The Mobile Image
Prints and the Shaping of Devotional Networks from Lima to the Andes and Beyond
A study of the production and movement of prints in colonial South America.
Printed images have had a central place in art-historical studies of colonial Spanish America, but scholars have typically focused on imported prints, designed and produced in Europe. The Mobile Image focuses instead on works printed in colonial Lima, generating there a distinctive print culture that served local and regional needs, while also appealing to European print consumers.
Inexpensive, easily transportable, and numerous, Lima’s prints traversed the varied geographies of the Viceroyalty of Peru both as loose sheets and within the protective covers of printed books. In the process, limeño devotional prints encouraged the development of shared regional imaginaries about the sacred Andean landscape, a space marked by miracle-working Virgins, potential saints, and powerful images of Christ. These same prints traveled abroad, where they promoted iconographies developed in Lima and influenced European conceptions of the Andes. Simultaneously, the visual language of limeño prints often challenges conventional approaches to interpreting colonial depictions of race. In analyzing limeño prints, and the identities of their makers, patrons, and consumers, The Mobile Image demonstrates that race is harder to recognize in colonial images than we might think. Unearthing hundreds of forgotten prints, Emily C. Floyd provides a fresh resource for interpreting colonial artworks, troubling established understandings of their aesthetics, and compelling us to reexamine colonial South American material cultures.
The Mobile Image is rich, as few books are, with never-before-published objects and notable archival details. Emily Floyd marshals this impressive apparatus to explore the singular status of colonial Lima: the only city in Spanish South America with functioning roller presses for the production of prints. These machines were positioned within networks of production and consumption that rendered Lima a node within overlapping networks that spanned the geographies of the Americas and, indeed, the world. This book stands as its own contribution just as importantly as it will act as a seminal resource (for the appendix alone!) in future studies.
Emily Floyd´s book on Peruvian prints offers a rich history focused on artists, patrons, and consumers. Highly sensitive to the way geography, a sense of place, and distance inflected art and image circulation in the colonial world, the author invites thinking anew about difficult themes, including racialization and how it affected colonial art making. Commendable for its thorough archival and field research, Floyd´s important new narrative offers fresh material for an understudied field; as a model study for how prints should be approached in general, it will have an impact well beyond the history of Peruvian viceregal art.
Emily C. Floyd is a lecturer of Visual Culture and Art before 1700 in the History of Art Department at University College London. She is also an editor and curator at the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR) at Yale University.
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Colonial Prints in Context
- 1. Between the Local and the Global: Virgins of Candelaria in the Andes
- 2. Paper Saints: Prints and the Promotion of the Local Holy Dead
- 3. Brotherhoods of Paper: Lay Religious Confraternities and Regional Sacred Geographies
- 4. Race, Representation, and Limeño Printmaking
- Conclusion
- Appendix: Engravers Active in Colonial Lima and Their Oeuvres
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
