Mary’s Green Brilliance: The Case of the Virgin of Copacabana
2014; The MIT Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/jinh_a_00724
ISSN1530-9169
Autores Tópico(s)Cultural Heritage Materials Analysis
ResumoCan materials preserve memory? Do materials contain within themselves memories of past practice? Can materials act as trace evidence? Suppose that the evocative power of images, understood as simulacra, guides us to a wide but finite universe of mental images preserved in memory. Is it possible to trace those indelible marks of past ideas and feelings within matter itself? Peru’s viceregal period, specifically the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, presents a fruitful area to study South American artistic production through the study of signs, taking into account cultural practices, artistic materials, and techniques combined with the evangelistic objectives of the period.An image assumes agency when its materiality not only reflects but also produces meaning. In the absence of an embodied “voice” to leave us traces of the past, materials have to become an important part of the artistic language. However, this relevance, which seems obvious to visual artists, has not always been acknowledged in the history of art. Recently, scholars in art history have turned to questions surrounding the material conditions of art objects, the choice of new materials, or the deliberate selection of materials charged with ancestral meanings. Art historians have to take into account how material condition reveals itself as a complex field of analysis. Material and its metaphorical density and opaqueness should not be underestimated; in fact, this “density” should be embraced if we want to understand creative processes, the conditions of production and consumption, and their functions across time.1In the dimension of making, the empathetic choice of materials, the fascination with their properties, and the relationship between humans and earthly substances alchemically converge. A powerful and generative energy in artistic materials invades the creative moment—the material power of the iconic, which, over time, displays both change and permanence.2One of the most compelling aspects of matter is its link to sacredness. Throughout the centuries, sacred images have shared a symbiotic relationship with materiality. Charged with a power given by those who promote, create, and venerate them, these images return that same power in a reflective and enhanced way, “offering” thaumaturgic, healing, or protective qualities and thereby creating a closed circuit between image, matter, and devotees. This circuit is activated in every cultural expression and every ritual. So, too, the objects’ sacredness results from the idea that the material was created/crafted by God’s hands. From the ontology of the sacred tree, the Shroud of Turin, and the mandylon to relics, matter in its various forms—wood, fabrics, bones, or pigments—is charged with sacredness. In these cases, matter and image seem inseparable, each conditioning the possibility of the other. The divine presence is inextricable from the materials chosen to represent it.Christian religious images considered miraculous share something of this ontology, even though Catholic doctrine is clear in showing the difference between “being in the place of” and “being pure presence.” The Spanish language uses two different verbs for this distinction—estar en lugar de and ser. During the colonial period in the Americas, Christian doctrine drew a line between being and representing, between a (false) presence of the sacred and an occupation of place by an absent but real object. The power of images lay not in what they were (canvases, pigments, wood, stones, or metals) but in what they represented.Sermons preached to the natives in the territories of the viceroyalty of Peru were clear on this point. In Avendaño’s words, “[T]hough in paintings, and images, the painters do paint Saint Michael armed, and holding a sword in his hand, you are not to understand that Saint Michael has a body, and flesh as we do, but that the painters could not paint a spirit in any other way, nor could the eyes see them, if they were not to paint him as if he were a man.” Another sixteenth-century sermon explained, “Christians worship not images nor kiss them for what they are, nor do they worship that wood or metal, or painting, but [they worship] Iesu Christo in the image of the Crucifix, and the mother of God Our Lady the Virgin Mary in her image, and the saints also in their images…and if they do revere the images and kiss them, and doff their hats before them, and kneel, and wound their breasts ’tis for what those images represent, and not for what they are in themselves.”3A research project from 1996 to 2005 focusing on colonial art and architecture in Argentina as part of the conservation project known as Fundación tarea of Argentina, identified a wide array of pigments, dyes, and resins manipulated by Spanish, native, Creole, and mestizo painters in workshops located in Lima, Cuzco, Lake Titicaca, Potosí, or the Humahuaca region of Argentina. Various scientific techniques were able to detect