CLOTHING THE
N E W WO R L D CHURCH Liturgical Textiles of Spanish America, 1520–1820
M A Y A
S T A N F I E L D - M A Z Z I
University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana
C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
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Acknowledgments
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Introduction
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ONE
Woven Silk
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T WO
Embroidery
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T H R E E Featherwork
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FOUR
Tapestry
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FIVE
Painted Cotton and Cotton Lace
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SIX
Conclusion
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Glossary of Liturgical and Textile Terms
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Notes
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Bibliography
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Index
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Introduction
A painting from seventeenth-century Peru expresses the Catholic belief that masses for the dead can free souls from purgatory (figure I.1a). It does so by illustrating on the left a contemporary mass (fig. I.1b), thus communicating to viewers the possibility of accessing the salvific sacrament themselves. To the right appears a group of souls in limbo, shown as nude figures nearly engulfed in flames. They clasp their hands together and weep, begging for salvation. At center-left appears the earthly scene of a priest and his attendants (deacon and subdeacon) in the process of celebrating mass at a church altar. At the far left is shown the more otherworldly, or at least anachronistic, figure of Saint Gregory, who as pope (590– 604) was believed to have fixed the form of the Roman Mass.1 While lifting the lid of a box likely meant to hold a missal, or authorized prayer guide, Gregory looks skyward to the ultimate purpose of the liturgical ceremony, which is to provide souls entrance to heaven. In the clouds an angel guides a prayerful soul, depicted as a nude, white-skinned youth, toward salvation. Many aspects of Catholic Church doctrine and history are evident in this painting. Considering that this is a painting created for a small parish church in colonial Peru, we might see its communication of Catholic tenets and its illustration of a proper performance of the liturgy as somewhat new and necessary for the church’s indigenous parishioners. Part and parcel of the liturgical performance is the fact that Pope Gregory, the priest, and the deacons are all shown wearing multiple garments of church ceremony, and the church’s altar is also copiously “dressed.” In all, at least twenty distinct textile items are represented. These items, shown here in their ideal, most “decent” state according to Church dictates, are indices of an overlooked fact: after Spain’s establishment of Catholicism in the region now known as Latin America, churches throughout the region were shrouded in cloth. Woven mats covered their floors, fine rugs lay before their altars, and a variety of cloths of different shapes and sizes covered the altars themselves. Curtains 1
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(a)
(b)
F I G U R E I . 1 . Mass for the Dead and Souls in Purgatory, in whole (a) and detail of left side (b),
Peru, late seventeenth century. Oil on canvas. Church of San Pablo de Cacha, Department of Cusco, Peru. Photograph © Rodrigo Rodrich Portugal.
and canopies hung behind altars, and when possible, textiles draped church walls. As churches became populated with statuary depicting Christian saints, the statues were also clothed in fabric. Church officials—priests, deacons, and acolytes—wore fine cloth vestments, especially in order to celebrate the central sacrament of Mass. Surviving account books and inventories of colonial Spanish American churches
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show that textiles were among the most numerous and costly features of church interiors. The modest earnings of parish churches, year after year, were spent on the necessities of wax, wine, soap, oil, and incense. Anything left over was spent on church clothing, and often priests and parishioners donated large sums to purchase cloth items seen to be lacking. It is thus not an understatement to say that cloth was the single most important material and visual feature of Catholic church interiors in Spanish America. Here I will tell the story of this cloth, in ways that illuminate its role in creating and maintaining the Spanish American church. The impetus for this study was not the fact that cloth was present in great quantities in colonial churches—any scholar of the colonial period will have noticed this when perusing parish records of the type found in church archives. Nor was it the fact that this cloth was highly valued and that the great majority of it was imported, made of silk spun in Europe and China or linen grown and processed in the Old World. These points are interesting in themselves, for they speak to the colonial regime of value and to the effects of