The Utility of George Kubler in Andahuaylillas, Peru
Returning in 1966 to his “On the Colonial Extinction of
the Motifs of Pre-Columbian Art” of 1961,1 George Kubler
noted, “I thought that American antiquity was ‘extinct
beyond recall.’ I still believe this.”2 This idea, laid out at
length in the earlier essay, has for many years been criticized
as ignoring the material evidence that Indigenous forms
were still deployed in the colonial period. The rapid growth
of the discipline of colonial Latin American art history in
anglophone circles during the 1980s and 1990s followed or
coincided with turns to social history and to feminist,
material/visual-culture, and postcolonial approaches.
These focused on recovering voices lost to the violence of
regimes of power, thereby rectifying (art) historical silences.
Kubler’s essay—which seems to insist upon “extinction,”
even in its title—was thus bound to be contested.
It is easy to look back on Kubler as remarkably un-
prescient, out of step with the field’s later trajectory. But
in fact, he saw the road that lay ahead. Indeed, in 1966,
when Kubler reiterated a belief in extinction, he actually
noted that it was “with an added reservation that like an
equally extinct Greco-Roman antiquity, the deep Ameri-
can past remains tangible enough to excite a prolonged
and even interminable speculation on its recovery.” This
“speculation” indexed the artistic power of objects, under-
scoring the still “affective value of the ancient remains
themselves.”3
1. George Kubler, “On the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-
Columbian Art,” in Essays in Pre-Columbian Art and Archeology, ed.
Samuel K. Lothrop et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1961), 14–34. This was reprinted under the same title in Studies in
Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George
Kubler, ed. Thomas F. Reese, Yale Publications in the History of Art 30
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 66–74. In this essay, the
page number of the original is followed by that of the reprinted essay, in
the format (14/66).
2. George Kubler, “Indianism, Mestizaje, and Indigenismo as Classical,
Medieval, and Modern Traditions in Pre-Columbian Art,” in Studies in
Ancient American and European Art: The Collected Essays of George Kubler,
ed. Thomas F. Reese (1966; repr. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1985), 75–80, particularly 78.
3. Kubler, “Indianism, Mestizaje, and Indigenismo,” 78.
Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Vol. 2, Number 4, pp. 79–83. Electronic ISSN: 2576-0947. © 2020 by The Regents of the University of
California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s
Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2020.2.4.79.
In mobilizing the theme of extinction while categoriz-
ing various types of colonial survival—and later raising
the possibility of recovery—Kubler seems to create a fun-
damental contradiction. That is, he speaks of extinction
even as he presents a bewildering preponderance of evi-
dence of Indigenous persistence—from the nearly faithful
copy of a preconquest object in the Codex Borbonicus to
the “colonial expansion of Pre-Columbian themes” in the
keros of the Andean highlands (2 6 /7 0 ). If pre-
Columbian forms were so evidently extant, in what sense
could they be considered extinct? Kubler’s invocation of
a supposedly “equally extinct Greco-Roman antiquity”
helps reconcile his thesis with the materials he lays out;
for while the societies of the Antique world had been so
fundamentally transformed as to be unrecognizable, their
motifs—and, so too, knowledge about their meanings—
remained available for centuries of appropriation and
redeployment. The same holds, Kubler implies, for pre-
Columbian symbolic systems, so interrupted and reconfi-
gured by “the Conquest.”
This is all to say: Kubler was not claiming that no pre-
Columbian “motifs” survived, nor that the meaning
attached to them was somehow instantaneously lost. Even
in their persistence, however, he saw troubling disruption,
even destruction, at the hands of colonial powers. By in-
sisting upon extinction, Kubler stressed colonial violence.
In the opening paragraphs, we read of the “extirpation of
native observances by religious authorities” (14/66), the
“expressions of native origin . . . suppressed by the colonial
authorities” (15/66), and the “division of colonial society
[into] exploiting and exploited groups” (15/67). Seeking an
affective narration of decimation, Kubler adopted the lan-
guage of the corpse. The essay promises an examination of
the “occasions when Pre-Columbian themes continued in
the artistic utterance of the peoples of Latin America;” but
lest the reader be moved to relief, Kubler reminds that
“these utterances were like death cries” (14/66). He points
to eschatology, the end of things, the destruction of one
culture by another.
