Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Washington, D.C.
This publication was made possible in part by a gift
from the estates of Milton L. and Muriel F. Shurr.
16 15 14 13 12 1 2 3 4 5
Past presented : archaeological illustration and the ancient Americas / Joanne Pillsbury, editor.
p. cm. — Dumbarton Oaks Pre-Columbian symposia and colloquia
Includes index.
isbn 978-0-88402-380-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Indians—Historiography—Pictorial works.
2. Indians—Antiquities—Pictorial works.
3. Archaeology—America—Pictorial works.
4. America—Antiquities—Pictorial works.
I. Pillsbury, Joanne.
e58.p27 2012
970.004'97—dc23
2011036487
Volume based on papers presented at the symposium “Past Presented: A Symposium on the History of
Archaeological Illustration,” held at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C.,
on October 9–10, 2009.
Jacket illustrations: front cover: Henry Warren, Broken Idol at Copan, from Frederick Catherwood, Views
of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, 1844. Back cover: Stela D, Copan, from
John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, 1841.
Frontispiece: Francisco Laso, Inhabitant of the Cordillera of Peru, 1855, oil on canvas, 135 × 86 cm, Pinacoteca
Municipal “Ignacio Merino,” Municipalidad Metropolitana de Lima, Lima.
www.doaks.org/publications
con t en ts
v ii
11 Printed Pictures of Maya Sculpture | 355
Bryan R. Just
c on t r i bu t or s | 471
i n de x | 477
v iii c on t e n ts
4
lisa trever
107
Figure 4.15
Significantly, Martínez Compañón’s images and charts stand alone, without an accom-
panying text, with the exception of the legends and extended descriptions (memorias) found
with some illustrations.8 Since Marcos Jiménez de la Espada (1883) announced the existence
of the chorographic work in the Biblioteca del Palacio Real in 1891, historians have searched
archives in hopes of discovering drafts of a manuscript presumed lost.9 But it is now clear
that Martínez Compañón did not plan to write such a text to narrate the watercolors.10
Rather, as historian Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois (1994, 1997) has masterfully demonstrated,
the collection of annotated drawings itself constituted the bishop’s history. As such, these
images serve as an important—although at times enigmatic—source for the early history
of archaeological investigations and illustration in the Americas.
Within Martínez Compañón’s ninth volume on antiquities—after meticulous plans of
archaeological sites that include the Chimú city of Chan Chan and its palaces (Figures 4.1–
Figure 4.1
4.2) and Huaca del Sol at Moche (Martínez Compañón 1781–1789:9:fol. 7) and before scores
Plan of the ancient Chimú
city of Chan Chan, from of drawings of textiles, ceramics, and other artifacts—there is a series of ten illustrations
Baltasar Jaime Martínez of burials discovered in the Trujillo area (e.g., Figures 4.3–4.4), which are the focus of this
Compañón, Trujillo del chapter. In an article in American Antiquity, archaeologist Richard Schaedel (1949) lauded
Perú, 1781–1789, vol. 9,
Martínez Compañón as the “founder of Peruvian archaeology,” amplifying the earlier
fol. 5, Biblioteca del
Palacio Real, Madrid. praise of Philip Ainsworth Means (1970 [1942]:67), who had dubbed the bishop the “grand-
© Patrimonio Nacional. father of Peruvian archaeology.” Of the burial illustrations in particular, Schaedel (1949:162)
10 8 t reve r
writes, “with the exception of the data on the general orientation of the tombs, there is little Figure 4.2
that modern archaeology could add to [the bishop’s] illustrations.” Other scholars have Plan of a palace of Chan Chan,
judged the bishop’s archaeological images similarly, reading their contents as precise and formerly known as Ciudadela
Rivero (Alcina Franch 1995:187)
objective, as if the drawings were equivalent to modern archaeological documentation (e.g., and recently renamed Conjunto
Ballesteros Gaibrois 1935:172n1; Cabello Carro 2003a, 2003b, 2003c). Amurallado “Chol An” by
But although Martínez Compañón’s archaeological images do seem ahead of their time, the Peruvian government,
from Baltasar Jaime Martínez
it is clear that these drawings are not commensurate with twentieth-century archaeological
Compañón, Trujillo del Perú,
illustration (Figure 4.5). They do not record the dead precisely as they would have been seen 1781–1789, vol. 9, fol. 6, Biblioteca
when their tombs were opened in the late eighteenth century: as skeletons or mummies that del Palacio Real, Madrid.
had suffered the ravages of time and interment. Instead, the dead are depicted as perfectly © Patrimonio Nacional.
