III.

Wooden Sculpture

Most carved wooden sculpture was created as part of altar ensembles for church interiors. Much of it was polychrome (multicolored) and in some cases decorated with gold leaf. The painted pieces exhibit an especially close relationship with the art of Spain and Portugal. Works produced at the centers of colonial power, such as Mexico City and Lima, are hardly distinguishable from the European originals they imitated. In 17th-century Peru, the availability of imported works by Spanish sculptor Juan Martínez Montañés enabled his many followers in Latin America to study his work firsthand. Montañés’s painted sculptures of Christian saints combine powerful realism with a feeling of controlled dignity.

A sculptor’s skills could be seen to greater advantage in the unpainted wood carvings commissioned to decorate the choir areas of large churches and cathedrals. Spanish-born Peruvian sculptor Pedro de Noguera was asked in 1623 to design choir stalls for the Cathedral of Lima. The Lima choir stalls feature an enormous, elaborately carved architectural framework with dynamic, realistic figures carved in high relief behind each wooden seat. Other important schools of carving developed in Guatemala, where ivory carvings brought by trade ships from Manila, the Philippines, influenced local sculpture, and in the Spanish colony of New Granada (now Ecuador and Colombia), where the super-realistic style of southern Spain was tempered by a graceful delicacy.

Art historians have not yet identified the sculptors of many early Latin American works. One work that remains anonymous, a painted wooden image of Fray Felipe de Jesús (about 1650) in the Cathedral of Mexico in Mexico City, presents the saint striding forward, his face locked in a tragic expression. Its combination of opposites—realism with a formal composition, dynamism with arrested motion—places this work among the most important pieces of 17th-century Mexican sculpture. Other 17th-century masters, including Tomás Xuárez and his son, Salvador de Ocampo, are better known to scholars. Ocampo’s choir stalls (now at the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria) for the former church of San Agustín in Mexico City combine exuberant baroque decoration with precisely carved reliefs depicting biblical scenes. Although they worked in a European style, Xuárez and Ocampo were of native origin. The fact that they were entrusted with large-scale, and therefore expensive, projects provides evidence of the degree of racial integration in the Spanish colonies.

The 18th-century Peruvian Melchor Huamán of Cuzco developed a realistic three-dimensional version of the hypnotic images found in local paintings. Manuel Chil Caspicara of Quito, Ecuador, extended the exquisitely delicate New Granada style to multiple figures in his Assumption of the Virgin (mid- to late-1700s, Church of San Francisco, Quito). Other notable sculptors of the 18th century include Peruvian Baltazar Gavilán and Ecuadorian Bernardo de Legarda.