79
 Kubler points out that these themes were at odds
with what he had been asked to write about, noting
that the editors “originally requested an article on ‘the
survival of native art motifs into the Colonial Period’”
(14/66). His essay emerged as a corrective to overly
optimistic modes of analysis, as if so much colonial
violence could be swept away by simply focusing hard-
er—and on survival rather than destruction. And he
thus pointed to a need to look at processes of colonial
production that utilized, if fundamentally destabilized,
Indigenous traditions and motifs. Here we argue that
this corrective is still critical—and in fact, more so than
ever before—given the field’s increasingly dramatic turn
from postcolonial approaches toward decolonial perspec-
tives about Indigenous recovery. Ananda Cohen-Aponte
recently and trenchantly articulated the potential pitfall:
“Artificially conferring equal footing to indigenous,
mixed-race or black artists with respect to their Euro-
pean counterparts in an effort to grant them agency in
the artistic arena inevitably does just the opposite; it
distorts the historical record by interpreting coercion
as choice and hybridity as a peaceful convergence of
visual systems.”4 If now unfashionable as an analytic
approach, Kubler’s taxonomic system of cataloging
Indigenous traces and presences in colonial visual culture
was in line with this sentiment; for these categorizations
demanded precision in handling forms of colonial co-
optation and oppression.
The mural cycle in the church of San Pedro Apóstol
in Andahuaylillas, Peru, along with some of its varying
interpretations, point to the need to recalibrate expecta-
tions about and approaches to recuperating Indigenous
ontologies within colonial visual regimes. The cycle is
one of the most studied in the highland Andes, in no
small part because of the unusual abundance of infor-
mation about both the church and the parish priest,
Juan Pérez Bocanegra (1598–1645), who most likely
oversaw the creation of the original seventeenth-
century frescoes. Possessing an uncommon facility with
Quechua and Aymara, Bocanegra authored the 1631
Ritual formulario, a Spanish-Quechua sacramental man-
ual to aid priests in the conversion of Indigenous com-
munities. Because of this, and because the criollo artist
responsible for the murals, Luis de Riaño (1596–1667),
4. Ananda Cohen-Aponte, “Decolonizing the Global Renaissance: A
View from the Andes,” in The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical
Review, ed. Daniel Savoy (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 67–94, here 72.
80 L AT I N A M E R I C A N A N D L AT I N X V I S U A L C U LT U R E
is thought to have worked primarily with Indigenous
assistants, scholars have searched the frescoes for surviv-
ing pre-Columbian motifs.
The choir loft program (fig. 1) has been the object of
particular scrutiny and interpretation along these lines.
Sabine MacCormack was the first to venture such an
account, one that took cues from anthropologically in-
flected colonial history and art history in the mid-1980s.5
The depiction of the Annunciation seems simple enough
at first glance—the Virgin Mary and Gabriel placed on
either side of a large oculus. But the scene is reconfigured
by text, with the window surrounded by seven lettered
roundels reading: “SA[PIE]N[TIA], ADONAI, RADIX,
EMMANVEL, CLAVIS, REX, ORIENS.” These, Mac-
Cormack posits, refer to the Christian Trinity: the text
inside the oculus, which she reads as “CONCEPIT” (“she
conceived”), refers to “the Holy Ghost by whom Mary
conceived;” “ADONAI” points to the Creator, God the
Father; and Jesus is invoked as “EMMANUEL” and
“ORIENS” (114).
