor based religion, scholars, including Peter Goss, argued that orientation survived into the colonial era. Furthermore, remnants of the SAIS may have remained visible or been prone to rediscovery in the 16th century.
Another major stone monument at Tiwanaku is the 3 meter high ponce stela, which consists of a fully round human figure wearing a tunic displaying the standard size pantheon in an arrangement like that on the sun gate. The tunic in the design is carved in low relief, which you can't really see here.
But a small cross was carved on the right shoulder of the stela, presumably on the order of Catholic missionaries, before the statue was buried as part of a campaign to eradicate Andean religious beliefs in the early 17th century. So, for people in the Tiwanaku region, it seems that at least one major display of size imagery was available during the early colonial period.
Furthermore, after the decline of the SAIS and the rise of the Inca in Cusco in the 14th century, Inca artists also established a sacred geometry. Weavers arrayed abstracted geometric motifs, known as toqapu which was seen earlier, into grids that completely covered the most high status garments.
Both Rebecca Stone and Christian [? Klados ?] identify certain toqapu that may have roots in the SAIS. Stone discusses one that appears four times on the back of the Inca royal tunic and consists of a nested square at top right, a diagonal white and green line with spiraling ends, and at bottom left, especially-- let's see if this works-- especially at bottom left what may be the downward facing back foot of size attendants with three white toenails.
Considering that the lifted back foot may have been an icon for SAIS more broadly and that it is a feature that is maintained in the 16th century putti, this stands as an important indicator of SAIS continuation over time.
In the early decades of Spanish colonization, some missionary priests looked and indeed looked for continuities between Andean religion and Catholicism. This extended to the cult of angels, which was encouraged but also treated with caution, since the indefinable nature of angels was seen as fertile ground for heresy.
Mendicant priests who arrived in the Americas prior to the late 16th century, so prior, Cristina, to the Council of Trent, argued for the constant presence of angels as companions to the faithful. Counter-reformation artists after Trent subsequently approached angels more cautiously, but the early authors had claimed angels existence as real embodied creatures, only insisting that they were subordinate to God and Christ.
Decades later, after spending time preaching in the Southern Andes, the mestizo Jesuit priest Blas Valera wrote a version of Inca history that sought to show the Inca as proto Christians. He remarked that the Inca Supreme God, which he called IHS. He said that this god had invisible soldiers and constant servants. They were called [INAUDIBLE]. People worshiped these servants and described them as resplendent, beautiful ones.
By describing a Supreme deity with powerful minions, Valera offered an Inca prototype for Christianity, intended to valorize Andean religious tradition and make the new religion more palatable. If theologically, Andes' angels were given a central role within Andean Christian spirituality that built on Andean precursors, it makes sense that they would be represented artistically in ways that also built on the Andean past in a manner parallel to how European art of the period reinvigorated Greco-Roman stylistic and formal precursors.
Andean angels could be encouraged but cautiously, hence the Angels that appear in our tapestry strips. It seems likely that a Catholic priest commissioned them, perhaps, offering figural models for inspiration, and a local head weaver developed their design. Then a team of weavers would have executed them based on a shared template.
Their overall grid format is clearly indebted to SAIS and Inca precursors. The predominance of putti, as opposed to dressed figures, is based on European shifts in the depiction of angels common to the 16th century with their infantile, as opposed to simply youthful nature, responding to the downgrading of the status of angels and their tenuous status in the Catholicism that was promoted in the 16th century Americas.
Several putti display light pink skin, inspired by European models, that reflect the skin tone more commonly seen on that continent. But they alternate with figures rendered in a dark pinkish red, thus approximating the pattern based alternation of colors that characterizes SAIS depictions of winged attendants.
The team of weavers that created the tapestry strips chose varied strategies to model the figures. You can see that in the juxtaposition of two of the most divergent here. By ultimately presenting them as abstracted profile attendants and as naturalistic, fleshy humans occupying three dimensional space, the weavers expanded the angels possible fields of meaning. They run, fly, and genuflect like SAIS supernatural beings, carrying staff-like items within a regimented grid.
