351
Imagining Hieronymus Bosch in colonial Peru:
foreign sources, indigenous responses*
Daan van Heesch
It has become almost a convention among Latin Ameri-
can historians of art to associate infernal imagery of the
colonial period (c. 1492–1821) with the phantasmal paint-
ings of the Netherlandish artist Hieronymus Bosch (c.
1450–1516).1 This is not surprising, since Bosch became
an artistic hallmark for the diabolic imagination from the
sixteenth century onwards.2 The pictorial parallels drawn
in colonial studies were, however, mainly based on rather
vague formal and thematic resemblances (hybrid devils,
wicked setting or horror vacui) that recurrently lacked cor-
responding Boschian models.3 Conversely, recent schol-
ars have successfully been addressing the ways in which
colonial artists adapted and understood the works of
other influential Netherlandish masters, such as Maarten
de Vos (1532–1603) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640),
* The research for this article was funded by the Research Foundation
– Flanders (FWO). The article was written in the context of my ongoing
PhD research on the transnational reception of Bosch’s pictorial mode
in the early modern world at KU Leuven (supervised by Jan Van der
Stock and Paul Vandenbroeck). I am most grateful to Jan Van der Stock,
Paul Vandenbroeck, Ananda Cohen Suarez, Werner Thomas, Susanne
Bartels, Alejandro Massó and the members of the Bosch Research and
Conservation Project for their valuable comments, help and support.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Jheronimus Bosch
Art Center (Jheronimus Bosch: his life & his work, ’s Hertogenbosch, 16
April 2016) and the Warburg Institute (Cultural encounters: tensions and
polarities of transmission from the late middle ages to the Enlightenment,
London, 17 November 2016). Special thanks go to Lorne Campbell and
Michael Hoyle for checking my English.
1 Influential accounts include G. Kubler and M. Soria, Art and
architecture in Spain and Portugal and their American dominions, 1500 to
1800, Baltimore 1959, p. 325, M. Toussaint, Pintura colonial en México,
Mexico City 1965, p. 115, and J. de Mesa and T. Gisbert, Historia de la
pintura cuzqueña, 2 vols., Lima 1982, vol. 1, pp. 111–12, 189.
2  On the vogue for and reception of Boschian imagery see, among
many others, G. Unverfehrt, Hieronymus Bosch: die Rezeption seiner Kunst
im frühen 16. Jahrhundert, Berlin 1980, L. Silver, Peasant scenes and land-
scapes: the rise of pictorial genres in the Antwerp art market, Philadelphia
2006, pp. 133–59, and M. Bass and E. Wyckoff (eds.), exhib. cat. Beyond
Bosch: the afterlife of a Renaissance master in print, Saint Louis (Saint Louis
Art Museum) 2015.
whose formal idioms became fundamental for art produc-
tion in the transatlantic world.4 In Bosch’s case, though,
we might be dealing with what has been described as the
problem of “pseudomorphism,” namely a colonial work
of art being formally analogous to, say, a work of Bosch,
“yet entirely unrelated to it from a genetic point of view.”5
In the end, the precise relationship between Bosch and
his presumed colonial counterparts has never been estab-
lished and is still in need of critical inquiry.
This article identifies and explores two rare instances
in which Bosch’s infernal images found their way to the
viceroyalty of Peru, a territory encompassing much of
present-day South America except for Brazil. The focus
will be on canvas paintings of the Last Judgment that
were produced in the Andes between roughly 1600 and
3  See, for example, F. Muthmann, Eine peruanische Wirkerei der spa-
nischen Kolonialzeit, Bern 1977, pp. 12, 50–54, where Bosch is said to have
influenced fantastical motifs on seventeenth-century Peruvian carpets.
4  For recent evaluations of the colonial afterlives of de Vos and
Rubens see S. Porras, “Going viral? Maerten de Vos’s St. Michael the
Archangel,” Netherlands Yearbook for the History of Art 66 (2016), pp.
54–78, A.M. Hyman, “Inventing painting: Cristóbal de Villalpando,
Juan Correa, and New Spain’s transatlantic canon,” The Art Bulletin 99
(2017), pp. 102–35, and B.E. Mundy and A.M. Hyman, “Out of the shad-
ow of Vasari: towards a new model of the ‘artist’ in colonial Latin Amer-
ica,” Colonial Latin American Review 24 (2015), pp. 283–317, esp. pp.
290–93 and 300–07 respectively. For the significance of Netherlandish
art in colonial Latin America at large, and an overview of conceptual
frameworks, see T. DaCosta Kaufmann, “Flanders in the Americas: the
challenge of interpretation,” in J. Kroupa, M. Šeferisová Loudová and L.
Konečný (eds.), Orbis artium: k jubileu Lubomíra Slavíčka, Brno 2009, pp.
43–58, and T. DaCosta Kaufmann, “The ‘Netherlandish model’? Neth-
erlandish art history as/and global art history,” Netherlands Yearbook for
History of Art 66 (2016), pp. 273–95.
5  See E. Panofsky, Tomb sculpture: four lectures on its changing aspects
from ancient Egypt to Bernini, ed. H.W. Janson, New York 1992, pp. 26–
27. For a recent discussion of pseudomorphosis see A.K. Powell, Deposi-
tions: scenes from the late medieval church and the modern museum, New
York 2012, pp. 10–11, and C.W. Bynum, “Avoiding the tyranny of mor-
phology; or, why compare?,” History of Religions 53 (2014), pp. 341–68.
352
1   Tadeo Escalante, Hell, 1802. Mural. Huaro, Church of San Juan Bautista (photo © Ananda Cohen Suarez)
1800. What is of special importance is how indigenous
artists encountered and actually dealt with these foreign
visual materials. This study will accordingly try to define
and explore the ways in which Bosch’s pictorial world
was understood beyond the original historical circum-
stances that created it. It will be necessary, then, to move
beyond the artist who ran a successful workshop in ’s-
Hertogenbosch, where he developed his highly unusual
and inventive iconography. When examining his artistic
afterlife it might be more useful to conceptualize Bosch
as a palimpsest, as both artist and artistic concept, al-
tered and expanded throughout the early modern period.
The reception of Bosch’s oeuvre was, in fact, distorted
6  See Silver, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 133–59, Unverfehrt, op. cit. (note
2), and M. Bass, “Hieronymus Bosch and his legacy as ‘inventor’,” in
Bass and Wyckoff, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 11–33.
7  It should be noted that Unverfehrt, op. cit. (note 2), nr. 45, 78, 86
and 147i, mentions several panel paintings in the manner of Bosch in
Latin America, but their provenance suggests they only arrived after
the colonial period. See also the almost undiscussed Ecce homo in the
Nunciatura Apostólica in Lima, an imitation of Bosch’s picture of the
same subject in Frankfurt. It is attributed to an Antwerp follower in E.
Bermejo, “Una pintura inédita con la Visión de la Cruz, en Madrid y
puntualizaciones sobre obras Flamencas del siglo xvi, en Perú y Boli­
daan van heesch
from the early sixteenth century onwards through rep-
licas, pastiches and forgeries that circulated throughout
Europe.6 His visual language was intensively mediated
by the works of his followers, and by widely circulated
prints — mainly originating from Antwerp presses — that
played a vital role in this process of transmission.7
From the sixteenth century onwards, Netherlandish
prints and canvas paintings did indeed flood the Iberian
colonies, and their foreign ideas, styles and techniques
were rapidly adapted by a recently founded Catholic
society.8 These images were important tools of conver-
sion that could translate key concepts of Christianity
more easily than the word. Visual aids could indeed by-
via,” in E. Arias Anglés (ed.), Relaciones artísticas entre España y América,
Madrid 1990, pp. 11–32, esp. pp. 17–18, fig. 9, and is regarded as “prob-
ably a copy by a Spanish artist” in C.T. Eisler, New England museums,
Les Primitifs Flamands, vol. 4: I. Corpus de la peinture des anciens Pays-Bas
méridionaux au quinzième siècle, Brussels 1961, p. 37, nr. 66Fe. The Lima
painting was donated to the Nunciatura at the end of the nineteenth
century by Don Manuel Ortiz de Zeballos García. I am grateful to Mgr
José Antonio Teixeira Alves for providing me with this information.
8  See the extensive PESSCA database (Project for the Engraved Sour­
ces of Spanish Colonial Art), http://colonialart.org/archives (accessed 29
April 2016). For the impact of Antwerp engravings see, among others,
Imagining Hieronymus Bosch in colonial Peru: foreign sources, indigenous responses 353

