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This book is the result of a study of cultural practices related to the uses of colouring materials in the South American Andean region during the colonial period (sixteenth�eighteenth centuries) and their 'powerful' presence in the images of the conquest. It offers the reader a new insight into the techniques and use of colour in Andean colonial painting.
A material history of color in Andean workshops (the 'making'), leads the reader to the exchange of ideas between different parties such as painters, pharamacists, physicians, alchemists, etc. (the 'knowledge'), and then to the symbolic and powerful dimension of these coloured powders as found in the sacred and political messages projected by the images (the 'power').
Starting with an analysis of the images and the concept of representation during the process of evangelisation/domination, the author describes the discursive and iconographic strategies used by different parties to achieve several goals through the use of colour. The book's main hypothesis is that colors were silent protagonists of the Andean ritual system, a fact that was identified only by certain 'idol exterminators' who tried to 'rebrand' them by giving them a Christian meaning.
This is the English language edition of�El Poder de los Colores�by Gabriela Siracusano, published by Fondo de Cultura Economica, Buenos Aires 2005.
Introduction
Grinding and mixing subtle elements
With artful brush & learned quill: colour & counsel in Spanish manuals
Newly identified materials: matter as document
The mixing of experience
Mechanical and servile arts in Spain and Andean America: colour in the workshop
The production and organisation of mechanical learning
Dyes, colours and urban spaces
The defence of noble painting, a marvel of understanding
The Andean painter's trade
Engravings and brushes
Saturn and Mercury in the workshop: hermetic and practical learning
Colours and Andean science: �?lvaro Alonso Barba and�Arte de los metales
Chemistry, mineralogy and alchemy in the use of pigments: recipes for transmutation or colouring?
Subterranean treasures: Potos� in the imaginary
Secrets between Spain and Andean America: circulation and appropriation
Coming back to the workshop
Good medicines of all colours: healing and painting in Andean America
Colours at the apothecary's shop
They do consume malice, correct the humoures: chromatic pharmacopoeia in the ancient lands of the Inca
Colours between bodies, souls and Andean sacralities
The spectrum in practices and representations of power in the Andes
Between the indeterminate and the perfect: the rainbow and healing by colours
The power of healing images
Representations, colours and powers of the sacred
Are these not guacas too, like to oure owne?�The problem of representation in the Andes
The power of absence
The visible and the invisible through the eyes of body and soul
Sermons, images and colour: loci of memory
Colours in the extirpation of idolatries: colour � substance or accident?
Coloured powders as bearers of sacred power
Preparing colours for the celestial workshop:�disegno, simulacrum and colour
Marshalling the powers of colour:�mixtures most divine
Bibliography