early modern economic globalization in the New World. But the motivation for this book was a more elusive fact—also found in archival documents but easily overlooked—that Amerindians were closely involved in the manufacture and maintenance of these cloths. Indigenous people cut, sewed, dyed, embroidered, painted, patched, and washed imported church textiles so they could be used and worn throughout the ritual year. Pieces were constructed of new cloth, but damaged works were often refurbished and altered to be reused. Most intriguingly, native people adapted their own textile materials and techniques to the demands of church patronage. We thus discover that Mexican featherworkers used the plumes of Mesoamerican birds to create shimmering priestly vestments. We learn that Peruvian weavers used camelid (primarily vicuña and alpaca) wool to weave tapestries that fronted altars throughout the southern Andes. Dye-painting on cotton cloth was adapted to adorn churches in northwestern South America, and American cotton was used to create lace for church articles throughout the New World. In myriad ways these cloths’ contexts of creation, their materials, the techniques by which they were created, and their final visual features make them hybrid manifestations of the New World church. This “church” with a lowercase c was a spiritual community that, while directed by the institutional Church headquartered in Rome, included potentially all members of Spanish American society: men, women, and children of multiple ethnic backgrounds. This study will delve into the hybrid or mestizo qualities of church cloths, uncovering the fascinating ways in which their makers united worlds and created objects that were spiritually meaningful on American soil. In this sense I follow a great amount of previous scholarship on “fine” art media such as painting and architecture.2 Yet this book is also a wider analysis of the transformative power of
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cloth, in the Renaissance and toward the present. Scholarship has sufficiently proven the importance of the textile industry for transforming the economies of early modern Europe and by doing so has shown us what globalization first looked like.3 Art history has more recently joined the fray, considering the worldwide trade in textiles and its broad visual impact.4 But there has yet to be a sustained consideration of the role of cloth within the massively expansive Catholic Church, which within the span of three centuries transformed the ritual and spiritual lives of a majority of the inhabitants of Central and South America. The real and metaphorical powers of cloth are wide reaching. When considered as an enveloping, covering object, cloth’s ability to transform is remarkable. Consider only the effect of a fine tablecloth draped over a temporary foldout table. If we link cloth to the spread of the Church, an imperialist metaphor would be a silk damask rippling across the Americas, obscuring past cultures, albeit with great sensual appeal. But the fact of the matter is that this cloth was not continuous or all encompassing. Instead, European cloth came to coexist with the diverse textile traditions already flourishing in the Americas, many with deep connections to religious belief and practice. Scholarship on dress and indigenous identity has shown how important locally significant garments are to the formulation and maintenance of native cultures, and we must keep this in mind to understand native peoples’ engagement with, and creation of, church textiles.5 Perhaps cloth’s deep connections to being rely on its phenomenological purchase. Cloth is understood to be vital to existence and identity, for who has not felt the ways it touches the body? It weighs or chafes. It also rustles, muffles, shrouds, and warms. And that is only the finished cloth—the processes of creating cloth are also terrain for cultural metaphors that bring us back to hybridity. Woven cloth in its most simple form consists of warp and weft threads placed perpendicular to each other (diagram I.1). Although these threads are opposed to each other, when the weft threads alternately pass over and under the warp threads, a whole cloth is created, uniting the opposing forces and using their tension to its benefit. We thus have a metaphor of cultural traditions coexisting and coming together to create something new. Many cloths have borders and fields, and these parts of cloth are given cultural significance. Which is more important: a border because it confines and frames a field, or the larger field, being only embellished by the border and given ample space to display a pattern or figures?6 The coexistence of ranked elements within a textile would seem to suggest social relationships and relative values applied to sectors of societies such as, for example, the European and indigenous members of colonial society.7 Similar in nature to questions about border versus field are figure and ground relationships, especially perplexing in woven textiles where both the figures and the ground make up part of an interwoven structure. How are we to
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D I AG R A M I . 1 . Plain weave structure.
Drawing by Dylan Stanfield.