pass obstacles to conversion, such as language and ab-

stract ideas that had no equivalent in native cosmology.
In 1600, Antonio de la Vega gave a vivid description of
pictorial catechism in colonial Cuzco (Peru): “There have
been remarkable changes and conversions among the
Indians on account of the [paintings of the] Last Judg-
ment, [Heaven’s] Glory, and the torments in Hell, since
everything is well painted on the wall of this chapel, and
particularly the sorrows and punishments of the doomed
that are caused by the vices and sins committed by the
Indians. Everything here is clearly depicted by its types
[of punishment] and [in its] details, because the Indians
are better persuaded by painted images than moved by
repeated sermons.”9
When the Jesuit chronicler wrote these words the
output of eschatological images had fallen off sharply
on the other side of the Atlantic. While the iconogra-
phy of the Last Judgment and the mouth of Hell indeed
practically disappeared in Europe by 1640, the pictorial
tradition survived in colonial Peru well into the early
nineteenth century (fig. 1).10 Throughout the colonial
era, the Last Judgment and eternal damnation in Hell
were central themes in the evangelization process. The
Europeans also believed that indigenous religious prac-
tices were inspired by the devil, and employed infernal
imagery to persuade natives to abandon their old “dia- 3  Philippe Thomassin, The Last Judgment, 1606. Engraving on
bolic” beliefs.11 These archaic or rather “anachronic” eight plates. Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, inv. nr. 20.B.I.74/28
characteristics of colonial painting have been identified (photo © Biblioteca Casanatense)
as the so-called “medieval symptoms of the American
Baroque,” whose forms and meanings will be discussed
in the following sections.12

C. Michaud and J. Torres della Pina (eds.), De Amberes al Cusco: el graba-
do europeo como fuente del arte virreinal, Lima 2009. For Netherlandish
canvas paintings see N. de Marchi and H.J. van Miegroet, “Exploring
markets for Netherlandish paintings in Spain and Nueva España,”
Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art 50 (1999), pp. 81–111, and S. van
Ginhoven, Connecting art markets: Guilliam Forchondt’s dealership in Ant-
werp (c. 1632–78) and the overseas paintings trade, Leiden 2017; see also
S. Stratton-Pruitt, “From Spain to the viceroyalty of Peru: paintings by
the dozen,” in D. Pierce and R. Otsuka (eds.), At the crossroads: the arts
of Spanish America & early global trade 1492–1850. Papers from the 2010
Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum, Denver 2012, pp.
71–90.
9  A. de la Vega, Historia y narración de las cosas sucedidas en este Cole-
gio del Cuzco desde su fundación hasta hoy, 1 de noviembre Día de los Santos,
año de 1600, Lima 1948, pp. 42–43: “Ya ha avido notables mudanzas y
conversiones de yndios con la consideración de juizio y gloria y penas
de los condenados, que está todo pintado por las paredes de esta Yglesia
y capilla, y particularmente con las penas y castigos que en el infierno
tienen los vicios y pecados de los yndios que están allí bien dibujados...
porque los indios se mueven mucho por pinturas y muchas veces más
que con muchos sermones.” The translation is from A. Cohen Suarez,
Heaven, Hell and everything in between: murals of the colonial Andes, Austin
2016, p. 51. I am grateful to Ananda Cohen Suarez for providing me with
access to her book prior to publication. See also the account about the
Last Judgment and Hell by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (1615) in T.
Gisbert and A. de Mesa, “Los grabados, el ‘Juicio Final’ y la idolatría in-
dígena en el mundo Andino,” in N. Campos Vera et al. (eds.), Entre cielos
e infiernos: memoria del V Encuentro Internacional sobre Barroco, Pamplona
2011, pp. 17–42, esp. pp. 18–20.
10  See the important contribution by R. Mujica Pinilla, “Hell in
the Andes: the Last Judgment in the art of viceregal Peru,” in I. Katzew
(ed.), exhib. cat. Contested visions in the Spanish colonial world, Los Ange-
les (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) 2011, pp. 177–201.
11  See Mujica Pinilla, op. cit. (note 10), pp. 186–87. On the demoni-
zation of huacas (indigenous sacred objects or ancestral spirits) see C.
Brosseder, The power of huacas: change and resistance in the Andean world
of colonial Peru, Austin 2014, pp. 104–35, and A. Redden, Diabolism in
colonial Peru, 1560–1750, London & New York 2008, pp. 121–26.
354 daan van heesch

