UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines a genre of painting called “true portraits,” or “statue paintings,” to produce new understandings of artistic media in viceregal Peru during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This project treats the relationship between painting and sculpture in the religious and intellectual colonial South American contexts. Painted and printed true portraits, which represented miraculous Catholic cult sculptures, originated in Europe but gained more popularity in South America during the early modern period. These simulated sculptures typically depict an altar occupied by a statue of the Virgin Mary in a large, richly adorned triangular dress. These artworks have been studied in-depth for their individual iconographies, but this dissertation contributes insight into the trans-medial presentations of statues and the resulting artistic hierarchies found within these paintings. My study places true portraits in conversation with European artistic treatises to demonstrate fundamental differences in how Spanish and colonial Peruvian subjects perceived the media of painting and sculpture. In Europe, painting was considered a noble artform, but in these artworks, local (mainly Indigenous) artists use paintings to diffuse the likeness of miracle-working sculptures for devotional and evangelical purposes. This common practice implies that sculpture, as a medium, was as important as the figures represented in that form. I illustrate the reasons for this shift in artistic thinking using Peruvian texts on idolatry, printed books that describe the cult statues these paintings represent, didactic printed images, and manuscript sources such as inventories and ship registries. This dissertation consists of six chapters and is divided into two parts. The first part addresses the visual and textual precedents for painted true portraits and the theological connections between statues and paintings in the Viceroyalty of Peru. Here, I present the contrasts between viceregal Peruvian and Spanish imperial ideas about painting and sculpture as artforms. This part also illustrates how sculptures were perceived in relation to other local artistic media and materials including stone, textiles and Indigenous huacas (devotional objects and elements of the natural environment). The second part uses two chapter-length case studies to demonstrate the ways in which the circulatory patterns of statue paintings and Marian devotional iconographies re-enforced the prominence of the art of sculpture in this colonial religious society.