cracks and clefts: dealing with the pigments of Our Lady of Copacabana

GABRIELA SIRACUSANO

Berlín

Simposio; Congreso Transkulturelle Imaginationen des Sakralen / Transcultural Imaginations of the Sacred; 2012

Freie Universitat Berlin

In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the process of Christian evangelization demanded diverse strategies in order to install the new religion. Within them, the uses of images were, of course, a necessary choice. With their double dimension of transitivity and reflexivity -in terms of Louis Marin- they offered the possibility of creating new sacred places, specially in territories where old places of sacrality had been functioning for years. In 1582, the devotion to the Virgin of Copacabana was installed by the Augustinians in the shores of Lake Titicaca (now Bolivia). Carved, guilded and polychromed by the hand of an native sculputurer, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, the image stands as a good example of how its image and, what seems more interesting, its materiality contributed to this plan. This paper will then follow the analysis of this case, paying attention on the relationship between written, visual and material sources