Painting and Performing the Past; Representation of a Historical Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Peru.

INTRODUCTION

Picture a family gathering that never happened: a mother, father, daughter, son-in-law,

uncles and grandparents celebrate the alliance of the Incas and the Jesuits. The scene is the

marriage of the Inca princess (or ñusta in Quechua) Beatriz Clara Sairitupac to a Spanish noble,

Martín García Óñez de Loyola, nephew of the founder of the Jesuit order. The marriage took

place in 1572 in Cuzco, Peru, but it was not depicted until over a century later. At the turn of the

eighteenth century, the scene was reproduced in several paintings (fig. 1 and 2). Repeatedly

commemorated through both paint and theatrical performance, the union became a central

cultural trope in the later narration of the early history of the Viceregal era in Peru.

The paintings and performances of this familial scene were commissioned by

communities that could claim only distant genealogical ties to the family. Aiming to assert local

authority or noble privilege by associating themselves with figures in the scene, different social

groups played on the role of portraiture in articulating aristocratic families’ claims to noble

lineage in the early modern Spanish world.

Even without direct lineage, different eighteenth-

century social groups positioned themselves as descendants of the various identities included in

the painting. Some of these same communities also commissioned theatrical works as

corroborating forms of official memory that reinforced their claims of authority as represented

by the individuals in the marriage scene.

Laura R. Bass, The Drama of the Portrait: Theater and Visual Culture in Early Modern Spain

(University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008), 63.

My analysis traces how this single historical episode, the marriage, was represented

through painting and public theater by two different constituencies in two cities in eighteenth-

century Peru: the predominantly European Jesuit community in Cuzco and the indigenous

nobility in Lima. Of the multiple extant paintings of the marriage, the two paintings examined in

this study are the only two known to remain in their original locations: the Compañía de Jesús in

Cuzco and the Beaterio de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana in Lima. Those primary contexts

allow us to better examine each works’ commission, display, and viewership. Further,

differences between the two lead to the question: how did two distinct social groups in two

different cities each depict the same historical union through two different media? The answer to

this question is grounded in the historical contexts of the paintings and performances.

The first half of this thesis examines the connection between the painting and

performance commissioned by the Jesuit institution dominated by criollo nobles in Cuzco, a

historically indigenous city. The analysis begins with the first representation of the family, a

painting hung in the church of the Compañía de Jesús, the primary Jesuit church prominently

located in Cuzco’s main plaza (fig. 1). The painting illustrates Beatriz and Martín with their

respective Inca and Jesuit forebearers, particularly highlighting Martín’s connection to his uncle

San Ignacio de Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. The couple’s daughter, Ana María,

and her husband are also present, even though both Beatriz and Martín died during her

childhood. By anachronistically picturing family members from multiple generations together,

the Jesuit commissioners of the painting sought to visually tighten the genealogical connection

between the order and the Inca line. This first painting shares both purpose and physical

proximity with a theatrical reenactment of the same subject that took place in the Compañía in

1741.

To analyze the theatrical event of 1741, I rely on a description written by the eighteenth-

century criollo Diego de Esquivel y Navia in his chronicle of Cuzco. He writes that the scene

composed of live actors corresponded with the painting of the marriage in the Compañía. The

Jesuit orchestrators of the performance took a scene rendered in paint and made it flesh. The

representational repetition was staged during a crucial historical moment regarding prized

agricultural lands in the Yucay Valley owned by the remaining descendants of Beatriz and

Martín and administered by Jesuit priests. In an attempt to highlight their regional authority, the

Jesuit order in Cuzco reified the shared family history through performance. By connecting the

rhetorical conceit of the painting and performance with the contentious Yucay Valley property, I

propose a narrowed date range for the creation of the painting as between 1735-1741.

The second half of the thesis addresses the representations of the marriage organized by

indigenous nobles in Lima, a city dominated by Spanish and criollo society. Here the focus is on

a painting housed in the Beaterio de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana in Lima, home of a tertiary

order of Franciscan indigenous women who chose to live a semi-cloistered life of religious

devotion (fig. 2). To situate the painting in Lima’s Beaterio de Copacabana, I turn to the

treatment of the marriage found in a contemporary theatrical manuscript produced in Lima. The

dramatic work was commissioned by the indigenous cabildo in Lima and written by the criollo

playwright Fray Francisco de Castillo y Tamayo (1716-1770) for the 1748 celebration in Lima of

Fernando VI’s proclamation as the new king of Spain.

In Lima, the family and dynastic history of Beatriz and Martín took on a different

meaning. In both painting and performance, the native nobility in Lima adopted the imagery of

the historical family to advocate for their own rights and privileges. For the indigenous nobility,

Inca descendants or otherwise, recalling this family helped them bolster the relevancy of their

own noble ancestry to strengthen their claims to privilege in the Viceroyalty of Peru.

The

metaphor of the painting shifted from representing genealogical authority and order in the Cuzco

region to emphasizing the historical prestige of the indigenous nobility throughout the former

Inca empire. The marriage painting offered an important and useful example from which to draw

political and cultural authority from the pre-colonial royalty while simultaneously displaying

Catholic devotion and loyalty. The broad constituency of Lima’s multi-ethnic indigenous

nobility strategically coalesced as a unified body of noble “Inca.”

Considering these multiple evocations of the same historical union in two distinct

geographical and social circumstances, I trace how these multiple paintings and performances

influenced the viewer’s understanding of and relationship to the history of the Viceroyalty of

Peru. Representations of the historical marriages of this single family drew audiences into a

dynamic and forceful partnership with history. Both paintings and performances effectively wed

a fictional scene from the past with the viewers of the present. This past operated as a malleable

allegory that used historical figures to advocate for utopic visions of the future in which either

the Jesuit order or the indigenous nobility, or both, consummated their privileged authority under

Spanish rule.

Dean, Inka Bodies, 98.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The cultural works I examine excise the history of violent conflict between the Inca and

the Spanish. The tranquil figures in the paintings conceal certain historical realities. In fact, the

marriage between Beatriz and Martín was the resolution of decades of Inca resistance to Spanish

rule in the southern Peruvian highlands.

Much of the conflict surrounding the family line began

long before Beatriz’s birth and revolved around a fertile piece of land in the Yucay Valley near

Cuzco. The familial connection to this land began with Beatriz’s great-grandfather Huayna

Capac, the Inca who developed Yucay as a royal estate.

Huayna Capac died in 1524 prior to the

arrival of the Spanish in Peru. After his death, his sons Huascar and Atahuallpa fought a civil

war of succession. Atahuallpa won only to be taken captive by the Spanish and executed in 1533.

After Atahuallpa’s death, another brother, Manco Inca (Beatriz’s grandfather), was

recognized as the Sapa Inca by the Spanish until he led an uprising against them.

He retreated to

the Yucay Valley and finally to Vilcabamba, where he declared political and cultural

independence from Spanish viceregal authority, founding a “Neo-Inca state.”

Francisco Pizarro

Gonzalo Lamana, Domination without Dominance: Inca-Spanish Encounters in Early Colonial

Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

After Huayna Capac died in Quito, his body was carried to Cuzco and then to the Yucay Valley

where his mummy was to stay. R. Alan Covey and Christina M. Elson, “Ethnicity, Demography,

and Estate Management in Sixteenth-Century Yucay,” Ethnohistory 54, no. 2 (April 1, 2007):

307.

R. Alan Covey and Donato Amado González, Imperial Transformations in Sixteenth-Century

Yucay, Peru, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 2008), 25.

Covey and González, Imperial Transformations, 25.

took Yucay as his personal encomienda in 1539.

The Pizarro family held on to the Yucay

possession until Gonzalo’s defeat in 1548, at which point the Spanish crown assumed

ownership.

In 1544, while the Pizarros still controlled the Yucay encomienda, Diego de

Almagro supporters assassinated Manco Inca.

After the death of Manco Inca, Beatriz’s father

Sayri Túpac succeeded him as the Inca in Vilcabamba.

Importantly for later generations, Sayri Túpac was a keen negotiator: in 1557 he pledged

loyalty to Philip II in exchange for the right to reassume ownership of the Yucay Valley.

When

Sayri Túpac died in 1561 his infant daughter Beatriz inherited the title to all those lands.

While

still a child in Cuzco, Beatriz’s uncles ruled Vilcabamba in succession: first Titu Cusi Yupanqui

(from 1563-71), then Túpac Amaru (from 1571-72). After years of ongoing conflict, negotiation

between the Incas at Vilcabamba and Spanish authorities deteriorated. Viceroy Francisco de

Toledo (1515-1582) ordered an attack on Vilcabamba in June of 1572. Martín García Óñez de

Loyola, in his role as captain of the guard for his uncle Viceroy Toledo, led the chase after a

fleeing Túpac Amaru. After the successful capture, Toledo arranged Martín’s marriage to young

Francisco Pizarro appointed the Cañari leader don Francisco Chilche to oversee the land. The

Cañari come from Ecuador but had been living in the Yucay valley as laborers since Huayna

Capac’s reign. The Cañaris supported Huascar against Atahuallpa and allied themselves with the

Spanish to fight against the Inca in Vilcabamba. See Covey and Elson, “Ethnicity, Demography,

and Estate Management,” 315.

Covey and Elson, “Ethnicity, Demography, and Estate Management,” 308. After Francisco

Pizarro’s death in 1541, his brother Gonzalo managed his estate and lived off the income from

the Yucay encomienda. Gonzalo was defeated in 1548, but the profits continued to support

Pizarro’s children who were exiled to Spain. Pizarro’s children who benefit from Yucay estate

also had Inca princesses as mothers. See Covey and González, Imperial Transformations, 24.

Covey and González, 25. For the conflict between the Almagros and the Pizarros see Gonzalo

Lamana, Domination without Dominance.

Covey and González, 25.

Ibid., 25.

Beatriz as a reward.

The couple was married, and Beatriz’s uncle Túpac Amaru was

beheaded.

Viceroy Toledo granted the couple the possession of the repartimientos and right of

primogeniture of the Yucay Valley.

The couple also sought legal action to claim 250 additional

tribute workers in the Yucay Valley.

This petition was grounded in Beatriz’s rights under the

Spanish legal system, rather than Inca hereditary practices.

Her claim to the tributary laborers

was based on the repartimiento given to her father under the Spanish system, not out of

indigenous fealty to Beatriz as the great-granddaughter of Huayna Capac.

Neither Beatriz or

Martín lived to see the case settled, but the court eventually ruled in favor of their only child,

Ana María. As part of the ruling, the Yucay estate became the Marquisate of Oropesa and Ana

María gained the title of the first Marquesa of Oropesa.

Corriente, “References to Morganatic Marriage,” 340. Beatriz was fifteen years old at the time

of her marriage. See also María Rostworowski. Doña Francisca Pizarro. Una ilustre mestiza

1534-1598. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1989: 81-82.

These two corresponding events, a beheading and a marriage, highlight how the imbalance of

violence and power between the Spanish and the Inca was also reinforced by an imbalance of

gender dynamics which left Beatriz with limited agency. Tom Cummins, “A Sculpture, a

Column, and a Painting: The Tension between Art and History,” The Art Bulletin 77, no. 3

(1995): 371–74. Marina Mellado Corriente, “References to Morganatic Marriage in Some of the

Pictorial Versions of The Marriage of Captain Martín de Loyola to Beatriz Ñusta,” Anales de

Historia Del Arte 28 (2018): 340.

Guillermo Lohmann Villena, “El Señorio de Los Marqueses de Santiago de Oropesa en el

Perú,” Anuario de Historia Del Derecho Español 19 (1948): 360.

Covey and Elson, “Ethnicity, Demography, and Estate Management,” 311,

Covey and Elson, “Ethnicity, Demography, and Estate Management,” 311.

Ibid.

Ibid., 312. Covey and González, Imperial Transformations, 30. King Philip III established the

Marquisate of Santiago de Oropesa under the influence of the house of Borja. Timberlake, 455.

For the first comprehensive treatment of the marquisate see Lohmann Villena, “El Señorio de

Los Marqueses de Santiago de Oropesa,” 5–116.

The paintings omit any trace of historical conflict. Instead, they illustrate only a tranquil

marriage scene. Túpac Amaru sits placidly on a throne in the upper left corner, without hint of

his protest or his violent end. The image’s eighteenth-century origins in Cuzco account for the

visual suppression of violence and the prominence of the Jesuit order.

PART I:

CUZCO

Both Spaniards and Incas (by blood or by right) in the vice-regal city of Cuzco took pride

in the city’s prestige as the former capital of the Inca empire and recognized the Inca as a symbol

of the city’s preeminence.

Although the indigenous population was never a homogeneous

group in the viceroyalty in general, nor within the city of Cuzco itself, indigenous families

“became” more Inca during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through aristocratic

symbols, vestments, and pageantry.

Within a Spanish system that privileged Inca nobility,

Cuzqueños (and indigenous elites throughout the viceroyalty, as evident in the following

chapter) benefited in performing indigeneity and nobility in a way that Spanish authorities could

recognize and understand.

While indigenous nobility elevated their elite status through their

association with the former authority of the Inca empire, they also served as political leaders and

religious stewards of the general indigenous population.

Thus, the Spanish religious leaders of

Cuzco and missionaries throughout the viceroyalty had a vested interest in establishing close

relationships with indigenous nobility and provincial leaders.

David T. Garrett, Shadows of Empire: The Indian Nobility of Cusco, 1750-1825, Cambridge

Latin American Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 81.

Garrett, 80.

Dean, 164.

Dean, 164. Kenneth Andrien, Andean Worlds: Indigenous History, Culture, and

Consciousness Under Spanish Rule, 1532-1825 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,

2001).

The Jesuits and the indigenous elites found allies in one another, as the Jesuits advocated

for indigenous rights and indigenous leaders helped promote Catholicism.

In the early

seventeenth century, Viceroy Francisco de Borja y Aragón, prince of Esquilache, a descendent of

the Jesuit San Francisco de Borja, founded two schools for the sons of native nobility: San

Francisco de Borja in Cuzco in 1619 and Príncipe in Lima in 1620.