“read” textiles that do not have a clear figure and ground? Is there the possibility of alternate readings, where the supposed ground becomes the figure? In the case of medieval Europe, Michel Pastoureau has shown that striped textiles came to have arresting (and generally negative) connotations because their figures and grounds were not clearly distinguished.8 It is important to question the relative values applied to these different aspects of textiles’ compositions, being sure to “read” them in all possible ways. The contiguous nature of woven textiles makes patterning, or the regular repetition of motifs, a naturally predominant feature. Worldwide, previously unrelated textile traditions display similar sorts of patterning, yet often with divergent associations.9 In sixteenth-century Spain, for example, a pattern of connected diamonds or ovals was known as “little almonds,” while in the Andes a similar pattern is called “eyes,” or “holes for planting.”10 Despite these culturally specific meanings, in a Christian European way of looking at art, patterns were thought to be a relatively innocuous way of occupying space—they did not offend or suggest idolatry, especially when devoid of representational figures.11 A space was thus opened for local textile makers to use patterns that were culturally significant to them and may have had meanings other than those expected in the church setting. Beyond woven cloth, many church textiles were adorned by way of superstructural techniques such as embroidery, appliqué, and painting. These techniques were relatively easy to learn and afford a certain freedom of choice in comparison to preplanned loom weavings. Tailoring also became a common trade for Amerindians, even though the tailoring of cloth was not common practice in the
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pre-Columbian Americas. Tailoring implies the power to cut down, modify, unite, and even radically transform existing pieces of fabric. The textile creators addressed in this book were designers who fabricated their own works based on tradition and existing models, infusing them with individual creative elements. So, as this is a study of the power of cloth, it becomes a study of the agency of clothworkers in the Americas. Women were almost completely barred from participating in the church hierarchy, and indigenous men only gained the right to ordination in the eighteenth century.12 But these people were often involved as church textile creators. However small, this involvement may have given them a measure of power within the church that tempered priestly power, held largely in the hands of Spanish or Creole men (of European descent but born in the colony). Armed with the power of cloth, these artisans created works that would have spoken to parishioners in ways that went beyond language. The question of language is indeed key, since the majority of Catholic services were conducted in Latin and sermons were most often in Spanish, a language that most Amerindians only spoke secondarily, if at all. We are limited by not knowing the names of our artisans, since textile works were rarely signed and the surviving documents do not tend to record the names of their makers. Indeed, we are working under a different, early modern definition of an artist that respected artists as craftspeople but did not view them as individual geniuses who should attain name recognition.13 It was much more common for the names of patrons and donors to be recorded, and occasionally we learn the gender and ethnic identity of an artist. But most often we are presented with anonymous craftspeople (more than one of whom could have worked on a single piece), known less as “artists” or “artisans” than by craft-specific terms such as “tailor” or “silkworker.” In large part we must judge their identities based on the products they created.14 In Europe early modern guilds protected male textile workers and further valorized their trade. Women were highly involved in the crafts, since a strict division between public and private space had not yet developed and relegated women to the home. But as guilds developed, women were restricted from participation and thus were accorded secondary status.15 In Spanish America’s colonial labor economy, formalized guilds were relatively rare outside the viceregal capitals of Mexico City and Lima. While native artisans were quickly put to work in the colonial setting, they were often supervised by European émigrés or Creoles.16 However, the colonial system did introduce an important distinction that encouraged and protected the work of indigenous artists, including makers of fine cloth. These workers were recognized as skilled artisans (embroiderers, featherworkers, weavers, etc.) called oficiales and were thus exempted from paying tribute to the Spanish government or providing other forms of obligatory labor.
