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Six - Deconstructing the Architectura: Enduring Matter and Transient Forms in Peru

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  aN Invalid Date NaN

Elizabeth J. Petcu
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

Dietterlin’s Architectura experienced perhaps its richest reception and afterlife among architectural sculptors in seventeenth-century colonial Peru. The façades of the Cathedral of Cuzco, Cuzco’s Jesuit Compañía church, and the monastery of the church of San Francisco in Lima all adapted motifs from Dietterlin’s Architectura to compare European and Indigenous Peruvian ideas about the stability of matter. Constructed in the wake of catastrophic earthquakes in the 1650s by Andean and other Indigenous sculptors, the façades reinterpret the structural, anatomical and material conceits of Dietterlin’s treatise to overturn its vision of architectural matter and especially stone as a materially unstable entity. Instead, they used the imagery of Dietterlin’s Architectura to promote an alternative ontology that underscored the transience of forms and structures while affirming the fixity of matter such as stone. Even as architectural images like those of the Architectura spurred artistic and natural philosophical discourses on a global scale, Peruvian artists adapted Dietterlin’s ideas to accommodate their own ontologies and philosophies of nature.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Architectural Image and Early Modern Science
Wendel Dietterlin and the Rise of Empirical Investigation
, pp. 347 - 398
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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