Carolyn Dean’s A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock and Gauvin Alexander Bailey’s The Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru offer important but very different contributions to the study of monuments—and more—in South America. One of the many achievements of Dean’s book is that it complicates any conventional description. She reckons with “pre-Hispanic Inka [her preference for the use of the Quechua language is significant] perspectives on stone, as they are articulated in and through the rocks themselves, as well as in Andean stories about stone” (1). While the author speaks of “Inka visuality,” her account does not adhere to any straightforward application of the terminology of visual culture studies, not to mention the normative language of the history of art and architecture. She demonstrates that Inca creations have indeed been regarded as works of art and architecture only very recently and in vastly altered contexts.

Previous scholarship provides just the starting point for this deeply imaginative book. Dean draws on a variety of sources: foremost of these, literally and physically, are the rocks themselves, as they may be observed in relation to human reconfigurations of the Andean environment. “Colonial” period sources, especially dictionaries and eyewitness accounts, inform her approach to Inca attitudes toward stone. Modern ethnographic and folkloric investigations enrich the possibilities of understanding indigenous constructs. Dean weaves these materials together to create an original and compelling vision of the Inca—although one of the implications of this book is the challenge it offers to interpretations of weaving as the primary form of expression in Andean visual culture.

In Dean’s reconstruction, stone was not simply the substance of Inca artifacts and edifices, but in many ways its essence. Dean describes the nature of some rocks, and mountains, as numinous, as waka. She analyzes how stones were regarded as sacred, and how they were treated as such by distancing, contouring, framing, and carving. Representation was not necessary for the Inca, for whom rocks were present in their own quasi-animate, unaroused state.

Observers have long noted that the Inca reshaped mountains. John Hemming has shown how they altered many other features of the Andean landscape (Monuments of the Incas, London: Thames & Hudson, 2010 [revised edition]). The Inca also incorporated rocks into their buildings, often megalithic, like the well-known structure at Sacsayhuaman. Some rocks in walls are given projections, and many others have beveled edges. They are nibbled, as the Quechua might have said, so that they can be fit together without any gap between them, without the use of mortar. Dean takes these observations farther. She demonstrates how Inca buildings incorporate outcroppings, how structures surround stones, and echo nearby mountains. She defines such processes as “place making” and “place holding.” All this implies an underlying conception of how Inca structures and the individual rocks out of which they are built relate to their rupestral surroundings.

While the Spanish who conquered the Inca admired their buildings, they could not appreciate what had motivated their construction nor understand their meaning. Dean’s final chapter presents the reception of the lithic manifestations of Inca culture and their ruins during the past five hundred years. In part this has involved the familiar use of indigenous structures as foundations for buildings of the colonial period, exemplified by the way the Dominican church in Cuzco stands on top of the Coricancha, one of the most sacred Inca sites. Dean suggests how the rock forms that embody Inca ways of seeing have been interpreted up to the present, by people ranging from the indigenous population to the promoters of the Andean tourist industry.

To use Paul MacKendrick’s fortunate formulation, Dean makes the mute stones speak. Her book has implications far beyond its locus in Latin America. As she recognizes, it represents an intervention into current debates about world art history. Dean suggests a way in which the interpretation of human interactions with nature that in the European tradition are called art and architecture may be imaginatively reconstructed with terms and concepts that are not Eurocentric.

Dean advances a notion of “Inka visuality” that is distinctly alien to European perceptions. However, Inca attitudes toward stone appear not only to represent an expression of general Andean attitudes, but also to differ fundamentally from those of earlier cultures in the region. Unlike many other pre-conquest populations in Peru, the Inca did not employ adobe or other alternative methods for buildings. Unlike earlier peoples including the builders of Tiwanaku who otherwise worked stone similarly by fitting it seamlessly into walls, the Inca almost never seem to have used clamps for construction. Significantly, while the Inca carved some figures out of or into rock, unlike the entire Andean tradition including Tiwanaku from Chavín or even earlier onwards, they do not seem to have carved or molded designs on or into the facades of their structures.

Fundamental distinctions thus appear to exist between Inca approaches to stone and those of their predecessors. If this inference is correct, conceptualizations of a continuous Andean tradition will have to be reconsidered; Dean does not address this question. In any case her interpretation may give pause to a reading of aspects of Bailey’s new book, The Andean Hybrid Baroque, which is a vastly different enterprise. This large volume tells a story that begins approximately a century and a half after the destruction of the Inca realm. Moreover, Bailey’s Andes lie outside the Inca heartland in Cuzco and neighboring valleys, and also far from the second Inca capital in Quito; they trace an arc from Arequipa in southwestern Peru through the region of Lake Titicaca (Collao) to Potosí in Bolivia. (The presence of a map would have been helpful.) Like Dean, Bailey utilizes ethno-historical and anthropological sources as well as publications from the colonial period, but his book’s major contributions result from an extensive campaign of archival investigation and photography.

