Being Drawn to an Image

Author(s): Guy Brett

Source: Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1 (1991), pp. 3-9
Published by: Oxford University Press
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Being Drawn to an Image

GuY BREr

Why do certain images matter to one, and why is the

desire to answer this question as involuntary as the
response itself? Why does it seem important that the
answer should have some 'objective' quality about it,
an insight into history, society, knowledge, rather
than point to a merely personal obsession? The
American film-maker Maya Deren says somewhere
that 'response should always precede analysis', a
remark which sounds as if it was made as an artist's
challenge to academic dryness and formalism. But is
not the response and the analysis actually part of the
same phenomenon, whether it results in an exclamation ('how beautiful!') or a new 'reading'? The
recourse to books, documents, or sources, underscores a perception which is somehow already in the
air. The effort to recapture art's 'history' is always
entangled with the desire to remake its identity and
meaning as part of contemporary struggles.
This article comes out of the familiar experience of
being drawn to a particular image, or set of images,
without at first knowing why, and the attempt to
account for this feeling. Looking intermittently at
the so-called colonial art of Latin America in
churches, museums, private collections and books, I
became magnetised by the figures of angels. They
are extraordinarily resplendent. They have a
material splendour in their dress. The spiritual (or is
it the psychic?) intensity of their presence goes
together with a marvellous air of freedom and
delicacy. They have a tendency to expand, to fill the
picture space. If the angel is already a hybrid (a
human with wings), the Latin American angels seem
to incorporate further incongruities into this composite of the human and the supernatural which
hints at further, latent meanings.
I knew that these paintings were produced for the
Spanish in the decades after their conquest of Latin
America, and represented the christianising of the
old centres of Inca culture, in Peru and Bolivia
especially. I knew that in the main they were painted
by Indian and mestizo artists at the command of the
Europeans. It lodged in my mind to try and answer
the question as to whether there was something
special about the depiction of angels in postconquest art, and if so, what it could be. I didn't
make a systematic study but I occasionally followed
up clues if I came across references in books and
catalogues.
I soon learned that the theme of angels was one of
the most popular in the paintings produced by
indigenous artists for the complex iconographic
programmes of the churches and missions estab-

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lished by the Spanish after the conquest. This word

'popular' is of course problematic and will be

returned to a little later. All colonial painting began

in a process of copying. Indian artists were obliged,
or forced, to abandon their own forms of representation and learn the European way. But after a period
of sheer copying, some themes took off. Some
developed differently in the American context. Why
did angels especially flourish? As I investigated
further, it seemed to become clear that if this
question could be answered it could only be in a
complex way. These paintings, in other words, could
only be read as the site of a complex play of forces.
They were not simply transcriptions of the power of
the conquerors and the coercive force with which
they attempted to annihilate the existing culture and
beliefs of the Indians and impose Christianity. Nor,
obviously, were they a simple expression of Indian
resistance to this assault. In some way they were
both these things at once. The more I looked into it
the more the paintings seemed to go beyond simple
unitary ideas of authorship and meaning.

The Peruvian art historian Luis Enrique Tord has

written:
The Spanish conquest of the Inca empire had a profound
impact on many aspects of Indian society, but by far the
most serious blows suffered by the Andean peoples were
administered by the Church. The efforts of priests and
missionaries to eradicate the Indians' ancestral beliefs
produced profound emotional disturbances as well as
great changes in their conception of the world. To enforce
conformity to the new orthodoxy, the Spaniards instituted ecclesiastical visitas, or inspections intended to
extirpate the idolatory that persisted long after the conquest.'

In the sphere of art the range of subjects and

genres permitted by the church was extremely narrow, only in fact religious paintings and portraits. At
that time after the conquest there was effectively no
'thought' (recorded discourse) outside the religious
framework and institutions. The first university in
Peru, for example, was founded by the Dominicans.
Painting was from the beginning one of the most
important instruments of conquest in the sphere of
thinking, the mind. In the earliest years of their missionary efforts Dr Tord writes:
the friars discovered that the Indians were deeply
impressed by sacred images created with the newest
artistic techniques brought from the Old World ...