Both schools were Jesuit.

The foundations in educational mission sought to cultivate the students’ own noble identity.

Pupils wore Inca-inspired uniforms, while the decoration of the building included invented Inca

heraldry and its halls displayed portraits depicting past Inca rulers.

The Society of Jesus fostered local community bonds in an effect to insert the Order

within the local political structure. Globally, the Jesuit evangelization efforts relied on the ability

to adapt their teachings to the specific social and cultural needs of a community. This cultural

“accommodation” was developed in practice, if not as an explicit theory.

Historian Jeffery

Muller characterizes the order’s evangelical success as the fruit of two main strategies. First,

Jesuit missionaries prioritized local language acquisition.

Second, they captivated their

Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Hidden Messages: Representation and Resistance in Andean

Colonial Drama (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999), 89.

Chang-Rodríguez, 89. Francisco de Borja was married and had several children prior to

joining the newly formed Society of Jesus after his wife’s death. See John O’Malley, The First

Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 72.

In the mid-eighteenth century, over twenty sons of Inca nobles and caciques attended the

colegio de San Francisco de Borja. Garrett, Shadows of Empire, 84.

Carolyn Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru

(Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 1999), 112-115.

Jeffrey Muller, “The Jesuit Strategy of Accommodation,” in Jesuit Image Theory, ed. Karl

Enenkel, vol. 45, Intersections: Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture (Boston: Brill,

2016), 461. Muller cites San Ignacio de Loyola’s iteration of the Spanish proverb: in by their

door to come out by ours. Muller, 462-66.

Such as the capability to preach and take confession in local vernaculars and contribute to the

creation of dictionaries and grammars. Muller, “The Jesuit Strategy,” 461. In the early

audiences with engaging multi-sensorial performances.

Throughout Latin America, those

performances were adopted to the particular locations and audiences. In one sixteenth-century

performance in Lima, Jesuits unearthed indigenous mummies to populate a macabre scene in the

theatrical performance of a play titled Historia alegorica del Anticristo y el Juicio Final.

While

not all performances were quite as intense, they were still an effective tool for converting and

influencing their audiences.

In addition to purely theological performances and imagery, the Society of Jesus in

Cuzco also invested in a re-telling of Peru’s evangelization—that is the colonization process. As

Luis Eduardo Wuffarden contends, the Jesuits designed “a complete reinvention of the Andean

past.”

For the celebration of the beatification of Ignacio de Loyola in 1610, indigenous groups

carried out secular performances of history. The Cañari and Incas reenacted battles and Inca

descendants impersonating historical Inca rulers paraded through the city.

They reframed the

marriage of Beatriz Clara Sairitupac and Martín García Óñez de Loyola as a symbol of Jesuit

authority in the region and strategically focused attention on this union by commissioning

several painted renditions.

The first painting created of the subject is located in the Jesuit church in Cuzco.

Construction of the Iglesia de la Transfiguración, currently referred to as the Iglesia de la

seventeenth century, the Jesuit Diego González Holguín published a Quechua-Spanish dictionary

and grammar.

Muller, 463.

Susan P. Castillo, Colonial Encounters in New World Writing, 1500-1786: Performing

America (New York: Routledge, 2006), 42.

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega describes the actors and themes of the performances organized by

Jesuits in Comentarios Reales from 1609 and 1617. See 1, bk. 2, ch. 28, 127. Chang-Rodríguez,

Hidden Messages, 33.

Wuffarden, 189.

MacCormack, “History, Historical Record, and Ceremonial Action,” 349.

Compañía de Jesús began in 1576. A major earthquake destroyed the church in 1650, and it

subsequently underwent a rebuilding and redecoration.

In 1668, the church celebrated its

consecration and the installation of the Eucharist, relics, and art works such as a polychrome

sculpture of San Ignacio de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order, and a series of lunettes

illustrating the cycle of his life.

The secular painting of the marriage of Beatriz and Martín is

located in the sotocoro, the area beneath the choir balcony at the entrance of the church. It is one

of the first images that viewers see as they enter the building.

The viewer leaves the public

plaza of Cuzco to enter a Jesuit precinct. Inside, the viewer is met with a view of history on

Jesuit terms.

i. CUZCO:

Painting in the Compañía de Jesús

The painting depicts an ahistorical path, a mythic Jesuit utopia.

It reorients the narrative

of the marriage of Beatriz and Martín to that of the Jesuit order by emphasizing Jesuit branches

in the family tree. In a collapse of historical time, two important Jesuit leaders stand between the

two couples at the center of the composition, with Beatriz and Martín to the left and their

daughter, Ana María, and her husband, Juan Enríquez de Borja, to the right. The Jesuit on the left

Post-1650 rebuilding efforts were headed by Jesuit priest Juan Bautista Gillis called Egidano

from Ghent, Flanders. See Timberlake, 295-296.

Marie Timberlake, “The Painted Image and the Fabrication of Colonial Andean History: Jesuit

and Andean Visions in Conflict in ‘Matrimonio de García de Loyola Con Ñusta Beatriz’”

(ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2001), 296.

Timberlake provides a reading of the painting in relationship to the other paintings that

surround it. The marriage painting hangs adjacent to an image of San Ignacio defeating the

Heretics, which Timberlake interprets as a parallel for Martín’s defeat of Túpac Amaru and Inca

pagans. Timberlake, 315-318.

Tom Cummins describes the painting as: “a vision of utopia inhabited by historical figures.”

Tom Cummins, “A Sculpture, a Column, and a Painting,” 374.

is San Ignacio de Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus and Martín’s uncle. The Jesuit on

the right is San Francisco Borja, an early member of the order who was canonized in 1670 and

the great-grandfather of Juan Enríquez de Borja. Thus, this next generation of the prominent

family tree united the Inca nobility with the Jesuit order for a second time. By uniting the houses

of Loyola and Borja, foundational families for the Jesuit order, with the last lines of the Inca

nobility, the Jesuits positioned themselves as the rightful heirs to the Inca empire.

Stationed at the center of the composition, the two Jesuit patriarchal forebears preside

over the couples. They lend their sacred authority to the two marriages. Their presence argues

implicitly that the marriages were sanctioned not only by the Jesuit order, but by its original

founders. The Society sanctifies the converging genealogy that unites the members of the central

group. The union of the Inca rulers with the Jesuit order appears seamless and inevitable. Figures

from across time and space converge on a single stage beneath the glowing emblem of the

Society of Jesus. In the anachronous setting, family members represent entire traditions of faith,

institutional power, and dynastic authority. Their union affirms the universality of the Jesuit

order, including their power in the Cuzco region.

The left side of the painting presents Beatriz’s Andean ancestry. Her uncle Túpac Amaru

sits between her parents, Sayri Túpac and Cusi Huarcay. The ancestral trio appears in front of a

geometric architectural structure whose broad appearance echoes the Compañía de Jesús in

Cuzco.

Unnamed princes and attendants stand around them. The entourage of theatrical figures

or stage-hands that emphasize the theme of aristocratic Andeanness. Behind the seated figures, a

Timberlake contends that place is identified as the Compañía de Jesús by its escudo. See

Timberlake, 31.

dwarf holds a feathered parasol, a motif that connotes the privilege of Inca royalty.

The parasol

of tropical bird feathers emphasizes Beatriz’s family as indigenous, while simultaneously

announcing the nobility of the seated figures relative to the lower socially-ranked attendants. A

second dwarf squats at the leftmost edge of the painting holds a parasol that extends out of view.

Two more small indigenous figures occupy the lower left corner. One blows a conch shell while

the other appears in profile, facing the center of the composition. That figure rests a hand on the

cartouche bearing a written description of the central figures. These two figures also remain

unnamed and serve to draw attention to the dignity of the painting’s principal actors. The conch

shell aurally heralds their presence while the profile and gaze of the other figure directs the

viewer’s eye toward the next nearest figures, Martín and Beatriz. The cartouche’s lengthy text

reiterates the scene for any literate viewers.

While the left side of the painting is dedicated to Beatriz, the right side is dedicated to her

daughter. On the right, a bishop conducts the marriage ceremony of Ana María and Juan

Enríquez. The ceremony is depicted as if in Spain where they married. Between these two

scenes, Ana María and Juan Enríquez appear twice. Raised between Cuzco and Spain and

illustrated here in both locations, Ana María represents the convergence of the roots of her two

parents. I agree with Anna Ficek that this painting aimed to reproduce the social significance of

Ana María’s birth and instruct viewers in the Jesuit’s familial ties to the Inca empire.

Timberlake, 219.

The Jesuits strategically chose painting rather than text to tell the story of the marriages for an

illiterate audience. See Gisbert 153-157; Timberlake, 28.

Agnieszka Anna Ficek, “Crossing Oceans, Crossing Boundaries: A Transatlantic Reading of

the Matrimonio de Don Martín García de Loyola Con Ñusta Beatriz Clara Coya,” The Atlantic

Millennium An Academic Journal on Atlantic Civilization 12 (2014-2013): 44-5.

As Beatriz and Martín’s only child, Ana María was of paramount importance for the

continuation of the family line. She was a crucial actor in securing the property, prestige, and

future of the family, as her biography will reveal. Before turning to her activity in the Cuzco

region, her role in the painting merits additional examination. Her role as daughter and painted

subject is best understood through the words of seventeenth-century Spanish painter and theorist

Francisco Pacheco.

Pacheco proposes that art is like reproduction of offspring in the natural world. He wrote:

“… just as nature […] ordered that there be children, so that in them, as in

identical portraits, the brevity of life be extended, and the limited become

perpetual and shining in everyone’s view, in the same manner the art of

painting ordered that images be painted of things so that in them lay figure

and similitude, and their memory be perpetuated and its knowledge and

notice extended.”

Pacheco asserts that both painting and children contribute to the endurance of the memory of the

subject they represent. Paintings represent people, objects, or historical events, as children

represent their parents. The Matrimonio painting is, of course, a painting, and functions in

accordance with Pacheco’s theory. According to Pacheco’s comparison of paintings and

children, its star figure is certainly Ana María. The Matrimonio paintings offer us three

generations, each progressively symbolizing their parentage. Thus, Beatriz represents the Inca

royal line into which she was born while Martín represents his Jesuit forebearers. The union of

Beatriz and Martín endures through their daughter, who extends “the brevity of life” of her

parents by symbolically signifying all that their marriage represented to the Peruvian audience.

In the body of Ana Maria, the memory of her parents became “perpetuate and shining in

Translated by Bass quoting Pacheco, 65-66.

everyone’s view,” as Pacheco suggests it does in all children and in all portraits. In the

genealogical painting, the viewer understands each successive generation through their offspring.

A similar concept is at play in a portrait of the genealogy of the Spanish monarchy from

around the same date as the genealogical painting of Inca and Jesuit marriages. Laura Bass has

shown how the portrait of Charles II Surrounded by Images of His Ancestors from 1670 (fig. 3),

attributed to Sebastián Herrera Barnuevo, stresses dynastic continuity through a series of

portraits within the portrait, picturing Charles II’s monarchical antecedents and family members

as well as ties to the other Catholic dynasties illustrated by his sisters’ husbands. Likewise, the

portrait in the Iglesia de la Transfiguración stresses dynastic continuity established with Beatriz’s

forebearers and transferred to the following two generations of daughters (Beatriz and Ana

María) in order to bolster the Jesuit authority through their unions, even though the Jesuit figures

themselves were not monarchs.

Both paintings also asserted the legitimacy of their subjects in the face of unease. In the

case of the portrait of Charles II, the genealogical function of the portrait worked to legitimize

the authority of the weak young boy who struggled to fulfill the expectations required of a king.

The anxiety surrounding the king’s abilities proved legitimate, as he died without an heir,

naming the Bourbon Philip of Anjou as his successor, which instigated the War of Spanish

Succession.

In Peru, Ana María’s presence proved contentious during her lifetime and her

image still held symbolic weight at the turn of the eighteenth century, when the group portrait

celebrating the marriages was painted.

Bass, 77.

Following the death of her parents (in 1598 and 1600), the young orphan Ana María

moved to Spain.

There, she married Juan Enríquez. When the couple travelled to Peru in 1615,

Ana María’s presence in the Yucay Valley was not welcomed by local interests.

Viceroy

Francisco de Borja y Aragón, prince of Esquilache, who was Juan Enríquez’s first cousin, feared

that the unique privilege of the first Marquesa of Oropesa would elicit social unrest among

Cuzqueño families with claims of Incan nobility.

He attempted to recall the couple to Lima and

requested that the king summon them to return to Spain.

Clearly Ana María’s noble title and

unique genealogical position wielded power within the social climate of the viceroyalty during

the first half of the seventeenth century. The couple returned to Madrid in 1627 and, from then

on, their descendants controlled the Yucay Valley from afar.

Ana María’s significance evolved over the century as she came to symbolically represent

the “Hispanicized Peru.”

By the end of the century, she had transformed into a symbol well-

suited to represent the interests of both the Jesuits and sectors of the Andean elite, who each saw

her as a distinguished and important member of their families. The lucrative endowment of the

Yucay Valley likely contributed to the Jesuit interest in Ana María. In 1711, the Marquisate of

Oropesa had passed into the hands of Ana María’s great-grandson, don Pascual Enríquez de

Cabrera y Almansa, Marques de Alcañices and Marques de Santiago de Oropesa (c.1682-1739).

Pascual Enríquez appointed the rector of the colegio of the Compañía de Jesús to oversee the

Yucay repartimiento.

When he died in January of 1739, his sister, María de la Almudena

Covey and González, Imperial Transformations, 30.

Timberlake, 417.

Lohmann Villena, “El Señorio de Los Marqueses de Santiago de Oropesa,” 433.

Ibid.

Ficek, 45.

Lohmann, 443.

Enríquez de Cabrera, became marquesa. She too continued to entrust the Jesuits with her

property.

Administration of Yucay brought in significant revue for the Jesuits and their tie to

the property may suggest a post-1735 date for the painting in the Compañía in Cuzco.