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It does not appear that native women could attain this status, however, and the details of their participation in the creation of church textiles are somewhat obscure. On one hand, we know that native women were important agents of textile production in pre-Hispanic times, and they continued with their traditional labors (such as spinning) to some extent. On the other hand, the Spanish American church was so patriarchal that it is difficult to imagine women receiving direct commissions for church textiles. Nevertheless, in keeping with European patterns, the church celebrated female piety and reserved a place of honor for women who created church ornaments.17 We thus find references to European and Creole women who embroidered church ornaments.18 Spanish, Creole, and mestizo women also appear to have practiced lacemaking, while native women innovated techniques such as drawn work that could be used for church textiles. It is thus possible to consider textile workers as important agents in colonial society, particularly as intermediaries between multiple forces: European and native textile traditions, priests and patrons, and the secular and sacred branches of colonial society.19 For example, in 1778 the priest of the town of Huanoquite, near Cusco, Peru, received a donation of fabric for a processional banner from the local cacique, or indigenous leader. The finished banner, which was commissioned from a tailor, was to be bordered with golden ribbon and had a coat of arms embroidered on it in gold thread.20 A banner surviving in Lima gives us a general idea of what it may have looked like, though it features Christian imagery instead of a coat of arms (fig. I.2). While the cacique of Huanoquite donated the cloth and likely was allowed to carry the banner in processions (since presumably it bore his family’s coat of arms), the priest paid the tailor to confect the piece. Apart from considering the roles of the cacique and priest as they came to shared purpose, we can think of the tailor as the facilitator of a delicate and important cultural interchange, materialized in the cloth of church ritual. For the purposes of this study I will usually sidestep the issue of whether to call our craftspeople “artisans” or “artists,” on the basis of the fact that the distinction in terms postdates the period of this study.21 I prefer to use “tailor,” “weaver,” “embroiderer,” and other terms we know were in use at the time. We can also search for local and native ways of esteeming the crafts of textile makers that are distinct from the Western framework. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that the artisan/artist split relates to a larger development in European thought that in the eighteenth century created two categories of arts, the “mechanical” and “fine” arts. Certain visual arts, such as painting, sculpture, and architecture, were assigned to the fine arts category, but textile arts were not. The period in which this occurred corresponded to the era in which the first public museums were established, and museums of fine art thus came to hold painting and sculpture but not textiles. If and when textiles were collected, they were
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F I G U R E I . 2 . Processional Banner with Flowers and Angels Adoring the Host, Peru, eighteenth
century. Embroidered silk velvet, silk and silver-gilt thread, glass gems. 79.3 × 127.5 cm. Museo Pedro de Osma, Lima, #2014.0.14. Photograph courtesy of Daniel Giannoni.
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included in museums of “decorative” or “applied” arts, such as the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. There is today not a single ideal place to go to appreciate the textile arts of the Spanish American church. Museums such as the Victoria and Albert hold some pieces, as do fine arts museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Private textile museums, most notably the Textile Museum in Washington, DC (founded in 1925) are important in their dedication to the textile medium. And former ethnographic museums, now classified as museums of anthropology or natural history, are important depositories of the indigenous textiles that I address here. In Latin America museums tend to be organized chronologically and, when focused on the colonial period, are inclined to stick to the fine arts category in their collecting practices. The private Museo Amano in Lima, Peru—unusual in its focus on textiles—holds a stunning collection of pre-Columbian pieces but has nothing from the colonial period. Meanwhile the Museo Pedro de Osma in Lima, specializing in colonial art, privileges the fine arts while holding a small collection of Spanish-influenced liturgical textiles. The Museo Franz Mayer in Mexico City is focused on decorative arts of the colonial period and so has a more substantial collection of Spanish-inspired pieces. Of course, any work of liturgical art in a museum is divorced from its sacred context and dependent on its more recent history of being somehow released from a church and taken by a collector to a museum. The changing fortunes of the Catholic Church, as well as the simple desire to renovate and renew church textile suites, have