These angels appear in community with their Andean church going viewers in deeply ancestral ways. Perhaps, the strip's creators consciously chose to emulate an alternate classicism, one whose Andean roots would allow it to flourish in subsequent decades. If so maybe, the period of 1560 to 1580 can be considered another root of the eventual expansion of the cult of angels in the late 17th century, by which time Andean artists had become adept at oil painting.
Apart from directly depicting central Christian figures, such as Christ and the saints, they dedicated individual canvases to new and presumably even more powerful sorts of angels. If we return to the angelic choir in Potosi, perhaps, the putto on the right should serve as a reminder of the deeper Andean roots of angelic devotion. Thank you.
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: Thank you, Maya, for a really fascinating talk. I'm so pleased to introduce our third speaker for this first session. Jennifer Baez. Dr. Jennifer Baez is an assistant professor of art history at the University of Washington. She specializes in the arts and visual culture of the Spanish colonial Caribbean and the Afro-Iberian world, with a focus on popular piety and vernacular knowledge production in the 18th century.
Her first book project, Miraculous Altagracia, Testimony, Artifact, and Creole Heritage in Hispaniola, is an object-centered study of miracle-making that traces the colonial origin story of the Virgin of Altagracia and its entanglement in nativist politics in the Dominican Republic. She obtained her PhD in art history from the Florida State University and has published on several academic and public facing platforms, including Small Acts, Hyperallergic, Arts, Yale University Press, and Smarthistory.
Her work has been funded by the Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation, and she's currently a fellow of the Center for Curatorial Leadership sponsored through the Mellon Foundation. The title of her talk today is Framing Miracles for a New World, the Oval. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Jennifer Baez.
JENNIFER BAEZ: Oh, I'm sorry. How am I-- oh, OK. OK. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Andy Weislogel and also a doctor Ananda Cohen-Aponte for the invitation. And really, I'm in awe by looking at the exhibition. It's so beautiful and beautifully co-curated by the students. I really appreciate efforts like that.
OK, let me just time myself. And OK, so in the last third of the 18th century, a series of paintings were produced depicting miracles of the Virgin of Altagracia and displayed at the sanctuary of San Dionisio in Higuey, which was the easternmost province of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. And I'm showing you here a picture of the main view of the altar of the sanctuary as it stood in 1923, with the images of the cycles in there.
The paintings were made at a time when the cult was being institutionalized. Her cultic day was made official to promote the pilgrimage, and her celebration masses were desegregated to encourage broader participation. These miracle cycles, of which 16 are extant, included images that represented members of the community asking or thanking the virgin for a miracle and really performing a type of a socioracial hierarchy.
And I'm showing you here the image of the icon of the Virgin of Altagracia, which is a Hispano-Flemish nativity and the parish of San Dionisio, where that image was originally located. Now, in these images-- In these images of the miracle cycles, you can find really the standard crop of miracles that would happen in an island colony in the Caribbean.
So you have a priest and children that run amok in the town fire. You have a mother supplicating on behalf of her dead child, an enslaved mute man, who miraculously regained his voice, and all these types of miracles.
Looking closely at the images and gathering historical context led me to conclude that the cycles attempted to give the devotion a more history and to forge a sense of community for the parishioners. But this was as far as I could go with the data that I had, because there's really no commission. There's fragments, right, of information and no commission-- no commissioning data.
So taking an embodied approach and analyzing the cycles as material objects has helped me to connect visual worlds with ways of seeing, which has allowed me to better frame reception. Additionally, I use contemporary art to bridge archival gaps, and I do a comparative analysis with a case study of another set of miracle cycles in colonial Cuba.
And this methodology of, basically, plugging in yielded more evidence that these miracle cycles helped Criollo place-making, and it helped island natives, basically, forge place and belonging. And it pushes me also to post questions about the relation between Marian miracle cycles as a genre of objects and Criollo place-making in the mainland.
So for this presentation, I just wanted to walk you through my process of a speculative looking and free association. I always find that helpful when other scholars do that. And while the images that I invoke may not imply causal links, they do plant signposts that matched with other data can help bridge gaps.