John Shearman once remarked that the most important parts of a book were its photographs, then its catalogue or documents, and it is the photographs and documents in Bailey’s book that should prove of most lasting value. Almost all the photographs, and seemingly all the illustrations of buildings, appear to be the author’s own. Since many of the buildings are found in out-of-the-way places, their reproduction in color, with many details, is a boon to scholarship. Another significant accomplishment is the transcription and publication of almost two hundred printed pages of documents, many of them newly transcribed or discovered and published by Bailey. This data is used to bolster the main argument, which Bailey situates in a polemic over the “mestizo style.” The introduction to the book explains that the choice of terms expressed in the title stems from a desire to avoid the racial overtones noticeable in use of the word “mestizo” while capturing the character of that style. Bailey defines the Andean Hybrid Baroque as a combination of predominantly European forms with Andean symbolism, most of which is traceable to the pre-Hispanic era. The often pointed and personal summary presented in the first chapter indicates how Bailey is responding to a debate that is now approaching a century old. The succeeding chapters constitute what he describes as a systematic stylistic examination of the churches, which in effect amounts to a description of the motifs and formal characteristics of their surface decoration, and to some extent of their contents (sculpture on altarpieces and paintings are briefly mentioned), and architectural design. A lucid chapter on the origins of the style (although it might be better said that iconography is chiefly what is at issue) in Arequipa starts the sequence, laying out how and where some of the major motifs first appear. Seven densely descriptive chapters follow: they move from the Arequipa region, through the Colca valley, to Collao, through what is called an intermediate zone that includes both Pomata (on Lake Titicaca) and La Paz, to end up with what are called outliers, churches in Potosí and northern Collao.

The conclusion discusses what Bailey titles “A Question of Method” presenting a dialectic of interpretation of European and American motifs that are related to different sets of beliefs that different communities may have perceived differently. Bailey avers that the decorative patterns seen as wholes syncretize these motifs into overall schemes, which are related to design concepts comparable to Andean textiles. The compositions of the whole often represent a hybrid vision of paradise. Eighty-three pages of notes undergird the arguments of the book.

These arguments are in many respects not new, and Bailey at one point does specifically acknowledge his reliance on prior scholarship. In numerous studies Teresa Gisbert has, for example, related the iconography of colonial church decoration to Andean myths and symbols (e.g., in Iconografía y mitos indígenas en el arte, La Paz: Gisbert y Cía, 1980), while Antonio San Cristóbal has emphasized the importance of indigenous “textilography” for the overall pattern (Arquitectura planiforme y textilográfica virreinal de Arequipa, Arequipa: Universad Nacional de San Agustín, 1997). It may be added that Bailey’s hypotheses for how things may have happened (pp. 48–49: the Jesuits were either sufficiently open-minded to encourage Andean carvers to develop their own artistic languages . . . or they did not know what was going on) are also variants of commonplaces that are widespread in the Andes. (This reviewer recently heard versions related by a sacristan in Tunja.) Furthermore, in stressing the flat character of designs as a sign of indigenous agency, Bailey echoes, perhaps inadvertently but nevertheless without apparent reflection, the older view that this trait characterizes the Amerindian hand.

Differences lie rather in the book’s emphases (European motifs are in a majority), the mass of information presented and discussed, and the new sources adduced, including documents attesting to the role of indigenous sculptors and the results of extirpation interrogations. The last help answer the vexatious question of how indigenous beliefs might have still been present two centuries after the initial conquest. Hence, Bailey claims: “I am now in a position to challenge or support accepted chronologies, rewrite the history of the spread and development of the style, and offer new contextual interpretations based on a wider range of sources” (43).