led to the sale of textiles by church guardians. For example, a collecting tendency during the first half of the twentieth century (the time in which George Hewitt Myers of the Textile Museum was active) caused most Andean churches to part with their early colonial tapestries to the benefit of foreign collectors. The Church lost much of its financial support after Latin American nations gained independence, and the interests (and wallets) of these new collectors created opportunities for many parishes.22 Postdating this trend, the reforms of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) made the use of elaborate vestments and altar coverings less common.23 Churches, especially those attached to monasteries and convents, became more willing to part with their textile treasures as monasticism began to lose its appeal. Yet there are still important holdings of textiles in church sacristies throughout Latin America. The cathedrals of Lima and Mexico City fastidiously preserve their fine liturgical vestments, and often some of them are on display. Small parish churches also have stacks of textiles piled in cedar drawers in their cool and dark sacristies. Whether in museums, churches, or private collections, all surviving church textiles face issues of preservation and display. Textile dyes are particularly sensi-
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tive to light exposure, and fibers themselves are susceptible to humidity, insect infestation, and breakage. They should thus be stored flat and in controlled environments. But in order to display such pieces, it is ideal that they be shown in ways that approximate their original usage. Relatively few were made to be hung flat on walls. Rather, they were meant to be draped over altars, stairs, and human bodies. Museum professionals and church officials must thus develop innovative ways to both preserve and display these works for the public and, in doing the latter, foster interest in their study and preservation. A major contribution of this book is bringing the whole range of textile types together, illustrating works that are now scattered around the world and reconstructing their original contexts. I create a field of comparison, within which readers can compare and contrast textiles of various types and see how they informed one another.
TEXTILE ITEMS AND THEIR CONTEXTS Let us now return to figure I.1b and explore the painting by way of its textiles. I will define the principal items and introduce their terminology, with the most common Spanish term(s) in parentheses when different from the English (see also the glossary).24 Before addressing the vestments themselves, we see that the figures stand on a richly colored carpet (alfombra) placed before the altar table. This carpet extends over the steps that lead to the church floor and would have been preceded by another, simpler rug. Behind the altar are two separate textile elements. A wall hanging (colgadura) in a striped green and red damask or velvet with repeating flower forms extends behind the altar but does not reach the floor. In front of this is a red silk dossal (dosel, palio, or cielo) that frames the painted (or perhaps sculpted) image of Christ on the cross.25 If the image is sculpted, it is also backed with a black textile panel. The altar, essentially a table with a consecrated stone top, would have had a negative space below it. In order to obscure that space, an altar frontal (frontal de altar) was attached to the altar’s top by way of hooks or ties. To the viewer, this item serves as a background for the priest from the waist down and almost entirely backs the two kneeling deacons. Here the frontal is a black panel that is surrounded by a separate red frame on its three upper sides, known as a frontlet or superfrontal (frontalera). Both the frontlet and frontal are bordered with bands of metallic ribbon, and the lower edge of the horizontal section of the frontlet is trimmed with a row of fringe. The altar’s upper surface is covered with a white altar cloth (paño de altar) trimmed with lace.
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Though not seen in this painting, another narrow cloth, known in Spanish as a palia, often crossed the main altar cloth at right angles and featured a richly worked panel that hung down at the center of the altar, to the bottom edge of the frontlet.26 Other textile items used in mass but not depicted here are the burse (bolsa de corporal ), a cloth folder meant to contain the corporal, a cloth upon which the chalice and paten are placed, and a small, often stiff, chalice cover (cubrecáliz). A white purificator (purificador) was also used to wipe the chalice clean, and all of these items could be covered with a chalice veil (velo del cáliz). Smaller cloth panels (known as paños de atril and de púlpito) could be used to cover the lectern and hang over the front of a pulpit, and long, narrow panels could be mounted on pillars. Moving to the vestments proper, each of the clerics wears a white alb (alba), a long gown with narrow sleeves, sometimes trimmed with lace. In addition to a white collar known as an amice (amito), for church services the alb was placed over the cassock (sotana), the clerical garment of daily wear. Over these items