The

reference to the marqueses in the cartouche in the lower left-hand corner supports this dating.

the post-1735 date stands true, the painting presents two cases in favor of the Jesuits as

authorities in the Cuzco region. The first is the union of the Inca and Jesuit bloodlines illustrated

through the body of Ana María. The second is their alliance with her descendants and

involvement in the Yucay Valley.

Furthermore, the importance of the Yucay estate also comes to the fore as a possible

instigation for the second Jesuit treatment of the marriage: the theatrical rendition in 1741. The

Marquisate of Oropesa reverted to the Crown with the death of the heirless Marquesa at the end

of July 1741.

Only two and a half months later, a short time considering the transatlantic time

Lohmann, 443. Records specifically name two Jesuit priests Simón Fuster and Juan Esteban de

Celayarán as having full power over the administration and property of the Marquisate.

The ARCHIPE website dates the painting between 1670 and 1690. For further information on

Jesuit repartimientos and land administration in the Viceroyalty of Peru, see Nicholas P.

Cushner, Lords of the Land: Sugar, Wine, and Jesuit Estates of Coastal Peru, 1600-1767 (SUNY

Press, 1980). Kenneth Andrien, Crisis and Decline: The Viceroyalty of Peru in the Seventeenth

Century (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985) 31-32.

The text concludes: “Con este matrimony [de Ana María y Juan Enríquez] emparentaron entre

si y con la real casa de los reyes yngas de Peru las dos casas de Loyola y Borja cuya sucesion

esta oy en los exmos sres marquestes de Alcanises grandes de primera clase.” Trans.: “With this

marriage [of Ana María and Juan Enríquez] they linked together the royal house of the Inca

kings of Peru with the two houses of Loyola and Borja, whose succession is today in the

honorable lords of the Marquesas de Alcañices, grandees of the first rank.” English translation

my own.

Neither Pascual nor María had any children. Following the end of Beatriz’s family line, a

genealogical dispute over who deserved right to the land began in 1742 and continued

throughout the entire eighteenth century, contributing to the 1781 rebellion of Túpac Amaru II.

Jesuit involvement in the litigation is not apparent in the surviving records. Covey and González,

Imperial Transformations, 30. Timberlake, 443. Soler Salcedo, Juan Miguel. Nobleza Española

Grandeza Inmemorial 1520 (Madrid: Editorial Visión Libros, 2012), 291.

lag of information, the Society of Jesus in Cuzco organized a tableau vivant of the marriage

painting. This performance symbolically exhibited Jesuit authority in the Yucay Valley and

highlighted the order’s family ties to the late Marquesa of Oropesa.

ii. CUZCO:

Performance in the Compañía de Jesús

The few remaining clues regarding the live re-enactment of the marriage exist in a

chronicle of the city of Cuzco written by Diego de Esquivel y Navia. He writes that, “a

representation of the marriage of Martín García Loyola and the daughter of Felipe Tupac

Amaru,”

was performed in 1741 on October tenth, the day of San Francisco de Borja, who

himself is pictured in the painted version. The feast day presented an apt occasion to assert the

Jesuit ties to the Inca family line that ended months prior with Beatriz’s great-great-great-

granddaughter. The liturgical celebration called attention to the relationship shared between the

Society of Jesus, the historical Inca family, the city of Cuzco, and its noble indigenous

denizens.

While Esquivel’s description of the performance is brief, the few details that he does

include reveal some of the elements of the event regarding the importance of genealogy, the

interpretation of history, and the audience’s experience. First, Esquivel names the actors who

played Martín and Beatriz. He identifies each only by their first name and the identity of their

“…una representación del casamiento de don Martín García Loyola, y la hija de don Felipe

Tupac Amaru” in Diego de Esquivel y Navia, Noticias Cronológicas de La Gran Ciudad Del

Cuzco (Lima: Fundación Augusto N. Wiese: Banco Wiese, 1980), 43.

Garrett, 88.

father. Pedro, the son of don Gabriel Arguelles, played Martín and Narcisa, the daughter of an

unnamed cacique, played Beatriz.

Mentioning the fathers of the actors exposes the continued

importance of family lineage in establishing identity.

Notably, Esquivel gets the family history wrong. He mistakes Túpac Amaru as Beatriz’s

father rather than her uncle. This simple historical blunder reveals how closely Beatriz was

identified with Túpac Amaru. Through their close association in the painting, and likely in the

performance as well as popular recounting of the history, the genealogical distance between

Beatriz and her uncle shrunk. The name and story belonging to Túpac Amaru resonated more

profoundly with eighteenth-century Peruvians than that of Beatriz’s biological father, to the point

that her uncle symbolically usurped the role of patriarch. By referencing Narcisa’s father by his

position as cacique but not by name and falsely naming Beatriz’s father as Túpac Amaru rather

than Sayri Túpac, Esquivel overlooks the specifics of indigenous individuals, both contemporary

and historic, to craft a simplified interpretation of history. Esquivel’s version of the history

simultaneously emphasizes the importance of familial lineage and disregards the distinguishing

facts of Túpac Amaru’s resistance to Spanish control in the Cuzco region. The redaction glosses

over Túpac Amaru’s execution in the plaza just outside the front door of the Compañía.

Esquivel also includes a few clues that help reconstruct how the spectacle was staged

within the church. He names two of the notable figures in attendance: the Corregidor of Cuzco

and the Marqués de Valle Umbroso. Those men, Esquivel notes, entered from the sacristy

without accompaniment to be seated in their designated seats. This comment, however trivial it

may seem, affirms that important members of the audience participated in the theatricality of the

Esquivel y Navia, Noticias Cronológicas, 43.

event. Important figures in effect performed as themselves, blending the pomp of the event with

the past of the historical reenactment.

Esquivel’s attention to the audience resonates anthropologist Victor Turner’s assertion

that, “Ritual, unlike theatre, does not distinguish between audience and performers.”

In a real

Catholic marriage ritual, the act of watching, of observing, constitutes a crucial action for the

completion of the marriage sacrament. The gaze renders the viewer complicit. It makes them an

actor. If they do not agree with the partnership, or possess information that would nullify the

marriage, they are obliged to interject and stop the ceremony.

In the context of the Viceroyalty of Peru, a Catholic marriage ceremony functioned as a

socially controlled event that required audience participation through a “communal act of

surveillance,” notes Tom Cummins.

In reducciónes, forced relocation settlements, marriage

rituals were performed before the entire community.

Prior to the marriage ceremony, the priest

would hold three masses during which he would address the entire indigenous community and

inquire about the degree of kinship between the couple, encouraging community participation in

policing one-another regarding the Catholic laws of consanguinity.

Cummins states that such,

“ritual performance standardizes and thereby disciplines and orders diverse pre-Hispanic social

practices…” within the context of a tightly controlled and surveilled environment of the colonial

Esquivel does not name the cacique in attendance at the performance, which “suggests that not

all in Cusco conceded to the Incas the standing they sought.” Garrett, 82.

Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York City:

Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982), 112.

Tom Cummins and Joanne Rappaport, “The Reconfiguration of Civic and Sacred Space:

Architecture, Image, and Writing in the Colonial Northern Andes,” Latin American Literary

Review 26, no. 52 (1998): 227.

Cummins and Rappaport, 227. See also González and González, Christianity in Latin

America, 85-86.

Cummins and Rappaport, 228.

reducciónes.

In this social environment, audience participation fulfilled an integral part of the

marriage sacrament.

The prominence of audience participation in the sacrament following the Council of

Trent shaped how seventeenth and eighteenth-century viewers experienced and understood the

sacrament of marriage across a variety of contexts. In the Andes, the crucial role of the audience

would have been on the minds of Catholics, from rural parishioners and the curates who oversaw

them to the high-ranking institutional leaders of the religious orders in Cuzco and Lima.

While

Beatriz and Martín were married in Cuzco, not in a reducción, the eighteenth-century viewers of

their marriage reenactment would have recognized their position as witnesses to the sacrament.

Performance theorist and theatrical director Richard Schechner offers insight on the

question of audience. His analysis of integral and accidental audiences helps elucidate how the

experience of an audience attending a marriage ritual differs from how Cuzqueños might have

responded to the spectacle held in the Compañía. Schechner suggests, “The best way to

understand the relationship between ritual theater – such as initiation rites, marriage ceremonies,

funerals, etc. – and aesthetic theater is to appreciate the variety of roles the audience plays.”

draws a distinction between two categories of audiences: integral and accidental. Schechner

defines an integral audience as “necessary to accomplish the work of the show” and attends a

performance out of requirement or special significance, such as the family of a bride and groom,

critics at a premier, or political dignitaries present at the signing of treaties.

An accidental

Cummins and Rappaport, 220.

For a seventeenth-century Peruvian treatment of the subject see Juan Pérez Bocanegra, Ritual

formulario, e institucion de curas (Lima: Geronymo Jerónimo de Contreras, 1631).

Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 193.

Schechner, 195.

audience is what we might consider a general viewer who voluntarily attends the show. No

particular accidental audience member is crucial for the existence or success of the performance.

The integral audience determines a performance as ritual, while the accidental audience

determines it as aesthetic.

Schechner clarifies that these two types of audiences can intermingle

and that a performance can be both ritual and aesthetic.

The spectacle that took place in the Compañía on October 10, 1741 involved both

aesthetic and ritual theater. The audience functioned as both “accidental” and “integral” as they

simultaneously enjoyed the wonder and spectacle of the live actors and their uncanny correlation

with the painted image and symbolically participated in the marriage ritual through their gaze.

The viewer’s status was “doubled” as they first watched an aesthetic representation of a historic

ritual, and second when they suspended disbelief to enter into the performance of that ritual as an

integral part of the audience of community members needed to administer the sacrament. Per

Hans-Georg Gadamer, the viewer engaged in the seriousness of play.

Likewise, Schechner

asserts: “…only during live performances do artists and audiences co-create together in exactly

the same time [and] space.”

Thus, the 1741 audience-members in the Compañía, both

distinguished and unnamed, played themselves. The doubled audience actively performed their

own roles as complicit witnesses to the historical marriage sacrament and to history. They

affirmed their acceptance and support of their current colonial circumstances which were a result

of that history. Consistent with the evangelical theater that began in the preceding centuries, the

Schechner, 195.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 102–3.

Schechner, 203.

performance concluded with a mass.

At that point, the audience transitioned from a hybrid

accidental-integral audience to a purely integral body of viewers required for the existence of the

Catholic mass and the raison d’être of the Jesuit church.

In his chronicle of Cuzco, Esquivel acknowledges the relationship between the

performance and the painting of the marriage located within the same space. He notes that the

performance “conformed with what was found painted in a painting at the entrance of the said

church.”

In other words, the painting acted as a mirror for the performance. Beatriz and Martín,

embodied by the actors identified by the chronicle as Pedro and Narcisa, looked at Beatriz and

Martín in the painting. The painting looked back, witnessing its own reflection in the flesh. The

painting likely resembles the performance more than it does any historical event. The figures

portrayed in the painting were separated by decades and oceans. They never met in real life, as

they did through the actor’s dramatic representation in 1741.

Additionally, the background of

the painting looks much more convincing as a theatrical set than it does a real geographical

location. The shallow, disproportionately small buildings are raised on a multistep platform.

Behind them, solid ground drops off abruptly and a hazy cityscape hangs flatly in the distance.

This is neither Cuzco nor Madrid; it is a fictional square constructed in paint to stage two

partnerships that occurred on either side of the Atlantic.

Esquivel y Navia: “Siguiose la misa con sermon; con que se dio fin a la fiesta.” See also

Chang-Rodriguez, Hidden Messages, 33.

Notably, Schechner argues that “By and large, the accidental audience pays closer attention

than does an integral audience.” Schechner, 195. Although the audience likely took pleasure in

marveling at the actor’s sumptuous costumes and comparing them to the painting by the door,

they likely failed to critically reflect on the implications of their role as audience members and

sacramental witnesses.

“…conforme se halla pintado en un cuadro que está a la entrada de dicha iglesia.” Esquivel,

43.

Recall that neither Beatriz nor Martín lived to see Ana María past the age of seven.

Even though the creation of the painting preceded the 1741 performance, I suggest that

the concept of illustrating history based off theatrical productions should not be entirely out of

the question. As Laura Bass notes painters Juan Bautista Maíno and Diego Velázquez did just

that. The Recapture of Bahia (1634-35) and The Surrender of Breda (1634-35) were both based

on stage productions authored by Lope de la Vega and Caledrón de la Barca of the historical

events which had occurred ten years prior.

Whether or not the painter of the historical scene in

the Jesuit Compañía in Cuzco was intentionally referring to theatrical representation, I argue that

the interconnectedness of the flat painted image and the live three-dimensional performance is

crucial for understanding the how the audience experienced each representation.

The choice of the word representation used in the chronicle to describe what the actors

did that conformed to the painting at the entrance of the church substantiates this point. The word

“representation” does not privilege one media over another. Instead, it posits them as

equivalents. Two early modern Spanish dictionaries do the same through two different means.

The first, from 1674, defines the verb to represent (representar) as “to enclose another person

within oneself as if they were the same, to follow them in all their actions and rights, as a son

represents the person of the father.”

This definition parallels Pacheco’s assertion that portraits

and children functioned similarly in their representation of a person (the sitter or the parent).

Bass, 4-5.

“Representar, es encerrar en si la persona de otro como si fuera el mesmo, para sucederle en

todas sus acciones, y derechos, como el hijo representa la persona dei padre.” Translation is my

own. Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de La Lengua Castellana, o Española (Madrid:

Melchor Sanchez, 1674), 160, http://archive.org/details/tesorodelalengua00covauoft.

Recall that when naming the actors and the personas they adopted for the performance, Esquivel

named the actor’s fathers and confused the identity of Beatriz’s father, displaying a perspective

of kinship that emphasizes the link between parent and child while discounting the individual.

Here too, the dictionary diminishes the child’s individuality to bolster the continuity of the

familial identity through the patrilineal line.

