The Mobile Image: Prints and the Shaping of Devotional Networks from Lima to the Andes and Beyond

Floyd, Emily C.

ISBN 10: 1477331123 / ISBN 13: 9781477331125

Published by University of Texas Press, 2025

About this Item

2025. hardcover. . . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9781477331125

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Mobile Image: Prints and the Shaping of Devotional Networks from Lima to the Andes and Beyond
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication Date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1477331123
• ISBN 13: 9781477331125
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

A study of the production and movement of prints in colonial South America.

Printed images have had a central place in art-historical studies of colonial Spanish America, but scholars have typically focused on imported prints, designed and produced in Europe. The Mobile Image focuses instead on works printed in colonial Lima, generating there a distinctive print culture that served local and regional needs, while also appealing to European print consumers.

Inexpensive, easily transportable, and numerous, Lima’s prints traversed the varied geographies of the Viceroyalty of Peru both as loose sheets and within the protective covers of printed books. In the process, limeņo devotional prints encouraged the development of shared regional imaginaries about the sacred Andean landscape, a space marked by miracle-working Virgins, potential saints, and powerful images of Christ. These same prints traveled abroad, where they promoted iconographies developed in Lima and influenced European conceptions of the Andes. Simultaneously, the visual language of limeņo prints often challenges conventional approaches to interpreting colonial depictions of race. In analyzing limeņo prints, and the identities of their makers, patrons, and consumers, The Mobile Image demonstrates that race is harder to recognize in colonial images than we might think. Unearthing hundreds of forgotten prints, Emily C. Floyd provides a fresh resource for interpreting colonial artworks, troubling established understandings of their aesthetics, and compelling us to reexamine colonial South American material cultures.

About the Author

Emily C. Floyd is a lecturer of Visual Culture and Art before 1700 in the History of Art Department at University College London. She is also an editor and curator at the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR) at Yale University.