So we stand in front of a series of 16 robust, gilded, oval-framed pictures with a cartouche at bottom that includes written inscriptions detailing the miracle. I would imagine that the oval frame and the shape of the cycles spoke to viewers way before they got up close to scrutinize the images.
At the museum, the local museum where these paintings now hang, which is just a couple of blocks from the original parish, they're displayed in a sequence that begins with the cycle that pictures the painter of the series, even though that cycle does not represent the first miracle that took place. This is probably due to the imperative of the museum, which is concerned with the project of finding authors.
The cycle that does represent the earliest miracle actually has the image portion missing, the oval part. But in the cartouche, the legend mentions sheep and Indios, Indians. And this may have been the case, or perhaps, it was a conscious choice. The series of miracle cycles was a reproduction, right, in the 18th century of select ex-voto that were picked, perhaps, by the priest or by the custodian.
So selecting or inventing this particular story of the sheep and the Indian could have been an attempt, in my view, to establish the antiquity of the devotion by linking the virgin to the native population, which was all but exterminated by the 1540s. So remember, this is the late 1800s.
An embodied approach to reading how these cycles created meaning as objects would have me imagine viewers circulating around the ovals and symbolically enacting becoming part of that genealogy. A radiating series of ovals organized around a central icon or image, indeed, follows an iconography of genealogy.
And I'm thinking here, specifically, of the iconography of Jesse's Tree, in which it's a medieval iconography where you have a tree growing from the sleeping figure of Jesse and with branches that support different figures from the Old Testament that link to Jesus. And in the 15th century, this actually a takes a turn to this iconography to really push for the genealogy of the virgin. And they really push to prove that Mary descended from the House of David.
So following a line of investigation that privees how the cycles may shape the formation of a collective identity, it ovals-- besides genealogy, it also evokes mirrors. And in the Americas, mirrors bring to the fore deep histories of racialization and gendering.
These are hard to access, but Victor-- looking forward, Victor Patricio de Landaluze, in his work, alludes to the colonial trope of Black women staring into mirrors and pining for the beauty of the mistresses while also a light-skinned-- the light-skinned mulatta [INAUDIBLE] a Haitian Orisha, has mirrors as iconographic attributes that symbolize her vanity.
And I'm showing you here some images by Landaluze. It is impossible to know whether the people looking at the cycles internalize these characterizations, subverted them, or even noticed them, but it is important to note that they existed as a history of mentalities.
The work of contemporary artists may also point to oval mirrors as racializing or oval shapes as racializing and gendering technologies. For example, a Rachel Mozman Solano, who in this work she posts her mom as a dark-skinned maid on one side and as a light-skinned housewife on the other standing in front of two oval framed pictures of a heterosexual couple. And the work speaks to the complicated colonial history of miscegenation and to the patriarchal project of family that replicates social classes.
Moreover, the frames of the Altagracia miracle cycles communicate the quality of what I'm calling hang ability. This would have been an appropriate thing to project in order to attach the wonder working icon of the Virgin of Altagracia to the San Dionisio parish in the minds of people at the end of the 18th century when the cult was being institutionalized.
Hangability evokes walls. It evokes solid structures against which to anchor wait. But hangability does not code as strongly in quadrilateral easel painting. Square formats resonate rather with Leon Battista Alberti's metaphor of a painting as an open window that looks out onto space.
The illusionism of perspective belongs mainly to squares and rectangles, while ovals and circles tend to reflect back to the viewer, invading their space and almost projecting realities and identities onto them. This perception, certainly, applied to imago clipeata from ancient Rome, which were portraits of ancestors on shields, on round shields, or tondi, where the bust of the deceased jumped out in high relief from the roundel.
There are countless examples in painting, easel painting and print, and closer to the 18th century that reveal the Western European preference of artists using ovals and circular shapes to evoke a sense of weight and of three dimensionality to ground the memory of important figures or of esteemed ancestors. And I've seen in previous presentations how you showed, I think, Cristina, an image of a casta painting here at the exhibition, which also showcases like the weight of the frame, right, which is not the case when it's pictured as a square, rectangle.
