HESCAH Lecture | Dr. Amara Solari “Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Color, Catholicism, and the Continuance of Maya Religiosity in Sixteenth-Century Yucatán”

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Color, Catholicism, and the Continuance of Maya Religiosity in Sixteenth-Century Yucatán​

Dr. Amara Solari​
Professor of Art History and Anthropology, Penn State University ​

In the middle of the sixteenth century, Franciscan friars launched a massive evangelical campaign that attempted to convert the Yucatán Peninsula’s Maya population to orthodox Catholicism. Monumental painted images formed the literal, figurative, and ideological backdrop of this ambitious mission, as they enlivened the walls of the architectural complexes that hosted the conversion effort. Maya muralists were tasked with these artistic commissions, resulting in a sizeable corpus of Indigenous-produced artworks that, until recently, has not received scholarly attention. This talk will illuminate the material and iconographical choices Maya artists made when painting these immense walls, choices that reveal the agentic role Indigenous neophytes actively played in the creation of localized Latin American Catholicism.