Yet many issues remain unresolved. Even the basic identification of many motifs is not always convincing. A fundamental problem is that the carving on many buildings is often so schematic that in the absence of comparative illustrations it is difficult to determine definitively, for example, whether what Bailey says is an Arequipa papaya (e.g., 49–50) is not simply a gourd common in classical and Renaissance garlands, or whether his Andean flowers are merely simplified schemes derived from previous European types. While Bailey’s identification of the Arequipa papaya may be ingenious, and some standard features like grapes are clear, other visual connections, such as those with exotic birds or other tropical fruits, call for further proof. Furthermore, some distinctions, such as what is or is not an angel, are arbitrary. Other descriptions, such as that of Native American facial features (e.g., at San Lorenzo, Potosí, 278) perpetuate stereotypes. And still other characterizations are wrong: the double eagle on the church of the Compañía in Arequipa (54) and on the chests of the figures on the facade of San Lorenzo in Potosí (278) is not that of the Habsburgs but of the Holy Roman Empire, a point needing further consideration, because the king of Spain, though a Habsburg, was not emperor at the time when La Compañía was built, and, more important, the Spanish king was neither emperor nor even a Habsburg when San Lorenzo was decorated.

Bailey’s interpretations of organization, agency, and the diffusion of these motifs have also not shut off possibilities for discussion. Bailey follows George Kubler (e.g., Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their American Dominions, 1500–1800, Baltimore: Penguin, 1959, 96–97)—who is otherwise often heavily criticized—and others in dismissing the association of facade designs with Nazca ceramics, yet asserts their relation to the Andean textile tradition. But if Dean’s arguments are right, can we be sure that such a continuing tradition exists? How in any case can we deal with the fact that Inca treated stone in a way in which there is no evident relation to this tradition? To follow Bailey we must, however, assume that Andeans used European forms to articulate beliefs that the Inca did not represent in their own arts. Moreover, even if newly discovered documents indicate that indigenous artisans were more involved than this reviewer and others may have known before, do we really have evidence that they determined what is actually represented? Attentive reading of Bailey’s documents does not allow for much more than hypothesis. Why not also allow the friars and Jesuits, whose involvement is proved, and whose education was after all extremely concerned with rhetorical composition, to have been extremely attentive to details of composition as well as content? A forthcoming publication of Raquel Reyes (announced for the Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient) on visual representations of New World plants and animals in eighteenth-century Philippine church decoration further problematizes the argument that non-European plants provide a sign for indigenous agency: while local workers were involved, they were using patterns they had never seen before European priests brought them—and these padres surely did not transport Amerindian beliefs along with the forms. (It is also noteworthy that these forms are also markedly planiform.)

In contrast, Susan Verdi Webster’s path-breaking documentary research clearly demonstrates that Andeans controlled the building trade in Quito for two centuries, and that they were involved in over ninety percent of the tasks from basic labor to administration to design (see most fully, “La voz del anominato: Authorship, Authority, and Andean Artists in the Construction of Colonial Quito,” in Donna Pierce, ed., The Arts of South America, 1492–1850: Papers from the 2008 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum, Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2010, 57–88, and now Quito, ciudad de maestros: Arquitectos, edificios y urbanismo en el largo siglo XVII, Quito, Ecuador: Abya Yala, 2012). Their work is indistinguishable from that of the European artists with whom they at times collaborated. The earliest surviving example of classicizing forms in Quito, long thought to be by Europeans, was made by indigenous artists. Similarly, Webster demonstrates what Bailey can only surmise, that Andeans, not Europeans, were responsible for the diffusion of practices and patterns. Yet in the regions of modern Ecuador and Colombia these patterns are again often indistinguishable from those made by Europeans, who previously had been assumed to be their authors: they closely resemble work in the European classicizing tradition, and are also finely rendered. Why should the quality and form of works done by Webster’s Andeans be so different than those of Bailey’s?

This relates to the fundamental question of the visibility of indigenous presence. Significantly, Bailey does not examine in any detail the concept of hybridity. But the hybrid has become a notion as freighted, and fraught, as the “mestizo,” which he rightly criticizes. It is important to point out that Bailey does not cite Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn’s “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America” (Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5–35). Yet this essay is not only one of the most important interpretations of colonial visual culture to have appeared in recent decades, it touches directly both on the central issues and the geographical area of Bailey’s book. Among other things, Dean and Leibsohn argue forcefully that the visibility of hybridity is highly problematic.

Dean and Leibsohn’s essay is but one of many pertinent essays and books that Bailey ignores, contradicts, or contends are wrong in fact or detail. Nevertheless Kubler, a major target, succinctly described sixty years ago the phenomena with which Bailey’s book deals at length using the more neutral and more accurate terms “highland planiform decoration”; Kubler also offered several insightful and still acceptable descriptions of carving and the approach to stone that are of a sort not present here. In Andean Hybrid Baroque Bailey has provided much material for study. It remains for future scholarship to formulate a fully convincing account.