2   Diego Quispe Tito, The Last Judgment, 1675. Oil on canvas, 280 × 582 cm. Cuzco, Convent of San Francisco (photo © Daniel Giannoni.
Archi, Archivo Digital de Arte Peruano)
Imagining Hieronymus Bosch in colonial Peru: foreign sources, indigenous responses 355
356
reconfiguring bosch’s image of hell in colo-
nial cuzco  When entering the convent of St Francis
in Cuzco, Peru, one encounters a monumental canvas
painting of the Last Judgment that would have satisfied
Antonio de la Vega (fig. 2). The large painting, measur-
ing 280 × 582 cm, was painted in 1675 by the indigenous
artist Diego Quispe Tito (1611–81), and narrates the Res-
urrection and judgment of the dead at the end of time.13
The upper zone is dedicated to the glories of Heaven, the
earthly sphere in the center to death and judgment, and
the lower part, finally, to damnation in Hell. The scroll
between earth and Heaven is inscribed with the lamenta-
tions of the damned: “Woe is us! Why did we sin? There
is no help in Hell. Where no order is to be seen, but rather
eternal confusion.”14 Under the triumphant Redeemer
we recognize a winged St Francis of Assisi carrying the
Cross of Golgotha, performing as a second Christ.15
It is well known that Quispe Tito’s main graphic
source for the canvas was the 1606 print of the Last
Judgment by the Roman engraver Philippe Thomassin
(1562–1622) or one of its restrikes (fig. 3). The design was
extremely popular in the colonial world, and artistic re-
configurations can be found from Colombia and Bolivia
to Isfahan in Iran and Old Goa in India.16 What seems
to have gone unnoticed, however, is that the space oc-
cupied by Hell on the right and bottom of the canvas was
modeled after a Bosch print that was first published by
Hieronymus Cock (1517/18–70) in the 1560s and later re-
printed by Michiel Snyders (1568–1672) (fig. 4).17
The print is an engraving of a triptych depicting the
end of time with Heaven and Hell. It is inscribed “Hiero-
12  See F. Stastny, Síntomas medievales en el “Barroco Americano,”
Lima 1994, pp. 7–34, and A. Windus and J. Baumgarten, “The invention
of a medieval present: visual stagings in colonial Bolivia and Brazil,”
INDIANA 30 (2013), pp. 51–76. For the concept of ‘anachronic’ see A.
Nagel and C.S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York 2010.
13  Signed and dated “D. diego quispe Tito a 1675.” See de Mesa
and Gisbert, op. cit. (note 1), p. 150, and R. Mujica Pinilla, “VI-77 Diego
Quispe Tito,” in J.J. Rishel and S. Stratton-Pruitt (eds.), The arts in Latin
America 1492–1820, New Haven & London 2006, p. 425. Jaime Lara
recently suggested that the canvas might not have hung in the vesti-
bule to the cloister originally but instead near the main doorway of the
church, as was appropriate for representations of the Last Judgment;
see J. Lara, Birdman of Assisi: art and the apocalyptic in the colonial Andes,
Arizona 2016, p. 201.
14  The original inscription reads: “Ai de nosotros! Para qve peca-
mos? Ya no ai remedio algvno en el ynf ìerno. A donde no ai que ver
algvn odren sino eternal confvssion.” The translation is from Mujica
Pinilla, op. cit. (note 13), p. 425.
daan van heesch
nymVs Bos Inventor” in the lower left corner, but its
precise relationship to Bosch’s original oeuvre is unclear.
Today, it is generally accepted that the print is a pseudo-
pictorial pastiche modeled after several works by Bosch
and his epigones rather than the reproduction of a lost
original. Sources include not only paintings by Bosch and
his workshop, such as the Haywain, the Prado Tabletop
and the Vienna Last Judgment, but also an engraving by
his fellow townsman Alart du Hameel (1449?-c. 1509).18
Cock’s fictitious triptych did not reflect a Bosch original
in the literal sense, but did embody what was thought to
be a genuine Bosch.
Quispe Tito adapted and reorganized several motifs of
the central and right panel of the printed triptych. They
include the toad-demon with raised hands, the man-de-
vouring leviathan hybrid, the besieged tower and multi-
ple punishments of Hell (figs. 5–6). The condemned soul
cringing in fear in the center of the print, supported by
a seemingly kind-hearted demon, underwent a remark-
able change in the colonial canvas. The first was turned
into a greedy soul vomiting gold coins, the second into a
tormenting, horned devil. Surprisingly, the Inca painter
dismissed not only the most capricious demons but also
the more absurd and corporal punishments related to the
sins of gluttony and lust, namely the diabolic banquet
and the infernal reenactment of adultery and prostitu-
tion. Instead, Quispe focused on the lifelike tortures de-
picted in the Boschian print, such as the bone-shattering
wheel, the boiling vessels and the forced ingestion of
liquids. The infernal imagination of colonial Peru was, in
fact, closely related to actual judicial and penal practices.
15  See J. Lara, “Francis alive and aloft: Franciscan apocalypticism
in the colonial Andes,” The Americas 70 (2013), p. 155, and Lara, op. cit.
(note 13), pp. 199–201.
16 See PESSCA, op. cit. (note 8), nrs. 939A, 939C-D, and Gisbert and
de Mesa, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 24–26, 40.
17  See J. van Grieken, G. Luijten and J. Van der Stock (eds.), exhib.
cat. Hieronymus Cock: the Renaissance in print, Leuven (M - Museum
Leuven) & Paris (Institut Néerlandais) 2013, pp. 248–49, and Bass
and Wyckoff, op. cit. (note 2), pp. 136–39. The Snyders reprint is il-
lustrated in T. Pfeifer-Helke (ed.), exhib. cat. Hieronymus Boschs Erbe,
Dresden (Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden) 2015, pp. 134–35, but
erroneously dated around 1600, which seems to be too early, given the
publisher’s admission to the guild in 1610 at the age of 24. See E. Du-
verger, “Le graveur et marchand imagier anversois Michael Snyders
(1586–1673),” Gentse Bijdragen tot de Kunstgeschiedenis en Oudheidkunde
29 (1990–91), pp. 91–116.
18  See Silver, op. cit. (note 2), p. 280, and Bass and Wyckoff, op. cit.
(note 2), pp. 136–39.
Imagining Hieronymus Bosch in colonial Peru: foreign sources, indigenous responses 357

4  Attributed to Cornelis Cort after an imitator of Hieronymus Bosch, Triptych with the end of time and Heaven and Hell, c. 1560–65.
Engraving, 338 × 500 mm. Brussels, Royal Library of Belgium, inv. nr. S.IV 84981 (photo © Royal Library of Belgium)

In both Spain and the colonies, for example, the Holy Of-
fice of the Inquisition symbolically evoked the Last Judg-
ment and other eschatological imagery in the auto-da-fé,
the public ceremony in which non-indigenous apostates
and heretics were punished.19 The small number of freak-
ish demons suggests that Quispe Tito had only a mod-
est interest in what is generally considered to be Bosch’s
pictorial trademark. The impact of Bosch’s disparates, as
his “caprices” were called in Spain, on colonial art was
indeed limited, perhaps because of their distracting na-
ture in the light of the Counter-Reformation, which also
affected religious practices in Peru through the Council
of Lima (1582–83).20 The modest afterlife of his labyrin-
thine compositions and grotesque settings does indeed
seem to have been brought about by the persistent focus
of colonial artists on visual legibility, didactic function-
ality and Baroque splendor, reducing erratic and non-
conformist themes and motifs to an absolute minimum.21

