Baroque Echoes: Faith and Ornament in Latin American Art — Epoche B2
Review: 'Art of Colonial Latin America' by Gauvin Alexander Bailey Visitors to the Iglesia de la Compañía de Jesús — the Jesuit church on the main square in Cusco, rebuilt after the earthquake of 1650 and finished in the following decades — tend to react to its interior in one of two ways. Either they are overwhelmed by the gilded cedar altarpiece rising the full height of the wall, or they find it excessive: too much gold, too many cherubs, a display of wealth where they had expected quiet. Gauvin Alexander Bailey's Art of Colonial Latin America , published in 2005, is a survey and not a defence of either reaction, but it gave me an answer to the second that I had not had before. This review sets out that answer and then tests it, because I think it survives the test with one correction. A word first about the object being reacted to, since the review turns on it. The structure filling the wall behind the altar is a retablo : a framework of carved wooden storeys, usually divided by columns into bays holding painted panels or statues, standing between the altar table and the ceiling. In the Andes it is normally cedar, carved and then gilded — covered in gold leaf laid over a prepared ground. And 'Baroque', the word in this essay's title, names the manner of the carving: the style that developed in Rome from about 1600 and spread across Catholic Europe and its empires until the mid-eighteenth century, distinguished from the calmer Renaissance manner that preceded it by twisting movement, strong contrasts of light, and ornament allowed to run continuously over a surface rather than being confined to borders. What Bailey argues, and what he is arguing against Bailey's organising claim is that this is not European art made worse by distance. It is the work of American workshops, staffed in large part by Indigenous and mestizo craftsmen and, in Brazil, by artists of African descent, working from imported engravings and from local materials and habits at the same time. Both halves of that sentence can be made concrete. On the imported side, the single most important source for Jesuit churches was a book: Jerónimo Nadal's Evangelicae Historiae Imagines , printed in Antwerp in 1593, a set of over a hundred and fifty engraved plates illustrating the gospel passages read at Mass through the year, produced expressly so that the order could send identical images to every mission it ran. A carver in Cusco and a carver in Goa could therefore be working from the same plate. On the American side, the standard example is Brazilian: Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, the son of a Portuguese architect and an enslaved African woman, who carved the twelve soapstone prophets that stand on the terrace at Congonhas in the first years of the nineteenth century — soapstone being a local material soft enough to cut deeply and not a European sculptor's medium at all. The position Bailey is arguing against had a respectable pedigree. The standard earlier survey in English, Kubler and Soria's volume of 1959 in the Pelican History of Art, organised colonial production around European models and the degree of fidelity to them, so that the further a façade departed from its Spanish source the more it was described as provincial. Bailey's book moves region by region and medium by medium — architecture, painting, sculpture, silver, textiles — and the cumulative effect is to make that vocabulary of imitation and decline unusable, because once you have seen the range of what the workshops did, 'departure from the model' stops being a measure of anything. By the time he reaches the churches of the southern Andes, the reader has stopped asking which European model a façade is copying. Why the images were doing the teaching That change of question is what helps with the altarpiece, but only once you know what the altarpiece was for, and here the review needs an instrument rather than an impression. The Council of Trent, the long Catholic reforming council that closed in 1563, devoted part of its final session to sacred images. Its decree ordered that images of Christ, the Virgin and the saints be retained and venerated, on the reasoning that the honour shown to an image passes to the person it represents; and it instructed bishops to teach that through these images the people are instructed and confirmed in the articles of faith. That last clause is the operative one. It made images an official channel of instruction, not a decoration tolerated alongside one. Why that channel mattered so much in Peru can be shown from another document. The Third Council of Lima, meeting in 1582–83, ordered the production of a catechism in three languages, and the resulting Doctrina christiana y catecismo para instrucción de los indios , printed at Lima in 1584, gives the text in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara. A church that commissions a trilingual catechism has conceded that its congregation does not read Spanish; and the same congregation, in the main, did not read Quechua either, since the language had no pre-conquest script. The doctrine had to arrive by ear and by eye. Seen that way the gold is not a distraction from the sacred but the available vocabulary for saying that something is sacred — the visual equivalent of raising your voice for the sentence that matters. What the gold actually costs Here is where I would correct the visitor's second reaction rather than merely disagree with it, and the correction is arithmetical. 'A display of wealth' assumes that a gilded wall represents a great deal of gold. It does not, and the reason is that gold is the most malleable of the metals: a goldbeater can reduce it to leaf about a tenth of a micrometre thick, which is $t \approx 10^{-5}\ \mathrm{cm}$. Take a mass $m$ of gold, of density $\rho = 19.3\ \mathrm{g\,cm^{-3}}$. Its volume is $m/\rho$, and beaten to uniform thickness $t$ it covers an area $$A = \frac{m}{\rho\, t}.$$ Putting in one hundred grams: $$A = \frac{100\ \mathrm{g}}{