HESCAH Lecture: Dr. Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt | "Art and Death in the Colonial Andes"

In twelfth-century monastic culture in Europe, the fragility of life and the inevitability of death became codified in images of the Four Last Things: Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. A fifteenth-century treatise by Denis the Carthusian titled De quatuor hominis novissimus (The Four Last Things of Man) is visualized in a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Many engravings of the Last Things were brought to the Americas by the missionaries who undertook the task of converting the indigenous people to Catholicism and, as importantly, keeping them converted. Dr. Stratton-Pruitt will examine the painting of Death in the church of the village of Caquiaviri, Bolivia to show how European visual culture was adapted by the clergy and local artists, while also considering its context within the persistent fears of death and judgment that were shared by all the social strata of Spanish colonial culture.