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'The Archangel Raphael', by a follower of Luis de Riano, Cuzco School c. 1640. Oil on canvas, 65" x 42".
Convento de San Francisco, La Paz.

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Those images were first seen in the catechisms, Bibles,

books of hours, and hymnals used to convert the Indians

nursing Spanish noble boys. Negroes and mestizos are

pressing around her throne, while nude Indian children
weep abandoned. Two richly dressed Indian couples

and direct their worship.2

present their gifts in a beautiful park crowded with dif-

The Jesuits brought over their leading painter in

Europe in the late sixteenth century, the Italian
Bernardo Bitti, to live and work in Cuzco. A school
of painting grew up in Cuzco which became the
leading centre of the production of paintings south
of Mexico and exported paintings and painters to
many other parts of the continent including remote
areas. Leopoldo Castedo, the Spanish-Chilean art
historian writes:
Of forty-seven painters documented in Cuzco during the
period, thirty-five were Indians, seven criollos or
mestizos, four Spaniards, and one Italian. This list does
not include the great number of Indians who remained

anonymous....

The similes usually used to describe the stylistic

hybrid produced over the years by the Cuzco

painters - the 'melding', or 'blending', or the
'intricate amalgamation' of European and indigenous traditions to produce an art of 'Byzantine richness and splendour' - obviously belies the violence
of events. These phrases do, however, have the ring
of truth in an aesthetic sense - or rather there was

an aesthetic process involved which had to some

extent its own story. This was manifested not only in
the precise, artistic and critical response by Indian
peoples to European paintings, but also in connoisseurship within the colonising ranks. A blossom-

ing of the arts followed the rebuilding of Cuzco after

the catastrophic earthquake of 1650, partly due to
the arrival of Bishop Manuel de Mollinedo y
Angulo. His collection included two El Grecos, and
other outstanding Spanish pictures, and he sponsored Indian painters like Diego Qu'spe Tito, as well
as sculptors, architects and jewellers.
Sometimes the coercion and oppression is felt

directly in the paintings: for example, in images of

Saint Isidore, a rather obscure Spanish saint vastly

amplified in the New World as the patron of

labourers, who is shown to carry a small bag of coca
leaves as the Indian peasants and miners did, and

do, to chew to combat hunger and fatigue. Castedo

points this out. He also shows that images of
Santiago (St James) slaying the moors were often

changed to Santiago slaying the Indians.' Indian

painters would in this case be painting an image
showing the Church's and the State's warning to
Indians who contemplated rebellion, as many did.
And occasionally, as, for example, during or around
the time of the rebellion led by Tupac Amaru II in
1780, an image would appear of explicit resistance to
colonialism. In the somewhat unlikely context of the
Pelican History of Art (the relevant volume is Art and
Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their A merican

Dominions l5t0ii}-18W0), an anonymous painting is

described which shows America:

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ferent animals. The legend says:

Where in the world has one seen what one sees here ...
Her own sons lie groaning and she suckles strangers.5

The images of angels are much more ambiguous

and capable of different interpretations (this could,
of course, be said of the angel theme generally as it
recurs in the history of art, and in various guises
across different cultures). It is not hard to find
documentary evidence for the Church's deliberate
use of the angel theme as an instrument of
conversion. The Bolivian art historian Teresa

Gisbert writes that the Councils of Lima, which

were responsible for questions of orthodoxy in the

Viceroyalty: 'sought to attract Indians to the new

faith by the use of images which would be
especially appealing to them.'6
Why were angels appealing to them? In the
Pelican History, Martin Soria tentatively puts
forward the theory that angels were popular because
'they replaced similar messengers in pre-conquest
beliefs'.7 Teresa Gisbert produces evidence to show
that Diego Quispe Tito's series of paintings of the
zodiac for the Cathedral of Cuzco was commissioned in order to counteract the traditional indigenous worship of the stars and were intended to aid in
Christianising the Indians of the Andes. And she
suggests that the angels, especially the series of
angels, could have a similar purpose, to 'replace
worship of celestial phenomena with the theologically acceptable cult of the angels'.8