The miracle cycles have an aura of truth about them as well, and I attribute it to the writing on the cartouche. Spanish America was a scriptural economy. And the inscribed legend on the cartouche looks a lot and actually reads like notarial linguistic formula. In these contexts in Spanish America, calligraphy projected a sense of authenticity, regardless of whether the viewer could read alphabetic script and independently of how many layers of mediation were involved.
Cartouche, in turn, are a ubiquitous element of Marian miracles cycles. They initially served apotropaic functions in ancient Egypt, where they protected the name of the pharaoh. And the form evolved to carry meanings of protection and exaltation. They were used also as architectural devices, placed on top of door frames, or on the entrances of buildings.
They are on maps, and I'm talking about colonial visual culture. They're on maps, portraits of the elite, and also developed as frames in their own right to contain miracle cycles in sculpted form but also in easel painting, as I'm showing you here in this image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, with all of these miracles encased in oval-framed cartouche. And you can see it in the exhibition here.
OK, so all of this suggests that the shape and materiality of the miracle cycles helped make place for the Criollo, projecting genealogical affinities and hierarchies onto the viewer, and firmly grounding the icon to the parish in the social imaginary at a time when it was necessary to do so because the cult-- that cult of the Virgin of Altagracia was actually dying. And so they needed to make it official and basically tell the pilgrims where they had to go.
In Cuba, something similar happened. The first broadsheet that was ever created for the Virgin de Caridad Del Cobre features six miracle vignettes surrounding an effigy of the Virgin, all floating above a bird's eye view of the village of El Cobre. Now, the six miracles are framed in a style that is similar to the Altagracia cycles, mounted in oval frames with a legend scroll at bottom and a decorative molding crowning the top.
Bishop [INAUDIBLE], a bishop for Santiago in the eastern region of Cuba, he commissioned the printing of the broadsheet around 1814 as the village of El Cobre was demanding privileges for their political designation as villa and also working to rehabilitate the mines. And that bishop was championing progress and free trade for the eastern region because at that time Havana was the one that was-- that was more successful, right.
So he was doing that for the eastern region, and he energetically supported the popular cult of the Virgin of La Caridad Del Cobre. And although we do not know the precise dissemination context of this broadsheet, its commission issues from a desire to institutionalize the miraculous history of the Virgin Del Cobre and to promote its site specificity in order to raise the profile of the eastern provinces of Cuba. The broadsheet, with the representation of the miracle cycles, indicates that they played a role in cult promotion and in a community's formulation of a political spatial claim.
Now, the broadsheet was redesigned twice with little changes, and it wasn't until-- and there's images that I couldn't bring, but there's other-- in this period between 1814 and I want to say 1840s, there's other designs that basically had a similar architecture.
And it wasn't until the bishop wanted to promote the cult in Havana that the iconography changed for print in the print culture, and also paintings that were created to depict the cult. It went from a series of-- as you can see on the left, a series of six cycles to just featuring one, which was the miracle where the virgin is seen with the three people that discovered her in the ocean.
So you have-- they're called the three [INAUDIBLE], and it varies. Sometimes it's an Indian, a Criollo, and a Black. And sometimes it's two Blacks and a Criollo. But it's, basically, that iconography was as a Francisco Ramos Garcia argues, it suggests that transition of the cult.
It was being detached from a very specific region and parish and site now moving on to a broader stage. And so it needed kind of to do different things. The image needed to do different things.
And you don't see the cycles, which that's what I'm arguing that these cycles really when they come to the fore, it's because they are attached to a parish, and they are-- that's what their focus is. That's what their goal is.
So going-- so to end, I wanted to go back to Hispaniola and to the present and to just talk a bit about how these ways of seeing and this material culture is very relevant in today's world. And so you see here-- what I'm showing you here is two years ago, on March 25, when the President of the Dominican Republic, Luis Abinader in the front, he renovated the parish of San Dionisio, where that image of the Virgin of Altagracia was displayed originally. Now it's not there, it's in a Basilica.