Like painted portraits, the actors fully embodied the people they represented. The actors Narcisa

and Pedro suspended their own identity to become one with Beatriz and Martín. The parallel

between the effect of painting and performance is also expressed in a 1737 dictionary, which

defines representar as “to make something present in words or figures …/ to recite a history or

tragedy in public, pretending to be the real people, or to be an image or symbol of something or

to imitate it perfectly.”

Following this definition, both representations, the painting and the

performance, rendered Beatriz and Martín present in the Jesuit church over a hundred years after

their deaths. The second part of the definition includes the significance of the audience’s role by

requiring the recitation to take place in public, that is, with an audience.

On October 10, 1741, the audience moved easily between two representations,

participating in both. Laying eyes on the painting, a representation of an ahistorical “past,” the

viewer saw a two-dimensional sort of vision that anticipated the imminent performance. Notably,

the painting’s location within the church guarantees that the audience would view the painting

prior to the performance. The painting is historical, not devotional, and so it is not hung at an

altar but rather in a liminal area marking the transition from the outside to the inside of the

church. It is the first image that a visitor glimpses as they enter. Thus, on October 10, 1741 the

painting greeted each audience member with a vision in two dimensions of what they would

soon see recreated live and in three dimensions. When the actors entered and the figures of the

painting stood live before their audience, they carried the marriages of the past into the present.

On that day, history was re-enacted on multiple planes and the audience performed multiple

“Hacer presente alguna cosa, con palabras o figuras…/ recitar en público alguna história o

tragedia, fingiendo sus verdaderas personas/ ser imagen, o Symbolo de alguna cosa, o imitarla

perfectamente.” Translation is my own. Diccionario de Autoridades, vol. 5 (Madrid: Francisco

del Hierro, 1737), 584.

roles. Almost two and half centuries separated the 1741 viewer from the event of the historical

marriages, but standing in the Compañía, the viewer foresaw the past painted in two-dimensions

and then lived in it in three during the performance. They looked, watched, listened, and gave

their consent as witnesses to a marriage performed in paint and in flesh.

Paintings are meant first and foremost to be looked at, however, under certain

circumstances, paintings (and particularly portraits) can invert the subject-object dynamic to

serve as watchful observers or even as actors. As Laura Bass describes, a painted portrait

occasionally played the active role of the Spanish king during events that he could not attend in

person. One such occasion was the 1622 proclamation ceremony in Lima announcing Philip IV

as the new monarch.

For the event, a full-length portrait of Philip sat on a canopy-covered

throne in Lima’s Plaza Mayor. Bass connects the portrait substitution to the role that the king’s

physical body played within the theater. She writes, “The theatrics of power staged around the

portrait of the king in real life was in many ways mirrored in the theater itself.”

Bass explains

that when attending a performance in both the Real Alcázar or at the Buen Retiro, the king sat

under a canopy, as his portrait did in Lima’s plaza. As Bass compares:

“…arrival and departure from the theater was conducted with the same ritual

formality with which the king’s portrait was carried to the throne set up for the

proclamation ceremony in Lima’s Plaza Mayor. Once seated, the king did not move

more than his eyes; he became his own living portrait.”

While viewing a theatrical production, the king (in this case, Bass refers to Philip IV) is both

audience and spectacle. The portrait of the king in the case of the proclamation in Lima is at once

Bass, 81. See also Alejandra Osorio, Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru’s South Sea

Metropolis (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 93–97.

Bass, 81.

painting, audience, and actor. Within the marriage paintings, the Inca royal family assumes the

place of the king seated under their canopy-like parasols on the dominant left side of the

painting. Like Philip IV, they play the part of both audience and spectacle.

Instead of directing their gaze toward the central figures, the Inca dynasts stare outward

toward the viewer as the viewer looks back at them. Their presence testifies to their historical

importance as the last stewards of the Inca empire. Their tranquil expressions reaffirm the Jesuits

at the center of the composition as the righteous new leaders of the Cuzco region. The

eighteenth-century painting pictures celebrates the Jesuit (Spanish) triumph before an audience

of dynastic Inca witnesses. And yet, looking Túpac Amaru in the eye today reminds us that it is

against a backdrop of the violent conflict and then tenuous union between Inca and Spaniard, of

evangelical theater, and of marriage ritual as instrument of social control, that the Society of

Jesus organized an aesthetic performance that sought to reproduce and represent the specific

historical ritual that wed the Inca princess with the Spanish captain and joined the two bloodlines

in holy matrimony.

PART II:

LIMA

The second portion of this paper turns to Lima to observe another painting of the historic

couples and for the celebration of another Spanish monarch’s arrival to the throne. Lima, the

political capital of the colonial viceroyalty, did not share the same history that Cuzco embodied.

Whereas Cuzco had been a bastion of Inca imperialism, culture, and monumental stone

architecture, Lima, first named the City of Kings (Ciudad de Los Reyes) by its Spanish founders,

was the center of vice-regal bureaucracy and Spanish society. In 1535, purely geographical

reasons guided the Spanish in choosing the plot of land that would become their colonial capital

with access to both river and harbor.

Without prominent cultural or structural features to

contend with, Lima sprouted up according to plan, following a gridded design and featuring

ostentatious buildings constructed from expensive imported wood.

Although the political center of power shifted to Lima during the colonial era, Cuzco

remained a cultural capital, exporting literature and visual art.

Cuzco maintained the historical

Cummins, 159.

Cummins, 159, 163-4.

Cummins, 166.

prestige as the capital of Tawantinsuyu, the Inca empire, while Lima boasted the viceregal court

and the seat of the archbishop.

The cities competed culturally, which was sometimes expressed

through the extravagance of their citywide celebrations.

A publication from 1748 documenting

the festivities of Lima celebrating Fernando VI’s royal proclamation, declared that the city’s

preeminence was as central to the Spanish empire as the Earth was to the universe.

If Lima was the center of the Spanish empire, then how did the social order within the

city reflect the macrocosm? On the surface, all aspects of city life were definitively organized

under Spanish control. However, the Spanish population did not comprise the majority of the

city’s inhabitants. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, almost half the population of

Lima was of African descent.

There was also a substantial indigenous population including

curacas who came from the northern coast, from various valley communities, and from Cuzco.

The indigenous population was relegated to segregated schools, monasteries, and other social

organizations.

However, the indigenous nobility argued for the right to enter and participate

José Jouve Martín, “The City and the Phoenix: Earthquakes, Royal Obsequies, and Urban

Rivalries in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Peru,” in The Transatlantic Hispanic Baroque: Complex

Identities in the Atlantic World, ed. Jesús Pérez-Magallón and Harald E. Braun (London:

Routledge, 2014), 206.

Jouve Martín, 205.

“En este Imperio, pues, de las delicias es Lima lo que la Tierra respecto del Universo, porque

es el centro, y la Capital del Perù, que es el mejor de sus Dominios, y la que preside à quanto es

Colonia venturosa de la España…” original text from José Antonio Manso de Velasco, ed., El

Día de Lima. Proclamacion Real, Que de El Nombre Augusto de El Supremo Señor D. Fernando

El VI, Rey Catholico de Las Españas, y Emperador de Las Indias, N.S.Q.D.G. Hizo La Muy

Noble y Muy Leal Ciudad de Los Reyes Lima, Cabeza de La America Austral, Fervorizada a

Influxo Del Zelo Fiel, Del Cuydadoso Empeño, y de La Amante Lealtad (Lima: n.p., 1748), 78,

http://archive.org/details/eldiadelimaprocl00mans. Quote also referenced by Jouve Martín.

María Soledad Barbón, Colonial Loyalties: Celebrating the Spanish Monarchy in Eighteenth-

Century Lima (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), 13. Unfortunately, archival

documentation needed to reconstruct the history of this population remains scarce.

Wuffarden, “La Descendencia Real,” 230.

Wuffarden, 230.

fully in Spanish institutions. The real cédula of 1693 had teased Inca descendants with the

permission to be granted the full privileges of nobility without providing any means of

enforcement.

Yet, this possibility of dissolving the boundaries between the Spanish and

indigenous republics “provoked an explosion of personal and collective revindications,” which

were supported in solidarity by mestizos and criollos.

Indigenous nobles of various origins and

affiliations united for common social interests and developed a narrative of shared history

revolving around the visual and literary symbol of the Incas to support their common agenda.

The native nobility adopted the imagery of the marriage of Beatriz and Martín to

represent their own history and illustrate their rights as nobility through historical basis, modeled

after the Jesuit commissions in Cuzco. Yet, as Cummins reminds us, “The differing colonial

nature of Cuzco’s and Lima’s public spaces called for different interpretive acts by the colonial

viewer. These spaces were not… neutral theaters of display; rather, each city’s walls, streets, and

plazas manifested in their very appearance and material substance the different histories (and

meanings) of colonization.”

The representations of the historic marriage in Cuzco and in Lima

addressed different audience in different spaces for different purposes. Whereas the Jesuit

commissions in Cuzco promoted the order’s location-specific genealogical authority (a Spanish

message in a historically Inca imperial capital city), the indigenous commissions in Lima sought

to eliminate geographical divisions and to support a unified multi-ethnic nobility (a pan-

indigenous message in the Spanish vice-regal capital city).

Juan Carlos Estenssoro Fuchs, “Construyendo La Memoria: La Figura Del Inca y El Reino Del

Perú, de La Conquista a Túpac Amaru II,” in Los Incas, Reyes Del Perú (Lima, Peru: Banco de

Crédito, 2005), 163.

Estenssoro Fuchs, 163.

Wuffarden, “La Descendencia Real,” 230.

Cummins, “A Tale of Two Cities,” 169.

i. LIMA:

Painting in the Beaterio De Copacabana

Until the late eighteenth century, indigenous men and women were not allowed to enter

Spanish convents and monasteries as normal monastics, although they were permitted to work as

volunteers and servants.

At the end of the seventeenth century, Charles II passed a cédula de

los honores which afforded new privileges to indigenous nobles including entrance to seminaries

and universities, but it was not enforced until the late eighteenth-century, leaving the native

nobility frustrated.

There was a great desire among native elites to manage their own sacred

spaces and educational institutions, which they sought to do through political appeals to the

Council of Indies. Indigenous devotees to the Virgin of Copacabana in Lima petitioned for thirty

years to be allowed to build their chapel in the San Lázaro neighborhood, a historically

indigenous sector of the city in which they thought it belonged.

They finally succeeded in

1633. They also wanted to build a beaterio, a cloistered space for female devotees, adjacent to

the Church of Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, which required another slow and arduous

campaign.

Waldemar Espinoza Soriano and Mery Baltasar Olmeda, “Los Beaterios En La Lima Colonial.

El Caso de Un Beaterio Para Mujeres Indígenas Nobles,” Investigaciones Sociales 14, no. 24

(2010): 135.

Espinoza Soriano and Baltasar Olmeda, 138.; Dueñas, 167.

Dueñas, 185. Ximena Gómez explains that in the sixteenth-century San Lázaro developed as a

multiracial neighborhood populated by poor Spanish and free afro-descendants in addition to the

indigenous community. In 1590 the indigenous residents of San Lázaro were relocated violently

and inhumanly to El Cercado where they remained until the 1630s. See Ximena Gómez,

“Fashioning Lima’s Virgin of Copacabana: Indiegnous Strategies of Negotiation in the Colonial

Captital,” in A Companion to Early Modern Lima, ed. Emily Engel, vol. 2, Brill’s Companions

to the Americas: History, Societies, Environments and Cultures (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 340–53.

Dueñas, 185.

The beaterio, dedicated to the education of indigenous girls, was finally established in

1691.

The official founder was Francisca Ignacia Carbajal Manchipula (1615-1693), born in

Lima to a cacique and a noble indigenous woman.

The beaterio was primarily founded for the

daughters of the members of the indigenous cofradía (brotherhood) of Copacabana in Lima, but

it also housed women from a wide area along the northern coast.

The beaterio functioned

similarly to educational institutions for the sons of caciques, such as the Colegio de San Borja in

Cuzco, teaching women to read and write in Spanish and Latin, as well as arithmetic, prayer, and

song.

100

Within beaterios, indigenous women were afforded positions of leadership and authority

not possible in any other contexts.

101

As Kathryn Burns explains, beaterios were the only religious institutions “endowed by

and for native Andeans,” which created opportunities to display the decency and respectability of

indigenous elites.

102

The indigenous elite of Lima celebrated the foundation of the beaterio as a

great achievement in the process of fulfilling their social needs and saw it as a reference point

and inspiration for future social goals and demands.

103

Burns asks, “What more can we learn

Espinoza Soriano and Baltasar Olmeda, “Los Beaterios En La Lima Colonial,” 138–39.

Beaterios functioned much like colegios for indigenous boys such as the Colegio de San Borja.

See also Timberlake, 353.

Copacabana website. “hija de Don Pedro Carbajal, Cacique y gobernador del Puerto del Callao

y de Doña Isabel Nipan Manchipula, india noble de aquel puerto.”

Kathryn Burns, “Andean Women in Religion: Beatas, ‘Decency’ and the Defence of Honour

in Colonial Cuzco,” in Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, ed. Nora

Jaffary (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 90. The Copacabana beaterio was also allowing non-

noble indigenous women to enter as illustrated by the archival documentation of a man who

thought it cost too much for his noble daughter to enter. See Burns, 90-91.

100

Espinoza Soriano and Baltasar Olmeda, “Los Beaterios En La Lima Colonial,” 193.;

Timberlake, 353.

101

Burns, “Andean Women in Religion,” 88.

102

Burns, 85.

103

José Rodríguez Garrido, “Guerra y Orden Colonial En Los Dramas Sobre La Conquista Del

Perú de Calderón de La Barca y Francisco Del Castillo,” Guerra y Paz En La Comedia

from this activity [endowing beaterios] about Cuzco’s indigenous elite – their shifting colonial

fortunes, affiliations, identities?”

104

Any answer to this question certainly includes that beaterios

served as an investment in the indigenous community. Indigenous families, noble or not, who

could afford to invest in such institutions demonstrated their dedication to indigenous women,

children, and families, while also displaying their own respectability and piety.

