Clothing the New World Church

Today, as in the past, these works speak to the early history of Catholic evangelization the Americas. Their preservation to the present suggests that even when damaged or understood as less than orthodox, they were esteemed as sacred historical artifacts. In comparison, the dye-painted cloths of Chachapoyas show the relative freedom allowed in an isolated region that was largely forgotten after the initial push for evangelization. There, in the eighteenth century, an indigenous textile type came to articulate a particular set of Holy Week rituals. Townspeople continue to preserve and take pride in their cotton church cloths. Parishioners in the church of Levanto in Chachapoyas, for example, recall that in the recent past one of the dye-painted tablecloths was laid out for meetings of the town council. Thus, liturgical textiles, with their historical and geographic specificities, offer another (and until now overlooked) dimension of the history of Catholicism in the Americas.

I have also suggested that despite the continuance of many traditional aspects of Amerindian textiles, the story of liturgical cloth in the Americas is one of transformation. The richly dressed churches evoked in this book were new ritual environments that offered a multitude of aesthetic proposals. Church textiles could also be viewed outdoors as they were hung, worn, and carried through streets in processions. It is thus important to consider the impact of church textiles on the wider visual culture of colonial society. We have seen that supreme status was attached to silk. The Church, as an avid consumer of this material, may have influenced the consumption and production of silk more widely, even though the wearing of this material was officially restricted to Spaniards. One particular type of silk that must have seemed fantastic was that described as tornasolado. Now called shot silk or changeant, this iridescent cloth displays different colors when seen at different angles. In 1631 the church of Vilque in Peru (see also chapter 4) had a damask frontlet surrounding a white damask frontal. The frontlet was said to be made of Chinese yellow and crimson tornasolado damask. It would have gleamed yellow and red, approximating the iridescence that was so admired in Mexican featherwork made from hummingbird feathers. Shot silk had been produced in Europe since medieval times and consisted of silk woven with contrasting warp and weft colors. Elena Phipps argues that in the Andes, weavers saw this new, iridescent cloth and emulated it by weaving warp-faced cloths with pink silk wefts and black camelid warps. She suggests that these cloths were then worn by indigenous elites of colonial society. They followed the Hapsburg fashion of dressing in black but ultimately wore blacks that were especially sumptuous. This is one example of a way in which the sacred and esteemed status of church silks extended into colonial society, where indigenous elites used the new, locally made tornesol cloth to enhance their own personas. The silk thread would have come from Spain or China, and when joined with camelid thread from the Andes, the cloth itself stood for the union of worlds.