preserved and lifelike, as if not deceased but perhaps just sleeping. Even in the bishop’s
illustration of a wrapped mummy (see Figure 4.3), which otherwise resembles seventeenth-
century illustrations of Egyptian mummies in Adam Olearius’s Gottorfische Kunst-Kammer
(1674; Figure 4.6) or Athanasius Kircher’s Sphinx mystagoga (1676:6), fleshy toes peek out
from the burial shroud.11 Certainly the Trujillo illustrators did not employ the same strict
conventions of line drawing and schematic rendering that are apparent in twentieth- and
twenty-first-century scientific illustrations of burials. Nor are the Trujillo tomb illustrations
comparable to the detailed nineteenth-century renderings of Peruvian mummies produced
by Mariano Eduardo de Rivero y Ustariz and Johann Jakob von Tschudi (1851) or the metic-
ulously naturalistic—nearly photographic—chromolithographs of mummy bundles from
Ancón made by Wilhelm Reiss and Alphons Stübel (1880–1887; see Pillsbury, this volume).
The bishop’s images also depart from other eighteenth-century archaeological illustrations
of Andean burials and human remains, such as the Malaspina Expedition cartographer
Felipe Bauzá’s sketches of mummified remains from Arica, which represent their subjects
with greater fidelity (Malaspina 1987–1996:5:69, 72). Although Martínez Compañón’s illus-
trations share tendencies toward idealization and standardization with other more typical
early modern scientific illustrations, which sought “truth to nature” over mechanical objec-
tivity (Daston and Galison 2007), the bishop’s images remain peculiar in their disarmingly
lifelike representations of the dead.
Instead, these eighteenth-century drawings of the tombs of Trujillo seem more like
twentieth-century artistic reconstructions of archaeological tombs (Figure 4.7), such as the
re-creations of the famous Moche tombs of Sipán (Alva and Donnan 1993:fig. 174). Both
sets of images depict the tombs as imagined at the moment of their closure and show no
evidence of decomposition or degradation, no signs of frayed cloth or damage to the grave
goods. And although coastal and highland Andean peoples practiced mummification for
110 t reve r
Figure 4.4
Tomb of an indigenous lord, from Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, Trujillo del Perú, 1781–1789, vol. 9,
fol. 12, Biblioteca del Palacio Real, Madrid. © Patrimonio Nacional.
millennia, these individuals could not have appeared this well preserved when discov-
ered in the eighteenth century. The bodies appear as if they might almost be alive; in most
images, the dead are pictured as if standing or sitting upright, raising staffs or other objects,
instead of recumbent in their tombs (Cabello Carro 1991:476, 2003c:13; Oberem 1953:262).
The ambiguity of these figures—dead, alive, perhaps only sleeping—may inspire a sense
of the uncanny in the pre-Freudian sense described by Ernst Jentsch (1997 [1906]:11), which
results from “doubt as to whether an apparently living being is animate and, conversely,
doubt as to whether a lifeless object may in fact be animate,” as in his examples of wax fig-
ures, moving dolls, and automatons.12 In this sense, the uncanny results from ontological
uncertainty that is resolved only when one succeeds in classifying the thing perceived. In
this chapter, I investigate the uncanny, ambiguous nature of these illustrations of Peruvian
tombs, which I suggest is at least twofold. On the one hand, the dead are represented as
uncannily lifelike, reconstructed, and in some cases nearly reanimated. But these images
112 t reve r
Figure 4.6
Funerary objects (1–3),
a South American mummy (4),
and an Egyptian mummy (5),
from Adam Olearius,
Gottorfische Kunst-Kammer,
1674, Typ 620.74.645, pl. 36,
Houghton Library, Harvard
University, Cambridge, Mass.
Figure 4.7
Artistic reconstruction of Tomb 2 at Sipán at the moment of interment, by Percy Fiestas, ca. 1993. Illustration courtesy of the
Museo Tumbas Reales de Sipán.
11 4 t reve r
Martínez Compañón’s graphic survey draws upon a wide range of visual genres and
conventions that his illustrators employed as models to facilitate the encyclopedic depiction
of their various subjects. The first volume includes full-length and equestrian portraits of
the region’s civic and ecclesiastic personnel as well as meticulous plans and technical views
of colonial architecture. The second volume documents native, creole, and Afro-Peruvian
types and traditions, industry, craft, dance, and so on and makes generous use of the pasto-
ral genre of painting.16 Volumes three through eight illustrate plants and animals, calling
upon standard visual methods developed by Linnaeus and other naturalists. Following the
six natural history volumes, the final volume is dedicated to the mapping of ancient archi-
tecture, roads, and aqueducts; the depiction of tombs; and the cataloging of antiquities.
