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  • Heaven, Hell, and Everything In Between: Murals of the colonial Andes by Ananda Cohen Suarez
  • Jay Burkette
Heaven, Hell, and Everything In Between: Murals of the colonial Andes By Ananda Cohen Suarez (now Cohen-Aponte). Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016.

Delving deeply into the political, religious and cultural history of church murals in the Cuzco district of Peru, Cohen-Aponte offers a rich analysis of the interstitial dialogue occurring between artists, observers, and their associated societal and cultural constructs. Her inquiry is tightly defined, centering on seven churches within rural communities (pueblos de indios). Rooted in the methodology of art history, her project deftly intersects with other disciplines to serve as an exemplar of the type of comparative theoretical analysis for which she advocates. She specifically argues that, conceding their objective to evangelize Andean Indigenous citizens, church murals in fact created space for the exercise of Indigenous agency, both for artists and viewers, while in the process renegotiating Andean identity.

Cohen-Aponte focuses on a two-hundred-year period during which the murals she examines were painted, while providing context by connecting pre-Columbian mural techniques and their significance with those of the colonial period. Referencing twenty-five stunning, full-color plates, coupled with numerous photographs and images, she concentrates on mural subjects and forms to illustrate the ways in which both Andean agency and identity were "worked out" within the spaces of their creation and consumption. Her approach is refreshingly original, juxtaposing in-situ archival and anthropological research with theoretical analysis, both of which reference and amplify previous work by Teresa Gisbert, Andrés de Mesa, Flores Ochoa and Gabriela Siracusano (among others).

Her initial case study is that of "paths to heaven and hell" in the context of Catholic evangelization (68–82). Patterned after a print by Hieronymus Wierix (c. 1600), the murals she analyzes feature a reimagining of topic and message within local contexts. Both painted art and recorded sermons from this period conflate the topical path to hell with the Capac Ñan, the royal Inca road. Strewn with flowers and filled with music and merriment, this is presented as the path to damnation, while the contrasting road to heaven is narrow and thorn-filled, leading to an almost unpassable gate. The Andahuaylillas mural not only features the town's patron saint, conflating heaven with the local church, but it also features details (e.g. an Incan noble sailing to hell and vignettes recalling an internationally popular auto-sacramental "play" about spiritual pilgrimage) that subtly locate the composition within Andean contexts and about Indigenous subjects. Here she viscerally demonstrates how Catholicism was forced to clash and combine with local narratives in order to be indigenously accessible.

She continues with two examples showcasing the agency, seen within efforts to negotiate colonial identity, exercised by mural painters even when subjectively constrained by religious requirements. Skillfully interweaving pre-Columbian mural painting history and imperial economic developments, she analyzes the ubiquitous textile murals found within parish churches to show how the widespread availability of European fabrics and their intrusion into Andean markets, both secular and religious, stimulated the emergence of these "clothed walls" covering church interiors (83–117). Intriguingly, this development turned the Incan religious practice of painting textile murals on the exterior of huacas and Incan temples inside-out, both recalling and repurposing it within a Christian context. She then unpacks mural depictions of the baptism of Christ through a close analysis of their technique and composition, revealing how artists co-opted local bodies of water and Indigenous subjects to situate the event within Andean space while referencing Incan origin sites as its locus of authenticity (119–44). In both the textile and baptism cases, artists opportunistically used border and margin details to penetrate Christian narratives with Indigenous cultural and religious iconography, exercising agency in order to reimagine sacredness in locally understandable forms that avoided church censorship.

She concludes by examining post-rebellion murals in Huaro and San Pablo de Cacha. During the Tupac Amaru rebellion, these had been the sites of horrific atrocities committed within their walls. Cohen-Aponte concentrates on the art of Tadeo Escalante at the Huaro church to bring artistic and cultural-religious...

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