But he renovated it, and it was inaugurated on March 25. And the restoration team took many liberties. A lot of people are not happy with it. But the facade for one was changed dramatically. It really-- it changed dramatically.
However, they commissioned exact reproductions of the medallions, of the miracle cycles, which had been relocated to a museum several years ago, and it was a museum that was made not too far from there also. It was made, specifically, to house the Treasury of the Virgin of Altagracia, and the medallions were the centerpiece of that museum just to give you an idea of how important this series is.
And so they reproduced the same medallions. And so with these reproductions, what I am reading is that the nation state communicated its privileged connection with and also it's authority over the voices of the colonial past. And at the same time, the objects themselves spoke to their continued ability for holding down an idea of place.
So this is what-- this is what my roundabout way of working through material that might not have-- you might not find a lot of archival documents for. But there's ways of maneuvering that by close looking and by bringing in your present experience and your knowledge and to interpret things. Because a lot of these ways of seeing are learned. They're collective ways of learning that are revised, appropriated. So there's always some grains of truth that it is our work as historians to pull apart. OK, thank you.
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: Thank you so much, Jennifer, for a wonderful presentation. I'd like to invite all three speakers to the front now for a Q&A. I should note we are running about 15 minutes behind schedule, but we obviously want to take some time to field questions from the audience, both in person and virtual.
So for those of you who are tuning in to the live stream, please feel free to put your questions into the Q&A section and we'll make sure to get to those as well. But Yeah, just to kick things off, do we have any questions from the audience for any of our esteemed speakers. Yeah?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: Oh, wait. Hold on one. Maybe I should-- let me pass you the mic really quickly.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. My question is for Maya. You mentioned, and obviously, we could see from your images the black background of the tapestry, which was really striking to me. I don't have as encyclopedic of knowledge of the presence of putti in these textiles, but that color and the way that they stood out from that was striking. And I was wondering if you have any additional insight on that or any comparative textiles that have that phenomenon.
MAYA STANFIELD-MAZZI: On before. There we go. Oh, thank you. And you're right, pointing that out, Lucy. I guess maybe I should make more out of that, actually.
So I didn't have time to go into it, but there are some similar tapestries that were created in the region of Arequipa, and I think the one these ones are probably from that area also. And they show putti similar to the ones that I discussed but sometimes holding like symbols of the wounds of Christ or something but with a Black background again.
So it seems to have been a definite choice. And I guess-- but the main ways that I was seeing it is in terms of this kind of choice for two dimensionality but that really makes the putti pop from out of that. And they're very visible, would be visible around an altar, a nice visual choice in that way. But I don't no, specifically-- well, in the context of passion imagery, that it kind of fits with the funerary sort of coloration. So there would be some different ways to think about it. Yeah. Thanks.
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: I think Hugo and then Kaya.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] question for Maya. [INAUDIBLE] showing the [INAUDIBLE] to be just, like, highly constrained to the work. Is there any other evidence of that [INAUDIBLE]?
MAYA STANFIELD-MAZZI: No. Except for those quotes that I mentioned from Blas Valera's research about these kind of soldiers and constant companions that he does mention, but his work is somewhat problematic. It might be inventive also trying to connect Inca religion and Christianity.
I guess, one thing not so much winged beings but in a broader sense, it's important to try and figure out what the Incas understood as what worry or even SAIS or middle horizon was. And there have been-- I've seen Andrew Hamilton's work shows some other Inca tunics that show other Wari motifs in them.
So I'm becoming more and more convinced that the Incas had an idea of what Wari was and wanted to maintain it in some way, not to the point of saying that the winged profile attendants that point, except for in that one Toqapu but that it was a continuity that we do not fully understand yet but I think really needs future research. So if that helps.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. These are just such inspiring and really rich talks in the way they interact. So I'm intrigued-- I work on another part of the world, but I'm very much intrigued by the encounter of cosmologies.
All of you are addressing that in various ways, and I was just struck by how movement is so key in that encounter, whether we look at the kinesics of feet and feathers or the relationship of the foregone and the dance and the seasonal seasoning, and finally, in the final paper, Jennifer, with that wonderful connection to these circular ovals and the cartouche.
