Crafts: Half-Breed Brilliance

The forced fusion of cultures can sometimes produce brilliant offspring. A case in point is colonial Peru. After King Atahualpa was garroted by Francisco Pizarro in 1533, the Spanish conquistadors turned the Inca kingdom into a viceroyalty; some 16 million Indians were enslaved and converted at gunpoint. Indian artisans were appalled by the viceroy’s cruelty, but they were thankful for the priests’ ministrations. They embraced the conquerors’ faith with fervor. They reared churches of baroque magnificence, carved passion figures of harrowing pathos. Delicately they embellished icons and chamber pots alike with the gold once sacred to the sun god and silver that once glittered in Cuzco’s temple of the moon.

The unique style thus developed under the tutelage of immigrant European craftsmen became known as mestizo (half-breed). It incorporated Christian and pre-Columbian conventions and beliefs, even included Oriental designs (copied from wares that had been imported via Pacific trade routes). The results were too precocious to pass for primitive, and not subtle enough to claim genuine sophistication. But as two current displays of post-Columbian Peruvian art testify, at its best the mestizo style was both lyrical and inventive (see color opposite).

40-lb. Stirrups. Indian painters in Cuzco showed Christ’s bleeding heart pierced by Indian arrows, and the Three Wise Men journeying to Bethlehem on llama-back. In gold-encrusted paintings from the Frank Barrows Freyer Collection, recently exhibited at the Columbus (Ohio) Gallery of Fine Arts, Christ is depicted on the Cross with native Peruvian flowers banked at his feet, while the Child Virgin is portrayed holding a distaff, vividly recalling Mama Oclla, the Inca deity who, according to legend, taught the Indians how to spin.

Few trades earned the mestizo craftsmen better wages or higher social status than silversmithing. That they worked with surpassing skill can be seen in 210 examples of their wares, selected by the Smithsonian Institution’s Richard Ahlborn, that go on view at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art this month. Silver was plentiful in colonial Peru, and Andean artisans used it for both religious and household articles. Grandees’ stirrups alone weighed as much as 40 lbs., and in even the humblest Indian homes were found silver incense burners and boxes.

What dealt a death blow to the mestizo tradition was the introduction of cheap chrome lithographs in the 19th century. At the same time, as silver became scarcer and more expensive, the lower classes increasingly turned to chinaware and crockery. Early mestizo art became a collector’s item, disappeared into wealthy homes, or was guarded by churches and convents. Many objects in the Smithsonian exhibition are being loaned for the first time in centuries. After the Metropolitan’s showing, the exhibition will be put on view in Lima, enabling Peruvians to rediscover the full range of their forefathers’ achievement.