Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Birdman of Assisi: Art and the Apocalyptic in the Colonial Andes

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-4214378

1527-1900

Ananda Cohen-Aponte,

Latin American history and culture

Jaime Lara's beautifully illustrated Birdman of Assisi: Art and the Apocalyptic in the Colonial Andes offers a sweeping account of the special role that painted and sculptural imagery of Saint Francis of Assisi played in Andean religiosity during the period of Spanish colonial rule. Lara deftly highlights the iconographic transformations that occurred when Saint Francis traveled to the Andes as an agent of religious conversion. Countless processional sculptures produced in Peru and Bolivia feature Saint Francis with silver wing attachments, while canvas paintings and murals depict the saint flying through the heavens. These iconographical shifts, Lara argues, can be attributed to early Franciscan conversion efforts that drew on preexisting Andean conceptions of the divine as embodied by flying shamans and other airborne figures. In fact, no known European paintings or sculptures of a winged Saint Francis existed prior to the mid-eighteenth century.Part 1 of the book, titled “The Apocalyptic Francis in the Old World,” offers a thorough overview of the life of Saint Francis, the chronicles of his life that began to be codified by the thirteenth century, and the theological debates that ensued between the Franciscans and the Dominicans with respect to his Christlike experiences as described in some of the chronicles. It is in this section that Lara displays his theological chops, providing highly nuanced yet accessible explanations of the specificities of monastic intellectual life and their resultant manifestation in the visual representations of the saint. Part 1, with its meticulous attention to the specificities of Saint Francis's hagiography and visual representations from the medieval period to the Renaissance, offers ample contextual information for understanding the saint's entry onto colonial Andean soil in the sixteenth century.Part 2, “The Apocalyptic Francis in the New World,” details the cultural appeal that avian creatures, both animal and anthropomorphic, held in the Andes prior to the Spanish invasion. Chapter 3, “The Birdmen of the Andes,” sets the stage by offering an overview of avian imagery and anthropomorphic images of winged creatures during the pre-Columbian period. Lara includes a representative sample of pre-Hispanic “birdmen” that includes Chavín carvings, Paracas embroideries, Moche ceramic vessels, the Nazca lines, and Tiwanaku's famed Gateway of the Sun. Specialists are likely to take issue with Lara's quick glossing of some of the greatest hits of pre-Columbian Andean art, particularly his designation of almost all these examples as reflections of shamanism without indication of the cultural particularities of shamanistic practice. Nevertheless, this section offers a crucial snapshot of the historical depth of avian representation and veneration in the Andes, which took on new forms during the colonial period.By the second half of the book, it becomes evident that this is not just a study of Saint Francis imagery but of Andean Catholicism as a whole. Lara offers an almost encyclopedic account of religiously charged moments in colonial Peruvian history, including the 1600 volcanic eruption of Huaynaputina near Arequipa, the 1650 Cuzco earthquake, the exploitation of indigenous laborers within the Andean mining industry, and eighteenth-century anticolonial rebellions. Franciscan apocalypticism serves as the connecting thread for Lara, who demonstrates through masterful visual and iconographical analysis the ways that contemporary events become referenced within religious paintings. He also shows how natural disasters and indigenous uprisings were understood through a millenarian lens, thanks to the profound influence of the Franciscans in colonial Peru.Throughout the book, Lara punctuates his text with references to and photographs of contemporary religious processions featuring sculptures of Saint Francis and festival costumes that integrate avian attributes, which demonstrates the perseverance of colonial religious practices into the present day. His inclusion of the twenty-first-century Andean world within a book about colonial art provides a refreshing take on the continual refashioning of syncretic religious identities that began their longue durée of transculturation in the sixteenth century and that has continued unabated over the course of five centuries. On the other hand, in his efforts to create an expansive art history of the Andes that uses a winged Saint Francis as a point of departure to explore issues of millenarianism, apocalypse, cross-cultural exchange, and subversion in the arts, Lara sometimes makes claims that unwittingly flatten out the texture of colonial Andean indigenous cultures. References to “the Andean mentality” (p. 85), the “mysticism of landscape” (p. 92), and “the indigenous mind” (p. 110) could have benefited from further exploration into the nuances of a variegated colonial society that made up the Viceroyalty of Peru. Nevertheless, this beautifully illustrated, meticulously researched, and masterful book is sure to have an important impact on the field of Latin American studies, colonial religion, and colonial Andean art history as a whole.