So apparently they were 'popular', for different

reasons, with both Christian and native American,
with oppressor and oppressed. It is as if you could
read in them simultaneously transcriptions of
inducement, threat, coercion, protection, solace,
yearning and resistance. Does this explain their
complex expressivity? For the same quality can be
interpreted differently according to one's point of
view, one's experience, and one's feelings. Protection
can mean Defence of the Faith, i.e. of Christianity, or
it can mean the adoption and identification of a
'guardian spirit', who will watch over your lifejourney, a universal, but at the same time very
individual and personal desire, expressed in most
religions and cultures. Looking at the angel's image
you can dream, ask for what you want. The angel,
with its brilliantly opulent but light clothing, its
mobility, its freedom from hierarchical placing in
the pictorial composition, and its bisexuality, is an
intimate image of enablement.
Among the images of angels is a genre apparently
unique to South America, even to the Andes, the
Angels with Guns. This was also a very popular
subject (one church inventory for 1748, for example,
lists 36 pictures of armed angels). Julia P. Herzberg,
who calls these pictures 'representations of winged

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well as a religious function by emphasising the lesson that

the Church and the Spanish colonial regime were united
in their goal to christianize the Indians. The military
aspect of the crusade is subliminally suggested by the
gentle figure who handles his firing weapon in varied
positions which recall those of a fighting force.9

In speaking about the angels' clothing, Herzberg

continues:

Far more important than the military aspects of the

angel's costumes are the explicit references to the high
social status of both Spanish colonial gentlemen and Inca
royalty. Richly brocaded fabrics, ribbons, and lace
characterize the opulent viceregal dress of the 17th
century. The gentlemen-aristocratic nature of angels with
guns is defined by their elegant dress, which relates them
directly to the ruling viceregal aristocracy. 1

AJ.,

A key phrase here seems to me to be 'gentle figure

who handles his firing weapon'. Although the
technical military details of loading and handling
the gun and so on, of the angel paintings, is very
precise - taken in fact from a Flemish military
manual of 1607 - the 'common soldier' of the image
in the manual is not retained: he becomes the
gorgeous aristocrat. The non-aggressive angel-like

__~~-

'Archangel with Gun', by an anonymous painter of

the Cuzco School, early 18th century. Oil on canvas,

63" X 391". Museo de Arte, Lima.

beings at once military, aristocratic and religious,

gives this explanation of their rai'son d'etre:
Paintings
angels with
at a time when the
blr of of
trmpts
th guns
roa appeared
of aqeusanarily'
Th firearm
na ne'
ad must
religious
orders were
confronted
with hvhaa
the stubborn
persistence of pre-conquest religion amongst their Indian
charges. Immense problems remained not merely in the
campaign to destroy Indian idols, but in teaching and
reinforcing the principles of the new faith. Sermons and
TArhe mgfteangel
gunoserved
painselr
as
catechisms
were of with
courseGu'yan
the primary
means
of conversion, but images of angels with guns were useful
symbols of important teachings of the church.
The Spaniards conquered the Incas with both the
Cross and the arquebus. The key to understanding the
religious function of these images is found in the gun
motif. Firearms, unknown to the Indians at the time of
the conquest, seemed a frightening manifestation of the
supernatural, for they 'fled out of fear when there was a

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'Acane wit Gun' by th Maste ofl Calamarca

(Js Loe du losF Ros Lak Tiicc Scol
c 68 Oil ncna 6_ X- '46 ' Mse Ncina
dec. ArXte La Paz.l

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pose, is of course extremely seductive, which makes

the threat of force oblique, only implied, as if a
beautiful face was being laid over the ugly face of
violent coercion. Are these pictures simply transcriptions of power, in which the hard approach is mixed
with the soft, and the Church is allied with the State
(and in this case hinting as well, not just at the
foreigner's domination of the native inhabitants but
also at class conflict within colonial society, since the
angel is a melange of Spanish and Inca aristocracies)? Perhaps. But again they seem to me more
enigmatic, more multiple - images full of aesthetic
tensions. Can one again make a conflation between
domination and rebellion in the image, an expression of both the Church/State and the Indian
wishes? Leopoldo Castedo writes:
The prestige of the armed archangel was and is still very
great. In mestizo architectural decoration of the 18th
century, the archangel brandishing the flaming sword
had a prominent place (particularly fine examples are in
the Cathedral of Puno and San Lorenzo, in Potosi); and
in the traditional diablada boliviana (Bolivian devil play), a

realm as something "different" from mundane

reality.'"2

The argument so far has been intended to put

forward the possibility that an art work or image
could be official and coercive, and unofficial and
subversive, all at the same time. The example I have
given is by no means the only one that exists. The

