Unlike in New Spain, illustrated manuscripts were uncommon during the centuries of Spanish colonial occupation in the Andes. In the Viceroyalty of Peru, only a handful of such documents are known, the most studied of those is Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno. Before he wrote this manuscript (which he sent to the King of Spain), Guaman Poma worked with a Spanish Mercedarian priest who wanted to produce illustrated manuscripts telling the history of the Inka, their customs and habits, and an account of the Spanish occupation. These works, which include Guaman Poma’s illustrations, are now known as the Murúa Manuscripts.
Title page and opening illustration, Martín de Murúa, Historia y Genealogía de los Reyes Ingas del Piru (History and Genealogy of the Inka Kings of Peru), c. 1580–90, manuscript on parchment (University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library, facsimile of the Galvin manuscript, owned by Sean Galvin)
Map of the Viceroyalty of Peru (underlying map © Google)
History and background
Martín de Murúa arrived in the Americas as a missionary, first to New Spain and then to the Viceroyalty of Peru around 1580. There he wrote what is considered the earliest illustrated chronicle of Peru along with several other books. Only two of Murúa’s texts survive and both have similar content, though they were made decades apart. The connections between the two texts are not only thematic; they involve a series of borrowings, corrections, mixing, and matching.
The oldest of the manuscripts is titled History and Genealogy of the Inka Kings of Peru (or Historia y Genealogía de los Reyes Ingas del Piru), made somewhere between 1580 and 1590, containing 147 folios and 112 illustrations, usually organized with text in the rectos and images in the versos. The illustrations are fully colored and comprise the whole surface of the page. The second manuscript is titled General History of Peru (or Historia General del Piru), dated around 1615, and involved some re-writing of the same content of the first manuscript, with some additions and some re-arrangements in configuration. It has 399 folios and 38 of those are illustrations. But most importantly, thanks to the recent availability of the two manuscripts for study, scholars discovered that some pages were taken out of the older manuscript and glued to this “second version,” creating a work of pastiche using elements from the older manuscript. [1]
Title page, Martín de Murúa, Historia General del Piru (General History of Peru), 1615, manuscript on parchment (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. Ludwig XIII 16). In this image Murua constructed a composite of fictional and real coats of arms alongside a common latin phrase meaning “We saw and heard the witness” a common legal phrase that was used to attest the recording of a first hand account.
The images
The production of the images occurred in connection with the text, a feat that involved several people working on the manuscript at different times. First was Murúa, who planned and surveyed the project, but only contributed annotations to the actual text. The second and third hands were the scribes who wrote the texts. The scribes were directly supervised by Murúa, writing on his behalf and under his instructions. The third group of hands were the artists who made the watercolor illustrations. Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala worked on the first manuscript, and at least one other artist can be identified as a contributor in the subsequent manuscript.
Left: Unknown artist, Inca Roca with a prince, page 22; right: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Inka worshiping the sun and praying for prosperity, page 188, both from Martín de Murúa, Historia y Genealogía de los Reyes Ingas del Piru (History and Genealogy of the Inka Kings of Peru), c. 1580–90, manuscript on parchment (University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library, facsimile of the Galvin manuscript, owned by Sean Galvin)
According to scholars, the production of the illustrations was supervised by Murúa, who decided where each picture would be positioned in the context of the overall manuscript. Scholars have identified two distinct artists’ work in the History and Genealogy: Guaman Poma and an unnamed artist. The second artist illustrated the Inka kings and coyas at the beginning of the manuscript. Guaman Poma produced the remaining illustrations and intervened in the royal portraits, leading scholars to surmise that he worked after the other artist. But, through the act of cutting and pasting, some of Guaman Poma illustrations are also present in the later Historia General del Piru, even though he was not involved in its production.
Left: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, The Execution of Tupac Amaru I, from Martín de Murúa, Historia y Genealogía de los Reyes Ingas del Piru (History and Genealogy of the Inka Kings of Peru), c. 1580–90, manuscript on parchment, page 94 (University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library, facsimile of the Galvin manuscript, owned by Sean Galvin); right: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, The Execution of Tupac Amaru I, from Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (The First New Chronicle and Good Government), c. 1615, page 453 (The Royal Danish Library, Copenhagen)
Guaman Poma’s recognizable style can be seen in an illustration depicting the public beheading of Tupac Amaru I, the last Sapa Inka. The illustration is in full color, and it includes strong outlines, an emphasis on curved lines, and elongated faces and limbs. Guaman Poma repeats the same composition of the same scene in his chronicle and letter Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno.
Unknown artist, Portrait of Manco Capac, from Martín de Murúa, Historia y Genealogía de los Reyes Ingas del Piru (History and Genealogy of the Inka Kings of Peru), c. 1580–90, manuscript on parchment, page 12 (University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Library, facsimile of the Galvin manuscript, owned by Sean Galvin)
The other artist of the Historia y Genealogía that made the portraits of the Inka kings and coyas has a noticeably different style. With an emphasis on details, and surface effects, the royal portraits present effects like shading, suggesting three dimensionality in a way that the rest of the manuscript does not. The unknown artist depicts the first Inka king, Manco Capac, in a contrapposto, displaying the symbols of Inka power with detailed clothing and an emphasis on the texture and shading of the figure.
The content
Both books by Murúa contain similar content and served to legitimize European conquest. Murúa was following the tradition of European chroniclers who established a literary tradition as part of their colonization strategies. One strategy was the establishment of a genealogy of the Inka, and therefore the construction of a “History” in European terms. Because Andean Indigenous cultures did not use alphabetic writing, the European colonizers deemed them as lacking in culture, and therefore history. Because of that, one of their first colonizing acts was the establishment of such history, which worked within the boundaries of European writing traditions. [2]
The impact
Although these manuscripts remained unknown until the 20th century, they give us information on Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, as well as on how some of the Indigenous stories being compiled by the European colonizers were conceptualized not only as texts, but also as images. These texts also show pre-conquest practices, and in particular collect narratives and customs that give us insight on the Indigenous cultures of the region, as well as the first decades of colonization (like the first missionary groups as well as the early descriptions of colonial settlements). There remains much to investigate about the Murúa texts and to learn about the illustrated manuscripts on the Andes.
