Fear of criticism by the Order, as much as the desire to beautify the church, led Schmid and his colleagues to attempt to disguise the humble nature of adobe and make the building look as much like a European baroque stone-built church as possible. Architectural features like pilasters and door and window surrounds were moulded and painted, or sometimes just painted on illusionistically, and tiny flakes of mica found in the area around San Rafael, San Miguel and Santa Ana were laid on the interior walls and some furnishings instead of silver or gold leaf. However, as we have seen, the Jesuits were not
53 P. Caraman, The Lost Paradise: An Account of the Jesuits in Paraguay (1607–1768) (London:
Sidgwick and Jackson, 1975), p. 317.
54 V. Fraser, ‘Hierarchies and roles of materials in building and representation’, in V. Fraser and G. Brotherston (eds.), The Other America: Native Artifacts from the New World (Colchester:
University of Essex, 1982), pp. 41–56 (p. 42).
DAMAGE LIMITATION IN THE MISSION TO THE CHIQUITOS 55 alone in thinking that adornment of a significant site, an important object or a vulnerable entity offered status and protection. Even in the 20th century the church was believed to have a jichi, a spirit, lurking behind it, as Fischermann and Quiroaga and Balza Alarcón argue.55 There is little doubt that by marking the walls of these churches with the ur-patterns of curlicues and lozenges, which recall pre-evangelisation rock drawings and petroglyphs and the incised designs on clay vessels subsequently excavated in the region, the 18th-century members of the missions with a tradition of body marking and modification to the same ends hoped to provide the vulnerable ‘body’ that was the church building with protection from supernatural damage while continuing their forebears’ practice of marking numinous places.
Since UNESCO’s recognition of the Chiquitos mission as a World Heritage Site in 1990, the story of the mission has been about wise, kindly Europeans and ‘artistic’ Chiquitos. This ignores the fact that the Chiquitos had no concept of ‘art’. The notion of mark-making on a significant object or site being purely decorative would have been baffling to them. Aesthetics had nothing to do with it:56 it was a matter of survival – and their part in the process of ‘disguising’ the churches was fundamental. The building of the churches of Schmid and his colleagues was a collective endeavour. There were rarely more than two priests in a mission and one of them was frequently away on expeditions: searching for the elusive Asunción/Chiquitos/Charcas route which Arce had been charged with forging in 1691; searching for indigenous peoples to evangelise; or chasing groups of them who had decided to leave the mission. In the Anua of 1714–20 it is recorded that ‘while one group of Fathers runs the temporal and spiritual administration of these pueblos, others are engaged on the apostolic exploration of the vast heathen territory outside it’.57 Undoubtedly Schmid, the Bohemian Juan José Messner, the Spanish Bartolomé de Mora and whoever designed the other churches rolled up their sleeves, but the bulk of the work of construction and decoration would have been carried out by indigenous members of the mission.
The conservator at the mission to the Chiquitos, María José Diez Gálvez, writes: ‘The Chiquitano painters not only decorated the moveable pieces in the
55 B. Fischerman and R.M. Quiroaga, ‘Viviendo en el bosque’, El Deber, 21 Sept. 1996, cultural section, pp. 3–5; R. Balza Alarcón, Tierra, territorio y territorialidad indígena: un estudio antropólogico sobre la evolución en las formas de ocupación del espacio del pueblo indígena chiquitano de la ex reducción jesuita de San José (Santa Cruz: Apoyo para el Campesino-Indígena del Oriente Boliviano, 2001), p. 259.
56 V. Fraser, ‘Ixmiquilpan: from European ornament to Mexican pictograph’, in S. Diez-Ruiz et al. (eds.), Altars and Idols: The Life of the Dead in Mexico (Colchester: University of Essex, 1991), pp. 13–16 (pp. 15–16); E. Wake, Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Early Colonial Mexico (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), pp. 102, 177. Both make the point about a parallel agenda in relation to early colonial Mexico.
57 Matienzo et al. (eds.), Anuas, p. 107.
churches but also the churches themselves’.58 Their work would undoubtedly have been supervised, perhaps to prevent the risk of the painter ‘falling into innocent heterodoxy’, as J. Plá notes in relation to indigenous engravers in the Guaraní missions.59 This was, however, in this author’s view never a risk in the Chiquitos mission. A polarised Chiquito cultural history of spirits/humans and a social history of patron/peon has led, as V. Silva points out, to the Other, in the eyes of the modern Chiquitanos she investigates, being an entity which needs to be turned from predator into provider by means of obedience and appeasement.60 Given a guide sketch drawn directly on the wall by, say, Schmid, or shown an engraving of a cartouche around the depiction of a saint in a book from the priest’s library, one must assume the craftsmen would have copied it exactly to the best of their ability.61 Knogler remarks that ‘those who are good at writing copy books we need in a hurry, like catechisms, missals, calendars and pieces of music’.62 ‘[T]hose who [were] good at writing’ were probably those entrusted with the job of painting the walls – and they would, again, have ‘cop[ied]’, but the physical and sensory act of painting on a sacred surface was theirs, with all the cultural connotations it carried. As P. Connerton writes,
‘[t]he world of the percipient, defined in terms of temporal experience, is an organized body of expectations based on recollection’.63 The artisans would, of course, have been male: the pre-evangelisation women who made decorated clay vessels64 and pricked freehand designs on the faces of pubertal girls were relegated to the hearth by the missionaries.