But MacCormack pushes the mural to reveal an An-
dean spatial logic and cosmology in line with precolonial
artistic production. She first claims that the positioning of
the angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary created a gendered
spatial divide mirroring that of colonial Catholic liturgies,
during which men and women were separated on either
side of the nave’s central aisle. But what was more impor-
tant, MacCormack suggests, was that this aligned with an
Indigenous ordering of space in which “the upper moiety
of each community [was perceived] as right, or male, and
the lower moiety as left, or female” (116). To make this
point, MacCormack draws on the colonial writings of
Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1534–c. 1615) and his
reports of preconquest traditions. Yet she links this
arrangement not just to broad Andean spatial categories
but specifically to a 1613 drawing by Joan de Santacruz
Pachacuti Yamqui of the golden “altar” in the Corican-
cha, the Inca Temple of the Sun at Cuzco. As the “altar”
was melted down by the Spanish soon after conquest,
Pachacuti Yamqui’s drawing is a seventeenth-century rec-
ollection of the preconquest world at nearly a century’s
5. Sabine MacCormack, “Art in a Missionary Context: Images from
Europe and the Andes in the Church of Andahuaylillas near Cuzco,” in
The Word Made Image: Religion, Art, and Architecture in Spain and
Spanish America, 1500–1600 (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum,
1998), 103–26.
FIGURE 1. Luis de Riaño (attrib.), The Annunciation, choir loft mural, c. 1626, fresco, church of San Pedro Apóstol,
Andahuaylillas, Peru (photo by Diego Pumacallao).
distance.6 And yet MacCormack argues for a clear parallel
between the drawing’s parts and
the distribution of components on the west wall of
the choir loft of the church of Andahuaylillas.
Pachacuti Yamqui’s man and woman are in the space
corresponding to that in the choir loft occupied by the
angel and Mary, respectively. The oval disk
representing the creator Viracocha, Ticsicapac, or
Tunupa which was ‘like the rays of the resurrection of
Jesus,’ matches the skylight with its inscription and
seven medallions referring to the three persons of the
Trinity (118).
This reading of the choir loft mural has gone oddly
unchallenged despite resting upon idiosyncratic visual and
textual interpretation. For instance, the gendered divide
attributed to the Annunciation fresco squares poorly with
Catholic theological tenets that long viewed angels, includ-
ing Gabriel, as incorporeal spiritual beings lacking gender.7
6. See Pierre Duviols, “‘Punchao’, ı́dolo mayor del Coricancha. His-
toria y tipologı́a,” Antropologı́a Andina 1–2 (1976): 156–83.
7. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia.50.1–2.
Seeing the oculus in line with an oval disc representing
Viracocha in Yamqui’s drawing of the Coricancha “altar,”
MacCormack concludes that the choir loft mural speaks
“with more than one voice,” and implies that she has recov-
ered an Andean whisper within the Catholic picture. But to
do so she must notably contradict her own reading of the
window: early on she identifies it with the Holy Spirit
(114), but now she points to an equivalence between this
Andean Creator and God the Father.
Furthermore, MacCormack’s interpretation, like those
that have come both before and after, originates in a mis-
understanding of the highly atypical roundels themselves.8
They do not make generic allusions to the Trinity—
a reading that, in any event, would only account for three
of the seven—but are rather very precise references to
Christ drawn from the Catholic liturgy. Each invokes one
8. See MacCormack, “Art in a Missionary Context,” 114; Jorge A.
Flores Ochoa, Elizabeth Kuon Arce, and Roberto Samanez Argumedo,
Pintura mural en el sur andino (Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú, 1993),
113–16; Ananda Cohen Suarez, Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between:
Murals of the Colonial Andes (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016),
57–58.
Dialogues 81
of Christ’s messianic titles, and together they comprise the
initial words of the “O Antiphons.”9 These are traditionally
sung or recited at vespers, one per day, from the seventeenth
to the twenty-third of December.10 These antiphons both
reflect and create mounting liturgical anticipation for
Christmas, Christ’s birth, the event fulfilling both Gabriel’s
Annunciation and the Incarnation via the working of the
Holy Spirit. In the painted scene, the sunlight streaming
through the oculus is made to play the role of the Holy
Spirit by which Mary conceives her son.
