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  • The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru
  • Marie Timberlake
The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru. By Gauvin Alexander Bailey. [History, Languages, and Cultures of the Spanish and Portuguese Worlds.] (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2010. Pp. xxii, 642. $75.00. ISBN 978-0-268-02222-8.)

This work constitutes a major contribution to the study of colonial Andean art and architecture through Bailey's documentation (photographic, visual description, and archival) of a corpus of churches located in the geographic area of Arequipa, Colca, Collao, and Potosí that were primarily constructed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era he labels Andean Hybrid Baroque. Although he includes color photographs that enhance his study, critically missing is a map to clarify the geographic positions of several hitherto undocumented churches. Bailey's most important contribution is the "Documentary Appendices"—175 pages of colonial inventories, including the arrangement of images within the church and the names of Andean architects and artisans.

Bailey's book begins with a survey of the late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century art historical literature on colonial Andean art, including Harold Wethey, George Kubler, and Pál Keleman, and acknowledging his use of Wethey as a model. He lauds the groundbreaking work of Teresa Gisbert and José de Mesa, and utilizes the comprehensive study of Ramón Gutiérrez et al., Arquitectura del altiplano peruano (Buenos Aires, 1986), whose interdisciplinary study also employed extensive archival resources.

Bailey's approach is purely descriptive, and although he frequently cites art historians Tom Cummins and Carolyn Dean in his discussions, he oddly excludes their contributions from his review of the art historical literature, suggesting their more comprehensive discussions of colonial art is outside the domain of art history. Quite the contrary; in the last three decades the standard art historical practice has been to analyze the work within the context of its social, political, and historical milieu, which is the only way a true understanding of the significance and cultural dimensions of the production of the art can be achieved. Not until the final chapters does he attempt to [End Page 406] place his corpus of images within a social/historical frame and to address the multiple meanings that these symbolic forms have to the congregations of indigenous and Spanish heritage.

In the final chapter he ascribes indigenous meaning to certain architectural motifs, but does so without sufficient explanation. For example, he suggests the flat, rectangular floral elements on several façades represent tocapu, but he never discusses what these floral designs have in common with abstract Inka tocapu other than the rectangular blocks on which they are carved. In a second example, he compares the dual social structures of Andean society (hanan/hurin) that link highland/lowland, civilization/ chaos, and heaven/hell oppositions with textile designs that contrast pampa/ pallai (that is, savage/civilized or chaotic/orderly). He translates this concept to designs on the façades of churches, equating narrow bands (columns, friezes, scrolls, angels, birds, monkeys) with pallai (civilized) and more loosely decorated sections such as the tympanum and large decorative panels with pampa (uncivilized). These are interesting assertions, but they require greater elaboration and discussion.

Overall, Bailey has produced a major, but flawed, contribution to the study of Andean baroque art and architecture. Although the book provides a valuable resource for future scholars, the author bypassed the opportunity to enrich our understanding of cultural hybridity and the processes that produce it.

Marie Timberlake
Arizona State University
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