The bishop’s questionnaire derives from specific Spanish royal requests for reports on
viceregal resources, including antiquities (Anonymous 1985). Martínez Compañón’s atten-
tion to Peruvian ruins and artifacts was part of a larger Bourbon interest in antiquity that
emerged out of the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii during Charles III’s tenure as
king of Naples and then extended across the Atlantic to Peru (Pillsbury and Trever 2008),
Mexico (Cabello Carro 1992; López Luján 2008), and elsewhere in the Americas (Alcina
Franch 1995:63–72). In 1776, Pedro Franco Dávila, the founder of the new Royal Cabinet in
Madrid, sent instructions to the viceroyalties for the collection of specimens from the “three
realms of nature” (i.e., botany, zoology, and mineralogy) (Cabello Carro 1991:469). The next
year, naval officer and royal adviser Antonio de Ulloa issued a specific call for the investiga-
tion of pre-Christian ruins and tombs and the collection of antiquities for the Royal Cabinet
(Alcina Franch 1995:79–80; Cabello Carro 1991:469).
In response to these royal requests, Martínez Compañón sent two shipments of Peru
vian artifacts to Spain in 1788 and 1790.17 Although many of these collections were lost,
some are now held in the Museo de América in Madrid (Cabello Carro 1989, 1991). Paz
Cabello Carro (1991:475–476) notes that it is often difficult to make positive identifications
of real objects among Martínez Compañón’s illustrations, but we can identify some ceram-
ics as the objects depicted in the watercolors.18 Others we can also match to their eigh-
teenth-century inventory descriptions, such as the Chimú bottle pictured in volume nine
(Figures 4.8 [bottom] and 4.9) that is now in the Museo de América and that was described
in the 1790 inventory as “a river shrimp on top of something like a box; lead-colored clay”
(Pérez Ayala 1955:app. 42, pt. 6, 407 [crate 1, no. 46]).19
Martínez Compañón’s attention to ancient Andean antiquities and architecture should
be understood as part of broader developments in Peru in the eighteenth century, even
though other projects did not produce such extensive visual documentations of their
archaeological materials. In 1765, the corregidor of Trujillo, Miguel Feyjoo de Sosa, exca-
vated a huaca at Tantalluc (now called Tantarica) near Cajamarca, which was illustrated
nearly twenty years later in Martínez Compañón’s volume nine (Martínez Compañón 1781–
1789:9:fol. 9; Alcina Franch 1995:172–175; Jiménez de la Espada 1896). Early archaeological
investigations in Peru were usually undertaken as part of larger survey projects or scien-
tific expeditions (Alcina Franch 1995:165–195; Pillsbury 2008, this volume). Pre-Columbian
antiquities were documented in the illustrated reports of Amédée François Frézier (1716)
and Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa (1748). The collection of artifacts and investigation
of ancient ruins were also secondary components of the Royal Botanical Expedition to
Peru led by Hipólito Ruiz (Cabello Carro 1991:479–481; Ruiz 1998 [1777–1788]), the work of
116 t reve r
Figure 4.9
Chimú ceramic bottle in
the shape of a shrimp from
Trujillo, Museo de América,
no. 10227. Photograph
courtesy of the Museo
de América, Madrid.
Although the illustrations are often quite faithful to their archaeological subjects, the
artists’ own aesthetic choices, preconceptions, limitations, and eighteenth-century styliza-
tion are also readily apparent. For example, silver artifacts have been arranged on the page
in one illustration so that they form a human face (Martínez Compañón 1781–1789:9:fol.
37). Unintended stylization is evident in a drawing of a Chimú metal ornament wherein
the forms of Indians are transformed into more elegant rococo-like figures (Martínez
Compañón 1781–1789:9:fol. 50). Within the ceramic illustrations, the face of a Lambayeque
portrait jar (Martínez Compañón 1781–1789:9:fol. 73) resembles the volume’s dedicatory
portrait of Charles IV (Martínez Compañón 1781–1789:9:fol. 1)—especially in the turn of its
hooked nose—more than the countenance of any coastal Indian.
Although their identities have been lost, one presumes that Martínez Compañón hired
three or four local artists from the Trujillo area to produce the illustrations of his diocese.
