The Quechua word “quillca” has been translated as both “writing” and “painting” since the early colonial period. What it might have signified before 1532 is uncertain, given that the Incas did not use alphabetic or hieroglyphic writing. Susan Webster's book takes a close look at the implications of this lexical coincidence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Quito, a viceregal urban center that had once been the northern capital of the Inca empire.

Some readers may be familiar with Andrés Sánchez Gallque's famous portrait of three mulatto chieftains from the coastal province of Esmeraldas: three black men in Spanish dress, their hats doffed to the representative of the Spanish Crown, carrying spears, their faces studded with gold jewelry. The portrait commemorates their 1597 pacification. Sánchez Gallque, an indigenous master painter, is one of the central figures in Webster's book. Her examination of him is not limited to the small number of paintings of his that survive; she inquires into his position as a lettered artist: a well-placed native who commanded Spanish notarial literacy and calligraphy at an expert level, in addition to being a prominent painter.

At the heart of Webster's book is this connection between notarial literacy and painting among a small but significant Andean elite engaged in artistic activities. Many of them—she counts ten in the period between 1550 and 1615, and 33 between 1615 and 1660 (and a 34th, whose ethnic identity is uncertain)—were well educated. Some held positions of authority in their communities, and many were attached through kinship or residence to the family of Atahualpha, the last Inca monarch. There are no surviving works for most of the artists whose lives Webster explores. Instead, her study is based on documentary evidence such as contracts, wills, and house-deeds, and is a kind of “ethnography” of this specialized class, describing their training, familial ties, purchases of property, what their studios looked like, and how they negotiated the sale of their work. This collective portrait, the product of painstaking research in notarial archives, provides a remarkable window into the lives of the indigenous elite.

Webster's main concern is not only to document the activities of the artists themselves, but also to read their artistic talents against the backdrop of their notarial skills. Her black-and-white illustrations document artists' signatures that identify them as lettered men who know how to make abbreviations, and add rubrics and so forth to their names, a set of practices we rarely associate with native actors. Webster dedicates a chapter to Andrés Sánchez Gallque, focusing on the traces of calligraphic training in his painting. His scribal proficiency, combined with his ability as a painter, allowed him to paint (as though he had written with pen and ink) a complicated signature that exhibits a command of several forms of calligraphic lettering, scribal conventions, and abbreviations. This leads Webster to surmise that his self-presentation as a native artist originated in a combination of skillfully executed scribal literacy and artistic representation. Notwithstanding Sánchez Gallque's uniqueness, Webster's work indicates that there was a conscious juxtaposition by elite indigenous actors of alphabetic and visual literacy in the colonial period, perhaps not precisely in the pre-Columbian sense of quillca, but in a distinctly Andean colonial association between painting and writing.

This magnificent book is directed at a specialist audience; however, its contents will also be relevant to Latin Americanist historians of the period and to students of literacy in general. It contains superb color plates and is written in fluid prose.