vermilion, hematite, minium, and cochineal carmine for the reds; indigo, azurite, smalt, and Prussian blue for the blues; malachite, verdigris, copper resinates, and Verona green for greens; orpiment and ochre for the yellows; and white lead, bone black, and smoke for shadows and lights, as well as earth colors. This analysis also discovered the mixtures of elements used in the creation of different hues.4By combining scientific method with cultural history, we began to understand that many of these pigments and dyes had travelled long distances from their place of origin—mines, mountains, volcanoes, or cultivated fields—to be processed in workshops and apothecaries for the benefit of textile, medicinal, or artistic use. Apprentices, officials, and masters had to experiment with these substances to obtain the necessary effect required by Christian symbolic strategies—for example, a bright blue for the cloak of an Immaculate Virgin or a passionate red for the blood of Christ. One of these colors was the cochineal carmine (see Anderson’s article in this volume). In historical written sources, it appears as grana, grana fina, and grana de esta tierra, among other terms. One of the most precious colors for painters, it was also strongly related to the Spanish Crown economy, which held it in monopoly. The vegetal dye indigo blue, known as añil or Castile blue, which had a similar relevance for the Spanish economy, was popular in Cusquean and Altoperuvian workshops because it covered surfaces well, produced green hues when mixed with yellow pigments (especially orpiment), came at a reasonable price, and was acceptable in payment for taxes. Like carmine, it saw extensive use in the textile industry. The Central American region was the great supplier of this color, although it was also pervasive in Andean territory.5Other interesting aspects of these colors concern how their names were derived and they acquired meanings and misunderstandings in South America. Cases in point are the confusion between vermilion and minium, and the virtues and defects of the green cardenillo. Native terminology sometimes allowed diverse meanings. For example, llimpi, the Quechua term for vermilion, is translatable as color but also relates to war and festive practices, and in the European tradition, the green verdigris “pestilence” was associated with the idea of idolatry. These layered meanings provide a clue to how and why painters decided to employ specific pigments in their works.6Color was extremely important to the Andean cultures subjugated to the Incas. The prehispanic construction of color in the Andean region enables forms of social, political, and economic organization to be identified. Color structured the relationship between the native settlers. The use of red, green, or blue hues in images, clothes, or other objects was a privilege of the Inca nobility or certain deities, as opposed to the brownish earth colors that indicated the dominated classes. The most vivid representation of this “glorification” of color in the Andean world was the rainbow, which was considered sacred—an embodiment of metals and precious stones from the mines, the confused and vague colors of twilight and dawn, the eyes of serpents and felines, as well as colored water wells or the changeable tints of fabrics and feathers. Could these perceptions of color have disappeared with the arrival of the new Christian images that followed the process of conquest?7Despite the forceful imposition of new iconography, the old perception of color may well have persisted. In any case, colors were re-signified, due to new appropriations. Christian imaginary recovered part of the iridescence of the hummingbird feathers that adorned royal Inca clothes, as well as the smooth chromatic changes in skies and rainbows, by granting a new meaning to them. The connection between colors, powers, and Andean sacral images was extremely intense. Many written colonial sources and some archaeological discoveries suggest that color powders, or powdered pigments, for example, were also involved in ritual practices. Worshippers kissed them and blew them into the wind during a ceremony called muchani. Vermillion, azurite, hematite, and copper-based pigments were the main substances in this ceremonial practice, mentioned by Spanish testimonies as idolatrous.How aware of these cultural phenomena were those in charge of their destruction, and could they neutralize the persistence of such practices by imposing a new imaginary without applying a mechanism of negotiation? The evangelization process found a potential means of counteracting “idolatrous power” in the divinization of the materials used to produce such devotional images and objects as virgins, saints, and crosses, building a semantic halfway between reflexivity and transitivity, to use Marin’s terms.8The power in the very materiality of Andean images rivals that which their shapes exhibit and evoke. An example is the image of Our Lady of Chiquinquirá from Colombia. According to the Chronicle of Fray Pedro de Tobar and Buendía written in 1560, Alonso de Narváez painted the Virgin of the Rosary with Child, escorted by Saint Andrew and Saint Anthony of