Stylistic similarities between his watercolors and decorative paintings found on the walls
of contemporaneous houses and churches in Trujillo suggest that the bishop might have
hired mural painters to do this work (Restrepo Manrique 1991b:67). In particular, Restrepo
Manrique (1991b:67–68, 1992:1:526) has observed that the decorative and religious paint-
ings on the walls of the Indian burial vault that Martínez Compañón (1781–1789:1:fols. 26v–
27r) had rebuilt in the cathedral in 1782 might be the work of these same artists. Scholars
have most often assumed that the bishop’s illustrators were indigenous or mestizo artists
118 t reve r
Figure 4.10
Rear view of entombed lord depicted in Figure 4.4, from Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, Trujillo del Perú, 1781–1789,
vol. 9, fol. 13, Biblioteca del Palacio Real, Madrid. © Patrimonio Nacional.
1984:181, fig. 194). Lecuanda writes that the San Pedro burial included a container filled with
rattles and bells, some of which could be dated to after the Spanish conquest because they
were made of brass. The spherical objects in the two containers in this illustration might
also be colonial-era bells.
Both the San Pedro burial and the one pictured here seem to be elite indigenous burials
that date to the colonial period. Cabello Carro (2003c:15–19) has observed that the leather
vest and short riding pants that the lord wears in these illustrations (see Figures 4.4 and
4.10) are Spanish military-style garments.23 She has gone so far as to date the burial to the
late sixteenth or early seventeenth century based on garment proportions, such as the size
of the buttons on the vest (Cabello Carro 2003c:43–45). For Lecuanda, Martínez Compañón,
and other eighteenth-century writers, the era of Peruvian antiquity did not end abruptly
with Pizarro’s defeat of Atahualpa in Cajamarca in 1532—as it is marked in our current
chronologies—but rather continued as pre-Christian (or to use their word, gentile, liter-
ally “gentile,” or perhaps better “pagan”) traditions survived, and so we find early colonial
Indian tombs and artifacts in these archaeological accounts (see also Martínez Compañón
1781–1789:9:fols. 38, 103).
12 0 t reve r
Figure 4.13
Indian warrior, based on the contents of an Amazonian tomb, from Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, Trujillo del
Perú, 1781–1789, vol. 9, fol. 21, Biblioteca del Palacio Real, Madrid. © Patrimonio Nacional.
The bishop’s tomb illustrations continue with a three-page set of burials (Figures
4.15–4.17). Two males and one female are depicted against the brown backgrounds of their
earthen tombs, but the vertical orientation of the drawings and the shadows cast behind
their bodies make them appear as if they are standing, although their eyes are closed in
death. Their garments and grave goods are numbered, but the legends were never inscribed.
The males wear ornate tunics and hold a wooden staff and a chicha paddle in their right
hands. One wears a red-and-yellow checkered tunic that is decorated with felines and
Andean crosses (see Figure 4.15). The other wears a black-and-gold checkered tunic that is
reminiscent of Inca military uniforms over a blue shirt with an embroidered figure on the
sleeve (see Figure 4.17). One tomb contains a gourd and a very large Spondylus shell at either
side of the head, and the other contains two woven mats or boxes in the same locations. The
female wears a gauzy dress and a decorated mantle (see Figure 4.16). She is interred with a
bivalve shell, a ceramic bowl, bobbins, a spindle, and a workbasket. All three wear the same
turban-like headdress.
Cabello Carro (2003c:9–26) has observed that these men’s garments appear more like
European shirts (especially in the lengths of their sleeves) than Chimú or Inca tunics.
12 2 t reve r
Figure 4.15
Chimú tomb, from Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, Trujillo del Perú, 1781–1789, vol. 9, fol. 14, Biblioteca
del Palacio Real, Madrid. © Patrimonio Nacional.
12 4 t reve r
Figure 4.17
Chimú tomb, from Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, Trujillo del Perú, 1781–1789, vol. 9, fol. 16, Biblioteca del
Palacio Real, Madrid. © Patrimonio Nacional.
12 6 t reve r
Figure 4.18
Chimú or Chimú-Inca tomb, from Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, Trujillo del Perú, 1781–1789, vol. 9, fol. 17,
Biblioteca del Palacio Real, Madrid. © Patrimonio Nacional.
12 8 t reve r
objective was not to draw particular plants or animals exactly as they appeared, but rather to
present the most informative and legible images of plant types.
We should not be surprised that graphic conventions and pictorial objectives would carry
over from botany and zoology into archaeology, since the latter was long considered a subdis-
cipline of natural history.24 I suggest that like the trees and birds in the earlier volumes, the
dead in the tombs of Trujillo were also drawn in standardized positions so that they would
appear as visually comprehensible and lifelike as possible. Like the naturalist illustrations,
these images are didactic as well as descriptive, and their objective seems to have been to pic-
ture these Indians as they would have been in life, not how they appeared after death.