105

Although the beaterio de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana was an indigenous institution, it

still operated under Spanish control. The cofradía struggled to obtain almost every element

needed for the functioning of the Church and the beaterio. They fought to employ a chaplain who

spoke Quechua, which they were finally able to appoint in 1704.

106

They selected a mestizo from

Arequipa, Juan Núñez Vela de Rivera, an outspoken champion of indigenous rights who had

been able to gain his ecclesiastical position.

107

Prior to his appointment as the chaplain for the

beaterio de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, Núñez Vela de Rivera had traveled to Madrid to

advocate for indigenous rights directly before the king.

108

In 1691, the same year that the beaterio was founded, Núñez Vela de Rivera wrote a

memorial that was fundamental in advocating for the legal inclusion of indigenous people in

social institutions such as the church, schools, and military.

109

In this memorial, he used first

Española: XXIX Jornadas de Teatro Cásico de Almagro, 2006, 286. They celebrated the opening

with a ceremony, processions, bell ringing, fireworks, speeches recorded in the Relación y

erección (1691-92). In attendance: the Virrey Conde de la Monclava and theAarchibischop

Melchor de Liñán y Cisneros.

104

Burns, 89.

105

Burns, 89.

106

Dueñas, 185.

107

Dueñas, 154.

108

Ibid.

109

Ibid.

person plural “we” to refer to indigenous people and mestizos (as he himself was a mestizo).

110

He also argued that Spaniards and indigenous people alike share a past of paganism, and that

therefore, those Andeans whose ancestors had converted to Christianity centuries prior deserved

to be considered “cristianos viejos,” along with all the rights and privileges that status that

entailed.

111

Historian Alcira Dueñas contends that the royal cédula of 1693 directly resulted from

Núñez Vela de Rivera’s activism including his writing and advocacy in Spain.

112

Núñez Vela de Rivera’s presence at Nuestra Señora de Copacabana supports arguments

by scholars Rodríguez Garrido and Estenssoro Fuchs that the beaterio functioned as a symbolic

center for the advocacy of indigenous rights.

113

One way that the beaterio symbolized its

advocacy for native nobility was through its decorative program. The beaterio displayed portraits

of abbesses and daughters of important curacas as well as one of the marriage paintings of

Beatriz and Martín alongside a painting illustrating the succession of the Inca dynasty

culminating with the succession of the Spanish monarchs (fig. 6).

114

The examples of both the

marriage painting and the dynastic painting located in the Copacabana beaterio vary slightly

from other paintings treating the same subject matter, further supporting the argument that they

represented the indigenous elite’s particular interest in referring to history as evidence for their

social and political rights.

110

Dueñas, 155.

111

Ibid., 155-56.

112

Ibid., 217.

113

See Rodríguez Garrido, “Guerra y Orden Colonial,” 275–95 and Estenssoro Fuchs,

“Construyendo La Memoria.”

114

Espinoza Soriano and Baltasar Olmeda, 142; Ficek, 40; Teresa Gisbert, Iconografía y Mitos

Indígenas en el Arte (La Paz, Bolivia: Gisbert, 1980), 156.

I will begin with the marriage painting before introducing the dynastic painting. In

comparison with the more common composition of the marriage painting, as seen in the Cuzco

example, the most striking difference of the marriage painting in the Copacabana beaterio is the

reorganization of the couples.

115

In the Cuzco painting, Martín and Juan Enríquez stand on the

left side of their wives.

116

In the Copacabana painting, the husbands and wives flip, so that the

women stand on the left side.

117

Traditionally, in European portraiture the position on the

viewer’s left (dexter) represents the dominance of the sitter.

118

In her dissertation about the

marriage paintings, Marie Timberlake chose to analyze these positions in terms of the Quechua

concepts of hanan and hurin, or upper and lower.

119

In the Quechua cosmovision these two

positions represent a spatial binary as well as a gendered binary of upper masculine dominance

and lower female subordination.

120

Timberlake also notes the change in hand position, in which

Beatriz authoritatively places her hand on top of Martín’s instead of the other way around.

121

Recently, Marina Mellado Corriente published an analysis of the significance of these

compositional changes. Corriente argues that these changes, and particular the alteration to the

hand positions, serve to identify the marriage as between two individuals of equal social ranks,

rather than a morganatic marriage depicted in the Cuzco painting type. She explains that a

morganatic marriage was a legal agreement for a marriage of unequal ranks in which spouses

115

Wuffarden also notes this difference as intentional for the specific audience of the beaterio.

116

The two paintings housed in the La Compañía in Arequipa and the Museo de Pedro de Osma

paintings follow the same format.

117

The Marangani version is also organized this way.

118

Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, 2 vols.

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953), I:479-480.

119

Timberlake, 372.

120

Ananda Cohen Suarez, Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial

Andes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 168.

121

Timberlake, 372.

kept their original social standing.

122

The spouse with the lower rank, along with any children of

the union, was not allowed to inherit property, rank, or titles of the higher positioned spouse,

which was typically the husband.

123

Morganatic marriage was sometimes referred to as a “left-

handed” marriage because it was symbolically represented by the groom (or higher-ranking

spouse) extending his left hand to his bride.

124

Corriente asserts that the marriage paintings that

depict Martín taking Beatriz’s hand with his left intentionally represent Beatriz as socially

inferior to Martín through the symbol of the morganatic marriage. In reality, their marriage was

not morganatic because their daughter inherited titles and property from both her parents.

125

Corriente contends that it is “implausible” that artists would mistakenly or unintentionally alter

the iconography of marriage for a Jesuit commission.

126

Thus, in the case of the painting in the

Compañía in Cuzco, the Jesuit order actively chose to re-write history through the inaccurate

illustration of the union between Beatriz and Martín. While the Jesuits in Cuzco and elsewhere

chose to picture their authority over the indigenous population, the Copacabana cofradía in Lima

used the same subject to convey a different meaning.

The painting in the Lima beaterio presents a marriage of equals between Beatriz and

Martín. Their hand position follows the iconographical convention for the wedding of Mary and

Joseph as described by Francisco Pacheco. He writes that the convention dictates that the couple

“give each other their right hands with great honesty.”

127

Consistent with this custom, Beatriz

122

Corriente, 356.

123

Corriente, 356.

124

Corriente, 355-6.

125

Corriente, 357.

126

Corriente, 355.

127

Francisco Pacheco, Arte de La Pintura, Su Antiguedad y Grandezas: Descriuense Los

Hombres Eminentes Que Ha Auido En Ella, Assi Antiguos Como Modernos ... y Enseña El Modo

and Martín hold their right hands, with Beatriz’s hand positioned on top in the Copacabana

painting.

128

The second couple also displays a more endearing unity. Juan Enríquez rests his right

hand on top of Ana María’s hand, as opposed to the Cuzco painting in which they do not hold

hands at all. In addition to the hand position, Corriente identifies concrete visual differences that

address the painting’s primarily indigenous audience. She points out that Ana María has a darker

skin tone than in the other paintings, emphasizing her race as mestiza, and that positioned on the

left, Beatriz maintains a closer physical proximity to her family, which re-enforces her

indigenous lineage and connection with the Inca nobility.

129

These details in the Copacabana

painting serve to produce an image of history in which the marriage between Beatriz and Martín

was a consensual union of equals. Although the painting depicts the hand position that more

accurately reflects the economic terms of the marriage, it still ignores the context of violence and

political pressure that led to the marriage. The Copacabana painting idealizes the agency of

Beatriz and her daughter.

The social order presented in the Copacabana painting eliminates the hierarchies of the

Cuzco version, and instead illustrates equality between the sexes, a powerful message for the

women living in the beaterio, as well as equality between indigenous, Spanish, and mestizo

nobility.

130

In this version, Ana María acquires more prominence which is conducive to an

de Pintartodas Las Pinturas Sagradas (Sevilla: Simon Faxardo, 1649), 496,

http://archive.org/details/HArteR03T09. See also Corriente, 355.

128

The anomaly of the hand position in this painting requires further investigation. Technical

imaging is needed to determine if the position of the couple’s hands has been repainted. Beatriz’s

left hand appears awkward in comparison to all the other peoples’ hands in the Copacabana

painting and all the other paintings which render Beatriz’s hands with delicate fingers and rings.

129

Corriente also comments on details of the architectural background, Martín’s staff, and the

garments of Beatriz’s family. See Corriente, 352-54

130

Wuffarden argues that the marriage paintings in general illustrate social equality between the

figures. He writes: “De un modo inequívoco, la republica de españoles y la republica de indios

interpretation of her body as a metaphor for a unified elite composing of both indigenous and

Spanish nobles. The indigenous elite of Lima may not necessarily have wanted to marry into

Spanish nobility and produce mestizo children, but they did want to attain greater social equality

as symbolized by Ana María. Ana María, a single noble body that was both Spanish and

indigenous, represented the ideal society that indigenous nobility strove to actualize in which

they shared the same rights, privileges, and dignities afforded to Spanish nobles.

Formally, a few compositional changes concentrate attention on Ana María in the

Copacabana painting. Standing to her husband’s right (the compositional left), Ana María

becomes a more central figure. This change also brings her closer to her parents, as her husband

no longer stands between them. Furthermore, the gap between the right couple and the saints

behind them disappears. In the Cuzco painting, Juan Enríquez stands a pace apart from San

Francisco de Borja, distancing the couple from the rest of the group, whereas in the Copacabana

painting, Ana María’s body overlaps San Borja, uniting them compositionally. Her bell-shaped

red skirt cuts across his black robes in a stark diagonal and the curve of her elbow nearly graces

the skull he holds. This overlap unites the Ana María and San Borja compositionally, increasing

Ana María’s compositional prominence near the center of the canvas and suggesting her piety

and close spiritual and genealogical connection to her venerated relatives. Thus, the symbol of

the mixed-ethnic utopia (Ana María) merged with the symbol of Catholicism (the saints) to

aprecen aqui en pie de igualidad, como dos mitades complementarias de un indissoluble cuerpo

social.” [In an unequivocal manner, the Spanish republic and the indigenous republic appear here

standing on equal footing, as two complimentary halves of an indissoluble social body.]

Wuffarden, 191-2. Translation my own. I move beyond this analysis to agree with more recent

scholars that the painting in Cuzco lacks the social equality between figures as seen in the

Copacabana version.

suggest the importance of the faith in the formation of a just society. This association was likely

inspirational for the women in the beaterio, who could identify with Ana María.

The compositional shift also brings Ana María’s name, labeled on the ground under the

central most edge of her skirt, closer to the center of the composition. In contrast, Beatriz’s name

is integrated inconspicuously into the bottom of her skirt. The names of both husbands fit neatly

into the spaces between their feet. Pentimenti are now visible, revealing that both men’s legs

were previously positioned slightly to the right.

131

In the earlier version, Martín stood closer to

the saints with his legs were shifted slightly to the left. The same is true for Juan Enríquez, who

stands slightly closer to his wife in the final version. As a mirror to Ana María’s compositional

position in the present version, Martín’s stance toward the left contrasts with, and accentuates,

Ana María’s centrality and closeness with the saints. Likewise, Juan Enríquez’s present

proximity to his wife helps direct attention to her, as his right leg and foot point even more

toward her body, further emphasizing the attention he directs toward her with his gaze.

All these compositional details place the compositional focus on Ana María without

setting her apart from the group or creating any connotation of superiority of any of the figures.

Rather, they contribute to the unity of the cluster of family members. The absence of the

peripheral figures present in the Cuzco painting (the woman on the far right and the two small

indigenous figures on the left) also streamlines the composition and bestows a clarity and

solidarity to the two couples and their saintly relatives. In the Copacabana painting, mother,

131

Technical analysis and imaging are needed to uncover what other changes were made to the

painting throughout time. For evidence for the importance of technical analysis in understand the

multiple images that can be buried in layers of paint, see Adam Jasienski, “Converting Portraits:

Repainting as Art Making in the Early Modern Hispanic World,” The Art Bulletin 102, no. 1

(2020): 7-30.

father and daughter, or indigenous, Spanish, and mestiza unite as a single integrated family and

social class.

The parents and child stand in line on the same plane as an orderly row of peers. This

format evokes the compositional order of the painting of the royal succession of Peru that also

hung in the beaterio de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana. The painting of the royal succession,

sometimes referred to as Efigies de los ingas y reyes del Perú, Genealogía de los reyes ingas del

peru, or translatio imperii (meaning “transfer of rule”), follows the format of a 1725 engraving

132

In this design, indebted to European genealogical

traditions, the busts of thirteen Incas and nine Spanish monarchs are organized into a neat grid

pattern consisting of three rows following their chronological succession. Each box includes a

decorative arch at the top, labels the ruler with their name above their heads, and presents

biographical information written with black text on a white background beneath each ruler’s

bust. This ordered sequence between Inca and Spanish rulers gives the impression of a seamless

transfer of power or translatio imperii.

133

Much like the paintings of the union between Beatriz

and Martín, the translatio imperii image omits the conflict and violence that the indigenous

people suffered at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors. In the painting, Atahuallpa, the last

Inca, becomes a transitional figure who extends his scepter to Carlos V.

134

In reality, the Spanish

executed Atahualpa in 1533, as they did Beatriz’s uncle, Túpac Amaru, in 1572. Both paintings

132

Wuffarden, “La Descendencia Real,” 232–33.

133

The orderly arrangement of the Incas also obscures the complexity and uncertainty of the Inca

system of succession. See R. Tom Zuidema, Inca Civilization in Cuzco, trans. Jean-Jacques

Decoster (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

134

Estenssoro Fuchs, “Construyendo La Memoria,” 163.

ignore the complexity and violence of Spanish invasion in favor of picturing a history that held

indigenous people and Spaniards as equals and allies.

One artist likely painted both paintings around the same time, prior to 1747.