19  See Mujica Pinilla, op. cit. (note 10), p. 185, and M. Flynn, “Mi-
mesis of the Last Judgment: the Spanish Auto de fe,” Sixteenth Century
Journal 22 (1991), pp. 281–97.
20 An interesting exception, also in Cuzco, is a monumental
canvas of The temptation of St Anthony in the Church of San Antonio
Abad, which is based on a print of the same subject by Jacques Cal-
lot (1592–1632), in which the anonymous artist magnified several witty
and anthropomorphic devils that distantly recall Boschian (or Bruege-
lian) figures. See de Mesa and Gisbert, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 111–12. The
Vivian and Jaime Liébana Collection (Lima, Peru) has a smaller canvas
with a similar composition, probably derived from the large painting in
Cuzco. See PESSCA, op. cit. (note 8), nr. 244B.
21  This observation harks back to what Stastny described as “the
medieval symptoms of the American baroque,” that is to say doctrinal
representation, schematic compositions, “medieval” iconographies
like the Last Judgment or the Trinity, and so on. See Stastny, op. cit.
(note 12), pp. 7–26, and Windus and Baumgarten, op. cit. (note 12), pp.
52–54.
358
5  Detail of fig. 2 (photo © Daniel Giannoni. Archi, Archivo
Digital de Arte Peruano)
6  Detail of fig. 4
A signature on one of Quispe Tito’s earlier paintings,
“Diego Quispi Titu inga,” proclaims that he originated
from a noble Inca family, and by 1670 several indigenous
painters are documented in the same parish as his Cuzco
workshop, some of whom might even have been work-
22  See de Mesa and Gisbert, op. cit. (note 1), p. 141, and T. Gisbert,
“La identidad étnica de los artistas del Virreinato del Perú,” in R. Mu-
jica Pinilla et al. (eds.), El Barroco Peruano, 2 vols., Lima 2002, vol. 1, pp.
99–144, esp. pp. 119–20. For the native painters working in the immedi-
ate vicinity of Quispe Tito’s workshop see S. Stratton-Pruitt, exhib. cat.
The Virgin, saints and angels: South American paintings 1600–1825 from
the Thoma Collection, Stanford (Cantor Center for Visual Arts) 2006, p.
128. See also C. Damian, The Virgin of the Andes: art and ritual in colo-
nial Cuzco, Miami 1995, pp. 44–49 for workshop practices in colonial
daan van heesch
7  Detail of fig. 2 (photo © Daniel Giannoni. Archi, Archivo Digital
de Arte Peruano)
shop associates.22 Two remarkable modifications tes-
tify to the way in which the indigenous painter and his
shop tried to reformulate their foreign models in accord-
ance with the social order of colonial Peru. In Hell, for
example, one of the devils is driving not only a bishop,
a cardinal and a king into the mouth of a leviathan, but
also an Inca. And while a Hispanic soul is ready to enter
the doors of Hell on the right, an apparently more vir-
tuous Inca ruler, recognizable by his mascaypacha (royal
crown), is queuing at the gates of Purgatory (fig. 7). A
friar, cardinal and pope await redemption with him.23 In
this way, the indigenous artist was able to synchronize
his own ancestral origin and that of his contemporaries
with the universalized history of Christianity.24 Quispe
Tito, however, was not the first to integrate the social re-
ality of viceregal Peru into an image of Hell or the Last
Judgment. Native communities are also represented, for
example, in the 1608 mural of the Last Judgment in the
church of Curahuara de Carangas in Bolivia, and in the
drawing of the mouth of Hell in the famous chronicle of
Peru of 1615 by the indigenous nobleman Felipe Gua-
man Poma de Ayala (c. 1535-c. 1615).25 Quispe Tito com-
mented again on the colonial condition in his 12 Zodiac
Cuzco.
23  See Mujica Pinilla, op. cit. (note 10), p. 190, and Gisbert and de
Mesa, op. cit. (note 9), p. 27. For the “anti-hierarchical” representation
of the clergy and episcopacy in the canvas, and its possible offensive
character, see Lara, op. cit. (note 13), pp. 200–01.
24  A fundamental work on this topic is S. MacCormack, Religion
in the Andes: vision and imagination in early colonial Peru, Princeton 1991.
25  See Mujica Pinilla, op. cit. (note 10), pp. 190–92, and Gisbert
and de Mesa, op. cit. (note 9), p. 27.
Imagining Hieronymus Bosch in colonial Peru: foreign sources, indigenous responses 359
8 Anonymous, Hell, 1739. Oil on canvas, 317 × 765 cm. La Paz,
Church of Caquiaviri
paintings of 1681 for Cuzco Cathedral. Those canvases
were copied after Antwerp prints based on designs by
Hans Bol (1524–93) and engraved by Adriaen Collaert
(c. 1560–1618). This much-discussed series, in which as-
tral signs correspond to parables of Christ, was probably
commissioned to encourage natives to abandon their
pagan deities and worship the miracles of Christ instead
of the sun, the moon and the stars.26 Quispe Tito, in sum,
actively engaged with his Netherlandish source material,
adapting and reassembling foreign visual forms into a
representational system that was compatible with An-
dean culture and history.
Returning to the inscription “HieronymVs Bos In-
ventor” on the graphic prototype of Quispe Tito’s in-
fernal image, one wonders whether there was any aware-
ness of Bosch’s authorship in the Spanish colonies. The
colonizers’s place of origin was, in fact, the country with
the most avid collectors of Boschian works of art, with the
commander-in-chief of the overseas empire, King Philip ii
(1527–98), as his most ardent admirer, and the abundant
26  See de Mesa and Gisbert, op. cit. (note 1), pp. 153–58.
27  For Philip ii as a collector of Bosch see, among many others,
P. Silva Maroto, “En torno a las obras del Bosco que poseyó Felipe II,”
in Felipe II y las Artes, Madrid 1998, pp. 531–51. For Bosch as a literary
device in Spanish literature see X. de Salas, El Bosco en la literatura es-
pañola, Barcelona 1943, H. Heidenreich, “Hieronymus Bosch in some
9  Detail of fig. 1
amount of literary responses to Bosch testify to his enor-
mous popularity in early modern Spain.27 It is therefore
not unreasonable to think that encountering his name
in the New World might have awakened Bosch-related
memories or experiences in at least some of the Spanish
settlers and their offspring. Yet it is hard to imagine that
referential discourses on European artists, such as the
ones on Bosch in Spain, were matters of major interest in
Latin American colonial communities. Within the frame-
work of colonial visual culture, it seems more fruitful to
focus on the transmission and mediation of forms and
ideas than on problems of authorship and invention.
Quispe Tito’s monumental Last Judgment does indeed
seem to have been the source for several other coloni-
al canvases in Cuzco, and in its southern provinces as
well.28 The colonial artists who made these paintings
were well-acquainted with Quispe Tito’s canvas in the
Franciscan convent or one of its derivatives. Several el-
literary contexts,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 33
(1970), pp. 192–96, and D. van Heesch, “Animated caprices: a note on
Bosch’s afterlife in seventeenth-century Spain,” in Jos Koldeweij et al.
(eds.), Jheronimus Bosch: his life and his work, ’s-Hertogenbosch 2016, pp.
124–36.
28  See Gisbert and de Mesa, op. cit. (note 9), p. 29.
360
10  Tadeo Escalante, The Last Judgment, 1802. Mural. Huaro, Church of San Juan Bautista (photo © Ananda Cohen Suarez)
ements of the Bosch engraving, including the toad-like
monster with raised hands, the devouring leviathan
and several instruments of torture, were repeated, for
instance, in the eighteenth-century Last Judgment in the
Church of Santiago Apóstol in the city of Huancané
(Puno, Peru).29 The same elements, plus the soul vomit-
ing money (designated as the sin of greed, “El Abaro”),
return in a painting of Hell (1739) in the Church of Caqui-
aviri (La Paz, Bolivia) (fig. 8).30 The Boschian motifs
reappear, finally, in the eschatological murals (1802) of
the late-colonial artist Tadeo Escalante in the Church of
San Juan Bautista in Huaro, near Cuzco (figs. 9–10), in
which the toad-demon even appears twice.31 In this way,
Bosch’s monstrous creatures and infernal punishments
29 See PESSCA, op. cit. (note 8), nr. 997B, and Gisbert and de Mesa,
op. cit. (note 9), p. 27, nr. 7. For a similar example in which Quispe Tito’s
Boschian Hell was copied see PESSCA, op. cit. (note 8), nr. 941B.
30  See Gisbert and de Mesa, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 31–35, fig. 15. An
identical composition, measuring 145 × 230 cm, is in a private collection
in Lima. The upper section of this canvas, however, depicts the fight
against indigenous idolatry and seems to have been derived from the
scene at the top of José López de los Ríos’s Hell painting (1684) in the
Church of Carabuco (La Paz, Bolivia); see Mujica Pinilla, op. cit. (note
daan van heesch
were once again regenerated in the ongoing sequence of
imitations and, ultimately, recharged with new mean-
ings and connotations in differing colonial contexts. The
second example in Caquiaviri, for example, belongs to
a series of five paintings (Death, The Last Judgment, Hell,
Heaven’s Glory and The Antichrist) representing the Pos-
trimerías (Four Last Things) in which the sin of indige-
nous idolatry is central to the iconographical program.
Bosch’s demons were therefore restaged indirectly in a
pictorial cycle that entwined European iconography with
indigenous elements, such as keros (Inca-style flared ves-
sels for the consumption of chicha), caciques (native rul-
ers) and jaguar-shaped devils.32 Also, the preoccupation
of these painters with the toad-like demon resonated
10), p. 196, fig. 146.
31  The second toad-demon with raised hands is situated in the
