Muisca cloth and image in early New Granada

Abstract

The Virgen de Chiquinquirá, the most important religious image of Colombia, is a painting of the Virgin of the Rosary flanked by Saints Anthony and Andrew (fig. 1). It was painted by a Spaniard in the town of Tunja, Boyacá, in the Eastern Cordillera, in the mid1500s. Only a few years after its execution, the image became the focus of a devoted cult. Since then, the Virgen de Chiquinquirá has played a role in the Colombian imaginary similar to that of other Marian images throughout the continent: it is reputed to have cured the sick in times of pestilence and has served as the Patroness of Colombia since the country’s independence (Arizmendi Posada 1986). The image, however, is almost unknown to both scholars and Catholic devotees outside of the country, and consequently studies of it tend to have a rather narrow and regional focus. In the interest of opening the field of inquiry of colonial New Granada (Nuevo Reino de Granada) outside national borders, the following analysis aims to situate the Virgen de Chiquinquirá within the wider context of indigenous and colonial South America by attending primarily to methodological concerns. I focus on the material and formal qualities of the object and image, which will be analyzed through recent approaches from the social sciences, namely new materialism and perspectivism. New materialism (Joyce 2015) seeks to retrieve the agency of objects by analyzing how their material, formal, and technical characteristics shape the way in which humans interact with them. In this perspective, new materialism questions the dichotomy between object and subject, nature and culture, and highlights interdependence and relationality in the creation of meaning. Perspectivism, derived from Amazonian anthropology, is closely related to the paradigmatic and epistemological changes invoked by new materialism, but based on direct ethnographic experience (Viveiros de Castro 1998). Perspectivism posits that for Amazonian people, bodies as matter are unstable and easily change from one form to another, from animal to animal or from animal to plant. Consequently, the world can be experienced differently and in fact enhanced by one’s capacity to travel from one state to another. One’s point of view (hence the term “perspectivism”) shapes the way one relates to the world and acts upon it. Although perspectivism is a relatively new proposition in South American anthropology, it shares a basic tenet that has long been applied in Colombian anthropology, that of shamanism. Since the foundational work of Austrian émigré Gerhard Reichel-Dolmatoff, Colombian social scientists interested in the country’s civilizations have fruitfully applied concepts derived from the ethnography of the Amazonian lowlands to archaeology, which is mostly conducted in the highlands (Botero et al. 2003; Pineda Camacho 2003). Finally, new materialism and perspectivism find a counterpart in the so-called iconic turn in the field of visual studies, which calls for a renewed interest in images as objects and presence, rather than representations and semiotic translations of an external and/or linguistic content (Moxey 2008). Images and objects, by virtue of their long biographies, have a life and purpose that extend well beyond the initial intentions of their creators. Interpretation as a phenomenological experience does not seek to go beyond the exterior appearance of the object to the idea behind it, but rather relies on the surface of things as a palpable interface between the object and the viewer.