De aqui y de allá. Muerte y conversion recorren el mundo

GABRIELA SIRACUSANO

Buenos Aires

Workshop; Transcultural and Transhistorical Baroque; 2016

The Getty Foundation, UNIFESP, Universität Zürich, UNTREF

In the last years The Carabuco series has been mostly addressed by art history writings when analyzing the place images have had in the evangelization and conversion processes within the highlands of the actual Bolivia in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Painted in 1684 by José López de los Ríos under the demand of father José de Arellano, these four huge paintings representing the Four Last Things (Last Judgment, Hell/Death, Glory and Purgatory) together with the story of the Carabuco Cross, stand in the center of several discussions around 1) how this iconography could have impacted in a ?Pueblo de indios? that was supposed to maintain idolatric practices, 2) their symbolic implications concerning their location on the shores of lake Titicaca, near the Quillima Hill and the Copacabana sancturary (three ancestral geographic sacred places), 3) the relationship between the relic of the Carabuco cross (present in this chapel), the preaching of Saint Thomas/Tunupa represented in them and how this stood as a construction not only through the Americas but also for local political and religious purposes, 4) the representation of local traditions such as the ceremony of toasting with qeros, the uses of Andean musical antaras and boxes, and the wearing of local clothes as a way of epitomizing and reducing them to idolatric signs within the aymara communities of those times. All these items have certainly focused the discussion on a historical and anthropological perspective, by which local circumstances were the key for deconstructing some former interpretations of these and other iconographies as, for instance, ?medieval symptoms? in America without much more complexity about how this really matched local purposes and about which artistic practices were involved in their creation. To center the discussion on the statement that this eschatological millenarist medieval iconographic set was a special Spanish American feature, so distant from the European artistic baroque scene, had some risks. On the one hand, it somehow reinforced the conception of these images as archaic and anachronic reappearings of a time when the category of ?art? could be understood under a different status (and therefore neutralized any possible aesthetic judgment on them). On the other hand, it avoided the possibility of thinking these iconographic programs in a more global sense, by which these Andean cases were only one tip of the iceberg in which Europe and Asia could not stand aside. In this opportunity, I would like to pay attention to one detail present in the canvas representing the Hell that could be useful to discuss these previous statements.