Putting the Saints on Trial: Miracle Accounts and Image-Objects in 18th Century Peru

• In Event: Colonial materiality: everyday objects in early-modern Spanish America

Abstract

One of the principal features of baroque Catholicism in the New World and Old is the worship of saints, their relics, and their representation in paintings, sculptures, and prints. In the context of the Counter-Reformation, image-objects depicting saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus were reaffirmed as instruments of devotion, essential to the evangelization and conversion of indigenous and Afro-descended populations in the New World.
In colonial Peru, religious image-objects were referenced in sermons from the pulpit, venerated by devotees in domestic chapels and convents, and, on special occasions, paraded through the streets in ceremonial pomp. My paper traces how artists, clerics, and devotees struggled to grapple with saints and their representations in two distinct cases: a 1748 judicial process concerning miracles attributed to the Virgin of Characato in Arequipa, and a 1765 statue-painting of the Virgin of Copacabana gifted to the pueblo of Cocharcas. How could Marianic devotions, cultural forms inserted within their specific political and geographic context, bridge social divides between indigenous, European, mixed-race, and African-descended persons? How were saints and their image-objects informed by and through trans-imperial conversations about power and hierarchy?

Author

• Caroline A Garriott, Duke University