Heaven, Hell, and Everything in Between

Ananda Cohen Suarez is an assistant professor of history of art at Cornell University. She coauthored Handbook to Life in the Inca World.

• Introduction    Chapter One: The Painted Walls of the Andes: Chronology, Techniques, and Meanings    Chapter Two: The Road to Hell is Paved with Flowers: Journeys to the Afterlife at the Church of Andahuaylillas    Chapter Three: Clothing the Architectonic Body: Textile Murals of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries    Chapter Four: Turning the Jordan River into a Pacarina:  Murals of the Baptism of Christ at the Churches of Urcos and Pitumarca    Chapter Five: Earthly Violence/Divine Justice: Tadeo Escalante’s Murals at the Church of Huaro    Conclusion    AbbreviationsBibliography

[T]his is an important book that makes a valuable contribution to a dynamic field. It fills in many lacunae in our understanding of Andean mural culture. (Hispanic American Historical Review) [A] well-written and amply illustrated contribution to Andean colonial history. (The Americas) A clearly written, mostly jargon-free, and scholarly book, which manages at once to be rigorous and comprehensible to a wider audience…The story [Cohen-Aponte] tells, of murals progressing from being a locally mediated tool of evangelisation to a medium for social critique, is compelling and convincing. (Bulletin of Latin American Research) The field should be grateful to have this book, both for the scholarly inroads it makes into this corpus and for its unusually readable and well-encapsulated chapters, which make it a wonderful teaching resource. (Ethnohistory) The author presents us with an all-encompassing view that covers over two hundred years. She takes excellent art historical interpretations of Christian iconography into new territories of social discourse to offer a description of the murals within the context of sacred architectural space. (CAA Reviews)