We cannot trust these illustrations in the same way that we expect to rely upon modern
archaeological documentation—that is, for the precise locations and forms of each feature,
artifact, and bone within a unit. To use the extended body positions alone to argue for a
postconquest date for these Chimú or Chimú-Inca burials would be unwise. The positions
of their bodies may well have been altered—perhaps visually unfolded from flexed skel-
etons25—to make them most visible and intelligible to the viewer. Such rearrangement and
amplification is not uncharacteristic of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century archaeological
illustration. Some of the other burials in volume nine may indeed be colonial, but we must
nevertheless proceed with caution and not rely so much on minute details—such as the size
of buttons and the lengths of sleeves—to date these tombs, since the transcription of fine
details and precise proportions in these images is unreliable.
Following the previously discussed illustration of the wrapped mummy (see Figure 4.3),
there is a folio that is split into two pictorial fields (Figure 4.20): at the bottom is a drawing
of a Recuay or possibly Moche wooden staff finial, and at the top there is an illustration of a
highland funerary structure with a crouched figure who appears to be grieving, a cranium on
the ground, and a buried Indian, who seems to have been originally drawn inside the structure
but was later moved outside in order to be more visible. The descriptions that should appear
in the legend, coded to each motif, do not survive with the image. The grieving figure with
cheek resting on hand is a clear visual reference to the allegory of Melancholy, perhaps best
known in the Americas and elsewhere from Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 master print Melencolia I
(Schenone et al. 1994:322). The particular combination of the melancholic figure with skull
is employed in religious paintings of the penitent Magdalene in the wilderness in European
and Latin American art (Figure 4.21). The bishop’s illustrator—especially if trained in mural
painting and thus versed in Catholic iconography—may have had a similar painting in mind
when he composed the illustration of this highland mortuary building.
The tomb series concludes with the image of an Amazonian Indian (see Figure 4.13)
compared earlier to Vecellio’s Indian of Florida. Unlike the rest, this figure is drawn with
eyes wide open. He wears a feather headdress and beaded skirt and carries a bow and
arrows. Cabello Carro (2003c:32–34) has identified a skirt made of wild boar and monkey
teeth in the collections of the Museo de América that bears a close resemblance to the one
drawn in the picture. Curatorial records indicate that it came from the burial of a lowland
Indian within the diocese of Trujillo. The image of the Indian warrior is an imaginative
reconstruction of the person who had been interred wearing that garment. It is a continua-
tion of the same visual strategies seen throughout this series, which depicts the dead as the
illustrators imagined they would have appeared in life, not as they actually appeared after
untold years interred.
In order to more fully understand these tomb illustrations, which were the product of a
scientific and ecclesiastical enterprise and were included within a natural and moral history,
let us again look back to the larger corpus of the bishop’s drawings. We find a clue in the only
other image of death, which appears in the second volume. Near the end of that volume,
after a series depicting local medicine and disease and a dying “Indian in agony” (Martínez
Compañón 1781–1789:2:fol. 200), we find the wake of an Indian in a Franciscan habit (Figure
4.22). This image directs us to the genre of funerary painting that was especially popular
130 t reve r
Figure 4.21
Annibale Carracci, Mary
Magdalene in a Landscape,
ca. 1599, oil on copper,
pd.12-1976, Fitzwilliam
Museum, Cambridge.
© Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge.
in Mexico, Peru, and elsewhere in Latin America in the eighteenth century (Figure 4.23).
In these paintings, the bodies of the recently deceased—especially children and nuns—are
painted as if they were but peacefully sleeping (M. Brown 2006; Elphick 2007:166–167, 195–
196; Montero Alarcón 1999, 2008). A series of such portraits of nuns hangs in the convent of
Santa Catalina in Arequipa, Peru. Like the drawings of the dead Indians in Trujillo, these
deceased Catholic women are painted as if sitting or standing upright, as if they had just
momentarily closed their eyes and dozed off. Paintings such as these, which were part of an
important popular and ecclesiastical genre in the eighteenth century, may have provided a
familiar model of how to represent the dead for the bishop’s illustrators.
The compositional relationships between these tomb illustrations and Spanish colo-
nial paintings do not end there. The particular placement of grave goods in the upper left
and upper right corners of the tomb illustrations may be based on the painterly practice
of depicting coats of arms in the upper corners of colonial portraits of kings, nobles, and
other important persons,26 for example, in the portraits of the bishops of Trujillo, including
Martínez Compañón himself, found in volume one (Martínez Compañón 1781–1789:1:fols.
