Our Lady of Cocharcas under the Baladachin

1765

Name(s) currently unknown

Brooklyn, NY, USA, Brooklyn Museum of Art (current location)

This kind of “statue-painting” was frequently created in Spanish America as a way of allowing individual sculptures to circulate to a wide audience of believers. Created in Peru in the 18th century, this particular painting represents a statue of the Virgin held in the church of Cocharcas. It is distinctive because of the wealth of anecdotal narrative that surrounds the central statue.

In this painting, the statue of the Virgin is set under a baldachin, a canopy that Catholics set over particularly sacred objects. The statue and the baldachin rest on a platform, and here artist has inscribed the work “The Miraculous Image of Our Lady of Cocharcas, 1765.” To the right is the church of Cocharcas, where the statue of the Virgin would have been housed. The statue was itself a copy of another miracle-working statue, the Virgin of Copacabana, whose shrine, the most important shrine in the Andes, sits on the shores of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia. The painting is filled with small narratives calling for close viewing. For instance, to the left of the Virgin, on the winding road to Cocharcas, a pilgrim is pulled in the ravine by a small black devil and a black-and-white robed Dominican friar has tried to intercede.

The painting is unsigned but has often been attributed to the Cuzco School. In 1688, indigenous painters active in Cuzco withdrew from the official painter’s guild after Spanish and mestizo painters excluded them from participating in an important commission, a triumphal arch to celebrate Corpus Christi, complaining that Indians were belligerent drunks. While the Cuzco School was prolific in the 18th century, not every work attributed to the school was painted in Cuzco. The term is sometimes used simply to mean “folk” or “provincial” painting from the Andes.

The work is done in oil paint on canvas. The painting’s size, over 6 feet tall, suggests it may have been an important commission for a provincial church, where it would have hung in a side altar. Similar statue paintings were also created for private worship, but they tend to be much smaller.

This work is part of the Brooklyn Museum’s collection of colonial art from Latin America. It was probably originally created for an Andean church whose parishioners knew of, or perhaps were devotees of, the cult of the Virgin of Cocharcas.

The statue of the Virgin represented in this painting was first created in the late 16th century when Sebastián Quimichi, having been healed by the Virgin of Copacabana, brought back a replica of the statue to his hometown of Cocharcas. Here, the statue effected its own miracles, drawing pilgrims from across the Andes like a magnet. Since it was frequently native Andeans who made pilgrimages and native Andeans who received miracles, the creation of statues like this one provided indigenous people a means of shaping Christian practice and belief.

© Brooklyn Museum of Art

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Benavente Velarde, T. 1995. Pintores cusqueños de la colonia. Cuzco: Municipalidad del Qosqo.

Dean, Carolyn. 1996. “The Renewal of Old World Images and the Creation of Colonial Peruvian Visual Culture.” In Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America. Diana Fane, ed. Pp. 171-182. Brooklyn, New York: The Brooklyn Museum and Harry Abrams.

Sarro, Patricia J. 1996. “Our Lady of Cocharcas on the Altar” and “Our Lady of Cocharcas Under the Baldachin.” In Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America. Diana Fane, ed. Pp. 222-25. Brooklyn, New York: The Brooklyn Museum and Harry Abrams.