Virgin of the Mountain of Potosí

1740-1770

Name(s) currently unknown

La Paz, BOL, Casa de Murillo (current location)

In this devotional image from Bolivia, known today as the Virgin of the Mountain, the body of the Virgin Mary merges with the great silver-producing mountain of Potosí.

The top of the painting is dominated by the Holy Trinity, with Jesus at left, the Holy Spirit, symbolized by a shining dove, in center, and God the Father at right. They are blessing Mary as the Queen of Heaven. The painting encodes the discovery of silver by an Andean named Gualpa in 1545. At one point in the narrative, he argues with the local curaca about whether to reveal his finding to the Spaniards. The mountain scene is also filled with anecdotal scenes of daily life—miners climb the mountains, llamas graze. One earlier artist who painted this well-known Virgin, Francisco Tito Yupanqui, showed the Virgin floating above the hill. This later artist brings her down into earth. Potosí mineworkers believed the Virgin to be responsible for helping them during countless accidents that punctuated mine life. At the bottom of the painting, saints kneel beneath the Virgin and the figure at the far right may be the painting’s patron. Additionally, the text tells of the devotion of the Quiros family to Pope and King.

Many versions of this image are known. Although the name of the painter here has not been preserved, he was (almost certainly) one of the many working in the numerous painters’ workshops in wealthy 18th-century Potosí. The patron of this painting is probably the demure figure at the far lower right corner of the painting, a member of the Quiros family named in the text. These elites may have been giving thanks for the riches they accrued from the mines, for it was widely believed by Spaniards and Creoles that the mineral wealth God had bestowed on the New World was a sign of his support of their colony. Thus, the cruel economies of mining found religious justification.

The painting is oil on canvas. The elaborate frame would have been common on an 18th century painting; inventories sometimes record that the frame was worth more than the painting. Many versions of the Virgin of the Mountain were painted, often in thanksgiving for the riches the mountain had bestowed. The figures at the bottom would change according to the patron’s preference.

The original setting for this painting is not known. It is currently in the Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz, Bolivia.

Paintings like this one appealed to viewers in Potosí by showing the familiar landscape—the mountain that dominates the town—through a scrim of divine intercession. In short, paintings made otherworldly manifest in a very local world. The Virgin was a familiar subject. As a divine mother, she was the intercessor between people, seen below, and the Holy Trinity, above. Because a female deity named Pachamama was worshipped in the Andes before the conquest, some scholars see the Virgin of the Mountain as a conflation of Pachamama with Christianity. Yet virgins and mountains also have a long history in Spain (for instance, the Virgin of Montserrat). Images such as this Virgin were therefore indebted to trans-Atlantic patterns of Catholic religious devotion, even as their painting style and local meanings made them profoundly Andean works of religious expression.

Reproduced courtesy of the Museo Nacional de Arte, La Paz

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

Damien, Carol. 1995. The Virgin of the Andes: Art and Ritual in Colonial Cuzco. Miami Beach: Grassfield Press.

Gloria in Excelsis: The Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and Bolivia. 1986. New York: Center for Inter American Relations.

Querejazu, Pedro and Elizabeth Ferrer. 1997. Potosí: Colonial Treasures and the Bolivian City of Silver. New York: Americas Society Art Gallery.

Stanfield-Mazzi, Maya. 2013. Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Diving in the Colonial Andes. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.