28–57). In the tomb illustrations, the artists drew gourds, baskets, and shells (see Figures
4.15–4.17) in the exact same pictorial positions as these colonial emblems of rank and lin-
eage. One wonders to what extent these grave goods were understood in the 1780s as func-
tionally equivalent to those colonial markers of status and heritage. Full-length paintings of
saints may have informed the compositions of the next two tomb illustrations in the series
(see Figures 4.18–4.19), wherein the dead are depicted as if standing with halo-like objects
around their heads. We know, for example, that Martínez Compañón brought religious
icons with him from Lima, including a full-length painting of Saint Peter and a painting of
132 t reve r
Figure 4.23
José del Castillo, Sister Juana
Magdalena, 1769, oil on canvas,
History Collection nmhm, dca
2005.27.13, Gift of International
Institute of Iberian Colonial
Art. Photograph courtesy of
the Palace of the Governors,
Santa Fe.
Saint Thomas,27 and that similar paintings could easily have been seen in the churches of
Trujillo, but more art historical research on northern Peruvian colonial painting is needed
to pursue this argument further.
Comparisons like these beg important questions: Why would pre-Christian Indians be
portrayed using the visual language of religious painting and in the same manner as pious
Catholic nuns or bishops? Are the similarities merely formal and the product of the artists’
limited iconographic repertoire, or are there more profound implications to be found? Several
historians have described how Martínez Compañón was deeply concerned with the plight of
the indigenous population of Trujillo and tirelessly sought to elevate their lot in life (Berquist
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Joanne Pillsbury, Tom Cummins, Carol Mackey, Nenita Elphick, the
Harvard Andeanists working group, the Archivo Arzobispal de Trujillo, Eulogio Guzmán,
Emily Gulick Jacobs, Stephen Trever, and the participants in the 2009 Pre-Columbian sym-
posium for their invaluable comments and contributions to this research.
13 4 t reve r
Notes
1 The most comprehensive biography of this prelate the late bishop’s nephew José Antonio Loredo (Vargas
remains José Pérez Ayala’s 1955 monograph, though Ugarte 1936:172n6).
Martínez Compañón’s life and work have been the 4 At the conclusion of his extended survey of the diocese,
subject of increasing interest since the bicentennial of Martínez Compañón recounted to the viceroy of Peru
his birth in the 1930s (e.g., Ballesteros Gaibrois 1997; that he had collected natural history specimens and
Berquist 2007, 2008; Domínguez Bordona 1936; Means Pre-Columbian antiquities that he envisioned arrang-
1970 [1942]; Navarro Pascual 1991; Pazos and Restrepo ing into a “History” or “Museum,” by which he seems
Manrique 1990; Restrepo Manrique 1992; Schaedel to have meant an early modern “paper museum” (i.e.,
1949; Vargas Ugarte 1936, 1952). He was born January 10, the atlas of illustrations in nine volumes) and not an
1737, in the village of Cabredo in the Basque province of institution or building as the latter word’s current
Navarra. In 1767, Charles III of Spain named him can- usage implies (Ballesteros Gaibrois 1994, 1997; Trever
tor of the cathedral of Lima in the Viceroyalty of Peru. and Pillsbury 2011). “Tambien he procurado acoger
In Lima, he served as rector of the Colegio Seminario quantas producciones de naturaleza, o curiosidades
de Santo Toribio (1770–1779) and as secretary to the VI del Arte de la gentilidad, he podido, con el designio
Lima Council (1772–1773) before being named bishop of de formar aunque no sea más que con Disposición de
Trujillo in 1778. Martínez Compañón served there until Múseo, que tal vez sea el primero, que haya formado
1790, when he left to become archbishop of Santa Fé de ninguno de los Obispos de las Americas, y acaso ni
Bogotá in the Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada, where he los de esa Provincia. Al que si Dios me diese vida, y
remained until his death in 1797 (Pérez Ayala 1955). algun descanso pienso agregar otro como algunos que
2 Manuscript 343, Biblioteca del Palacio Real, Madrid. corren impresos, que al menos comprehenda unas
The complete corpus of illustrations is now available memorias punturales, y exactas para que sobre ellas se
in facsimile (Martínez Compañón 1978–1994 [1781– pueda formar una Historia completa de esta Diocesis
1789]:vols. 1–9). An eighteenth-century copy of volume intitulandolo así: Museo Historico, Ficico [sic] Politico
one is held in the Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia y Moral del Obpdo. de Truxillo de Peru” (Martínez
in Bogotá (Sección Libros Raros y Curiosos, ms 216) Compañón to Viceroy Teodoro de Croix, July 25, 1785,
and has also been reproduced in facsimile (Martínez Trujillo, Archivo Nacional de Colombia, Virreyes,
Compañón 1978–1994 [1781–1789]:app. 1). Copies and 17, fols. 432r–433r, in Martínez Compañón 1978–1994
drafts of illustrations from volumes two, seven, and [1781–1789]:app. 3, 52).