Preconquest highland religions heralded the sun as
a revered deity, the creator and life force. This was widely
understood by colonial officials and even became a topic of
linguistic debate amongst missionaries.11 Ironically then,
there is a clear survival of Indigenous systems of belief or
thought in the choir loft at Andahuaylillas, but not in the
form of an autonomous expression hiding in the Catholic
picture. Rather, the Indigenous element of the sun has been
knowingly and insidiously seized for the rhetoric of the
Church and thus of the colonial enterprise. The identifi-
cation of the Holy Spirit with the oculus void reconfigures
the Andean “idol” of sunlight as the Christian God. Sur-
rounding the oculus with seven incantations of Christ re-
frames both literally and conceptually the Indigenous
“idol” as the incarnational Christian presence. Bocanegra
was particularly sensitive to taking hold of such resonances
between the natural elements of the Andean pantheon and
Christian devotion; in his Ritual formulario, he even com-
pares the Pleiades star formation to the Virgin Mary.12 The
choir loft mural at Andahuaylillas thus could be read as
a clear case of a colonial religious regime using a preconquest
element for its own aims and within its own frameworks—
what Kubler calls a “transplant.”
Of course, in 1961 few were considering the role of the
nonvisible, the material, or the metaphysical within Indig-
enous epistemologies. But Kubler’s schematization of
9. These are sometimes also called the “Great Antiphons”; see J. Allen
Cabaniss, “A Note on the Date of the Great Advent Antiphons,” Speculum
22, no. 3 (1947): 440–42.
10. The order at Andahuaylillas has been changed to give priority to
“Emmanuel” or “God is with us,” the title referring to Christ in Matthew
1:23. The prescribed order is: Sapientia, Adonai, Radix, Clavis, Oriens, Rex,
Emmanuel.
11. A 1594 Jesuit text explains that the Quechua Illa Tecce translates as
divine light, equivalent of El in Hebrew, Ela in Syriac, and Deus in Latin.
See Alan Durston, Pastoral Quechua: The History of Christian Translation
in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 2007), 142–45.
12. Bocanegra, Ritual Formulario, 708–9.
82 L AT I N A M E R I C A N A N D L AT I N X V I S U A L C U LT U R E
colonial appropriations of pre-Columbian motifs and
forms suggests that if he had been able to think beyond
the motif, or the work of art as a purely symbolic expres-
sion, then he would have seen this as an act of co-
optation, if also one of colonial negotiation. So too, now,
can we; but seeing it at all requires coming to terms with
the ecclesiastical milieu and the symbolic systems in which
colonial actors operated. Kubler’s essay actually primes us
to take stock of such dynamics of power vis-à-vis the
visual culture that comes down to us. Colonial regimes
make space, Kubler contends, for that which they see fit
to exploit. He conceived of that in terms of use-value.
“Only the practical or useful items were eagerly adopted”
(15/67), he writes, and he underscores the point by weav-
ing words like use, utility, useful, and utilitarian through-
out the essay.
That insistence upon utility also makes Kubler’s essay
productive for assessing newer, but related, directions in the
field of colonial Latin American art history. If the effort to
find Indigenous persistence, and with it resistance, has been
motivated by a desire to see agency within colonialism
rather than to parse the top-down implementation of
power, the same can be said of the impulses behind more
recent attempts to uncover moments of local autonomy,
whether Indigenous or not. That is, the field has moved
ever more emphatically to resurface voices speaking in their
own interest, rather than strictly in accord with the hege-
monic structures of empire. But Kubler’s correlation of
power and “use-value” points to the importance of keeping
imperial frames fully in view while doing so.
Andahuaylillas again serves as a potent example. A
recent restoration of the church required the removal of
enormous, gilt-framed canvases depicting the life of Saint
Peter that line the upper portions of the nave’s walls.
Cuzco’s bishop, Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo (1626–
99), commissioned these large oil paintings after visiting
the church in 1687.13 One canvas was not reinstalled after
restoration, leaving exposed several textual roundels from
the original mural program.14 Recently, Ananda Cohen-
Aponte has argued that two of the roundels effectively
13. Pedro Guibovich Pérez and Luis Eduardo Wuffarden, Sociedad y
gobierno episcopal: las visitas del obispo Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo,
1674–1687 (Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos, 2008),
145–46.
14. See “Andahuaylillas ‘Signature’ of Juan Pérez Bocanegra,” Center
for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR),
Yale University, accessed May 20, 2020, https://mavcor.yale.edu/material-
objects/giga-project/andahuaylillas-signature-juan-p-rez-bocanegra-zoom.
constitute the signature of the parish priest Bocanegra.
