Pigments and Power in the Andes

This English edition of El Poder de los Colores by Gabriela Siracusano explores the cultural, material, and symbolic roles of colour in Andean colonial painting from the 16th to 18th centuries. Tracing the journey from the making of pigments in workshops to their use in religious and political imagery, the book reveals how colours functioned as powerful, often contested, elements in the colonial encounter. It offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective, combining art history, material studies, and cultural analysis.

This book is the result of a study of cultural practices related to the uses of colouring materials in the South American Andean region during the colonial period (sixteenth-eighteenth centuries) and their ‘powerful’ presence in the images of the conquest. It offers the reader a new insight into the techniques and use of colour in Andean colonial painting. A material history of color in Andean workshops (the ‘making’), leads the reader to the exchange of ideas between different parties such as painters, pharamacists, physicians, alchemists, etc. (the ‘knowledge’), and then to the symbolic and powerful dimension of these coloured powders as found in the sacred and political messages projected by the images (the ‘power’). Starting with an analysis of the images and the concept of representation during the process of evangelisation/domination, the author describes the discursive and iconographic strategies used by different parties to achieve several goals through the use of colour. The book’s main hypothesis is that colors were silent protagonists of the Andean ritual system, a fact that was identified only by certain ‘idol exterminators’ who tried to ‘rebrand’ them by giving them a Christian meaning. This is the English language edition of El Poder de los Colores by Gabriela Siracusano, published by Fondo de Cultura Economica, Buenos Aires 2005.

Introduction

Grinding and mixing subtle elements

With artful brush & learned quill: colour & counsel in Spanish manuals

Newly identified materials: matter as document

The mixing of experience

Mechanical and servile arts in Spain and Andean America: colour in the workshop

The production and organisation of mechanical learning

Dyes, colours and urban spaces

The defence of noble painting, a marvel of understanding

The Andean painter's trade

Engravings and brushes

Saturn and Mercury in the workshop: hermetic and practical learning

Colours and Andean science: A?lvaro Alonso Barba and Arte de los metales

Chemistry, mineralogy and alchemy in the use of pigments: recipes for transmutation or colouring?

Subterranean treasures: Potosi in the imaginary

Secrets between Spain and Andean America: circulation and appropriation

Coming back to the workshop

Good medicines of all colours: healing and painting in Andean America

Colours at the apothecary's shop

They do consume malice, correct the humoures: chromatic pharmacopoeia in the ancient lands of the Inca

Colours between bodies, souls and Andean sacralities

The spectrum in practices and representations of power in the Andes

Between the indeterminate and the perfect: the rainbow and healing by colours

The power of healing images

Representations, colours and powers of the sacred

Are these not guacas too, like to oure owne? The problem of representation in the Andes

The power of absence

The visible and the invisible through the eyes of body and soul

Sermons, images and colour: loci of memory

Colours in the extirpation of idolatries: colour - substance or accident?

Coloured powders as bearers of sacred power

Preparing colours for the celestial workshop: disegno, simulacrum and colour

Marshalling the powers of colour: mixtures most divine

Bibliography,

Introduction

Grinding and mixing subtle elements

With artful brush & learned quill: colour & counsel in Spanish manuals

Newly identified materials: matter as document

The mixing of experience

Mechanical and servile arts in Spain and Andean America: colour in the workshop

The production and organisation of mechanical learning

Dyes, colours and urban spaces

The defence of noble painting, a marvel of understanding

The Andean painter's trade

Engravings and brushes

Saturn and Mercury in the workshop: hermetic and practical learning

Colours and Andean science: Ã?lvaro Alonso Barba and Arte de los metales

Chemistry, mineralogy and alchemy in the use of pigments: recipes for transmutation or colouring?

Subterranean treasures: Potosí in the imaginary

Secrets between Spain and Andean America: circulation and appropriation

Coming back to the workshop

Good medicines of all colours: healing and painting in Andean America

Colours at the apothecary's shop

They do consume malice, correct the humoures: chromatic pharmacopoeia in the ancient lands of the Inca

Colours between bodies, souls and Andean sacralities

The spectrum in practices and representations of power in the Andes

Between the indeterminate and the perfect: the rainbow and healing by colours

The power of healing images

Representations, colours and powers of the sacred

Are these not guacas too, like to oure owne? The problem of representation in the Andes

The power of absence

The visible and the invisible through the eyes of body and soul

Sermons, images and colour: loci of memory

Colours in the extirpation of idolatries: colour – substance or accident?

Coloured powders as bearers of sacred power

Preparing colours for the celestial workshop: disegno, simulacrum and colour

Marshalling the powers of colour: mixtures most divine

Bibliography

• By (author) Gabriela Siracusano