the priest wears a long curved garment known as a chasuble (casulla), the most essential vestment for the sacrament of Mass and the one restricted solely to it. By the sixteenth century this garment was sleeveless and had a similar curved shape on front and back.27 In the painting the chasuble has a central red strip or orphrey (cenefa) bounded by ribbon, and the whole garment is edged in the same ribbon. The deacon and subdeacon wear a dalmatic (dalmática) and tunicle (tunicela) respectively, garments that nevertheless are hardly distinguishable from each other. They differ from the chasuble in that their profiles are largely rectilinear, with wide rectangular panels on front and back and wide rectangular sleeves that are open on the bottom. Each features a curving collar, which was often removable. Dalmatics had stiff decorative panels known as apparels (tarjas) applied to them, as in the square red panels applied at the base of the back of each garment in the painting. Very often, and as reflected in the painting, a liturgical set (terno) or ornament (ornamento) of matching items was created that included the altar frontal, a chasuble, and two dalmatics. It might also include insignia for the officiants in the form of three stoles (estolas) and two maniples (manípulos). The priest’s stole, a long, narrow, scarf-like strip with flared ends, was worn around his neck and empowered him to say mass, while the deacons wore stoles crossed on their torsos. The maniple, a shorter strip of cloth also with flared ends, was worn over the priest and deacon’s left forearms. Also part of the set might be a burse, chalice cover and/or veil, and, as seen in the painting, a frontlet and dossal. Finally, it might include a wide humeral veil (velo humeral or almaizal), meant to be draped over a priest’s shoulders and used to hold the Sacrament when transporting it. Very few sets included all of these items, however, and the most complete sets were
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reserved for pontifical (bishops’) masses. The simplest sets might just be made up of a chasuble, dalmatics, and frontal. To the left of this scene of the mass appears Gregory, wearing other garments that are important to mention.28 He wears an alb over his cassock, though bishops also were entitled to wear the rochet (roquete), like an alb but with more extensive lace decoration at the neck and on the skirt and sleeves. All clerics, including choir members, also wore the surplice (sobrepelliz), a white tunic with wide sleeves, for ceremonies outside of mass. Gregory’s primary vestment is the garment used by bishops for processions and ceremonies beyond mass, the cope (capa pluvial). The piece is depicted as made of a rich brocade, trimmed with jeweled ribbon, and lined in green silk. Copes featured ornamental hoods, left over from when they were more functional, protective garments. Choir members wore shorter, simpler choir copes (capas de coro). Gregory’s cope is attached at the neck with a jeweled morse (rana). Since he was a pope rather than a bishop, he is shown wearing a white papal tiara. This item was never used or created in the colonial Americas because no pope visited the New World. Nor is it used today, having been symbolically abandoned by Pope Paul VI at the Second Vatican Council.29 However, the similar item of headwear reserved for bishops and archbishops, the miter (mitra) was widely used and manufactured in Spanish America. A cylindrical hat made of two pieces of cloth that extend above the head in a pyramidal shape, the miter is fitted with two lappets or infulae (caídas or ínfulas), strips of cloth that hang down the back. Miters are never used during mass but are worn for other church rituals, such as baptisms, blessings, and processions. As they are not part of mass vestments, they are often created independently with unique decoration. They are traditionally divided into three classes that correspond to their use and type of adornment: the mitra preciosa, used for the highest festive occasions, is decorated with jewels; the mitra aurifrigiata is used for penitential days and can be embroidered with gold thread but not jewels; and the mitra simplex, used for ordinary days (those not designated as feasts in the Catholic calendar), is plain.30 Textiles were also used within the Church to clothe sculpted images of saints. Following Spanish baroque practices developed especially in Seville, statues (even if sculpted as if wearing clothing) were additionally dressed in clothing that was changed on a regular basis, especially for the feast days of the saints depicted.31 A devotional painting from eighteenth-century Peru represents a statue of Mary and the Christ Child within a church, installed behind a clothed altar and adored by two donors (fig. I.3). The altar features a lace-trimmed altar cloth and also shows a palia, mentioned above, hanging down in the center over a red frontal. The statue of Mary is dressed in a red brocade or embroidered mantle trimmed with gold ribbon, under which is a matching red apron (often called an escapulario). Her neck and cuffs are trimmed in lace, and she wears a gauze veil. The Christ
F I G U R E I . 3 . The Virgin Mary with Two Donors, Cusco, Peru, eighteenth century. Oil on panel.