mouth of Hell of the Last Judgment mural (fig. 10). The paintings of
Huaro are discussed at length in Cohen Suarez, op. cit. (note 9), pp.
145–81.
32  Gisbert and de Mesa, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 31–35, and L. Quere-
jazu Escobari, “Cielo / Infierno / Tentación: la muerte en Caquiaviri,” in
Campos Vera et al., op. cit. (note 9), pp. 271–78.
Imagining Hieronymus Bosch in colonial Peru: foreign sources, indigenous responses 361
with the prominent symbolic position of the toad in the
colonial highlands, where the creature came to embody
the idea of evil, indigenous sorcery (hechizería).33 The
canvas paintings following Quispe Tito’s Last Judgment
were indeed generally produced for smaller villages and
parishes with a higher concentration of native inhabit-
ants where Inca paganism was still predominant.34
As discussed above, colonial communities reformu-
lated or adapted pre-Columbian cosmology in conform-
ity with the religious imperatives of Christianity. Sabine
MacCormack, for instance, suggested that for the native
beholder Quispe Tito’s painting not only recalled the for-
eign concept of the Last Judgment but might also have
represented the indigenous idea of pachacuti, an apoca-
lyptic or miraculous disruption of time and space. Per-
ceived as both a Christian representation of salvation
and as a complex Andean image of fertility, political au-
thority and cosmic reversals, the rainbow on which the
figure of Christ is sitting, for instance, might have exem-
plified this idea of an end or new beginning most clear-
ly.35 Contemporary accounts of dreams and supernatural
visions also reflect the complex process of entwining
Christianity with native traditions. In 1726, for instance,
the Bolivian convert Lucas Xarupá described a visionary
experience in which he seemed to rely on infernal im-
ages similar to those of Cuzco and its surroundings. The
native Christian saw “a corps of very ugly demons with
terrible appearance and grotesque movements of body;
some had tigers’ heads, others dragons’ and crocodiles’,
still others had appearances so monstrous and terrible
that anyone would be discouraged from looking at them.
All were emitting terrifying, black flames from their
mouths and other parts of their bodies. They were yelling
33  On the significance of the toad in Andean and Spanish culture,
and its appearance in the paintings by Quispe Tito and Escalante, see
Brosseder, op. cit. (note 11), pp. 208–20.
34  See Gisbert and de Mesa, op. cit. (note 9), p. 24.
35  See S. MacCormack, “Pachacuti: miracles, punishments, and
Last Judgment: visionary past and prophetic future in early colonial
Peru,” The American Historical Review 93 (1988), pp. 960–1006, esp. pp.
995, 1003–04. For the motif of the rainbow see also T.B.F. Cummins,
Toasts with the Inca: Andean abstraction and colonial images on Quero ves-
sels, Ann Arbor 2002, pp. 261–67, and Lara, op. cit. (note 13), p. 199.
36  J.P. Fernández, Relación historial de las misiones de los indios, que
llaman chiquitos, que están a cargo de los padres de la Compañía de Jesús de
la provincia del Paraguay, Madrid 1726, pp. 133–34: “Una cuadrilla de
demonios feísimos, con terribles semblantes, y descompasados mo­
vi­mientos del cuerpo: unos con cara de tigres, otros de dragones, y
and moving around from one side to the other, imitat-
ing the dances of the Indians until they laid hands on the
poor new Christian who was all of a tremble, believing
that that festival was for him, and made a big fuss, yell-
ing: ‘It’s him, him, Xarupá, our friend, who used to be our
devotee and used the malicious witchcraft we had taught
his grandparents’.”36 To gain a subtle understanding of
visual culture in Peru is indeed to acknowledge these
complex interplays and conflicts between European and
indigenous modes of thought.
Yet the production and consumption of eschatologi-
cal paintings were also triggered by factors disconnected
from the evangelization process, such as the geographi-
cal conditions of the region. It would be oversimplify-
ing to state that religious images in Peru only served a
purpose within the didactic program of the foreign op-
pressors. In Franciscan communities, for instance, visual
discourses about the end of time were interconnected to
the high level of seismic and volcanic activity on Peru-
vian soil, especially after the major eruption of Huayna-
putina in 1600.37
Eschatological associations with local geography,
although equally bound to social circumstances, have
also been made in the city of Potosí (Bolivia) and its sur-
roundings. The silver mines of this mountain city were
recurrently compared to the infernal underworld. As
early as 1550, Domingo de Santo Tomás (1499–1570) re-
ported that Potosí was “a mouth of Hell” which annually
swallowed countless innocent natives.38 Fifty years later,
a disillusioned Diego de Ocaña (1565–1608) made a simi-
lar comparison after witnessing the miners’ working con-
ditions, and in 1638 Antonio de la Calancha (1584–1654)
compared the descent into Hell with the entry of the na-
cocodrilos, y algunos con apariencias de tan monstruosas, y terribles
formas, que no sufría el ánimo mirarlos: echaban todos por la boca, y
por las otras partes del cuerpo, llamas de color negro, y espantoso, y
gritando, y discurriendo de una parte a otra, remedaban las danzas, y
bailes de los indios, hasta que agarrándose del pobre neófito, que estaba
todo temblando, creyendo que aquella fiesta era por él, hicieron gran fi-
esta, gritando: Él, él es, Xarupá nuestro amigo, que antiguamente era nuestro
devoto, y usaba de los hechizos, y maleficios, que enseñamos a sus abuelos.”
This is discussed and translated in A. Saito, “Art and Christian conver-
sion in the Jesuit missions on the Spanish South American frontier,” in
Y. Sugimoto (ed.), Anthropological studies of Christianity and civilization,
Osaka 2006, p. 188.
37  See Lara, op. cit. (note 15), pp. 139–63.
38  See L. Hanke, The imperial city of Potosí: an unwritten chapter in the
history of Spanish America, The Hague 1956, p. 25.
362
tive miners into the abyss of the mountain.39 The afore-
mentioned Guaman Poma de Ayala, finally, stated that
“[indigenous] people were not as greedy as the Spaniards
who kill each other for half a silver coin and will go to the
inferno for silver like slaves.”40
Scholars have, in turn, associated the popular-
ity of infernal imagery in the vicinity of Potosí, such as
the canvases in Caquiaviri, with the infernal depths of
the mines.41 One might wonder, for instance, whether
churchgoers gave thought to the underworld of the
mountain when beholding the monumental painting of
the Last Judgment (1708) by Melchor Pérez de Holguín
(1660–1732) in Potosí’s Church of San Lorenzo (fig. 11).42
George Kubler and Martin Soria described the colonial
canvas as a “vast Bosch-like allegory,” and the formal
qualities of the hellish scenery do indeed suggest that
de Holguín made use of Netherlandish prints, although
the precise source material remains to be identified.43
39  See P.J. Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian labor in Po-
tosí, 1545–1650, Albuquerque 1984, p. 137, and Mujica Pinilla, op. cit.
(note 10), p. 189. On the transformation of mining and underworld my-
thology during the colonial period see also M. Taussig, The devil and
commodity fetishism in South America, Chapel Hill 1980, pp. 114–213, esp.
pp. 201–05.
40  See F. Guaman Poma de Ayala, The first new chronicle and good
government: on the history of the world and the Incas up to 1615, trans. R.
Hamilton, Austin 2009, p. 52.
41  See Gisbert and de Mesa, op. cit. (note 9), p. 22, and A. Crei­
scher, M.J. Hinderer and A. Siekmann (eds.), Principio Potosí: ¿coìmo
podemos cantar el canto del Señor en tierra ajena?, Madrid 2010, pp. 4,
daan van heesch
11  Melchor Pérez de Holguín, The
Last Judgment (detail), 1708. Oil
on canvas, dimensions unknown.
Potosí, Church of San Lorenzo
The man-devouring dragon in the scene of Hell on the
right was, in any case, based on a reversed copy of a print
by Hendrik Goltzius (1558–1617) of The dragon devouring
the companions of Cadmus, which was itself copied after
a painting by Cornelis van Haarlem (1562–1638).44 Re-
gardless of the possible models, however, Gisbert and de
Mesa rightly assume that such works of art were in large
part directed towards a community for which forced
labor in the mines was a central fact of daily life.45
a franciscan allegory of the hereafter in colo-
nial quito  The second part of this study moves on to
evaluate the ways in which Bosch’s pictorial mode was
imagined further north in the Andes, in the colonial city
of Quito, in modern-day Ecuador. It centers around a
remarkable painting of the hereafter in the Convent of
San Diego, a Franciscan monastery dating back to the
first two decades of the seventeenth century.46 Again,
21–22.
42  See J. de Mesa and T. Gisbert, Holguín y la pintura virreinal en
Bolivia, La Paz 1977, pp. 159–63, and Gisbert and de Mesa, op. cit. (note
9), pp. 30–31.
43  See Kubler and Soria, op. cit. (note 1), p. 325. See also de Mesa
and Gisbert, op. cit. (note 42), p. 159: “Muchos rasgos característicos
confirman su vieja ascendencia medieval como el Cristo sentado sobre
el arco iris y el infierno con los siete pecados capitales, en escenas que
parecen estar arrancadas del Bosco.”
44  Noted by A. Hyman and A. Ojeda. See PESSCA, op. cit. (note 8),
nr. 2310A/2310B.
45  See Gisbert and de Mesa, op. cit. (note 9), p. 22.
Imagining Hieronymus Bosch in colonial Peru: foreign sources, indigenous responses 363

