Mary’s Green Brilliance: The Case of the Virgin of Copacabana

Scientific method in collaboration with cultural history demonstrates that many of the pigments and dyes used by Spanish, native, Creole, and mestizo painters in workshops located in Lima, Cuzco, Lake Titicaca, Potosí, or the Humahuaca region of Argentina had traveled long distances from their place of origin—mines, mountains, volcanoes, or cultivated fields—to be processed for artistic use. Apprentices, off icials, and masters had to experiment with these substances to obtain the necessary effect required by Christian symbolic strategies. When deciding on interventions or deep restorations of sacred art—such as Francisco Tito Yupanqui’s Our Lady of Copacabana—technicians must be mindful of how religious congregations conceive of these representations and their material dimension. Conservation/restoration of these images entails a series of interdisciplinary actions and methods. This dialogue should embrace not only historical, anthropological, aesthetic, and scientific criteria but also devotional criteria to preserve, along with the material image, the memory and cultural identity that lies beneath the poetics of matter.