17.5 × 26.0 cm. Barbosa-Stern Collection, Lima. Photograph by Daniel Giannoni, courtesy of the collection.
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Child wears a matching tunic and a coat or cape-like garment often called a capisayo. Statues of other saints were also dressed in rich garments, depending on their attributes. Christ crucified was dressed in a gauze skirt known as a sudario, and saints who had been church officials in their lives, such as Saint Blaise, were dressed in their own vestments. As also seen in the painting, cloth canopies (cielos) and curtains known as veils (velos) surrounded statues and could be closed over them.32
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F I G U R E I . 4 . Workshop of José Juárez. Franciscan Procession from Tlatelolco to Tepeyac Imploring the Intercession of the Virgin of Guadalupe to Calm the Cocolixtli Plague of 1544, Mexico City, ca. 1653–1655. Oil on canvas. 275 × 571 cm. Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe, Mexico City. D.R. ãArchivo del Museo de la Basílica de Guadalupe.
A variety of other cloths could be used for festival occasions and penitential processions. The faithful whose homes were located along processional routes hung long pieces of fine cloth from their balconies. As we learned above with the Huanoquite commission, processants displayed a variety of banners to mark their participation. A painting from mid-seventeenth-century Mexico (fig. I.4) depicts a penitential procession of the previous century in which inhabitants of Mexico City processed to the village of Tepeyac to request the Virgin of Guadalupe’s assistance
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in quelling the plague known as cocolixtli. The processants are dressed in cotton skirts to display their humility, accompanied by a Jesuit priest in a cope with a rich morse and a Franciscan priest in traditional woolen habit. The church’s altar is dressed as we have come to expect, with a rich rug preceding it and a somber black frontal surrounded by an embroidered red frontlet. Outside the chapel a processional cross is adorned with a black cylindrical banner known as a manga, and processants near the altar (dressed in the white gowns of neophytes) hold other flag-like banners, two black and one red. The black textiles shown in the painting correspond to the somber occasion of the penitential procession. Church textiles, especially liturgical sets, were created in colors keyed to the liturgical year. The Church only gradually developed standard prescriptions for which colors were to be used at which times, however. In the late twelfth century, Innocent III established four main colors for use in Rome (white, red, black, and green) during specific seasons. The French liturgical writer William Durandus, in his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum written before 1286, further spelled out the use of colors through the year while acknowledging variations.33 Just as powerful dioceses, such as Toledo and Milan, maintained variations in their liturgy, so did different religious orders vary in their use of colors.34 In the early colonial period in Spanish America, which predated the Council of Trent, the use of liturgical colors was still largely unstandardized. It may have varied between priests, depending on where they were ordained, and it certainly varied between religious orders. But the 1570 Roman Missal of Pius V contains a short section on colors, reflecting a new spirit of liturgical standardization.35 It prescribes white for feasts dedicated to Christ and Mary, as well as for Corpus Christi, Maundy Thursday (Holy Thursday), and All Saints’ Day. Red is recommended for feasts of the cross and of martyrs. Green should be used from Epiphany to Septuagesima (the ninth Sunday before Easter) and on ordinary Sundays. Violet is prescribed for Advent and the weeks from Septuagesima to Holy Saturday (except Maundy Thursday and Holy Friday). Harking back to the importance of purple in the Roman Empire, violet is also to be used for the Purification of the Virgin Mary, Palm Sunday, masses of the Passion of Christ, and masses for the dying. And finally, black is for Good Friday and masses for the dead.36 Neither yellow, orange, nor blue appear as liturgical colors, though traditionally blue had been (and continued to be) associated with feasts of the Virgin Mary. Church inventories from Spanish America often categorize church clothing on the basis of color, providing separate lists of “red ornaments,” “white ornaments,” and so on. Bishops’ inspections of their dioceses commonly included visits to church sacristies, during which the inspectors reviewed the “decency,” or cleanliness and good repair, of vestments. They also checked to be sure that there