12 Anonymous, Franciscan allegory of the Last Judgment, seventeenth/eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 110 × 192 cm. Quito, Museo del
Padre Almeida (Museo de la Antiqua Recoleta de San Diego) (photo © Christoph Hirtz)

the canvas testifies to the wide-reaching afterlife and
semantic flexibility of Bosch’s pictorial manner (fig.
12).47 Although not discussed in Bosch studies, the sev-
enteenth-century canvas is fairly well-known among
the local community, which tends to attribute it to the
“afamado El Bosco” (“the renowned Bosch”).48 The can-
vas was even subjected to technical research and exhaus-
tive conservation treatments in 1982 and 1993.49 In 2012,
a scholarly monograph on painting in colonial Quito
reevaluated the canvas and suggested that it might be “a
European painting... transformed in a Quito workshop
into a Franciscan allegory.”50 However, after exploring its
peculiar Boschian iconography and revisiting the techni-
cal research reports, this study attempts to show that its
genesis is fully in agreement with colonial artistic prac-
tice.51
When beholding this painted vision of the afterlife,
the viewer’s eyes are immediately drawn towards the
pale, organic orb at the center of the canvas. The giant
sphere is surmounted by Christ’s Cross and can thus be
identified as a world globe ruled by God. Mortal souls try
to enter the globe, which is, in fact, an allegorical repre-
sentation of the upright and wicked paths of life and of
God’s final judgment that follows at the end of time. The

46  See A. Kennedy Troya and A. Ortiz Crespo, Convento de San
Diego de Quito: historia y restauración, Quito 1982, pp. 24–52.
47  I am most grateful to Susanne Bartels for alerting me to this
painting, and to Susan Webster and Alejandro Massó for providing me
with photographs.
48  For example, presented as the “famosa obra de El Bosco” (“fa-
mous work by Bosch”) at Museo Franciscano del Padre Almeida, http://
www.museosquito.gob.ec/index.php/component/k2/item/66-museo-
franciscano-del-padre-almeida (accessed 20 May 2016).
49  See L. Cevallos, N. Gomez and M. Rosero, “‘El paso de la vida
a la eternidad’: un nuevo enfoque para la conservación,” Caspicara 1
(1993), pp. 3–7, and Kennedy Troya and Ortiz Crespo, op. cit. (note 46),
pp. 140–41, 276–77.
50  See S.L. Stratton-Pruitt (ed.), The art of painting in colonial Quito /
El arte de la pintura en Quito colonial, Philadelphia 2012, pp. 150–51, nr. 37
(with no references to the studies in the previous note).
51  Cevallos, Gomez and Rosero, op. cit. (note 49), p. 4, already stat-
ed briefly that the visual narrative corresponds to the implicit function
of colonial works of art. My interpretation of the painting, however,
deviates considerably from their Dantean reading, in which the globe is
identified on pp. 4–5 as Purgatory.
364 daan van heesch

13  Hieronymus Bosch, The garden of earthly delights, c. 1495–1505. Oil on panel, central panel 190 × 170 cm, wings 187.5 × 76.5 cm. Madrid,
Museo Nacional del Prado, on loan from the Patrimonio Nacional, inv. nr. 2823 (photo © Museo Nacional del Prado)

path from earth to Heaven is indeed difficult: the major-

ity of the sinners on the right are expelled into eternal
damnation, and only few souls await redemption. A sin-
gle soul who reached the top walks anxiously over a small
rope towards an angel.52 It is not clear, however, whether
he will reach Heaven, which is represented by a fortified
castle with the Trinity and the Virgin Mary at top left.
The celestial court of justice, conventional to Last Judg-
ment iconography, was thus reduced to and abstracted
by the Cross-bearing terrestrial globe, the well-known
attribute of Christ as divine judge.
The organic nature of the orb also recalls another pic-
torial motif, however, one that is characteristic of the pic-
torial worlds of Bosch and his followers: the multi-shaped
sphere, evoking fruits, eggs or fungi, frequently fractured
and inhabited by human sinners (figs. 13–16). The sym- 14  Detail of fig. 13, central panel
bolic reach of these vegetal spheres was ambiguous and
their precise meaning — if any — still remains to be de-
termined. Yet it is generally accepted that they evoked

52  An X-radiograph and the semi-translucent layers of paint re- was overpainted; see Kennedy Troya and Ortiz Crespo, op. cit. (note
veal, however, that at some time a second, crawling soul on the rope 46), p. 277, fig. 88.
Imagining Hieronymus Bosch in colonial Peru: foreign sources, indigenous responses 365

15  Follower of Hieronymus Bosch (workshop of Jan Mandijn?),

St Christopher and the Christ Child, c. 1530–1550. Oil on panel,
34 × 46 cm. Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift
of Mr and Mrs Ben Maddow, inv. nr. 59.48 (photo © Los Angeles
County Museum of Art) 16  Detail of fig. 15

connotations with the generative forces of nature and the

omnipresence of worldly sins.53 It is significant that the
artist of the Quito canvas combined Bosch’s phantasmal
vegetation with the iconography of the Cross-bearing
globe (parallel, for instance, to the Haywain tapestry in
the Escorial or The seven deadly sins in Geneva by an early
Bosch imitator).54 In this way, the artist realized a cosmic
transposition of the Boschian “fleur du mal,” reframing
the putrefied orb of sin and temptation within the wider
narrative history of salvation.55
The phantasmal globe is not the only element that can
be traced back to Bosch and his followers, though. Apart
from the fire raging in the right background, the canopied
boat conveying numerous souls to eternity on the left
also seems to derive from a Boschian prototype.56 For ex-
ample, the motif accords with the celestial boat depicted