Padua, at the request of the encomendero Antonio Santa Ana and the Dominican order in the city of Tunja. After several years in the chapel of Suta, the image was spoiled due to “having been wet many times, and as [the authorities] didn’t care, putting straw in the roof of the chapel, a lot of water entered through the altar and … fell on the canvas.” Therefore, it became faded and “disfigured,” with numerous tears and large torn pieces. After being moved to a small chapel in Chiquinquirá, the painting continued to deteriorate, especially after being used as a fabric for drying wheat, until a devout woman named María Ramos rescued it.9Without recognizing its iconography, Ramos cleaned the canvas of accumulated dust, recomposed the broken frame, and attached the painting to the wall “with a string of sique, with four or five knots” at the top of the altar. One day, an Indian woman named Isabel and a mestizo boy noticed what became understood as the first miraculous renewal of the painting—the image of the Virgin turning bright. This miracle was followed by others—the chromatic “reintegration” of the pigments in the painting—“so bright and renovated with cheerful heavenly colors, so much that it was a glory to see it”—and then the repairing of the holes by the “Deus Restaurator” that left no trace in the support or in the pictorial layer. Thanks to its sacred materials, the image, as promoted by the Dominican order, acquired a sacred presence. Its “divine renewal” transformed it into a “living body”—an intervention by God that enabled miraculous actions.Sixteenth-century Spanish America was the site of numerous legends and traditions about images created or modified by belief in divine intervention. In the celestial workshop, the Deus pictor—the Holy Spirit, Christ, or the Virgin—with the help of color-grinding angels, or in the earthly workshop, a painter or sculptor, “aided” by the divine hand, introduced these Imagines Dei into colonial America to “talk” to the soul of the faithful. Indeed, among the acheropoietas images created in the viceroyalties—those thought to have been created without the involvement of the human hand—the Virgin of Guadalupe is the most radical example of this synthesis between the material and the divine. The imprint of her image on the cloth of the Indian Juan Diego at Tepeyac gave rise to a myriad of interpretations that led to identifying its materials—an ayate cloak and its pigments—either with those present in the Eucharist, which reinforced the presentational character of the image, or with the elements of God’s prodigious nature, roses, transformed into celestial pigments.10In the viceroyalty of Peru, Our Lady of Copacabana, on the banks of Lake Titicaca, stands halfway between these strategies (Figures 1 and 2). It still remains one of the greatest Andean devotions. Though not attributed to the hand of God but to that of a native sculptor named Francisco Tito Yupanqui, who had carved and polychromed it by 1582, historical written sources declare the presence of divine intervention in three ways: (1) through the position of the Virgin’s hand, (2) through its brightness (gold leaf), and (3) through its pigments. The Chronicle of Alonso de Ramos Gavilán and the Holy Poem of Fernando de Valverde, both of them by Augustinians, are central to understanding the artistic strategies that were responsible for the idea that a human creation could embody a strong sacred presence. The Chronicle demonstrates how the Augustinian order was able to establish itself in a region previously administered by the Dominicans; one of its many plans included the implantation of powerful images in specific places.As Ramos Gavilán says, “[W]here the Prince of Darkness set the stone of scandal, the Prince of Peace put the precious stone, the rich Daisy of His Mother to enrich heaven, for that means Copacabana: the place where you can see the precious stone.” He justified the name of Copacabana by saying, “Copa sounds so much like precious stone, and cabana is deduced from the term kaguana which means the place where you can see…. Copacabana, the town where you can see the stone…. Precious stone is Mary, as she is a smoothed diamond polished in the mines, not of the Earth, but of the high heavens.”11The reference is evident: Corpa was a native term related to the world of inorganic pigments. Brightness, brilliance, and visibility were the qualities that Ramos Gavilán chose to implement, one of the many strategies that accompanied the evangelization process in Andean lands—the replacement of a “false” presence of the sacred with the “true” Marian image. Lake Titicaca (Figure 3) was the place chosen by the gods. Copacabana—the strategically visible site where an idol “of a bluish stone” with the “figure of a human face, with neither feet nor arms”—gave account of what has been considered the first Andean hierophany (the presence of the sacred in the human world). According to Ramos Gavilán, “([T]alking about the image) you came to Copacabana to extirpate idolatry, to break the false, to mute the idols, to destroy their altars and temples, to spread Holy doctrine, to bring faith, and ultimately to set your sanctuary at Satan’s