nine are now in the collection of the Banco Continental 5 “Y que después se pasen (siendo de su Real agrado)
in Lima, Peru, and have been published (Macera el Serenisimo príncipe de Asturias, nuestro Señor,
et. al 1997). Seven additional drawings from Martínez para su entretenimiento y diversión, y que insensible-
Compañón’s survey reportedly survive in Cajatambo mente y con gusto pueda irse aficionando al estudio
(Macera 1997:42–43). y conocimiento de las artes, cibilidad y cultura de los
3 “Pero correspondiendo todas las dicha piezas a una de Indios del Perú, anteriores a su conquista” (Martínez
los nuebe tomos de la historia natural y moral de aquel Compañón to Antonio Porlier, December 13, 1790,
obispado por estampas, estados y planos, en quarto de Cartagena de Indias, in Martínez Compañón 1978–1994
papel de marca maior, que tengo ya encuadernados, [1781–1789]:app. 3, 54).
me ha paresido combeniente diferir la remisión de 6 Martínez Compañón had intended to finish annotating
dicho caxón hasta que pueda hazer la de dicho tomo, the drawings in Bogotá with the specialized assistance
para que, cotejadas dichas piezas y estampas, se bean la of José Celestino Mutís, director of the Royal Botanical
conformidad y perfecta semejanza entre unas y otras, Expedition to Nueva Granada, with whom he developed
y por ellas pueda congeturarse o creerse y compre- a friendship (Pérez Ayala 1955:48, 83–86, 406). Mutís
henderse ser igual la correspondencia de las estampas was a witness to Martínez Compañón’s will and also
de los ocho restantes tomos y sus orginales, por haverse named the botanical species Martinezia granatensis after
formado con ellos a la vista, y a mi presencia” (Martínez the bishop (Means 1979 [1942]:72; Pazos and Restrepo
Compañón to Antonio Porlier, December 13, 1790, Manrique 1990:340–341). Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón
Cartagena de Indias, in Martínez Compañón 1978–1994 had named a genus of palm (Martinezia) in his honor as
[1781–1789]:app. 3, 54; my emphasis; translations by the well (Ballesteros Gaibrois 1994:37; Pérez Ayala 1955:86).
author). After the bishop’s death in Bogotá, his execu- 7 See note 3.
tor, Fausto Sodupe, in 1803 described the illustrations 8 Martínez Compañón’s nephew José Ignacio Lecuanda
similarly as the “Historia Natural, Civil y Moral de (Anonymous 1792; Lequanda 1793a, 1793b, 1793c, 1794)
dicho Obispado, por Mapas, Planos y Estampas con published a series of chorographic and geographic
sus Memorias para ella” (Fausto Sodupe to Charles IV, descriptions of this same region that roughly corre-
October 8, 1803, Archivo General de Indias, Audiencia spond to the layout of the nine volumes of illustrations
de Santa Fe, 743, in Vargas Ugarte 1936:172). The nine and that likely draw upon the bishop’s observations
volumes were soon thereafter remitted to Spain by and materials.
136 t reve r
23 The deceased’s outfit recalls the intermixing of indige- Santo Thomás, en cien pesos” (“Capital e Inventario de
nous and Spanish goods and garments by early colonial los bienes del Ilmo. Sr. Dr. Dn. Baltazar Jayme Martínez
native lords on the North Coast, as Guillermo Cock Compañón, Obispo de este Diócesis de Truxillo del
(1986) has documented historically. Perú del Consejo de Su Magestad,” 1779, Archivo
24 In The Order of Things, Michel Foucault (1994 [1970]:137) Arzobispal de Trujillo, expediente no. k-01-13).
notes that the illustration of botany preceded and influ- 28 See note 22.