I wondered if you wanted to comment on that encounter of cosmology and motion. And particularly, I was going to encourage you to speak, Jennifer, to the ribbons at the top. You speak to the text at the cartouche at the bottom, but what about those threads?
You're arguing for a community. These are ribbons that are tied that connect each of these round frames, and also the roundness of heavenly divine sky and square as Earth, which is such a universal cosmological encounter. So I just-- thank you all, and I wanted you to comment on the encounter of cosmology. Thank you.
JENNIFER BAEZ: Well, Thank you so much for that question. I'm going to have to write it down because you're giving me more material to work with. I'm not sure. The ribbons-- I haven't-- to be honest, I haven't looked into them as much as I wanted to.
Sometimes what's obvious, you discard it immediately because you say, oh, this bourbon or Rococo type of ornamentation. And you discard it. Yeah, there's definitely a lot that we can do to unravel these cosmologies.
I'm thinking also of a slide that I included, but I didn't get a chance to talk about it on actually afrodiasporic religion, Dominican voodoo, which is called a [SPEAKING SPANISH] And their iconography, they use a chromolithograph.
But their iconography, I found an image from the 1950s in the Smithsonian that shows ovals. And so they're trying to connect-- it's a genealogical type of a iconography as well, which shows you that there's other types-- there's these ways of depicting associations and ancestries gets borrowed by everyone.
So there's nobody that has control over it. It keeps growing. And yeah, so it's-- yeah, it's fascinating how different cosmologies meet at some point, where it's indistinguishable. And there's, yeah-- there's a lot to say about what's appropriation and so on. But yeah, looking forward to exploring more that question. Thank you.
CRISTINA CRUZ GONZÁLEZ: I think I just want to say a little bit about your talk to is and the question you just posed that there are a few examples in New Spain at least of the virgin of the rosary, for example, where that circular frame is, in fact, composed of little medallions that are mimicking a rosary. So they're not just creating sacred space, but they're mimicking a sacred object for approaching the Marian icon. And so I think that's really powerful.
I also was struck that they're all medallions, but they're not all the same shape. I mean, they're all ovals, but not the same shape. Yeah.
JENNIFER BAEZ: Actually, the biggest one depicts a miracle. The only one that is collective and shows the city of Santo Domingo. So it's also that gives you an indication of how important it was for that series to show space right of place-making. So that's the biggest one.
CRISTINA CRUZ GONZÁLEZ: Yeah. And then finally, [INAUDIBLE], these little reliquaries are often these medallions as well.
MAYA STANFIELD-MAZZI: Well, I just I mean the circular shapes and the, kind of-- I don't really what to add to that, but I liked your points about how movement was connecting our three talks.
AUDIENCE: Because your kinesics sets it all in motion. It's not about feet. It's feathers and feet, right. And I just thought it was fabulous, your argument, because you're setting it in motion in a way that I think is an encounter of cosmology, perhaps.
JENNIFER BAEZ: [INAUDIBLE]
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: Any other questions from our audience? Juliana?
AUDIENCE: Well, to that point of motion, I wanted to ask a question to Cristina and just to share a family anecdote, which I was reminded of with your talk with the Statue of San Pascual Baylón because my grandfather always used to tell this story about how in his small town, about four hours from Bogota in Boyaca, he grew up in a peasant community. And they would set up a statue of San Pascual Baylón.
And then a, kind of, a party would start around it. And there was this game where all of the dancers that were participating in this game could never turn their backs to the statue. And any time they did, then they would have to leave the circle. But he would tell us, kind of, jokingly, how he would always go get back into the circle of dancers without anyone noticing.
So I was just noticing, kind of, the spread of this cult into New Granada, too, and into the 20th century and not only in the kitchen but also in this festivities and religious festivals. So I was wondering in relation to the Council of Trent and this idea of regulating certain practices around saints, if you know of any attempts to regulate this kind of more performative ways of devotion that maybe weren't as approved or seen in a good light by the-- I don't know-- the Pope or in Rome versus in how in colonial Latin America there were this continuity of practices from the pre-Hispanic past.