Court.”12What did he mean by “Satan’s court”? Ancient ritual practices once took place near Lake Titicaca. Close to Copacabana, at the northeast shore, lay another place that the priests had marked out as witness to important idolatric rites. The Quilima hill, also called the sleeping dragon that drowns into the Titicaca, was supposed to be a huaca, a space of the sacred (Figure 4). A few miles away stands Carabuco, an old Indian town, which saw the first chapel built in the sixteenth century. As with Copacabana, the plan was to replace idolatry with a “true” object of belief that could “arouse” the souls of the native people.13“[A] new man was seen, and never again, who did great miracles and wonders, and [the people] therefore called him…tunupa.” With this sentence, Ramos Gavilán introduced the story of the Carabuco cross and that of the presence of a disciple of Christ in the Andean region, who supposedly preached before the arrival of the Spaniards. As Bouysse-Cassagne stated, the legend links him ambiguously to St. Thomas or St. Bartholomew, a hagiographic construction that mixed elements from both saints with those of other figures like Empedocles, Moses, and such pre-Columbian divinities as Viracocha and Tunupa. Ramos Gavilán tells of Tunupa’s preaching in the Carabuco domains and his martyrdom, in which he was impaled by a chonta or palm stake. The chonta palm belongs to the species of palm assahy mirim, a black wood with brown fibers, used in the South American indigenous manufacture of bows, arrowheads, and canoes.14Why did Ramos Gavilán offer information about this material? He remarks that the dead saint’s body was sent adrift on the lake, eventually arriving on a shore where a chonta palm grew. Ramos Gavilán characterized this palm as a sign of Christ’s triumph, even claiming that it had a place on the crowns of kings and popes. The palm was also a symbol of medicine, the thaumaturgical power of kings, and incorruptibility—hence, the miraculous nature of the Carabuco cross. The Augustinian shrewdly forged a synthesis between the cross of martyrdom, the cross with which the saint had preached, and the one that grew on the shores of the lake. By establishing this wood as a new venerable substance, he also tied it to the Holy Cross and to the image of Copacabana.The Virgin was the first person to venerate the holy tree of Christ. Both the saint with his cross and the Virgin were put together and represented in the large canvas of Purgatory, which is part of a series that still hangs in the church of Carabuco. These pictures, painted in 1684 by José López de los Ríos, represent the Last Judgment, Purgatory, Glory, and Hell—the Last Four Things. The goals of controlling the territory, strengthening evangelization politics, and substituting idolatric practices with sacred objects and images was successful for almost 100 years. The images pointed out the dialectic between sins, idolatry, and punishment. Within this visual tale, the tondi, or circles, that run through the entire series brought back to memory the story of the saint and his cross (Figure 5). Through words and images, they show how the cross resisted being burnt by idolaters due to its hardness. Even after it was cut into pieces and buried, its sacred materiality prevailed; its nails and pieces were converted into relics. The cross and the Virgin of Copacabana represented the presence of the sacred that counteracted the force of ancestral beliefs on behalf of metropolitan and local interests.15Regarding the image of the Virgin, how could the pure materiality of the image created by Yupanqui possibly convert the ancient “head of idolatry” into a Christian holy site? The answer is simple—by converting the pigments’ powders used in Andean rituals—azurite, verdigris, orpiment, or vermillion—into “divine mixtures.” The Holy Poem of Valverde written a few decades after the creation of the sculpture is the key to understanding the scope of these words. In it, Valverde explains how the intercession of grace changed the pigments of the Virgin of Copacabana extracted from Mother Nature into sacred materials, or “divine mixtures.” This holy intervention, similar to the one that Ramos Gavilán mentions, occurred the night after Yupanqui had finished the gilding, when God’s hand made the sculpture bright and shining.16In this land of “idolatry,” the sacred Christian aspect of the image, to which color made a major contribution, had to be reinforced. In fact, sem-eds analysis, performed about ten years ago, confirmed that azurite and orpiment, both mentioned by written sources as entangled in native ritual practices, are present in its polychromies (Figures 6 and 7). Such pigments, included in the palettes described in the manuals of Lomazzo, Carducho, Pacheco, et al., also comprised the “allied body” of the images that supported the Catholic representational system. But were all of the pigments in this image employed in European artistic practices?17In 2011, with the help of restorer Carlos Rúa Landa and the religious community, we returned to the Copacabana sanctuary for a closer look at the image and take some more samples from the cloth and the veil (Figure 8). Recent