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  • Fashioning a Prince for All the World to See:Guaman Poma's Self-Portraits in the Nueva Corónica
  • Lauren G. Kilroy-Ewbank (bio)

One of the most famous manuscripts to survive from the Spanish colonial Americas is El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle, and Good Government). The title is usually abbreviated, as it is here, to Nueva corónica. The indigenous Andean author, Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1535-c. 1616), was nearly 80 years old when he completed the work in 1615.1 Written in Peru in Spanish, Quechua, and Aymara, it consists of 1,189 pages with 398 full-page ink line drawings, produced in the form of a letter to Philip II (r. 1556–1598), who was the Spanish king when Guaman Poma began drafting it, and later to Philip III (r. 1598–1621). While Guaman Poma also intended the Nueva corónica to be published "for all the world" to see, he makes his intent to address the king explicit through an illustration titled "His Majesty Asks, the Author Responds."2 The illustration depicts the author kneeling before Philip III, offering a book and gesticulating with his free hand (Figure 1).3 [End Page 47]


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Figure 1.

His Majesty Asks, the Author Responds (Pregunta su M[ajestad], responde el autor)

Source: Nueva corónica, folio 961 [975].

[End Page 48]

In the discussion accompanying the drawing, Guaman Poma designates himself a "prince" and the "grandson to the tenth king of Peru, Topa Inka Yupanqui," titles implying his noble status and right to converse with the king.4 He wears an Andean unku (sleeveless tunic worn by men) that is decorated with small kantuta flowers and parallel dots in rows. Beneath the unku is a European collared and sleeved shirt, breeches, and a cape, with his hat cast to his left side. With its mixture of local and imported elements, this ensemble speaks to the dynamic sociocultural changes then occurring in colonial Peru.

Guaman Poma clearly understood the power of portraits. While "His Majesty Asks" presents an engaging interaction between the two men, they never met: the scene is both a discursive tool and an imagined encounter between the Spanish monarch and Guaman Poma. The Andean author presents his audience with the king in such a way that no one observing the illustration could argue that it was fiction. It is as if Guaman Poma made manifest their meeting through a process of visualization, bringing the king's presence into being in a royal portrait—but also his own presence in the form of a self-portrait.5

Addressing the king via images had a long-standing tradition in Europe, as pictured in offering pages in medieval and Early Modern manuscripts, and Guaman Poma realized the value of both words and images in making a compelling visual argument for his royal audience.6 "His Majesty Asks" drew on compositional conceits from these offering pages: a royal subject presents a book to a ruler, employing visual concepts familiar to Philip III as a way to facilitate understanding and reception.7 Moreover, imagining oneself before the Spanish king corresponded to a tradition of portraits serving as representational stand-ins for any absentees.8 If indeed the Nueva corónica is, as Mary Louise Pratt has described it, an autoethnographic text—one in which Guaman Poma attempted to describe himself to the king of Spain based on how Europeans [End Page 49] perceived Andeans—then "His Majesty Asks" and Guaman Poma's other self-portraits reveal significant information about the author and the status of self-portraiture in colonial Peru.9 Guaman Poma, like other Early Modern artists, sought to augment his social and intellectual position and gain social recognition through his self-portraits.10

The Nueva corónica is remarkable for numerous reasons, but here I emphasize two of them: its incorporation of the first five self-portraits from the Spanish Americas, and the way in which Guaman Poma cleverly connects himself to his male ancestral lineage by including portraits of his ancestors wearing the same familial unku he dons in his letter. As...

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