ABOUT THIS BOOK

Examining the vivid, often apocalyptic church murals of Peru from the early colonial period through the nineteenth century, Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between explores the sociopolitical situation represented by the artists who generated these murals for rural parishes. Arguing that the murals were embedded in complex networks of trade, commerce, and the exchange of ideas between the Andes and Europe, Ananda Cohen-Aponte also considers the ways in which artists and viewers worked through difficult questions of envisioning sacredness.

This study brings to light the fact that, unlike the murals of New Spain, the murals of the Andes possess few direct visual connections to a pre-Columbian painting tradition; the Incas’ preference for abstracted motifs created a problem for visually translating Catholic doctrine to indigenous congregations, as the Spaniards were unable to read Inca visual culture. Nevertheless, as Cohen Suarez demonstrates, colonial murals of the Andes can be seen as a reformulation of a long-standing artistic practice of adorning architectural spaces with images that command power and contemplation. Drawing on extensive secondary and archival sources, including account books from the churches, as well as on colonial Spanish texts, Cohen Suarez urges us to see the murals not merely as decoration or as tools of missionaries but as visual archives of the complex negotiations among empire, communities, and individuals.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ananda Cohen Suarez is an assistant professor of history of art at Cornell University. She coauthored Handbook to Life in the Inca World.

REVIEWS

An insightful, thorough, and well-presented book that adds significant new scholarship to the study of mural painting in the Andean region. Cohen Suarez urges the reader to regard the murals she studies as visual archives capable of revealing the complex ways that artists and viewers negotiated a conceptual space in the world they inhabited and created. She masterfully demonstrates the advantages of her approach, revealing a world of negotiated meanings that are not readily apparent.

— Carolyn Dean, Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture, University of California, Santa Cruz and author of Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru

Beautifully written and very well argued. With unique interpretations and several original archival discoveries, the book highlights the potential of murals as an art form, applied to a relatively little-known mural tradition.

— Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Florida, and author of Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes

[T]his is an important book that makes a valuable contribution to a dynamic field. It fills in many lacunae in our understanding of Andean mural culture.

— Hispanic American Historical Review

[A] well-written and amply illustrated contribution to Andean colonial history.

— The Americas

A clearly written, mostly jargon-free, and scholarly book, which manages at once to be rigorous and comprehensible to a wider audience…The story [Cohen-Aponte] tells, of murals progressing from being a locally mediated tool of evangelisation to a medium for social critique, is compelling and convincing.

— Bulletin of Latin American Research

The field should be grateful to have this book, both for the scholarly inroads it makes into this corpus and for its unusually readable and well-encapsulated chapters, which make it a wonderful teaching resource.

— Ethnohistory

TABLE OF CONTENTS