Pigments and Power in the Andes From the Material to the Symbolic in Andean Cultural Practices 1500-1800

by Siracusano, Gabriela

• ISBN13: 9781904982562
• ISBN10: 1904982565
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-07-16
• Publisher: Archetype Books

Summary

This book offers the reader a new insight into the techniques and use of colour in Andean colonial painting. The main hypothesis is that colors were silent protagonists of the Andean ritual system.

Author Biography

Gabriela Siracusano is Professor of Colonial Art History at the Universidad Nacional de General San Martn, Buenos Aires, Argentina and Academic Director of the Center of Production and Research in Artistic and Bibliographic Conservation and Restoration (TAREA), at the same university.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. vii
Introduction	p. ix
Grinding and mixing subtle elements	p. 1
With artful brush and learned quill: colour and counsel in Spanish manuals	p. 1
Newly identified materials: matter as document	p. 2
The mixing of experience	p. 8
Mechanical and servile arts in Spain and Andean America: colour in the workshop	p. 54
The production and organisation of mechanical learning	p. 55
Dyes, colours and urban spaces	p. 57
The defence of noble painting: a marvel of understanding	p. 57
The Andean painter's trade	p. 59
Engravings and brushes	p. 63
Saturn and Mercury in the workshop: hermetic and practical learning	p. 74
Colours and Andean science: Alvaro Alonso Barba and Arte de los metales	p. 77
Chemistry, mineralogy and alchemy in the use of pigments: recipes for transmutation or colouring?	p. 81
Subterranean treasures: Potosi in the imaginary	p. 83
Secrets between Spain and Andean America: circulation and appropriation	p. 84
Coming back to the workshop	p. 91
Good medicines of all coloures: healing and painting in Andean America	p. 101
Colours at the apothecary's shop	p. 101
They do consume malice, correct the humoures: chromatic pharmacopoeia in the ancient lands of the Inca	p. 105
Colours between bodies, souls and Andean sacralities	p. 108
The spectrum in practice and representations of power in the Andes	p. 109
Between the indeterminate and the perfect: the rainbow and healing by colours	p. 111
The power of healing images	p. 117
Representations, colours and powers of the sacred	p. 128
Are these not guacas too, like to oure owne?: the problem of representation in the Andes	p. 128
The power of absence	p. 131
The visible and the invisible through the eyes of body and soul	p. 132
Sermons, images and colour: loci of memory	p. 135
Colours in the extirpation of idolatries: colour - substance or accident?	p. 139
Coloured powders as bearers of sacred power	p. 141
Preparing colours for the celestial workshop: disegno, simulacrum and colour	p. 143
Marshalling the powers of colour: mixtures most divine	p. 147
Bibliography	p. 165
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