Staring, big-eyed cherubic angels, stalwart warrior archangels, exuberant floral fantasies, pious scenes of saints' lives, and the passion of Christ; these and more were created by indigenous artists to grace the façades and interior walls of the churches that dominated their pueblos, both architecturally and spiritually. This beguiling art has fascinated scholars and laypeople alike, most famously in the work of academics such as George Kubler and John McAndrew. Until recently, and with some exceptions, notably Jeanette Peterson and Constantino Reyes-Valerio, the art history of Mexico's first century of church construction has accentuated things European at the expense of indigenous Christian sculpture and painting, usually defined as copies or interpretations of ‘Old World’ models.
Eleanor Wake, though benefiting from such foundational studies, has embraced the conceptual approach pioneered by investigators such as Louise Burkhart, James Lockhart and Serge Gruzinski, among others, who reinterpreted the ‘spiritual conquest’ based on the analysis of indigenous-language texts. To borrow a concept from Gordon Brotherston, this revisionist scholarship saw things Christian ‘entering’ pre-existing and enduring indigenous sacreds, affecting them, but not ever really ‘conquering’ them in an absolute sense. Wake argues that this same kind of evolutionary development in artistic expression took place in a colonial indigenous ‘subreality’, the ‘level of social, political, and economic circumstance or aspiration’, which in turn affected the greater reality of the sixteenth-century sacred. Drawing on such conceptual models as Lockhart's concept of ‘double mistaken identity’, the process by which cultures in contact see false cognates in the cultural beliefs and practices of their opposite number, the author argues that by and large the indigenous peoples of early colonial central Mesoamerica, particularly the Nahuas, but others such as the Mixtecs and Zapotecs of Oaxaca as well, saw no fundamental difference between their own and the new faith, no reason to abandon their traditional rituals, forms of expression, and even fundamental belief systems as they honoured the Christian god and saints.
The ‘framing’ in the book's title refers to what Wake calls ‘framing rituals’, the ‘summoning and reenactment of the being of the sacred’ linked to ‘the creation of a ritual arena to which the sacred could be called or enticed’ (p. 46). Devotional ceremonies (food offerings, song and dance, the creation of floral adornments, etc.), as well as their representation, were part of these ‘framing rituals’. The seemingly ‘decorative’ elements gracing churches, from reused pre-contact carved stones to exuberant painted floral ‘grotesque’ friezes framing didactic Christian scenes, had ritual and sacred meanings going beyond pleasing artistic embellishment: bulging-eyed cherubic angels may have carried attributes of goggle-eyed tlaloque water deities, the angelic simultaneously invoking an older sacred force that provided life-giving water; certain native flowers painted on the interior walls of cloisters announced the continuing efficacy of ritual floral offerings in the ‘summoning and reenactment’ of the sacred. The rhythms created by painted flowing vegetative life may have been texts telling sacred stories or may have been scripts for ritual dancing. Thus indigenous artists and artisans employed their own traditions and techniques to ‘entice’ and celebrate Christianity as it was incorporated into a Mesoamerican cosmos, creating an ‘Indo-Christian’ sacred world.
Wake presents her arguments and realisations effectively, her text appropriately supported by numerous illustrations, some of them in full-colour plates. In the early chapters of the book the author assembles a cogent overview of pre-Hispanic indigenous beliefs about the cosmos, ritual practices, and the ways in which these peoples confronted, made sense of and folded Christianity into their own cosmic world, a process that among many other things made the local church into a new kind of teocalli (temple). The author convincingly argues that the sixteenth-century era of congregación and the deepening Spanish colonial presence was also the period of the most exuberant indigenous enthusiasm for church construction and for the placement of Mesoamerican sacred symbolism on and into these structures. Only when official Spanish efforts to censor, and sometimes to deface, what were seen as potentially dangerous ‘idolatrous’ elements took hold by the end of the sixteenth century did this enthusiasm wane. From chapter 5 onwards the author looks more systematically at the cultural implications and meanings of ‘embedded stones’ (carved elements carefully rescued from pre-contact structures like the ubiquitous concentric circle emblem of the chalchiuitl precious water symbol), at post-contact sculptures and paintings in which, for example, indigenous artists inserted their own traditional sacred colours and landscapes into biblical scenes, and at the alignments of the buildings themselves. These elements are those that ‘framed the sacred’ in such a way as to make ‘the churches … the architectural and iconographical embodiment of the Indio-Christian sacred’ (p. 256).
All of this is based on the masterful use of sources ranging from the façades and walls of numerous churches themselves (not just major edifices, but smaller visita churches as well, a complete list of which may be found in the book's Appendix A) through pertinent secondary literature to primary records (mapas, cartographic histories, the Cantares mexicanos, and the works of clergy such as Fray Toribio de Benevente Motolinia, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Fray Diego Durán and Jacinto de la Serna). While we have known for a good while that the indigenous peoples made Catholic churches their own, the focal points of local corporate and religious identity, sentiments expressed powerfully in such genres as historical annals and títulos primordiales, Eleanor Wake has given us a compellingly detailed picture of how this came about and was expressed in the very fabric of those same sacred structures. Framing the Sacred is thus an essential work of scholarship, and should remain the basic point of departure for those who want to pursue this subject area for years to come.