53 See P. Vandenbroeck, “Jheronimus Bosch’ zogenaamde Tuin

der lusten. I,” Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen
(1989), pp. 121–47.
54  See P. Vandenbroeck, “Meaningful caprices: folk culture, mid-
dle-class ideology (ca 1580–1510) and aristocratic recuperation (ca
1530–1570): a series of Brussels tapestries after Hieronymus Bosch,”
Antwerp Royal Museum Annual (2009), pp. 213–69, esp. pp. 233, 240, fig.
11, and Unverfehrt, op. cit. (note 2), nr. 62, fig. 227.
17  Detail of fig. 4 55 The Baudelarian paraphrase is adapted from G.T. Clark,
“Bosch’s Saint John the Baptist in the wilderness and the artist’s ‘Fleurs
du Mal’,” in A tribute to Robert A. Koch: studies in the northern Renaissance,
Princeton 1994, pp. 3–19.
56  As suggested in Stratton-Pruitt, op. cit. (note 50), p. 150.
366
18 Anonymous, Franciscan allegory of the Last Judgment (condition in 1982), seventeenth/eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 110 × 192 cm.
Quito, Museo del Padre Almeida (Museo de la Antiqua Recoleta de San Diego) (photo © A. Kennedy Troya and A. Ortiz Crespo)
in Bosch’s Last Judgment triptych in Bruges. However, the
left-hand panel of Hieronymus Cock’s printed triptych,
thoroughly discussed in the previous case study, also
contains a heavenly pleasure boat in which angels and
the blessed dwell (fig. 17). It seems more likely, then, that
the anonymous artist of the Quito canvas used the same
graphic source that Quispe Tito employed for his Cuzco
Last Judgment.
Yet despite these crystal-clear Boschian motifs, it re-
mains hard to pinpoint the graphic or pictorial source
of the central image of judgment. Image-making in the
Netherlandish manner in Quito was, in any case, generat-
ed by the presence of Flemish Franciscans from the mid-
dle of the sixteenth century onwards.57 Of particular note
are the friars Joos de Rijcke of Mechelen (Jodoco Rique,
57 See J. Everaert, “De verovering van de Indiaanse ziel: mis-
sionarissen uit de Lage Landen in Spaans-Amerika (1493–1767),” in
P. Vandenbroeck (ed.), exhib. cat. America, bruid van de zon: 500 jaar
Latijns-Amerika en de Lage Landen, Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor
Schone Kunsten Antwerpen) 1992, pp. 59–68, esp. pp. 63–64, 68.
daan van heesch
1498–1578) and Peter Goltzius of Leuven (Pedro Gosseal,
1497/98–1570), who according to contemporary docu-
ments “taught the Indians all types of trades... [produc-
ing] very perfect painters and sculptors, and scribes.”58
Turning to the foreground of the picture, we see a Fran-
ciscan friar in a three-phase sequence in what is possibly
a vision of the hereafter. On the far right he is tumbling
down a rock face into the realm of the afterlife. His soul
is then guided through Hell and Heaven, perhaps com-
parable to medieval visionary accounts like the Vision of
Tondal.59 His short experience of damnation and glory
will make him reconsider the course of his life when back
on earth. It is also possible, though, that the friar liter-
ally fell to his death and ended up in the afterlife, his des-
tiny still to be judged. He is frightened by the horrors of
58  See K. Donahue-Wallace, Art and architecture of viceregal Latin
America, 1521–1821, Albuquerque 2008, p. 38.
59  This reading is in contrast to Kennedy Troya and Ortiz Crespo,
op. cit. (note 46), pp. 276, who interpret the Franciscan as (1) falling, (2)
meditating and (3) fleeing from worldly sin.
Imagining Hieronymus Bosch in colonial Peru: foreign sources, indigenous responses 367
19 Anonymous, Franciscan allegory of the Last Judgment
(X-ray detail), seventeenth/eighteenth century. Oil on canvas,
110 × 192 cm. Quito, Museo del Padre Almeida (Museo de la
Antiqua Recoleta de San Diego) (photo © A. Kennedy Troya
and A. Ortiz Crespo)
60  See S. Sebastián, El barroco iberoamericano: mensaje iconográfico,
Madrid 1990, pp. 225–48.
61  Whether the Franciscan in the Boschian canvas represents a
cleric in a general sense or a specific individual or character remains
to be determined. However, a possible identification, or rather a later
interpretation, of the Franciscan friar may be derived from an inventory
of the Convent of San Diego of 1847. The document mentions several
paintings on canvas, only one of which corresponds to the Franciscan
vision. In the portería, near the lower convent corridors and cells, there
was a large painting that was described as a Vision of Father Almeida
(“una Visión del Padre Almeida, con su moldura pintada”). See A. Ken-
nedy Troya and A. Ortiz Crespo, Recoleta de San Diego de Quito: historia
y restauración, Quito 2010 (the revised edition of their op. cit. (note 46)),
p. 437. The description refers to a legendary monk of the Convent of
San Diego, the Franciscan friar Manuel de Almeida, who became a be-
loved character in Quito through the folk tale Padre Almeida (hence the
name of the convent museum, Museo del Padre Almeida). According
to the legend, this dissolute friar frequently sneaked out of the convent.
After staggering back after a long night out, the drunken novice stum-
bled into a funeral procession and accidentally knocked the coffin to
the ground. The coffin opened and, to his surprise, Almeida saw his
own corpse in the casket. After this dreadful vision, the remorseful friar
Hell, but his destiny seems assured, as the angel is point-
ing towards the glories of Heaven. In this reading, the
picture might represent the Four Last Things (death,
judgment, Hell and Heaven), an iconography that was
extremely popular in colonial Spanish America.60 Taken
together, the picture seems to have had a site-specific
and didactic function within the Franciscan convent,
where it warned the Franciscan beholder away from the
road to perdition.61 The iconography of the Quito paint-
ing unfolds an even more complex narrative, however,
when the findings of the technical examination are taken
into consideration.
The canvas underwent a turbulent conservation his-
tory to say the least, and it seems that the painting al-
most vanished in the 1980s (fig. 18).62 The small-scale
technical study and conservation treatment of 1993 con-
cluded that it is a seventeenth-century canvas that was
partially overpainted at some time in the eighteenth cen-
tury. The overpainting, however, was radical and raises
doubts about its original iconographic program, as X-ra-
diographs and the semi-translucent paint surface reveal
peculiar details in the underlying paint layers, such as an-
thropomorphic demons with goat and wolf-like features
and an unidentified individual with Andean physiog-
nomy and headdress beneath the Franciscan friar in the
lower right corner (fig. 19).63 This indicates that at some
point the uncanny and perhaps disturbing hybrids were
replaced by the more straightforward and instructional
returned to the convent in order to devote his life entirely to God. The
painting of the Vision of Father Almeida, then, might have represented
Almeida’s experience of his own mortality and, perhaps, the specters
that infested his mind on the sight of his own dead body. Although it
remains speculative, it might therefore be possible that for some be-
holders, including the scribe of the inventory, the Franciscan in the
Boschian painting experiencing a vision of death and the afterlife in
similar fashion was thought to be the most famous Franciscan in San
Diego’s history, the repentant Manuel de Almeida. Whether or not the
Boschian picture can be identified with the painting of Almeida’s vision
in the 1847 inventory, the messages of both works must indeed have
been alike. For the legend and the historical figure, who is documented
as a friar in the convent between 1663 and 1716, see J.G. Navarro, Con-
tribuciones a la Historia del Arte en el Ecuador, 2 vols., Quito 1925, vol. 1,
p. 164, and L. Pérez de Oleas Zambrano, Historias-leyendas y tradiciones