_I * SI I
..... ~ ~ ~ ..... ...... . :

religious drama, the Archangel Michael defeats [... .] the

Devil of the Seven Masks. In 1950, in a curious or con-

sistent coincidence [as Castedo pointedly calls it], Pope Pius

XII declared the Archangel Michael patron of police - a
decision that may well diminish the archangel's prestige

in Latin America."1
Aside from dealing, as I have been doing, with one

of the major subjects and themes of Cuzco painting,

an inventory could be made of ways in which
painters departed from European models, or from
academic notions of excellence. There are peripheral
insertions, like borders of flowers, or tropical birds
which populate the background landscapes of many
religious paintings. Or survivals at the level of
colour: liking for flat and intense colours, local earth
and vegetable dyes, which may go all the way back
to the ancient textile traditions such as that of the
Paracas culture in Peru. Also, intensification of the
colours in the angels' wings as compared with
Europe. These questions were not merely 'academic'. Disputes among Spanish and Indian
painters themselves, in some ways antecedents of all
subsequent debates around 'indigenism', go back to
the early days in Cuzco.
In 1688 the Cuzco guild of painters split. The
immediate reason seems to have been that Indian
painters working for some of the Spanish and criollo
masters complained of mistreatment. The Spanish
admitted their guilt but no agreement could be
reached and the two sides moved apart. The Spanish
guild tightened its European rules of style. The
Indian painters lost contact with European developments and, according to Teresa Gisbert, 'sought
inspiration both in the old styles and in their own
tastes and traditions', a mixture of ornamental
stylisation with observation of the reality around
them. Their religious pictures, she writes, 'belong to
an archaic world [...] who viewed the religious
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same process has been documented in other situa-

tions where a people have been conquered,

colonised and their cultural beliefs assaulted.
Eduardo Mondlane found that African carvers in
nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
Mozambique had made their own use of Christian
themes imposed by priests and missionaries:
When a [Makonde] sculptor departs from the stereotype
[. . .] this is nearly always because an element of doubt or
defiance has been worked into it; a madonna is given a
demon to hold instead of the Christ Child; a priest is
represented with the feet of a wild animal, a piet'a
becomes a study not of sorrow but of revenge, with the

mother raising a spear over the body of her dead son.'3

Such images may startlingly demonstrate the
general truth that the meaning of a work cannot
simply be equated with its subject. But particularly
intriguing is the phenomenon of syncretisation itself,
as an artistic process, and its relationship to
meaning: the process whereby something new is
created that cannot simply be reduced to either side
of two antagonistic forces, or returned to a former
'purity'. A new 'in-between' is created. This is
especially true in the context of Latin America where
this kind of duality and fusion has been a feature of
culture from the time of the conquest right up until
today - both on the popular and the intellectual
level. 'Latin America is such a syncretic, eccentric,
disjointed fusion of European, Amerindian and
Afro-Caribbean culture,' in the words of the

America arit nte oltdy.Hsshlo

Mexican artist Guillermo Gomez-Pefia.14 Or, as the

Chilean painter Juan Davila recently put it: 'You
take something of yourself, something of the con-

queror'.1 5 In both cases these are intellectuals talking

about their own work by linking it with a process
continually taking place at a popular level and in
everyday life.
Today, the image of the angel is still alive, and still
in contention; it has by no means been merely
consigned to the museum. It is still a part of con-

mural in Port au Prince Haiti 1989 Photo by

*.e ;_.E;f-. . . . ,^. . . t2.p\ . . . :

huortae n u issteata rm n

An Inca Warrior in the guise of the Archangel

Michael with a flaming sword. Stone carving in a
church
at Potosi,of
Bolivia,
18th
century.
sensibi2t
ththbi
uino
teaitcain
thepoplarwhih tok lac al thse ear ag i

Cuzco.~~~~

temporary power struggles. On the one hand it has

appeared as a focus for resistance. The militant
angel appeared, for example, in wall paintings in
Haiti during the shortlived popular uprising for food
and democracy of 1986. The extraordinarily effective

popular figure of the masked Superbarrio, who

emerged spontaneously to lead the movement to
demand the provision of proper housing in the aftermath of the disastrous Mexican earthquake of 1986,

surely appeals to memories of the angel-enabler,

along with references to Mexican popular masked

Pabl Butcher'

Syboi angel lances a Tonto Maot on a

wrestling heroes and perhaps to Superman.

