Converging cultures in viceregal Peru

Magazine Antiques, April, 1996 by Kevin Stayton

At its founding in 1542, the viceroyalty of Peru encompassed modern Peru, as well as present-day Ecuador and Bolivia, and the northern parts of Chile and Argentina. The Spanish took advantage of the sophisticated network of Incan roads and revived the feudal system of the mita, a form of labor tribute, to extract the mineral wealth of the Andes, particularly the great lode of silver discovered in 1545 in Potosi (in present-day Bolivia).

Long before the founding of European colonies on the Atlantic coast of North America, a highly developed society existed in viceregal Peru. A university opened in 1551 in the newly founded Spanish capital at Lima, while in 1559 work began on the cathedral in Cuzco, the ancient Incan capital in the highlands of Peru, using the sacred sand of the Incan plaza as the building material. Thus, from roads to buildings, colonial society was built on the very foundations of the past.

The public display of wealth among the colonists was as important in Peru as elsewhere, at least among the elite, who maintained close ties to Europe. The lace-trimmed silk dress depicted in the painting shown in Plate VII bespeaks the desire of the wearer, Dona Mariana Belsunse y Salasar, to follow the fashion of the international elite, while her abundant jewelry reflects her wealth. J. J. von Tschudi, a nineteenth-century visitor, commenting on this love of display, wrote:

To this passion for personal adornment they sacrifice everything. Formerly, when none but real pearls and diamonds were worn, many a lady was known to have ruined her husband by the purchase of these costly articles.(1)

Dona Mariana ruined her husband in quite a different way. When her guardian forced her to marry a rich, old count, she demanded a year before consummating the marriage. However, before the year was over she fled to a convent and refused to emerge. The scandal provoked not just public interest but a flurry of ribald rhymes questioning the counts virility. A contemporary commentator noted that

when copies of these verses circulated, the injured party was so irritated that he expended great efforts to prove to his detractors that he was still a man capable of burning incense at the altars of Venus, so he threw himself into a life of vice....This state of disorder sped him to his grave....Mariana Belsunse then left the cloister, a virgin and a widow, young, beautiful, rich, and independent.(2)

An early eighteenth-century visitor, Amedee Francois Frazier, commented that with the exception of the palatial residences of Lima, "the housing of the Spaniards in Peru bears no comparison with the magnificence of their clothes."(3) Frazier goes on to describe houses only one story high that were configured as follows:

The first room is a large hall about nineteen feet wide and thirty to forty feet long, from which one enters two or three rooms in succession: the first is the show room with the dais....The dais is covered with a carpet and squares of velvet for the women to sit on. The chairs for men are covered with leather stamped in half-relief [ILLUSTRATION FOR Pl. VI OMITTED].(4)

The dais (estrado) was a feature of many Peruvian houses, adopted from Moorish Spain. This was where the women of the house dined while the men dined separately, seated in chairs at a table. A French writer visiting Spain wrote that she was led

into a hall...set round with cushions. Cloth was laid there upon the table for the men, but upon a carpet on the floor it was laid for Donna Theresa, myself and my daughter. I was surprised at this fashion, not having been used to dine in this manner.(5)

In viceregal Peru the dais was sparsely furnished, but by the mid-eighteenth century it might have had a sofa and a low table called a mesa ratona (mouse table) at which to drink mate, a South American tea sipped communally through a straw from a silver-mounted gourd. A portable escritorio (writing cabinet) such as the one shown in Plate X might also have found a place on the dais. The splendid inlay on this cabinet imitates marquetry in a technique that flourished in the Jesuit-dominated Moxos region of Bolivia. The decoration incorporates representations of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden as well as contemporary hunting scenes. These cabinets were not limited to use by the Spanish colonists. The native elite also responded to the importance of writing, a form of communication unknown before the arrival of the Spanish, and writing cabinets begin to appear in their wills in the late seventeenth century. In 1681, for example, Don Sebastian Yaputa bequeathed to his son a locked box, most likely an escritorio, "so that he keep in it the records of collection of royal tribute."(6)

The coca box has stronger ties to native customs. After the Spanish Conquest coca was transformed from a ritual substance limited to the ruling class into a product available to anyone who could pay for it. Coca did not lose its ceremonial associations for the native population, however, and on the box shown in Plate V the double-headed eagle of the Hapsburgs is combined with the images of two men drinking from kero cups to reflect the value of the contents of the box. Before the Spanish conquest keros (see Pls. II, IV) were used in pairs for drinking chicha (maize beer). During the colonial period their geometric decoration was replaced by narrative pictorial scenes in the European tradition.