135

Together

these paintings depict a cohesive view of an orderly and peaceful history in which indigenous

people and mestizos (Beatriz and Ana María) stand in line on equal footing with Spaniards (their

husbands), share a close relationship to important Christian figures (saints Loyola and Borja),

and ruled Tawantinsuyu, the Inca empire, in anticipation for the arrival of their Christian

counterparts to whom they complicity handed over their power. The Inca past cordially gives

way to an equitable union of Spanish and indigenous nobility grounded by the Catholic faith.

The linear compositions of both paintings celebrate the historical social status of indigenous

nobility prior to and during the early period of colonization and offer their eighteenth-century

audience a vision of the respect they deserved at the expense of forgetting the horrors of the past.

The rhetoric of these two paintings was replicated in other commissions by the

indigenous nobility in Lima. Compared to the marriage painting in the Compañía in Cuzco, the

two paintings in the beaterio of Copacabana share a slightly less direct, but nonetheless poignant

connection with theatrical performance. José Rodríguez Garrido sees the two paintings as an

“implicit nexus” between the Peruvian playwright Fray Francisco del Castillo’s Conquista del

Perú (1748) and renowned Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barcas’s La aurora en

Copacabana (1664-65), a comedia about the indigenous Christian icon, the Virgen de

Copacabana, to whom the beaterio was dedicated.

136

Devotion of the Virgen de Copacabana

135

Wuffarden, “La Descendencia Real,” 240. The image of Ferdinand appears to be by a

different hand and was added after his proclamation.

136

Rodríguez Garrido, “Guerra y Orden Colonial,” 286.

originated in Potosí (present-day Bolivia) and involved the veneration of the Virgin through a

statue carved by the Andean sculptor Francisco Tito Yupanqui.

137

This particularly Andean form

of Catholic reverence incorporates homage for the mountain of Potosí.

138

Thus, Calderón de la

Barca tackles a specifically Andean topic and also shares some of the plot points and themes

addressed in Castillo’s Conquista del Perú.

139

In addition to the connection with these dramas,

the two paintings also align with the 1748 celebration in Lima of Ferdinand VI’s coronation,

which I will address in the following section.

ii. LIMA:

Performance in the Viceregal Capital

The death of Philip V and Ferdinand VI’s ascension to the throne provided the

indigenous elite of Lima with the opportunity to tell their story in another medium.

140

The

festivities are recorded in a publication titled El día de Lima written by the Jesuit priest Juan

Antonio Ribera. The celebrations were divided into two main portions, with the second occurring

after Easter and organized by the indigenous leaders of the cabildo of El Cercado, a segregated

indigenous neighborhood in Lima.

141

El día de Lima describes that the indigenous organizers

137

See Rodríguez Garrido, “Guerra y Orden Colonial”; Timberlake, “The Painted Image and the

Fabrication of Colonial Andean History.”

138

Timberlake, 354.

139

Rodríguez Garrido, 287-8.

140

News of Philip’s death arrived in Lima four months after a devastating earthquake struck the

city. Lima tried to use the obsequies for Philip V and coronation of Ferdinand VI as momentum

for a rebuilding campaign. As the city worked to reorganize and rebuild itself structurally, the

indigenous cabildo advocated for their place within the social structure of the city, and the

empire. See Jouve Martín and Soledad Barbón, 150-151.

141

Soledad Barbón, Colonial Loyalties, 151; Alcira Dueñas, Indians and Mestizos in the

“Lettered City,” 196.

wanted to arrange something new “never seen before, and never to be seen.”

142

María Soledad

Barbón argues that the newness alluded to in El día de Lima references the commission of the

play written by Castillo, since the cabildo of El Cercado had never organized a theatrical

performance for public celebration before.

143

However, the commissioned play, La Conquista del

Perú, was never performed. Instead, El día de Lima explains that the corregidor appointed to

oversee the cabildo prevented the organization’s unprecedented patronage, “persuading” them to

perform the more standard Inca procession instead.

144

I will return to the Inca procession, the

performance that actually took place, in the following section, but first the unperformed drama

warrants attention.

The drama and its accompanying loa communicate a message consistent with the

marriage paintings, translatio imperii paintings, and Inca processions like the one performed

instead of Castillo’s drama. All these paintings and performances rely on history to craft a vision

of the native nobility as socially equal to Spanish nobility. The multiple iterations of using

Cuzqueño history in eighteenth-century Lima demonstrate that indigenous elites were adopting

visual rhetoric and theatrical traditions established in Cuzco and applying them for their own

purposes. The play commissioned for the 1748 celebration of Ferdinand VI provides one

142

“lo que nunca havría visto, ni jamás podría ver” Manso de Velasco, El Día de Lima, 238.

143

Soledad Barbón, Colonial Loyalties, 152. Seems like a highly plausible claim because the text

itself says in the loa para la comedia Conquista del Perú, “Fiesta con que los Naturales de esta

ciudad de Lima celebran la feliz coronación de nuestro Cathólico Monarca Fernando el Sexto”

Francisco del Castillo, Obras de Fray Francisco del Castillo Andraca y Tamayo Vargas, ed.

Rubén Vargas Ugarte, Clásicos peruanos; Vol. 2 (Lima: Editorial Studium, 1948), 222.

144

The corregidor was Don Casimiro de Beytia who “para dirigirlos, les persuadió, que nunca

podrían inventor nuevo, ni mas ilustre regocijo, que el que mas de veinte años antes havían

ofrecido al Publico en igual Regia Celebridad, porque aun era todavia un encarecimiento

continuo de la ponderacion en la memoria de los que lo gozaron.” Manso de Velasco, El Día de

Lima, 239.

example of a diverse group of indigenous nobles employing Cuzqueño history to represent

themselves. Although Castillo’s Conquista del Perú was neither performed nor published, I

concur with many other scholars that its subject and text deserve analysis.

145

Of particular interest, the plot of Castillo’s drama is preceded by a loa, typical of

celebratory commissions. The loa centers around allegorical characters corresponding to the

letters spelling FERNANDO: Fama, Europa, Regocijo, Nobleza, Amor, Nación Peruana, Dicha,

Obligación (Fame, Europe, Delight [Rejoicing], Nobility, Love, the Nation of Peru, Happiness,

Obligation). Each wear their respective letter on a badge and enter the scene one by one.

146

When

Peru arrives in the form of an “india,” the other allegorical characters inquire after her identity.

They ask brusquely: “What is this?” and “Who are you and why have you come?”

147

The

accurate answer is not so simple. Who is the Nation of Peru? This is the very question that the

indigenous council of El Cercado sought to answer through the commissioning of this original

drama. Peru herself does not answer the question directly, but I believe the text reveals

subliminal answers.

To begin with, the name Nación Peruana, is a choice necessitated by the nonselective

collection of letters forming the new monarch’s name. Most of the letters are represented by

145

Despite his respectable education and legitimate lineage from Spanish father and noble

limeña mother, Fray Castillo’s oeuvre, including La conquista del Perú, remained largely

unpublished, and was primarily shared in manuscript form. Publication proved difficult for many

colonial playwrights, perhaps because of the high cost of printing, the rigorous censorship in

Peru and a cultural climate of intellectual decline. La conquista del Perú, in particular, would

have been subjected to additionally strict regulations for works about the Americas under the

direction of the Consejo de Indias in Spain. See Concepción Reverte Bernal, Aproximación

crítica a un dramaturgo virreinal peruano: Fr. Francisco del Castillo (“El Ciego de la

Merced”) (Cádiz: Universidad de Cádiz, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1985), 17–32.

146

The badges are referred to as tarjas.

147

Regocijo: “Qué es esto?” Fama: “Quién eres y a qué has vendio?” Europa: “Lo mismo saber

deseo.” Castillo, Obras, 224.

abstract concepts: Fame, Love, Happiness, etc. Only two, E and N become proper nouns,

distinguishing them as key characters. Although FERNANDO includes neither an S for Spain or

a P for Peru, Castillo orchestrates their presence by way of the E and N. Thus, Spain becomes the

more generalized Europe and her opposite becomes the Nación Peruana, as a unified whole.

What qualities does the Nación Peruana embody? The description of her allegorical

human form simply reads “de india,” which I believe constitutes a deliberate argument for the

essential role that indigenous people inhabit within the colonial “nation.” In Castillo’s loa, the

Nación Peruana, one of the broadest units of political organization, symbolizes the indigenous

population at large. The allegorical figure unites diverse social and ethnic groups across

thousands of miles of territory, including Limeños descendant from coastal ethnic groups

alongside Cuzqueños claiming Inca ancestry. The Nación Peruana illustrates the unity of an

indigenous nation through one single female body. Further on in the loa, nobility emerges as her

other salient feature.

In the dialogue that follows the blunt inquiry into the identity of the Nation of Peru, one

of the main themes of the loa becomes the questioning of the love that Peru feels for Europe.

Europe interrogates Peru, asking what reason or basis she has for attempting to celebrate to unite

with Europe.

148

Peru responds by asserting that the king belongs to her, as well. Europe argues

that in order to unite, they must first dismiss the disparities between their origins. At this point,

the allegory of Nobility (Nobleza) arrives with a history lesson to explain that Peru and Europe

have already been united through the marriage of Don Martín de Loyola and Beatriz Clara Coya,

148

“…qué razón o fundamento tiene la nación peruana cuando intenta este festejo para adunarse

conmigo…” Castillo, Obras, 225.

a woman of “high nobility.”

149

Nobility extols at length about each of their lineages, then about

their daughter and her husband and his lineage, and about their offspring and their titles.

150

Finally, after explaining all these marriages, Nobleza says “I won’t give you any more tests

proving our bonds [encadenamiento]… it’s certain that nobody could find faults in our chain.”

151

While the metaphors of bondage and chains can also connote enslavement and degradation, here

Castillo uses them to demonstrate strength, forcefulness, and continuity through time. The chain

represents the generational links of the multiple noble families that bind Peru and Spain through

marriage and blood. Nación Peruana declares that Peru and Spain can never be separated and

now form a unified identity.

152

This history lesson nestled within the lengthy allegory serves to

highlight the importance of nobility in the unification of Peru and Spain. Thus, the loa presents

an argument for the equality of the native and European nobility and the responsibility they share

for the development of the colonial territory under the Spanish monarchy.

In her textual analysis, Soledad Barbón describes the loa as an “exaltation of the

Amerindian aristocracy” that takes “a bold and confident step further by claiming that Spanish,

Creole and Indian nobility, were in fact, one and the same.”

153

This is the very reason that

149

“elevada nobleza” Castillo, 227–28. Chang-Rodríguez contends that Castillo likely would

have already known the history of the marriage and even attended dramatic representations of the

subject in Jesuit cloisters and seen the painting in the Beaterio de Copacabana in Lima. Raquel

Chang-Rodríguez, “La Princesa Incaica Beatriz Clara y El Dramaturgo Ilustrado Francisco Del

Castillo,” Centro Virtual Cervantes, n.d.,

https://cvc.cervantes.es/literatura/mujer_independencias/chang.htm.

150

Castillo, Obras, 228–30.

151

“y, en fin, Europa, por no molestarte más, pretendo no dar más pruebas acerca de nuestro

encadenamiento…” Castillo, 230.

152

“… Ya soy contigo tan una que la separación niego porque la union de la sangre casi

identidad se ha hecho…” Castillo, 230.

153

Soledad Barbón, Colonial Loyalties, 153; María Soledad Barbón, “‘Never before Seen, and

Never to Be Seen’: Fray Francisco’s La Conquista Del Peru and the Royal Celebrations for

Ferdinand VI,” Romanistisches Jahrbuch 64 (2014): 298. Although Fray Castillo himself is

Soledad Barbón offers as to why Castillo’s play proved undesirable in the viceroy’s eyes. In

particular, she points to a quote from the allegory of Nobility that argues that it is impossible to

distinguish between or to separate the Spanish nobility and the Inca nobility: “If of different

liquors/ You mix two cups, it is true/ That to undo their mixture/ Is an impossible endeavor.”

154

Through the marital and sexual union of Martín and Beatriz, the liquors of the Andean and

Spanish nobility were thoroughly mixed. Whether the Spanish nobility approved of the

concoction or not was irrelevant for it could not be undone.

Although the characters and plot of the play differ entirely from the loa, it still presents a

similar version of Peruvian history in which an Inca past consensually accepts Spanish rule and

Catholic faith. Important parallels between the drama and the loa include the emphasis on

indigenous nobility and the consensual union between Inca and Spanish powers. Castillo

illustrates a peaceful transfer of power through three main plot devices: a prophecy, the actual

exchange, and the allusion to marriage. The reference to marriage in the loa, and the drama, as in

many plots of Spanish Golden Age comedias, signals resolution and the “return to the prevalent

social order.”

155

Regarding plots that deal with the Spanish conquest of the new world, marriage

criollo, Emmanuel Velayos notes that criollos are absent from the allegorical categories, from the

drama as a whole, and from the other art works that seek to define national identity centered

around elite indigenous interests. He suggests one reason for this absence may have been that

indigenous elites saw criollos as a “destabilizing” element in their pursuit of social advances

because some criollos sought to displace indigenous elites from their leadership positions and

increase their own political authority. See Emmanuel Velayos, “Porque su derecho no

perdieran”: la representación de la elite indigena (y la marca criolla) en la loa y la comedia de La

Conquista del Perú (1748) de Francisco del Castillo” in Ciberletras: Revista de crítica literaria y

de cultura 24 (2010): 146-172.

154

“Si de distintos licores/ dos vasos mezclas es cierto/ que el deshacer su mixtión/ es un

imposible intent.” Castillo, La conquista del Perú, 211. Soledad Barbón, Colonial Loyalties, 154.

155

Chang-Rodríguez, Hidden Messages, 113.

serves to emphasize the conquest as peaceful and consensual transfer of power facilitated by both

indigenous and Spanish nobility.

The symbol of marriage as architect of social order translates back into the paintings of

the historic marriages. In an allegorical reading of the paintings, all of the principal characters

from the loa take shape in the bodies of various figures. Europa corresponds to the Spanish men,

Martín, Juan Enriquez and the Jesuit forebearers, while Nación Peruana is equivalent to the

members of the Inca lineage concluding with Ana María. Nobleza does not embody one single

figure, but rather is composed of all the family members, both Spanish and indigenous. In the

loa, Nobleza addresses the topic of history; whereas in the painting, it is History, as represented

through the bodies of the ancestors of both the Inca and Jesuit lineages, that produces Nobility.