At the same time, the armed angel is continually
reproduced as a figure of folklore, a naive stereotype
of Latin America, typically exploited in the paintings
of Femrncand Botero, the higrhest sellingr Latin

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'Popular culture is not what is technically called

folklore, but the popular language of permanent
historical rebellion.' This sentence, by the Brazilian
film-maker Glauber Rocha, written at the turn of the
1970s, clearly identifies a form of expression with a
mass of oppressed people whose experience has
been continuous over at least four centuries. And
Glauber also implies that the forms and images in
which this experience is expressed are not fixed but
open and changing. The sentence comes from an
essay called Eztetyke du Re^ve, an eccentric spelling of

tie in closely with Glauber's identification of a

continuing thread of psychological resistance in
Latin American culture.
The writer would like to express his appreciation of the art
historical studies of Teresa Gisbert, Leopoldo Castedo,

Julia P. Herzberg and Dr Luis Enrique Tord, to which he

has been deeply indebted in writing this article.

Notes

Esthetique du Re^ve ('Aesthetic of the Dream') in

which, building on the idea that 'the dream is the
only right which cannot be forbidden', Glauber
Rocha described how he had come to realise the
revolutionary importance of the mystical in Latin
American popular culture. It was the only way of
contesting that 'bourgeois reason' which, for him,
was as much a feature of left-wing political programmes as it was of traditional colonial domination. In his 1965 article, 'Aesthetic of Hunger',
enormously influential on Third World cinema and
art, Glauber felt he had given 'the measure of my
rational understanding of poverty'. By 1971 he was
saying that, as artists:
We must touch, by communion, the vital point of poverty
which is its mysticism. This mysticism is the only
language which transcends the rational schema of
oppression.

1. Dr Luis Enrique Tord, 'The Viceroyalty of Peru, 1532-1825',

Gloria in Excelsis: the Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and
Bolivia (New York: Center for Inter-American Relations), 1986, p. 15.
2. Ibid., pp. 14, 15.

3. Leopoldo Castedo, The Cuzco Circle (New York: Center for InterAmerican Relations/The American Federation of Arts, 1976), p. 34.
4. Ibid., p. 57.

5. Martin Soria and George Kubler, Art and Architecture in Spain and
Portugal and their American Dominions 1500-1800 (Harmondsworth,
Pelican History of Art, 1959), p. 327.
6. Teresa Gisbert, 'The Angels', Gloria in Excelsis, op. cit., p. 62.
7. Martin Soria, op. cit., p. 303.
8. Teresa Gisbert, op. cit., p. 63.
9. Julia P. Herzberg, 'Angels with Guns: Image and Interpretation',

Gloria in Excelsis, op. cit. , p. 64.

10. Ibid., p. 70.

11. Leopoldo Castedo, op. cit., p. 56.

12. Teresa Gisbert, 'Andean Painting', Gloria in Excelsis, op. cit. , p. 27.
13. Eduardo Mondlane, The Struggle for Mozambique (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969), p. 104.

14. Guillermo Gomez-Penia, in Coco Fusco, 'The Border Art

Workshop/Taller de Arte Fronterizo: Interview with Guillermo Gomez-

The role of the angel as an intermediary between

the human and the mystical world, and its elaborate
beautifying as a vehicle of the dream, would seem to

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Pefia and Emily Hicks', Third Text, no. 7 (Summer 1989), p. 68.
15. In a conversation with the writer, London, May 1989.

16. Glauber Rocha, 'Eztetyke du Reve', in Sylvie Pierre, Glauber

Rocha (Paris: ed. Cahiers du Cinema, 1987), pp. 130, 131.

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