Staff of Office

1800-1825

Name(s) currently unknown

Denver, CO, USA, Denver Art Museum (current location)

This wooden staff, with its silver handle and cross, was used in an indigenous community in the Andean highlands. The shaft has also been covered in bands of pounded and incised silver, which would have caught the light when displayed in ceremonies.

While the general form of these staffs was similar, owners could personalize theirs, as this one shows. A cross, covered with hatch marks, has been incised in the handle of the staff. Another small silver cross, hanging from the top of the staff, was attached to the staff via a woven silver wire. The repeated crosses suggest that political authority also involved expression of religious faith. Silver bands are often incised with floral and leaf patterns, as is this one. In other examples initials of owners appear. The pointed end of the staff, made of harder metal than the silver adornments above, had a practical role, allowing the staff to be planted in the ground.

The staff has a wooden shaft, surrounded by silver bands and covered, at its bottom, in a hard metal. The crosses have been suspended from a crisscross of silver wire. The staff measures 93 cm in length (ca. 36.5 inches, or just over 3 feet).

Today this staff is in the Denver Art Museum. Its history is largely unknown, although similar staffs are still in use by indigenous people living in the highlands of the Andes. This one, too, likely comes from a highland community, perhaps in Bolivia or Peru.

In ceremonies and rituals, staffs such as this one could be wielded by indigenous leaders, passed onto those who succeed them, used by confraternities in public dances on feast days, and offered as gifts to sacred spirits. Every staffs had distinct meanings for its owners, yet as a group these objects evoke both local political authority and the connections a community sought to maintain with the sacred.

Reproduced courtesy of the Denver Art Museum. Estate of Leon H. Snyder

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

Phipps, Elena, Johanna Hecht and Cristina Esteras Martín, eds. 2004. The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530-1830. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.