The Flexibility of Sin: Mural Painting and Social Meaning in Colonial Peru

    Mural painting was a long-standing artistic tradition in Peru, with the earliest known examples dating to about 2000 B.C.  In the colonial period (1534-1824), murals covered the interiors of churches throughout the Andes, providing parishioners with didactic images depicting the tenets of the Catholic faith.  Mural painting served as an important tool in the evangelization of native communities, many of whom were not literate in Spanish and therefore came to understand Christianity through sermons and visual images.  In addition to their religious aspect, however, murals also encoded social values and community identities to local populations.  Muralists of the colonial Andes frequently interwove local symbolism and historical references into their religious compositions, endowing murals with great complexity and sophistication.

    This presentation will explore how murals featuring representations of the apocalypse and religious allegories could emit double meanings to their congregations, as both images of evangelization and coded references to colonial violence and rebellion.  The murals under consideration correspond with the notion of “flexible sin” for the malleability of religious allegory in the creation of mural images; the representation of embodied “sinners” often constituted a form of incisive social critique while also participating in evangelical aims.

    A writer in residence in the Library’s Wertheim Study, Ananda Cohen is a PhD candidate in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center.  She is also an adjunct professor of art history at City College (CUNY).  Her dissertation focuses on Peruvian mural painting and social change in the late colonial period.

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