The only additional allegorical character in the painting would be Catholicism, personified by the

two central saints. All the same key elements are present and contribute to the same message.

Both the loa and the paintings, especially the one located in the beaterio de Copacabana,

illustrate how marriage unites two distinct historical lineages and produces a social order of

equality between individuals of different genders and ethnicities who all belong to a unified elite

social class.

Ultimately, the connotations of radical equality for the multi-ethnic nobility may have led

to the censorship that prevented the staging of Castillo’s Conquista del Perú and to the

“persuasion” in favor of the Inca procession.

156

If the “persuasion” was an act of censorship due

to the content and message of Conquista del Perú, it does not seem successful. The Lima

procession did not argue as boldly for the equality of indigenous and Spanish nobility, but it did

156

Rodríguez Garrido supposes the change might have been due to cost based on his

interpretation of the explanation in El día de Lima. See Rodríguez Garrido, 282.

accomplish the same proclamation of indigenous unity through the symbol of the Inca. In Lima,

a wholly colonial city that had no historical connection with the Inca empire, the indigenous

community worked to borrow the prestige of an empire their ancestors may never have

participated in. Indigenous elites in Lima with no genealogical connection to the Inca nobility

dressed as Incas, a privilege reserved exclusively for actual Inca descendants in Cuzco.

157

Most

actors in the procession in Lima could not claim descendance from an Inca lineage, yet members

of distinct ethnic groups and geographical origins rallied together under the symbol of the

Inca.

158

For elite indigenous Limeños, participating in the Inca procession was a visceral way to

align themselves with the Inca empire as part of an elite pan-indigenous community. They also

employed other tactics of unification by inviting nobles from Cuzco to play some of the most

important Incas such as Manco Capac, the founding-father of the Inca empire, and incorporating

aspects of local coastal history with the Inca line of succession.

159

Basing their procession on the Cuzqueño tradition, the indigenous cabildo in Lima

attempted to adopt (or appropriate) Cuzco’s historic authority. However, in transposing the

tradition to Lima, its meaning shifted in the new context. The city of Cuzco was legendarily

founded by Manco Capac. To march in an Inca procession in Cuzco was to walk the same streets

that Incas walked and to concretize the city’s mythological origins. Inca processions in Lima

achieved an inverse operation. To hold a procession in Lima was to perform Inca-ness on the

coastal edge of the Inca empire 575 kilometers away from the Inca center of power in Cuzco.

Processions in Lima generalized, idealized, and Inca-fied the city’s concrete vice-regal structure.

157

Dean, 107-108.

158

Dueñas, 207.

159

Soledad Barbón, 142.

While Cuzco had been staging Inca processions for centuries, the concept was still novel

in eighteenth-century Lima. There was an Inca reenactment procession in Lima in 1659, but it

remains unclear whether it was put on by Spaniards, criollos, or indigenous people.

160

1723 was

the first instance of indigenous people petitioning to organize their own celebration for a

citywide festival as an ethnic group rather than as guild members.

161

They were allotted a space

in the main plaza in which they presented two processions of Inca kings.

162

In that iteration,

Manco Capac was played by the Cuzqueño noble Don Ventura Sonco Cusi-Huallpa.

163

Working

together with nobles from Cuzco offered an opportunity to strengthen relationships between the

indigenous elites of the two different cities. Cuzqueños also participated in the 1748 procession,

the second known indigenous-organized Inca procession in Lima.

164

Manco Capac was played

by don Felipe Huaman-Navarro from Cuzco.

165

Several other Cuzqueños also represented other

Incas. All their names and home cities are recorded in El día de Lima.

The publication also describes the order of the procession, the costumes of the Incas, their

wives, attendants, and dancers, and the music and other features of the parade. Many of these

elements contributed to the amalgamation of the indigenous identities. Careful attention is

devoted to the details of each of the costumes, usually consisting of finely woven garments,

cumbi and mantas, pinned with metal topos for the women, and the royal fringe. The description

of these elements are consistent with representations of Incas and Coyas such as Beatriz’s family

160

Soledad Barbón, 137

161

Ibid.

162

Soledad Barbón, 137-8. See also Cummins and Rappaport, “The Reconfiguration of Civic and

Sacred Space.”

163

Ibid.

164

Ibid., 142.

165

El día de Lima, 256.

in the marriage paintings.

166

Other details recorded in El día de Lima that are not specifically

Inca but that represent indigeneity more generally, are bare feet and the use of feathers.

167

Further relocation of Inca culture to Lima includes actresses portraying ñustas who sang in their

native language, Quechua.

168

Singing in Quechua celebrates an element of culture that spread to

many diverse communities of indigenous people through imperial conquest carried out under the

Inca empire and then again by Catholic missionaries under the Spanish empire. Thus, the

Quechua language itself represents the linguistic unification of the indigenous population under

two imperial regimes. Finally, the procession included not only Andean people but also llamas,

bringing the fauna of the highlands to the coastal city.

169

The procession concluded with a triumphal cart pulled by eight horses and decorated with

gilded reliefs and paint.

170

The book describes some of the imagery including an Imperial eagle

and flag with the insignia of the sacred cross above “figuras de Indios” dressed with colorful

feathers and playing flutes.

171

Another part of the cart illustrated the “principal provinces of the

kingdom of Peru.”

172

Based on this description, the decorative scheme of the triumphal cart

celebrates Peru generally, including multiple geographical regions and an inclusive and generic

group of indigenous people. Also present at the end of the parade was a placard announcing,

“Long live the Catholic Monarch Ferdinand the Sixth, King of Spain and Emperor of the Indies”

166

For further analysis of Inca costumes see Soledad Barbón and Carolyn Dean for analyses of

costume designed by the students, sons of caciques, at San Borja Jesuit school in Cuzco.

167

El día de Lima, 243.

168

“Damas de Real Sangre de su Corte, que se llamaban Nustas, las quales en su natural idioma

entonaban dulcissimas letrillas” from Manso de Velasco, El Día de Lima, 245.

169

El día de Lima, 255.

170

Ibid., 260.

171

Ibid., 261.

172

Ibid., 261-2.

and people reciting a poem that ended with shouts of “Viva el rey!”

173

Thus, the parade

culminated in a celebration of Peru, its indigenous population, and the Spanish king. Ferdinand’s

symbolic location at the end of the procession demonstrates the procession’s similarity to

translatio imperii imagery.

The initial description of the procession in El día de Lima reads much like a description

of a translatio imperii painting might. It describes the parade as: “a representation, in which they

reduced the history of the series and succession of the known past kings who from triumph to

surrender, came in magnificent pomp to sacrifice their crowns to the Inca of two worlds, who

they recognized as their master.”

174

This “representation” (the same generic term that Esquival y

Navia uses to describe the 1741 performance in the Compañía in Cuzco) functioned as a live

embodiment of the translatio imperii imagery.

The procession in Lima differed in one key aspect in that it included local lords

impersonating Incas as well as the Chimu monarch, who marched as the first noble figure in the

procession.

175

The Chimu culture was located on the northern coast of Peru and conquered by the

Inca in the late fifteenth century. By including a Chimu leader as the first monarch, a place

normally occupied by Manco Capac, the Limeños asserted the importance of coastal indigenous

nobility on the same level as the Incas, even presenting them as an older and thus more

173

Ibid., 259- 260. According to El día de Lima, the tarja read: “VIVA EL CATHOLICO

MONARCHA DON FERNANDO EL SEXTO, REY DE ESPAÑA, Y EMPERADOR D LA

INDIAS.”

174

“una Representacion, à que redujeron la Historia dela Serie, y Suceísion de sus Antiguos

conocidos Reyes, que Triumphantes de rendidos venían en Magnifica Pompa a sacrificar sus

coronas al Inca de dos Mundos, a quien reconocían por Dueño” Translation is my own. Manso

de Velasco, El Día de Lima, 239.

175

Ibid., 243.

authoritative society.

176

In the context of an Inca re-enactment in Peru, stationing a Chimu at the

head of the parade and the Spanish king at the end, creates the appearance that coastal lords are

part of a sequential and consensual transfer of power beginning with the Chimu and ending with

the Spanish, recalling the linear organization of the translatio imperii paintings.

Further complicating the transfer of power in the Lima procession, is the reversal of the

chronological order, beginning with the Chimu, followed by the Inca rulers organized in reverse

chronological order to end with Manco Capac as the last Inca prior to the Spanish monarch or

“Inca of two worlds” who ruled over both the old and new world.

177

The previous chronological

processions were actually more similar to a translatio imperii painting, which represent a

panorama of the passage of time. In a chronological sequence of Inca, time moves with their

steps as they parade through the streets and plaza. In the 1748 procession, time falls apart in an

awkward ahistorical series that highlights the importance of the Chimu and the Spanish as the

bookends of Peruvian history. Thus, the slightly scrambled history of the 1748 parade crosses the

orderly linear organization of a translatio imperii painting with the collapsed genealogical

history of a marriage painting, especially considering the inclusion of the female ñustas and

coyas.

The kinetic format of the procession alters the viewer’s experience of the history. Rather

than occupying a static seated position in a church or amphitheater, the audience watching a

parade is free to move in the outdoor space.

178

During the festivities, paintings, tapestries,

176

Soledad Barbón, 290.

177

Soledad Barbón, 290.

178

The location of the festivities in the central plaza is triumphalist in nature, given the recent

destruction the city suffered during the earthquake of 1746, after which the plaza became a site

of disorderly states of refuge and survival. In the span of a few years, Limeños saw their city

placards and sculptures periodically became part of the exterior decoration of the city.

179

Human

bodies also served as part of the celebratory decoration through costume, procession, dance, and

theater. In an unusual feat for the city of Lima, the passage of time came alive as the cabildo of

El Cercado glorified Peru as a nation indebted to its indigenous forebearers and their present

descendants who marched proudly through the entire historical span of the Inca empire. The

public outdoor location increased the size of the accidental audience that was able to see the

show, allowing for a large and diverse viewership to receive the cabildo’s message promoting

the coastal elite’s participation in a unified indigenous nobility. The audience was likely

primarily composed of primarily indigenous viewers, as well as Afro-descendants, and some

Spaniards and criollos. While most of the audience would not be included as members of

indigenous noble class, they could serve as crucial allies in working toward the cabildo’s goals.

Even though the paintings and performances representing the union between Inca and

Spanish nobility in Lima did not confront each other in the same space, they still functioned in

conversation with one another, addressing related audiences and conveying similar messages

about indigenous heritage, nobility, authority, and rights.

transformed and the plaza reorganized as a stage for the mourning of the Spanish monarch Philip

and the celebration of his successor, Ferdinand VI.

179

Cummins, “Tale of Two Cities,” 169.

HISTORICAL AFTERMATH

Although clergy and indigenous elites alike wished the future would produce the peaceful

union represented in the artworks and performances of history, their vision was not realized. In

the latter half of the eighteenth century, rebellions erupted throughout the viceroyalty. The years

following Fernando’s proclamation saw both indigenous unity and insurrection. Shortly after the

1748 celebration, Fray Calixto de San José Túpac Inca, an unusually accomplished Franciscan

intellectual and Inca descendant, met with the El Cercado cabildo. A few months later, he

traveled to Cuzco to consult with the caciques of the indigenous cabildo there and the Jesuits at

San Borja, where he was received with support and encouragement.

180

In 1749 Calixto printed

his Representación verdadera, a document denouncing the widespread social and institutional

abuses of indigenous people and advocating for the implementation of the indigenous right to

join the priesthood.

181

Calixto then traveled to Spain and delivered the text to the king.

182

In June

of 1750, a conspiracy to assassinate the viceroy was uncovered, implicating members of the El

Cercado cabildo, who were present at the 1748 meeting with Calixto.

183

Due to this connection,

bans were placed on performances of Incas, which the local government in Lima realized

180

Dueñas, Indians and Mestizos in the “Lettered City,” 67.

181

Dueñas, 68.

182

Dueñas, 68.

183

Dueñas, 73.

inspired sadness and nostalgia for indigenous rule and a desire to see the Inca in power once

again.

184

The following month rebellion broke out in Huarochirí.

185

Tension continued to seethe in the following decades. A new marriage painting

representing an entirely European subject was installed in the Compañía directly across the nave

from the first, perhaps to “neutralize the local content of the previous composition that began to

be perceived as potentially dangerous.”

186

The new painting also focused on important figures in

the Jesuit order, but illustrated no connection to local history. However, not even the powerful

Society of Jesus was safe from the Spanish monarchy. In 1767, Charles III banished the order

from his empire.

187

All Jesuit property became state property, causing Jesuit paintings to be

rehoused throughout the viceroyalty, including all of the Jesuit-commissioned marriage paintings

apart from the one in the Compañía in Cuzco.

188

Despite Charles III’s long-awaited enactment of the cédulas in 1776, social instability

continued to mount.

189

Túpac Amaru II, a cacique who had attended San Borja in Cuzco,

identified as a devout Catholic, filed claims to the lands and title of the Marquisate of Oropesa

184

“la representación de la serie de sus antiguos reyes con sus propios trajes y comitiva; memoria

que en medio del regocijo los entristece, y pompa que les excita el deseo de domiar y el dolor de

ver el cetro en otras manos que las de su nación” Quotation from José Manso de Velasco,

Relación de gobierno (1756) cited in Soledad Barbón, 250. Despite this ban, Inca procession was

performed for the proclamation of Charles III in 1760. Soledad Barbón, “‘Never before Seen,’”

299.

185

Dueñas, 206.

186

Wuffarden, 247. Translation my own. The opposite painting represents two marriages of

Martin’s cousins Beltrán de Loyola with Francisco Xavier’s grandniece Teresa Idiáquez and

Magdalena de Loyola with Francisco Xavier’s grandnephew Juan Idiáquez. See Timberlake,

“The Painted Image and the Fabrication of Colonial Andean History,” 6.

