For nearly ninety years, scholarship on Latin American colonial art has been dominated by a discourse over the content and significance the Mestizo style. Art historians have analyzed this unique style of architectural sculpture that emerged in the southern Andes during the mid-seventeenth century as part of a vigorous debate over whether its characteristic merger of indigenous and Spanish iconography expressed an authentic, local fusion of European and Andean motifs and cultures. This dialogue has served as a medium to articulate larger historiographical concerns for the possible saliency and continuity of indigenous religious traditions amidst colonial experience and a means to recognize the cultural contributions made by native Andean peoples to the artistic legacy of the colonial era. While proposing the term “Andean Hybrid Baroque” to reference this style, Gauvin Alexander Bailey offers a thoughtful and welcome contribution to this rich corpus of academic scholarship. The Andean Hybrid Baroque is the product of over six years of photographic surveys and archival research throughout the region and the first major work to incorporate detailed descriptions of the facades and portals that the movement produced along with governmental and ecclesiastical archival documents from the era. These new sources allow Bailey to analyze the art and motifs within the context of the architecture and histories of the buildings upon which these sculptural forms prominently appear. For the publication of these detailed accounts and archival transcripts alone, this tome would be a grand contribution to the historiography of the architectural form. However, Bailey utilizes these sources in an effort to identify indigenous elements, structures, and interpretations and to reconstruct the historical experiences, understandings, and culture that generated these carvings.

The text begins with a useful introduction to the voices and issues that have dominated the academic discussion of the Andean Hybrid Baroque since the early twentieth-century. The following eight chapters offer a catalogue of the products of the movement arranged by region and chronology that integrates detailed descriptions of the carvings derived from original photographic surveys with some analysis and brief building histories constructed primarily from archival documents. The cultural historical presentation propels the scholarship beyond laboriously discussed considerations of style and patronage to challenge considerations of the social, ethnic, religious, and political contexts of many of the monuments. Within each chapter, Bailey notes regional variations within the artistic form and reveals that the geographical differences that diversified the livelihoods and experience of colonial communities affected the emergent iconography and style. While the work overwhelming depicts the products of the Andean sculptors as authentic expressions of popular religious understandings, he does note the impact of frequently antagonistic relationships with the European authorities and patrons and the effect of forced labor within the construction of church facades. It is within the final chapter that the author significantly brings the insights gleaned from the cultivated extirpation documents, sermons, and oral histories into dialogue with ethnohistorical scholarship on Andean religion and iconography to reflect upon the ornamentation as a whole, considering the meaning, interaction, and significance of motifs.

Throughout the work, Bailey presents the sculptural forms of the Andean Hybrid Baroque to aver the complexity and interrelation between power, art, ethnic identity, and religion throughout colonial Latin America. Bailey sets his analysis of the products of the Andean Hybrid Baroque within the history of the rebellions of the era in order to highlight the nuanced yet fluid colonial interactions and interpenetrating cultural hybridization that defined and shaped colonial Andean experiences, Andean Christianity and, by extension, the Andean Hybrid Baroque. The text maintains that Andean peoples were proficient with the practice of cultural translation and the Andean sculptors were able to actively engage and reinterpret imposed Catholic European iconographies and practices to express their own religious worlds and understandings. The Andean Hybrid Baroque proposes a historical narrative and analysis of the mingled Andean imagery and European Christian iconography on church facades that depict a Catholicism that was ambivalent towards the message and experiences of Andean rebels but inextricably integrated with indigenous practices and identities. As a result of the oversight and willful ignorance of colonial architects and patrons and the emergent articulation of Incan legitimacy through public patronage of Catholicism, the carved decoration that adorned the church facades of the eighteenth century expressed a religious reality in which Christianity had been embraced as an inextricable component of Andean daily life. In the author's hands the iconographic elements and internal structure of Andean Hybrid Baroque facades and doorways evidence a cohesive religious world that intertwined the imagery, cosmology, and priorities of European Catholicism with their indigenous counterparts. He boldly maintains that the carvings reveal the sacred temporal structures of the Andean agricultural calendar and an indigenous perception of a dualistic cosmos expressed through the delicately balanced, symbiotic Hanan and Hurin system that Andean peoples observed within geographic, social, and cosmic schemes and their iconographic references. In recognition of the blurred religious boundaries within the cosmologies of colonial Andeans, the work encourages scholars to transcend the hindering practice of dichotomizing colonial carvings and culture into Christian and Andean components in order to appreciate the complexity of these historical religious encounters and transformation. Although this publication merits appreciation as a resource for its rich descriptions, colorful gallery, and five appendices of manuscript sources, Bailey carves a significant niche into the extant scholarship by illuminating a mature and nuanced depiction of colonial life and religious experience among the Andes.