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chapter 12 k Martı́nez Compañón and His Illustrated ‘‘Museum’’ Lisa Trever and Joanne Pillsbury As bishop of the intendancy of Trujillo, Peru, during the 1780s, the Basque priest Baltasar Jaime Martı́nez Compañón y Bujanda (1737–97) created what was surely the most systematic and best-documented collection of natural history and pre-Columbian art and artifacts assembled in late eighteenth-century Peru.1 In 1788 and 1790, the bishop sent box upon box of flora, fauna, metals and minerals, northern Peruvian antiquities, ethnographic objects, and colonial artworks from Cartagena, across the Atlantic, to the Bourbon crown in Spain.2 Although the current location of the natural history collections is unknown, fortunately many of the artifacts the bishop collected survive today in Madrid’s Museo de América, where they have recently been studied by Paz Cabello Carro.3 The bishop’s endeavors are best understood as part of a broader tradition of Enlightenment-era efforts to document and order the world in encyclopedic form, although traces of an earlier paradigm of collecting remain in his work’s occasional attention to the monstrous and the marvelous. Not just an imperialist project to document and collect examples of all aspects of northern Peru, the bishop’s work also often relies on the production and visualization of local, creole, and indigenous South American knowledge. Born in the village of Cabredo in the province of Navarre, Spain in 1737, Martı́nez Compañón was ordained a priest in 1761 and shortly thereafter completed a doctorate in canon law. In 1767, Charles III appointed him cantor of the cathedral in Lima, Peru. He spent a decade there, serving as rector of the Santo Toribio Seminary and as secretary to the Sixth Lima Provincial Council. He was named bishop of Trujillo in 1778 and thereafter dedicated nearly a dozen years to the documentation and reform of that province. In 1791, Martı́nez Compañón left Peru to become archbishop of Santa Fé de Bogotá, where he remained until his death in 1797.4 We consider Martı́nez Compañón’s work as a collector to be two-fold. On the one hand, in Peru he collected thousands of natural and cultural objects on behalf of Charles III for his newly opened Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid, which had been founded in 1771. On the other hand, during the course of the three-year inspection tour (visita pastoral) that inaugurated his tenure in Trujillo, the bishop oversaw the creation of a series of over 1,400 watercolor illustrations by local artists who systematically depicted nearly every aspect of the natural and social worlds of Trujillo. Through these illustrations, Martı́nez Compañón also collected the likenesses of Andean natural history specimens and artifacts (for example, Color Plate 10 and Figure 12.1). This graphic collection, or paper museum, which today survives in Madrid’s Biblioteca del Palacio Real under the modern title Trujillo del Perú, complements the bishop’s collections of objects, but it also exists as a corpus of visual knowledge independent of the things themselves.5 Although Martı́nez Compañón never wrote a text to accompany these images, the bishop’s nine volumes of illustrations remain an astonishingly rich source for the study of northern Peru in the late eighteenth century.6 The first volume documents the region’s demography, illustrates civil and ecclesiastical institutions and personnel, and includes maps and plans of cities, towns, and churches. The second volume is largely ethnographic and illustrates the ethnic and social categories current in eighteenth-century Peru, as well as a variety of local costume, industry, craft, dance, and music. Volumes three and four contain botanical illustrations, which are arranged according to their non-Linnaean , common or indigenous names (Figure 12.2). The fifth volume is devoted to medicinal plants, many examples of which were remitted to Spain in 1788. Volume six illustrates ‘‘quadrupeds, reptiles, and insects.’’7 Volume seven contains illustrations of birds, and volume eight illustrates marine life. The final volume of illustrations is devoted to Andean antiquities and contains maps and plans of Inca, Chimú, and Moche archaeological sites within the bishopric, as well as representations of burials, ancient textiles, metal and wood artifacts, and a vast array of ceramic vessels.8 Martı́nez Compañón’s own words indicate that he envisioned this extensive documentary project as a kind of graphic museum in itself.9 In 1785, at...

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