One roundel reads “EDIFI” when scanned from bottom
to top, while another reads “BOCA” when read from top
to bottom. Cohen-Aponte takes these together to say
“edificó Boca,” or “Boca[negra] built [this].”15 This inter-
pretation would help settle a stubborn scholarly debate,
namely whether Bocanegra was primarily responsible for
Andahuaylillas’s mural program, or whether there was
Jesuit input.16
Yet this accounting also rests upon isolating a fragment
of the mural’s lexical program. Indeed, though covered or
partially obscured by later additions, small textual round-
els are spaced at intervals all along the walls of the nave.
Reading them in sequence and in a consistent orienta-
tion—from bottom to top—they compose the Latin text
of Matthew 1 6 :1 8 . “EDIFI” “BOCA” becomes
“[A]EDIFICABO,” “I will build,” Christ’s declaration
to Saint Peter: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will
build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail
against it.”17 Such doctrinal frameworks do not necessarily
preclude wordplay of the sort Cohen-Aponte describes,
but drawing the focus narrowly on the local has conse-
quences for interpretation. What, in Kubler’s language,
would be the colonial use-value? It is notable that the
larger Latin text has never factored into analyses of this
church, given that the biblical verse points directly to the
church’s patron saint, Peter, and that this passage figured
centrally in Catholic-Protestant debates over papal
supremacy and apostolic succession. Indeed, on its walls
and into the rafters, Andahuaylillas is awash with the
papal insignia of tiaras and crossed keys. Together, textual
and visual elements link the small village congregation to
their celestial patron, Saint Peter, and thus to the Pope,
his direct successor and the figure of greatest ecclesiastical
power across an ocean. Indeed, one imagines that Boca-
negra—as an early modern priest and theologian—took
a quite active interest in such matters, however global, or
imperial, they might be.
15. Cohen Suarez, Heaven, Hell, 62–64.
16. Some accounts claim the Jesuits had control from 1628 to 1636;
see, for instance, Regina Harrison, “Pérez Bocanegra’s Ritual Formulario:
Khipu Knots and Confession,” in Narrative Threads: Accounting and Re-
counting in Andean Khipu, ed. Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2002). However, more recent review of the
documents suggests the Jesuits never ousted Bocanegra; see Durston, Pas-
toral Quechua, 155.
17. Some of the roundels containing the following text were visible
during recent restoration: “Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo
ecclesiam meam et portae inferi non praevalebunt adversum eam.”
There is more at stake in the examples we have chosen
than merely setting the record straight. Andahuaylillas
points to the particular directions the field has taken that
have now made Kubler’s views in the 1960s look so wrong-
headed. The “Colonial Extinction” essay centers on the
notion that what was useful to colonial aims was retained
and repurposed. In this, Kubler points to a potential trap in
the interpretation of colonial visual culture: without fully
interrogating the ecclesiastical and liturgical contexts in
which colonial actors maneuvered, we risk finding Indige-
nous resistance where there was in fact symbolic co-
optation and coercion. Likewise, in the drive to recover
and emphasize signs of local agency, we can overlook
important aims of the colonial project—in this case, in-
scribing the residents of a highland reducción into a global
Church keen to emphasize the primacy of its own leader
and the universality of his claims. To not hold that balance
is to dull rather than sharpen our understanding of the
shifting colonial contexts in which period actors (Indige-
nous and not) were forced to try to leave their mark.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors wish to thank Emily Floyd, Dana Leibsohn,
Lisa Regan, and—of course, most of all—Barbara Mundy
for their generous reading of this piece, which was greatly
improved by their insights.
Aaron M. Hyman
Timothy W. O’Brien, S.J.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Aaron M. Hyman is assistant professor of the History
of Art at Johns Hopkins University. His first book,
forthcoming in 2021 with the Getty Research Institute,
treats colonial Latin American artists’ broad use of
European prints—particularly those designed by Peter
Paul Rubens.
Timothy W. O’Brien, S.J., is a doctoral student in
History at Johns Hopkins University. He studies the
religious culture of the early modern Iberian world.
Dialogues 83