analysis, developed with the help of the laboratory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, enabled us to identify one more pigment absent in the Spanish manuals of the period, never detected before in the Andean palette—Atacamite, a polymorph of the basic copper (II) chloride minerals group. Even more interesting, this pigment had a natural native origin and was used in pre-Columbian objects and burials. Archaeological and chemical studies confirm the presence of Atacamite in powdered form inside leather bags and small pumpkins in prehispanic Inca burials in the Tojo (Highlands of Tarapacá), the Humahuaca valley, the highlands of Jujuy in northern Chile, and the Lipes plateau in Bolivia. It appeared in texts for the first time in the late eighteenth century, after the mineralogical expedition to Peru and Chile (1795–1800) headed by the Germans Christian and Conrad Heuland. The Heulands had arrived in Spain by 1792 to arrange the sale of the mineralogical collection of their uncle, which the Crown acquired in 1793 for the Royal Cabinet of Natural History (founded in 1771). The brothers identified the mineral as a native copper present in mines of the Lipes in the Atacama desert.18During the viceroyalty of Peru, the Atacama region was in the province of Potosí, where Yupanqui lived while developing the initial steps in the creation of the image. Álvaro Alonso Barba, the author of The Art of Metals (1640) and an inhabitant of the Lipes, wrote about the “the many wonders of every kind of minerals and stones” in Atacama: “[T]here are many copper ores in all of these provinces…. Potosí is surrounded by hills where there are many of these mines…. There are very great veins in Atacama and some of them face the sea in large cliffs of this solid metal.” These facts, apart from the technical results, confirm Atacamite as the pigment chosen by Yupanqui to make the estofado of the Virgin’s veil—a pigment that exceeded his artistic purposes. But it may well have appealed to him because it had a powerful presence in the native tradition (Figure 9).19From what can be called an anthropology of matter, these subtle green pigments, once used in non-Christian ritual, remained present through the material of a new sacred image. The extent to which the sacred presence of this color persists for the faithful became evident during conservation work on the image. Rúa Landa, who directed that project, recalls how every cotton swab used to clean the sculpture at the sanctuary mysteriously disappeared every afternoon. After a few days, she realized that the swabs had been taken by silent and anonymous devotees who wanted to preserve what they had absorbed.20The three case studies presented show the relevance of the material dimension in the construction of devotions in South America. The Chiquinquirá’s renewed threads and colors, the wood of the Carabuco cross, and the Copacabana’s pigments applied in its polychromies played an important role in the sacredness of these three devotional and miraculous pieces. By identifying and analyzing their materials from a scientific and historical point of view, we come to answer the questions that started this article: The memory of old practices remains in the material of these images.To borrow Belting’s terms, the triad of image, medium, and body, catalyzed by faith and tradition, creates a sacred work that transcends the wood, pigment, oil, or gypsum of its construction to become living matter, capable of feeling and suffering as well as of healing souls and flesh. By this operation, material body and devotional body merge into one. This cultural relationship between matter and sacredness became established in the Andes at the very beginning of the conquest. Although present in Europe, the relationship assumed special significance in America, resting on the dichotomy between real images and false idols. Within the process of evangelization, images of Christianity were able to replace native sacred objects or places through the granting of sacredness to traditional materials.21This anthropological and cultural condition should not be dismissed even in scientific analysis. In the conservation of sacred works, the ancient tension between sculpture, matter, and idolatry—about which even the Old Testament’s Book of Deuteronomy issues a warning—is still palpable. The use of pigments in traditional rituals, the meaning of colors in Andean societies, or the collection of remains by a religious community are clear testimonies to this phenomenon. Finally, when deciding on interventions or deep restorations of sacred art works, technicians must be mindful of how religious congregations conceive of these representations and their material dimension. Conservation/restoration of these kinds of images, far removed from our modern episteme, necessarily entails a series of interdisciplinary actions and methods. This dialogue should embrace not only historical, anthropological, aesthetic, and scientific criteria but also devotional criteria to preserve, along with the material image, the memory and cultural identity that lies beneath the poetics of matter.22
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