Object and Apparition: Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes by Maya Stanfield-Mazzi (review)
This book investigates the role of religious images in conversion to Christianity in the Andes. Although Spanish missionaries thought that Catholicism should exclude all traces of native belief, the need to make the new religion visible, tangible, and believable allowed for an increasing incorporation of local references and, crucially, local materials in the dissemination of Christian ideas and practices. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi argues that, "metals, pigments and fibers that were sacred within the Andean worldview to represent key Christian subjects" were "crucial to the future of Christianity in the region" (p. 2). To demonstrate this interesting idea, the author focuses on two types of images: statues (three-dimensional) and paintings (two-dimensional) of Mary and Christ. Stanfield-Mazzi maintains that the two were the "visual representatives" of Catholicism and that the introduction and influence of statues and paintings followed a chronological order that exerted a distinctive ascendancy over indigenous Andeans and their perception and acceptance of the Christian divine.