The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (review)

In this ambitious and lavishly illustrated volume Gauvin Alexander Bailey reconsiders the imagery carved on the stone facades and portals of a group of colonial churches in present-day southern Peru and northern Bolivia. More than 170 color photographs display the visual opulence and lush variety of the ornamentation. Extensive appendices containing more than 200 transcriptions of archival documents, many published for the first time, will be of great service to scholars in the field. Bailey's approach—both novel and traditional—to the complex issue of Andean contributions to colonial architecture will also be of interest to scholars; indeed, the book seems largely intended for specialists and as a reference work. Bailey takes on the formidable task of tracing the chronology, authorship, diffusion, and interpretation of the complex imagery of 50 colonial churches that share decorative features.

The book opens with a thorough historiographical introduction, and a final chapter offers novel interpretations of selected Andean motifs and designs that bring to bear a range of sources, from extirpation documents to anthropological literature. The eight intervening chapters are organized as a traditional regional survey in which Bailey combines new archival documentation and the collective research of earlier scholars with detailed descriptions of the carved ornamentation. He approaches the churches and their decoration in a holistic fashion, considering the construction history, patronage, and regional context of each building; establishing updated chronologies; and tracing the authorship and diffusion of the carved ornamentation from the late seventeenth through the early nineteenth century, this in an area the size of Iberia and France combined. Readers unfamiliar with this Andean region therefore will lament the lack of even a single map that might provide a sense of the geographical relationships and extent of the style.

Bailey's principal goal is to answer what he calls "one of the most vexing questions in the field: What does Andean Hybrid Baroque sculptural ornament mean?" (p. 7). To this end, the author parses the "European" and the "Andean" elements in an attempt to identify the specifically native flora and fauna that constitute his definition of the style. Arte mestizo, arte indocristiano, tequitqui, criollo, ibero-indígena, orden indo-español Americano—these are a sampling of the nomenclatures employed by earlier art and architectural historians to describe the visual mixes of indigenous and European forms and motifs that characterize the sculptural ornament of colonial churches in Peru and elsewhere in the Americas. To this list Bailey proposes to add a new term, "Andean Hybrid Baroque," which is intended to replace earlier racially biased and unwieldy nomenclature and to apply specifically to the region in question. However, his proposed terminology may seem to some a perpetuation of biological considerations and Eurocentric perspectives, even if that is not the author's intent. The ways in which Bailey employs and pursues the term "hybridity" in this book constitutes a form of racial profiling, as it is dependent upon correlating indigenous craftsmanship with the visual identification of Andean motifs carved on churches. His approach presumes that works made by Andeans will bear the visible marks of their ethnicity. When Andean master builders and sculptors in this region or elsewhere in the viceroyalty did not incorporate visually identifiable Andean motifs or techniques, do the works they created belong to another category? Although Bailey seems unaware of Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn's seminal 2003 study, "Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Latin America" (it is not cited in his bibliography), their consideration of the political implications of the term might have proved particularly useful to the author. Naming is not a disinterested endeavor and "seeing hybridity" is perforce an act of discrimination. Bailey remarks that "white clerics, architects and artists frequently did not—or would not—see the hybridity in Andean Hybrid Baroque" (p. 304), implying that only Andeans "saw" it. Yet it may be that such mixes...