The subject of this book is the relationship between three- and two-dimensional divine images—that is, religious statues and paintings—in the colonial central Andes. It focuses as case studies on three statues of Christ and the Virgin and the representations of those statues in paintings: the Virgin of the Rosary in Pomata, the Virgin of the Purification in Copacabana, and the Lord of the Earthquakes in Cuzco. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi shows that statues were privileged conduits to the divine, at times verging on autonomous deities in their own right, while paintings documented and amplified those statues' power. In the end, it was the statue, not the painting, that granted worshippers' prayers and protected their communities.
While the author's discipline is art history and the book includes some formal analysis, it focuses especially on the cultural history of religion, both elite and popular. Communities did not select their Christs or Virgins by chance....
