Nuestra Senora: Confraternal Art and Identity in Early Colonial Lima

This dissertation investigates the visual culture of black and indigenous lay confraternities in Lima during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. With limited extant visual evidence, I take advantage of Lima’s rich documentary record for the early colonial period and use the confraternities of the Virgin of Copacabana and of the Virgin of the Antigua as case studies for how we might incorporate subalterns into Lima’s art-historical purview. By prioritizing confraternity members’ self-identifications over colonial administrative categories, I demonstrate that black and indigenous people in colonial Lima were active patrons, defined the city’s visual culture through religious and social engagement, and applied their own cultural lenses in their use of sacred images and ritual objects. Following the Introduction, Chapter 2 uses confraternal records, especially inventories, to recover and examine the sacred images and goods of Lima’s black and indigenous confraternities. I argue that by commissioning sacred images, displaying these images in ornamented chapels and during urban processions, and adorning them with clothing and accessories, confraternities should be considered curators of material “collections.” I contend that, as the majority of the city’s population, black and indigenous sodalities significantly defined the visual aspects of the religious and municipal landscape of colonial Lima. Chapter 3 addresses the confraternity of the Virgin of Copacabana, an indigenous sodality founded in part by people from Chachapoyas. The confraternity commissioned a polychrome wooden statue of the Virgin and Child in 1588 that evolved into a popular cult image after it was observed miraculously sweating in 1591. Following the statue and confraternity as they were relocated within the city, I consider the statue, its renaming, and its adornment through the interpretive lens of Chachapoya art, architecture, and religious ritual, in order to speculate about the devotees’ experiences. Approaching the image from a Chachapoya perspective reveals that the confraternity members imbued the statue with their history under Inca and Spanish control in ways that colonial officials could not perceive. Chapter 4 examines the confraternity of the Virgin of the Antigua, a black sodality that came to be controlled by Greater Senegambians in the seventeenth century. I begin by discussing the ways in which the confraternity mobilized its confraternal goods to assert their superiority over rival Afro-confraternities, and argue that material culture played a critical role in legal disputes that was comparable to the racially-charged language examined by historians. Then, focusing on the group that identified with Greater Senegambia, I analyze the confraternity’s goods, including a wooden statue of the Virgin that was commissioned by the sodality in 1568, alongside visual art and rituals from modern Greater Senegambia. In so doing, I propose that the Virgin’s devotees formed possible correlations with West Africa through interactions with their sculpted image.PHDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/151728/1/xasgomez_1.pdfDescription of xasgomez_1.pdf : Restricted to UM users only