'Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between' Q&A with Ananda Cohen Suarez

Examining the vivid, often apocalyptic church murals of Peru from the early colonial period through the nineteenth century, the new book Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between: Murals of the Colonial Andes explores the sociopolitical situation represented by the artists who generated these murals for rural parishes. Arguing that the murals were embedded in

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complex networks of trade, commerce, and the exchange of ideas between the Andes and Europe, Ananda Cohen Suarez also considers the ways in which artists and viewers worked through difficult questions of envisioning sacredness.

Ananda Cohen Suarez is an assistant professor of history of art at Cornell University. She is editor and principal author of Pintura colonial cusqueña: el esplendor del arte en los Andes. She has also published articles in the journals Colonial Latin American Review, Americas, and Allpanchis. We talk to Professor Suarez about her work, her intentions, the preconquest and postconquest visual world in Latin America, and the challenges she faced in documenting, photographing, and writing about mural painting. 

In the region you cover in your book, what are the differences between rural art production and how religious art changed in urban centers?

I have found that by the seventeenth century, we begin to see a shift in artistic production between the city of Cuzco and its rural environs. The churches and convents in the urban center tend to feature larger-than-life canvas paintings, elaborate gilded retablos, and an array of aesthetic embellishments that endow these religious spaces with a sense of grandeur and architectural complexity. Rural parishes located in Cuzco’s southern provinces are usually much smaller with humbler interiors, especially the farther you travel from the city. You see a sparser prevalence of gold and silver, given their high cost. The artworks contained within these churches are often produced by so-called “second rate” artists whose prices would have been more affordable for the priests, donors, and confraternities that commissioned their works. However, their visual impact is no less stunning. It is in these spaces that you find the exuberant murals featured in this book.

Interior view of the Church of Rondocan, Acomayo Province, with murals dating to the late 17th or 18th century. Note the combination of trompe l’oeil framed paintings, depictions of angelic musicians, and textile murals lining the choir and nave. Photo by Raúl Montero Quispe.

Mural painting remained a prevalent art form in the rural Andes well into the nineteenth century. Even today, you can find political slogans and imagery painted along the exteriors of residences and stores throughout the Andean countryside. Murals were expected to do much of the “heavy lifting” for church decoration, imitating retablos, picture frames, textiles, and an array of other expensive materials through the medium of tempera on adobe walls. These murals began to develop their own aesthetic language by the eighteenth century, and in fact, we can trace uncanny similarities across far-flung mural programs by this period, demonstrating the cohesiveness of rural artistic networks across the southern Andes.