ecuatorianas, 2 vols., Quito 1962, vol. 2, pp. 327–36.
62  The poor conservation and questionable restoration practices
of colonial artworks are a well-known problem. For their consequences
for connoisseurship and art history see recently Mundy and Hyman,
op. cit. (note 4), pp. 307–09.
63  The X-radiograph of the Franciscan friar also reveals that his
eyes were pierced and his torso ripped open. This damage to the can-
368
20 Anonymous, The path to Heaven and Hell, c. 1620. Mural. Andahuaylillas, Church of San Pedro Apóstol de Andahuaylillas
(photo © Ananda Cohen Suarez)
Franciscan vision of the afterlife. That also indicates that
the site-specific Franciscan sequence was thus not part
of the original iconographic program. Yet it remains un-
clear who the barely legible individual beneath the friar
represents, although he is very probably of indigenous
descent.
All of these elements bring us back to the histori-
cal origin of this highly interesting Bosch pastiche and
the initial question of whether it is a European paint-
ing indigenously transformed into a Franciscan vision
for a viceregal convent. Although it is true that dozens
of Netherlandish canvas paintings were exported from
Spain (especially Seville) to the New World, there are
vas points to an iconoclastic attack, but the motivation for this action
remains unclear. For the X-radiographs see Kennedy Troya and Ortiz
Crespo, op. cit. (note 46), p. 277, fig. 88, and Cevallos, Gomez and Rose­
ro, op. cit. (note 49), p. 5.
64  See note 8 for the export of Netherlandish canvas paintings to
Latin America.
daan van heesch
several reasons to believe that the painting was entirely
produced in the colonial Andes.64 Doctrinal and nearly
extinct European iconographies, such as the Trinity, the
Last Judgment and the Broad and Narrow Ways were,
above all, typical of colonial art production of the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries.65 Single motifs be-
yond the indigenous individual, secondly, testify to a
native origin as well. The soul on the rope, for instance, is
being menaced by a demon on a rock with what appears
to be a blowgun, a native weapon dating back to the
pre-Columbian period and widespread in northwestern
South America.66 Although it was not possible to visu-
ally confirm this observation, the 1993 technical research
65  See Stastny, op. cit. (note 12), pp. 7–26, and Windus and Baum-
garten, op. cit. (note 12), pp. 52–54.
66  See S.C. Jett, “Further information on the geography of the
blowgun and its implications for early transoceanic contacts,” Annals of
the Association of American Geographers 81 (1991) pp. 89–102. The tubu-
lar weapon in the Quito canvas is less likely to be an arquebus, however,
Imagining Hieronymus Bosch in colonial Peru: foreign sources, indigenous responses 369
report also mentions a devil with spotted fur in the ‘pre-
Franciscan’ layers of paint, akin to those of native ani-
mals such as the puma or the jaguar.67 The presence of
the narrow bridge or rope, finally, is reminiscent of native
understandings of the afterlife, which may have triggered
the creation of this and similar iconographic programs in
colonial Latin America. It was believed, for instance, that
to enter the underworld (ucu pacha) — the Inca realm of
the afterlife — was to cross achacaca, a hazardous bridge
made of human hair.68 This transition from the earthly
to the eternal was generally constructed above vast
amounts of water, akin to the panoramic seascape in the
Quito painting.69 A comparable conception of the road
to the afterlife as a spiritual pilgrimage, with two narrow
bridges above water, can be found in a well-known mural
of the Path to Heaven and Hell (c. 1620s) in the church of
Andahuaylillas (near Cuzco) (fig. 20), which was based
on an engraving of The Broad and Narrow Ways (c. 1600)
by the Antwerp engraver Hieronymus Wierix (1553/54–
1619).70
In the words of Cohen Suarez, these colonial works
of art could indeed “have recalled long-standing beliefs
about the journey to new realms after death.” The im-
ages were “embedded in the very language employed in
the evangelization process, creating a productive tension
of language, image, and collective constructed memories
of the Inca past.”71 The results of this case study rein-
force the idea that the Boschian pastiche in Quito was
produced entirely in the colony and was directed towards
an Andean audience. Yet it should be admitted that it
remains hard to determine its origin and original icono-
graphical program because of the overpainting and lack
of clear provenance data. Nevertheless, the overall com-
position and rendering of detail do indeed suggest that
for its position at mouth level, the puffed cheeks and the bent position
of the arms match the handling of a blowpipe.
67  See Cevallos, Gomez and Rosero, op. cit. (note 49), p. 5. On the
position of jaguars and pumas in native American cosmology and the
shifting context of the ferocious feline in the colonial era see N.J. Saun-
ders, “Architecture of symbolism: the feline image,” in idem, (ed.), Icons
of power: feline symbolism in the Americas, London & New York 1998, pp.
12–44. See also Brosseder, op. cit. (note 11), p. 125, and Redden, op. cit.
(note 11), p. 128.
68  In Andean cosmology, the realm of the afterlife was always situ-
ated in the underworld, because the celestial realm (hanan pacha) was
reserved for the gods. From the colonization onwards, however, native
understandings of ucu pacha and hanan pacha were reformulated in the
the genesis of the painting is fully in agreement with co-
lonial artistic practice.
conclusion  Reaching beyond the borders of early
modern Europe, this article has tried to demonstrate how
Bosch’s pictorial mode came to lead a life of its own in
completely different sociocultural circumstances. Two
case studies have revealed how colonial artists did not
straightforwardly copy but subtly engaged with Bosch,
both adapting and omitting a variety of his forms and
ideas. Bosch’s world of sin, judgment and Hell was in-
deed actively transformed and reimagined for a colo-
nial society, where the eschatological imagination was
central to its existence. Through the lens of Bosch, this
article also shows the astonishing mobility and gradual
transformation of visual elements from, say, a sixteenth-
century Antwerp engraving in the manner of Bosch to
the early nineteenth-century murals of Tadeo Escalante
in Huaro. Yet it would be an exaggeration to state that
Bosch’s pictorial idiom held a prominent position in the
visual culture of colonial Latin America, such as those
of Rubens and Maarten de Vos. The artistic afterlife of
Bosch in the Andes seems to have been quantitatively
limited, but was nevertheless fundamental to a consider-
able number of infernal images preserved in the former
viceroyalty of Peru.72 Although much more research
remains to be done on Bosch’s transnational legacy, its
continuity, and change in form and meaning over time, it
is hoped that this study has provided a new dimension to
his reception history in the early modern period.
Illuminare – Centre for the Study
of Medieval Art
KU Leuven
Christian Heaven/Hell dyad of the hereafter. See Cohen Suarez, op. cit.
(note 9), pp. 69–70, and MacCormack, op. cit. (note 24), p. 428.
69  See Cohen Suarez, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 69–70.
70  See ibid., pp. 70–74, and A. Cohen Suarez, “Painting Andean
liminalities at the Church of Andahuaylillas, Cuzco, Peru,” Colonial
Latin American Review 22 (2013), pp. 369–99.
71  See ibid., p. 70.
72  A substantial 21% (4 out of 19) of colonial canvas paintings and
murals of the Last Judgment and the Four Last Things mentioned in
Gisbert and de Mesa, op. cit. (note 9), p. 27, for example, were directly
or indirectly based on Hieronymus Cock’s Boschian engraving dis-
cussed above.