enced the study and depiction of other classes of natu- 29 Martínez Compañón’s attitudes toward the Pre-
ral history materials because botany lent itself best to Columbian traditions of Trujillo were more positive than
the visual mode of analysis. See also Byron Hamann’s those of his nephew, Lecuanda (Ballesteros Gaibrois
chapter in this volume. 1994:37; Macera 1997:30), and other members of the
25 In his descriptions of antiquities and tombs of Trujillo, Sociedad Académica de Amantes del País who published
Lecuanda describes the mummified and skeletal con- the Mercurio peruano (Millán de Aguirre 1791). Other
ditions (Lequanda 1793b:83, 86) and flexed positions more prominent members of that society also wrote lau-
(Lequanda 1793b:87) of many of the bodies discovered. datory protonationalist essays on ancient “Peruvian” art
26 I am indebted to Nenita Elphick for pointing out this and culture in the 1790s (Nolasco Crespo 1792; Unánue y
similarity in pictorial composition. Pabón 1791), though that rise of pro-indigenous rhetoric
27 “Iten un lienzo del glorioso San Pedro, de cuerpo proved to be short-lived (Walker 1996).
entero, en ciento y cincuenta pesos. Iten un lienzo de
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1 40 t reve r
et érotique en Grèce ancienne (1996), I l’histoire de Fellowship in Pre-Columbian Studies at Dumbarton
l’art (Préhistoire et antiquité) (1997), Encyclopedia of Oaks for 2011–2013. She holds an MA in art his-
Archaeology (coeditor, 2001), Guide des méthodes de tory from the University of Maryland and a BA in
l’archéologie (2002), and L’histoire ancienne à travers archaeological studies from Yale University. Trever
cent chefs-d’œuvre de la peinture (2004). is the coauthor (with Joanne Pillsbury) of “The
King, the Bishop, and the Creation of an American
Adam T. Sellen Antiquity” (2008) and “Martínez Compañón and His
Adam T. Sellen is professor of Mesoamerican stu- Illustrated ‘Museum’” (2011). She is also the author
dies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de of “Idols, Mountains, and Metaphysics in Guaman
México in Mérida, Yucatan. He is a specialist in Poma’s Pictures of Huacas” in Res: Anthropology
pre-Hispanic Oaxacan cultures and ceramic analy- and Aesthetics (2011).
sis. His dissertation, which was awarded the Premio
Alfonso Caso in 2002, focused on the iconography Luis Felipe Villacorta Ostolaza
of ceramic effigy vessels commonly referred to as Luis Felipe Villacorta Ostolaza received his
Zapotec urns. This study, entitled El Cielo com- licenciatura in archaeology from the Pontificia
partido: Las vasijas efigie zapotecas (2007), was Universidad Católica del Perú. He was the recipient
recently published by the Universidad Nacional of a museology scholarship granted by the Japanese
Autónoma de México. He has written extensively International Cooperation Agency in 2000. A for-
on a variety of themes relating to nineteenth- mer member of the Instituto Nacional de Cultura
century archaeological collecting, such as ceramic del Perú, he was the director of the Puruchuco on-
fakery and private cabinets. He helped curate the site museum (1999–2002) and served as a member
permanent Pre-Columbian exhibition at the Royal of the board of the National Technical Commission
Ontario Museum, where he was a postdoctoral for Archaeology (2005–2006). He is currently a can-
fellow (2002–2004), and he was recently awarded didate for the MA in history at the University of
the Edmundo O’Gorman Fellowship at Columbia Guelph, Canada. His archaeological work focuses
University to complete his latest book, Orphans of on the Central Coast, with an emphasis on the era
the Muse: Archaeological Collecting in Nineteenth- of Inca occupation. Villacorta Ostolaza has been
Century Oaxaca. This study documents the history the director of the Museo Raimondi in Lima since
of local Mexican collectors and their groundbreak- 2002. He studies the legacy of the Italian natural-
ing vision, with the aim of reuniting the orphaned, ist Antonio Raimondi and the development of the
decontextualized remnants of their collections. sciences in Peru during the nineteenth century. He
Sellen’s current project studies parallel collecting directs a publication project for the Fondo Editorial,
practices in the Yucatan Peninsula. Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, that
aims to annotate and reissue Raimondi’s major sci-
Lisa Trever entific studies; so far, he has published six books
Lisa Trever is a doctoral candidate in the Department under the collective title Estudios geológicos y mine-
of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard Uni ros para la obra “El Perú” (2003–2009). Each volume
versity. Her research interests embrace issues of is accompanied by an introductory study that links
visual representation in the ancient Andes as well Raimondi to broader trends in the history of sci-
as colonial illustration and interpretation of Pre- ence and modernity, nature and nation-building,
Columbian art and culture. She is completing her appropriation of the past, historical representation,
dissertation “Moche Mural Painting and Practice at liberalism, and the local bourgeoisie. For his efforts,
Pañamarca; A Study of Image Making in Ancient the Italian government bestowed on him the title
Peru” and has been awarded the William Tyler “Knight of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity.”
4 74 c on t ri bu tors