187

Timberlake, 340.

188

Timberlake, 341.

189

Dueñas, 167.

and led an uprising in Cuzco during 1780-1.

190

His rebellion resulted in his public execution in

the plaza in Cuzco and the banishment of representations of Incas, including paintings, costumes,

and performances.

191

Officials recognized the nature of representations of Incas in multiple types

of media as persuasive and influential in the argument for indigenous rights. Paintings of Inca

kings were destroyed in Cuzco, the center of the 1781 rebellion, but spared in Lima.

192

response to the ban, some paintings were painted over with religious scenes to obscure the

likenesses of the Inca rulers and protect them from total destruction.

193

In 1782, another cédula

banned the circulation and reading of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios Reales, a major

source of Inca history that informed works such as Castillo’s Conquista del Perú.

194

In spite of

the bans, people were intent on continuing to represent the Inca. Archival sources attest to the

use of Inca costumes after 1780 and into the nineteenth century.

195

Overall, the suppression of

representations of Incas during the eighteenth century demonstrates the gravity of their role in

late colonial Peru. Viceregal authorities linked both paintings and performances to political

agitation and censored their display on multiple occasions and yet people continued to reproduce

190

Túpac Amaru II held respect for the Church and its clerics but was angry at colonial

authorities for being bad Christians. Dueñas, 222. For Túpac Amaru II’s claim to the Yucay

territory and Marquisate of Oropesa see David Cahill, “Una Nobleza Asediada: Los Nobles Incas

Del Cuzco En El Ocaso Colonial,” in Élites Indígenas En Los Andes: Nobles, Caciques y

Cabildantes Bajo El Yugi Colonial (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2000).

191

Dean, 178. Túpac Amaru II was brutally executed in the same location as his antecedent, the

first Túpac Amaru.

192

Cummins, “A Tale of Two Cities,” 167.

193

Natalia Majluf, “De La Rebelión al Museo: Genealogías y Retratos de Los Incas, 1781-1900,”

in Los Incas, Reyes Del Perú (Lima, Peru: Banco de Crédito, 2005), 256.

194

Reverte Bernal, Aproximación crítica a un dramaturgo, 32.

195

Dean, 178. After national independence of Peru was won from Spain in the nineteenth

century, there was a resurgence of Inca genealogy paintings in the translatio imperii style but

without the conclusion of the Spanish monarchs at the end. See Majluf, “De La Rebelión al

Museo.”

proccss

them. Their predominance and survival over centuries attest to their centrality in the Peruvian

historical narrative.

CONCLUSION

The words of Anthony Cascardi may help us reflect on the psychological impetus for the

multiple representations of the historic marriages. Cascardi suggests that the remarkably high

literary productivity of Golden Age Spain may have arisen from “the impossible and

unfulfillable desire to ground the present in the past.”

196

I propose that the artistic repetition of

the marriage scene in the Viceroyalty of Peru reverberates with a similar sentiment. The multiple

marriage representations reveal a yearning for a more harmonious reality. They attempt to

reinvent a past that justifies the actualization of the desired present and future. This idealized

vision of the past was, of course, false, but the truth was not an obstacle. Again, as Cascardi

remarks, “…the role of some of the most powerful “ideologies of history” at work in the Gold

Age was to produce imaginary worlds in which historical conflict is itself eliminated.”

197

In Peru,

the marriages modeled a fabricated vision of a virtuous and conflict-free past. The conjugal

scene was repeated throughout the viceroyalty and celebrated by distinct groups because of its

power to symbolize a unifying historical narrative that could satisfy Spaniards, diverse groups of

indigenous people, mestizos, and religious orders.

196

Anthony Cascardi, Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age (University Park, Pa.:

Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 10.

197

Cascardi, Ideologies of History, 2.

In addition to the institutional commissions presented thus far, paintings of the subject

also appear in private family collections. A notable example is documented in the 1777 inventory

of the possessions of the Inca noblewoman Doña Josepha Villegas Cusipaucar y Loyola, herself

a descendent of Beatriz and Martín.

198

The painting stands as a testament to her desire to

celebrate the history of her family, to recognize and display her own social and political privilege

garnered as a consequence of that history, and to envision herself as intimately connected to, or

even as a participant in, that history. The family of Doña Josepha was so intrigued with the

possibilities offered by an idealized past that they also commissioned portraits of themselves

wearing historical clothing.

199

By representing themselves with the authority and prestige of an

idealized past they hoped to achieve in paint what may have felt unstable in the present.

While Doña Josepha could claim descendance from the figures portrayed in the marriage

paintings, other indigenous viewers who could not, perhaps women in particular, still felt

inspired by the imagery. They may have looked at the painting in the home of Doña Josepha, in

the church in Cuzco, in the beaterio in Lima, or in another location and felt a connection to their

own family history. Here, I would like to pause to reflect on the roles of female bodies in the

narration of the history of the Viceroyalty of Peru. All the primary sources representing history

that I examine in this paper, visual, textual, or dramatic, were principally organized and executed

by men. Men left clearer documentary evidence about male contribution to such representations,

but women also participated as patrons, actors, and viewers.

198

Dean, Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ, 113; Timberlake, “The Painted Image and the

Fabrication of Colonial Andean History,” 360. The description as quoted by Timberlake reads:

“Un lienzo grande con su chorchola dorada con oro de nro padre San Ygnacio y San Francisco

de Borja, y el casamiento de Doña Beatris.”

199

Dean, Inka Bodies, 113–15.

The traces of several women grace the remaining written records that relate to the

seventeenth and eighteenth-century portrayals of the historical partners: Narcisa, the actress who

played the “wife” in the Cuzco performance; Francisca Ignacia Carbajal Manchipula, the founder

of the beaterio in Lima and the women who lived alongside the painting displayed there; the

many women both named and unnamed who performed as ñustas and coyas to march and dance

their way through Inca history during the 1748 procession in Lima; and Doña Josepha Villegas

Cusipaucar y Loyola who owned a painting of the marriage scene. Additionally, the female

description “india” indicates that the Nación Peruana in Castillo’s loa was embodied by a

woman.

200

The feminization of Peru extends to the allegorical reading of the painting in which

the majority of the indigenous figures are female and a mother and daughter take center stage to

represent Peru and the indigenous nobility. The marriage paintings and performances offer rare

instances in which artists represent women as crucial to the broad historical narrative.

In recognizing the rarity of the appearance of women in male-dominated narratives of

history, we can perhaps begin to understand the radical inclusiveness that the family story

offered to eighteenth-century viewers in Peru. By illustrating only a few individuals, the entire

past, present, and future of the viceroyalty and its diverse population could be visualized. The

artistic representations proposed a vision of proto-nationalistic unity. Fray Calixto, the devoted

indigenous-rights advocate, expressed the same vision when he wrote in Representación

verdadera that he hoped for a time when “Spaniards and Indians united and all together became

one, and loved each other, marrying among themselves and becoming one whole people and one

200

Dean notes that women were “generally excluded (following European custom) from festive

performance.” Dean, 174.

nation…”

201

Although Fray Calixto does not recall the members of the Sairitupac-Loyola family

by name, he evokes the same concepts foregrounded in the paintings. His statement can be

understood both literally and symbolically. In one sense, he may have been advocating for legal

marriages and sexual reproduction among mixed-race couples. In another, his message refers to a

Christian notion of love and relies on the symbol of marriage as a metaphorical evocation of a

unified society composed of distinct groups harmoniously united under God.

Fray Calixto, like patrons and audience members of artistic representations, exalted the

symbol of the married couple because of the forceful impression it left on the reader or viewer.

Most eighteenth-century inhabitants of Peru likely did not consciously interpret the symbolic

power of the marriage. They did not articulately record descriptions of the viewers’ experience in

books such as Noticias cronológicas or El día de Lima or write treatises on audience

participation. Nevertheless, the close relationship between the depiction of the historic marriage

in paint and in live performance reveals an understanding on some level of the power of the

representation of marriage to produce an enchanting and influential experience for the viewer.

One final object epitomizes the importance of the connection between the historical

marriage and performance. An eighteenth-century silver placard depicts a man and woman

holding hands in lower relief (fig. 8). The man, presumably Martín, wears Spanish garb. A ruff

rings his neck; a sash and chain cross his chest; his sleeves split; a sword hangs from his waist.

He holds a baton and a plumed hat. With his left hand he grasps at the woman’s wrist,

presumably his wife, Beatriz. Her clothing marks her as indigenous. Her hair, parted in the

middle, frames her face in two thin braids. A mantle drapes around her shoulders. A long skirt

201

Translation from “Representación verdadera” (1749-50) as quoted in Dueñas, Indians and

Mestizos in the “Lettered City,” 220.

with geometric patterns reaches her ankles. Her feet are bare. She holds a spindle whorl which

symbolizes her matrilineal authority within the royal lineage.

202

A dwarf attendant with a gaping

grin shades her with a feathered parasol.

203

A parrot sits on the attendant’s head and other

animals indigenous to either the jungle or the altiplano populate the lower edge of the silver

piece along with a second indigenous dwarf figure.

204

The silver background is burnished flat,

which emphasizes the single couple. The other principal figures represented in all of the

paintings of the marriage scene, the saints and the second couple, are absent, as are Beatriz’s

parents and uncle. The simplified composition highlights a generic indigeneity represented

through Beatriz’s bare feet, woven clothing lacking tocapu, the attendant and parasol, and the

animals. This reduced composition was likely meant to be appreciated up close, but also to be

seen from a distance as it glinted in the light during a performance.

Palmer and Pierce identify the object as a breastplate originating from Cuzco or

Bolivia.

205

It could have adorned the body of a performer, producing an intriguing argument for

the importance of the body as both conveyer and witness to the history told through the marriage

story. Was the silver plate worn specifically during a performance of the marriage or of a

different subject? Could it have been worn by an allegorical character like those in Castillo’s loa

such as Nobleza? Timberlake argues that the object is not a breastplate, by rather a placard to be

202

Timberlake, 366.

203

The dwarf attendant is commonly featured in seventeenth and eighteenth-century paintings of

ñustas. For further information on the feathered parasol see Benjamin Schmidt, “Collecting

Global Icons: The Case of the Exotic Parasol,” in Collecting Across Cultures: Material

Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Daniella Bleichmar and Peter Mancall

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 31-57.

204

The three animals are a monkey, a puma, and a viscacha, as identified by Timberlake, 367.

205

Gabrielle Palmer and Donna Pierce, Cambios: The Spirit of Transformation in Spanish

Colonial Art (Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art; University of New Mexico

Press, 1992), 65.

tied at the end of a pole.

206

In this function, it could have been paraded in the air to enhance a

procession. In fact, the style of the silver plate corresponds with the decoration of the triumphal

cart that concluded the 1748 procession in Lima. The cart was “embellished all with fine and

delicate painting with gilded profiles and reliefs.”

207

While the odd quadrangular shape suggests

that the silver placard did not adorn a cart or a more architectural structure, it may have served as

an accoutrement or costume piece for a performer who accompanied such a construction. If the

object was displayed in any fashion during an Inca procession, it would insert Beatriz and Martín

into the dominant mode of performing Inca history and fully combine the popular translatio

imperii form with the marriage scene. In the case of the Limeño procession, any decorative

representation of the couple would reinsert them into the festivities after they were omitted due

to the exclusion of Castillo’s drama.

Any theatrical context evoking Peruvian history that included the placard or similar

decorative images exemplifies how the static and the bodily can work together to provide a

multi-dimensional performance of history. Most performances include some form of static media

that is expressly designed to accompany or enhance bodily performance such as props, painted

sets, backdrops, or costumes. The painting in Compañía in Cuzco complimented the

representation that actors performed their while wearing costumes that matched the painting. The

allegorical characters in Castillo’s loa wore their corresponding letters and carried props (such as

Amor who held a bow and arrow or Peru who dressed as an “india”). The Incas and Coyas in the

Inca procession also wore their specific costumes and carried sumptuous props. In all these

206

Timberlake, 367.

207

“embellezido todo de fina delicada pintura con dorados perfiles y relieves” from El día de

Lima, 260. Translation is my own.

instances, bodies in motion activated the images and objects that contributed to the execution and

success of the performance. Considering the bodily, the kinetic, and the theatrical helps resituate

the human body’s relationship to static art forms such as painting. As this thesis argues, an

understanding of the marriage paintings is not complete without such an analysis.

Even in the absence of the actors, the paintings aroused a sense of performativity and

invited the audience to participate in a more animated form of viewership. They evoked the ritual

of the Catholic sacrament and thus the audience necessary to fulfill that sacrament. Unlike the

devotional paintings in churches, the marriage paintings did not ask for interaction through

prayer but were activated through the viewer’s gaze and through their silence. To gaze in silence

at the marriage paintings in the eighteenth century was to allow one’s mind and body to travel

back in time, to witness a desirable past, to confirm the reality of that past, to commend it as just,

to unite it with the present, and to feel hope for the future.

FIGURES

Figure 1. Unknown artist, Matrimonio de D. Martín de Loyola y Beatriz Clara Coya,

early eighteenth century (1735-41). La Compañía de Jesús, Cuzco.

Figure 2. Unknown artist, Matrimonio de D. Martín de Loyola y Beatriz Clara Coya, first half

of the eighteenth century. Beaterio de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, Lima.

Figure 3. Attributed to Sebastián Herrera Barnuevo, Charles II Surrounded by Images

of His Ancestors, 1670.

Figure 4. Juan Bautista Maíno, La recuperación de Bahía, 1634-35.

Figure 5. Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, La rendición de Breda, 1635.

Figure 6. Unknown artist, Genealogía de los reyes ingas del peru, first half of the

eighteenth century. Beaterio de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, Lima.

Figure 7. Alonso de la Cueva, Genealogía de los reyes ingas del peru, 1725. Engraving.

Figure 8. Unknown artist, Ornamental Plaque, eighteenth century. Silver.

Painting and Performing the Past; Representation of a Historical Marriage in Eighteenth-Century Peru.

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