I don't really know if this kind of dancing context has a connection with the pre-Hispanic communities in [INAUDIBLE]. But yeah, I just wanted to ask you about this.
CRISTINA CRUZ GONZÁLEZ: I love that anecdote. I think it's fantastic. There's lots of references to honoring San Pascual Baylón through dance as well and references to his dancing. And I think the sculpture tries to show that kind of pirouette and honoring him through dance.
And he's not the only one. So the Santo Cristo de Chalma as well, traditionally, you enter the sanctuary dancing. And that does not seem to have been banned by The Inquisition. To this day, you could don flowers in your hair and do like a little jig when you enter, and it's perfectly OK.
The Newberry has a very interesting case of banning dance and associating it with idolatry or heresy. And in that case, it's very clear that it's suspect. And I don't remember the saint that the dance is dedicated to but it's a colonial case in The Newberry, and it's a substantial document that's been published and discussed by a historian. And I just don't have the details of the top of my head right now.
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: Luis Burckhardt's scholarship comes to mind in terms of dance. I wanted to quickly turn to the Q&A in the Zoom chat because I know that for those of us in person, we'll have some more time to talk about this over the break. But we have one anonymous commenter who's asking for Dr. Cruz González, would the potential reuse of nacre from pre-Hispanic garments have influenced the Indigenous religious interpretations of these artworks, especially given the religious implications of Indigenous mother of pearl objects.
CRISTINA CRUZ GONZÁLEZ: Perhaps. I want to remind, like myself, about something that Dr, Katzew alluded to is that Indigenous knowledge and understanding is not static, and we oftentimes want to freeze frame the Indigenous ethos and mind to this like pre-contact period. The viceregal period is 300 years, and it's a large territory.
So I think San Pascual Baylón is a great example. I mean, you could have an Indigenous community, kind of, approaching that saint in one way and an Indigenous community approaching him in another way in the same viceroyalty. So San Pascual Baylón also journeys up north and to Santa Fe.
There's a wonderful print that arrives in Santa Fe, and it's produced in 18th century Mexico City. And Santero incorporates it into a [INAUDIBLE], and he paints it. And so it's not just-- it's not a model for something that's a traditional religious item from Santa Fe. But in fact, it becomes part of that object.
We have no such thing happening in a Nahua community in Central Mexico City. And there's nothing to say like, oh, that should be happening in the 16th century. But no, it's happening in the end, probably, of the 18th century, early 19th century.
So I think it's a landscape not of reflection but of refraction. And it's not just for the White European or Criollo but for the Indigenous as well. They're open to changing their interpretations and their devotions and their approaches too.
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: And one thing I really appreciate about all three talks is you're very careful attention to temporality in many different ways, whether it is pre-Hispanic and early colonial, whether we're talking about 16th century and their 18th century reiterations and reinterpretations.
I do have one other question from the webinar chat that I wanted to put forth to the speakers. And then I think from there, we're running out of time, so we'll close for our short break.
So Lucia [INAUDIBLE] has two questions, one for Maya and one for Cristina. The one for Maya, do you think that a continuity was sought for by the early priests, as can be seen in some translation cases, angels being translated as Yanaconas for God, according to Estenssoro.
And I'll let you think about that as I pose the question for Cristina. For Cristina, the idea of global and local in the construction of sanctity is really challenging to address. So could you please elaborate on your idea of the global being appreciated in the local, if I got you correctly. Thank you. And thank you to Lucia. Hello across the virtual divide. So whoever wants to go first.
MAYA STANFIELD-MAZZI: Oh, can you reread the question?
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: Do you think that a continuity was sought for by the early priests, as can be seen in some translation cases, such as angels being translated as Yanaconas for God, according to the scholar Estenssoro?