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were sets to fit the five main colors: red, white, green, violet, and black. Items were categorized according to their base color. Naturally, the San Pablo de Cacha painting (fig. I.1b), which illustrates a mass for the dead, shows a liturgical set whose base color is black. It is likely, however, that such a set could have also been used as a red ornament. Pieces such as copes that were covered in multicolored embroidery were seen as appropriate for a variety of festive occasions. Another concern for church inspectors, as for priests instituting Catholic ritual at the beginning of the colonial era, was that vestments be made of cloth that was distinct from that seen in common dress and non-elite household furnishings. This preference was understood within the rubric of “decency” but was also related to more subtle distinctions between textile fibers, including silk, fur, linen, and sheep’s wool. Distinctions were also made between fibers of these four main categories. For example, from the fourteenth century, the church hierarchy was made visible through variations not only in garment type but also the fibers used to create the garments. Thus, today only cardinals are allowed to wear the short cape known as a mozzetta in merino sheep’s wool or silk, and only the pope can wear a velvet version trimmed with ermine fur.37 The most appropriate cloth for liturgical sets was silk, and albs and altar cloths were to be made of linen. These preferences greatly affected the types of liturgical cloth that could be made in the Americas. Silk was generally not produced in the Americas, and only Mexican feathers and camelid fibers (vicuña and alpaca, but not llama or guanaco) were seen as acceptable substitutes. Priestly preferences for silk always continued to inform church textiles, leading to the overwhelming presence of imported yardage and silk thread. Cotton was generally used only as a replacement for linen, also not a New World product. The chapters in this book proceed based on these preferences and in an attempt to show chronologically the development of church textiles in the Americas, with an emphasis on Amerindian contributions. They will be defined by textile type, in the sense of a “type” consisting of a particular union of materials and techniques that was practiced by a distinct group of artisans to produce unique sorts of textiles. To begin, chapter 1 addresses silk and its manifestation as woven cloth in order to address the primary type of imported fabric that was so desired by the Church in the Americas. To do so I also delve further into the concept of decency. This chapter addresses the one case of silk production in the Americas, which occurred in southern and central Mexico in the sixteenth century, and the predominance of global silks in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Chapter 2 discusses embroidery, which while made of silk and metal threads, is a distinct type of nonwoven work that was practiced by embroiderers in Spain and then in the Americas. In chapter 3, on Mexican featherwork, we see the first example of a purely Amerindian type (in terms of both materials and technique) being adapted
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for liturgical textiles. Chapter 4 addresses tapestry-woven textiles, especially the camelid-fiber works from Peru that Spaniards likened to both woven silk and Flemish tapestries. Chapter 5 discusses the primary examples of cloth created in American cotton for church use, especially dye-painted Holy Week hangings from Chachapoyas, Peru, and openwork cloth, including lace. Each of these chapters introduces the origins, techniques, and materials of the textile type and discusses the artisans who created it and the people who commissioned it. I analyze specific pieces and their imagery in detail within a chronological framework for that particular type. The conclusion underscores the historical dimensions of New World liturgical textiles. It addresses the wider significance of the textile incarnations I examine, showing how styles and techniques developed for church textiles influenced secular textiles during the colonial period. We also see that in many areas the production of church textiles is still an important element of religious culture, as well as a source of livelihood for artisans. This book takes a hemispheric view and shows readers several key ways in which textile makers responded and adapted to priestly dictates in order to participate in the creation of the Catholic Church in the New World. It is the first to look across the Spanish Americas and focus on the textile medium, showing that while the region worked from a Spanish baseline for many of its church textile practices, regionally specific and highly creative textile types also emerged. Liturgical textiles in the New World were diverse and historically contingent, offering a plethora of forms that diverged from what had been in Spain. I contend that when artists in the Americas created church textiles, they did so consciously, in the understanding that they were creating the church anew, with their own hands.