MAYA STANFIELD-MAZZI: Well, that's-- thank you, Lucia, for suggesting another place that I can look for continuity possibly. It does seem like that. And so that would be a, kind of, a linguistic way of doing that translation and then Blas Valera, kind of, writing about in Inca mythology of angels, possibly, seemingly rescuing that, or somehow inventively describing it and then doing that in the visual material.
Certainly, one thing that I've wanted to look at is in relation to our talking about temporalities and things carrying over and going back to past traditions is understanding better some Indigenous terminology for continuity and what does it mean-- not that something is directly continuing, but instead you're consciously going back and picking up something from the past and reviving that. And I think that is a way to underscore the Indigenous beliefs were not constant or unchanging and also give agency to artists to go back and decide to pick up on these things and bring them into the present.
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: Yeah, thank you.
CRISTINA CRUZ GONZÁLEZ: So I think that the encontrado is a perfect example of the object that comes from motion, essentially, but also a global object. So you have the shell that is coming maybe the Pacific, maybe Indonesia, but probably in this case from the Sea of Cortez, from Baja, California.
So maybe the nuance with origin is purposeful, actually, that it's a product that comes from somewhere else, from the world, from the ocean. In any case, the model is a print that's produced in one country for a publication in another country. And it is being used as a model for a local Indigenous workshop in Mexico City.
And that workshop is not just local, but it's also being influenced by the Manila galleon and the wares and the technologies that are arriving-- and ideas that are arriving from Asia via the Philippines. You don't get much more local than that, probably, except that, of course, we have to remind everyone that this is a Saint that also is banking on the global, right. And he's being, kind of, localized in this object. This kind of object, while it's a global object, could only really be produced in Mexico, actually.
It's not like we have there's some mystery when you see an encontrado like this of, oh, could it be produced in Rome or Madrid or the Philippines or-- no, very recognizable, uniquely Mexican encontrado. So that kind of tension between the global and the local, I think, is really not just fascinating but very important as well.
But also, I wanted to say and this is something that I develop elsewhere is the approach to sanctity and the tension inherent in the, kind of, local and the global as well. The case of New Spain is rarely-- rarely comes into play when you are talking about early modern sanctity globally in the discipline, in early modern history and art history.
The focus is going to be Rome. And if you're talking about the Spanish world, then it's Spain. And that's basically it, Italy and Spain. And then there are case studies perhaps with other areas, but that's the focus.
And what I wanted to do is create an intervention in those discussions that just because colonial Mexico doesn't produce a saint in the early modern period doesn't mean that it gets excluded, actually, from the conversation, and it doesn't only mean that people celebrate European saints either.
I mean, they have agency, and they're impressing their belief systems and their technologies and their art-making and their being in the world on the process of saint-making, even from Mexico. And they're proposing their own saints.
And so I wanted the global discussion to include the viceroyalty of Mexico. But I also wanted the local discussion to include Trent and that global world. Because in Mexico, we've been studying saints for many years, and there are serious scholars who have done a lot of incredible work. But it's really, kind of, localized to a large degree. So I wanted to bust that open a bit.
ANANDA COHEN-APONTE: Thank you so much. Can we give a hearty round of applause to our brilliant speakers? So we have time for a very short break. So stock up on coffee, pastries, and other snacks, and we'll reconvene shortly.
AUDIENCE: Nandi, should the microphone go back up there or?
At this symposium, presented in conjunction with the Johnson Museum of Art exhibition “Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas,” established scholars whose work encompasses a variety of regions and approaches to colonial Latin American art history offer new methodologies seeking to expand the boundaries of this visual culture. The symposium was made possible through the generous support of the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.
The first session, “Framing the Divine: Visualizing Devotion in the Spanish Americas,” was moderated by Ananda Cohen-Aponte (Cornell University).
Presentations at the first session were: “Trent as Compass: Directions, Circuits, and Crossings of the Visual and Canonical in Spanish America,” Cristina Cruz González (Oklahoma State University); “Invisible Soldiers and Constant Servants: The Pre-Hispanic Roots of the Andean Cult of Angels,” Maya Stanfield-Mazzi (University of Florida); and “Framing Miracles for a New World: The Oval,” Jennifer Baez (University of Washington).