No plans of the original Chiquitos churches have been found, nor any sketches of how they were adorned. This reflects what may have been embarrassment at the time about the humble materials involved and that the construction resembled a ‘native’ building. Martin Schmid was not praised as an architect/builder in the Cartas Anuas, only as a musician, which was the
58 M.J. Diez Gálvez, Los bienes muebles de Chiquitos: Fuentes para el conocimiento de una sociedad (Madrid: Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, 2006), p. 379.
59 J. Plá, ‘El grabado en las misiones jesuíticas’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 198 (1966): 577–
92 (12).
60 V.C. Silva, ‘Extracción, dueños y patrones entre los Chiquitanos del Valle del Alto Guaporé, frontera Brasil-Bolivia’, in D. Villar and I. Combès (eds.), Las tierras bajas de Bolivia: miradas históricas y antropológicas (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: El País Srl., 2012), pp. 297–317 (pp. 316–
17).
61 Despite exhaustive research in the mission music archive, not one single piece of music has been found which can categorically be attributed to an indigenous musician. Given the score of a piece of liturgical music to perform, it is difficult to imagine an obedient 18th-century Schmid- or Messner-trained Chiquito musician choosing to improvise a descant or an instrumental part.
62 Knogler, Relato, p. 156.
63 P. Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 6.
64 In the Relación Caballero notes fired clay vessels made by Manasica women ringing like metal to the touch (Caballero Relación, p. 17).
DAMAGE LIMITATION IN THE MISSION TO THE CHIQUITOS 57 reason he was sent there. The fact that the churches could not be built of stone or even brick, let alone marble, was glossed over by Schmid in his letters to his family at the time (intended for a sympathetic audience, though no doubt they would have been widely circulated once they reached Switzerland), which note the scene-painting/trompe l’œil techniques used to overcome this failing.65 However, it became apparent in Knogler’s Relato, written post-expulsion, that it was definitely considered a failing: ‘We do what we can to make [the churches] beautiful and respectable’, Knogler writes, making the best of what was evidently considered a bad job.66 The 1762 Anua local, which was written for a more general readership than Schmid’s letters, mentions ‘fine, well-decorated churches’67 but does not mention they were built of adobe; neither does Esteban Palozzi’s Informe (1763) to the governor of Santa Cruz, though he writes of ‘very good churches, quite well adorned’68 (Palozzi was then the superior of the mission).
It is arguable that no plan was drawn up because the builders would have found difficulty in understanding it. However, in the mid 18th century, at a time when all educated people were taught to draw, why did Schmid, with his four churches, and those who built churches subsequently during the life of the mission, not, as far as is known, leave a visual record of them – like a little sketch, perhaps, in a letter? A clue lies in an observation by Sánchez Labrador:
‘While [the Guaycurú’s] female captives collect wood and water . . . and their male captives hunt and fish, the masters are just sitting there drawing lines on their bodies. In this way they spend entire days in total disregard of what needs to be done, amusing themselves with frivolous things while their families suffer’.69 Sánchez Labrador’s judgmental tone is directed as much at the ‘idle’
Guaycurú as it is at recreational sketching since he also drew, but his work was a record of flora and fauna. It is notable that Sánchez and Florian Paucke (in the mission to the Mocobies in the western Chaco) are the only Jesuit missionaries to this huge region to have left any pictorial record on paper of their time there;
and Sánchez’s work was not published until about 1770, after the expulsion, while Paucke’s frequently comic scenes of mission life did not see the light of day until the 20th century. It is possible that fear of condemnation by Church or political authorities for using humble materials during the period of construction of the mission churches was felt so strongly by Chiquitos mission priests that it was thought safer to commit nothing other than edifying words to paper.
65 Hoffmann, W., Vida y obra del P. Martin Schmid SJ (1694–1772) (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1981), p. 149. This contains Schmid’s letters.
66 Knogler, Relato, p. 171.
67 Matienzo et al. (eds.), Anuas, p. 379.
68 Matienzo et al. (eds.), Anuas, p. 407.
69 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay, p. 286.
For the Chiquito church painters, however, ‘drawing lines on their bodies’
was – culturally and just about within living memory of the painters – very far from a waste of time. Sánchez remarks amusedly on how the Guaycurú expressed concern to him that the Jesuits did not paint their own bodies, thereby laying themselves open to spirit attack.70 Body painting was frowned upon in the mission to the Chiquitos, though tolerated outside the church building.71 What can be seen outside and inside the church building is a transmission of the idea of status and protection which transcended cultural differences, or, rather, happened to say the same thing in two mutually incomprehensible languages. Lévi-Strauss’s experiments with face-painters and paper in the 1930s showed him that the surface on which considered marks were made did not affect the quality of the mark-making. Extrapolating his conclusion to the mission to the Chiquitos 200 years earlier and 600 kms to the north-west may seem over-imaginative, but I have already drawn parallels between rock markings 400 kms apart and noted the similarity between Dobrizhoeffer’s observations on Abipone tattooing practice in the southern Chaco and those of Sánchez Labrador on the eastern side of the upper River Paraguay, 1,000 kms apart. Before the foundation of the mission reductions this was a highly mobile society. Once having thrown in their lot with the Jesuits, the peoples who inhabited the pueblos of the mission to the Chiquitos would surely not have been perplexed by the use of meaningful marks on a flat, white-washed church wall instead of on the contours of the body, an uneven rockface or a curved bowl. Both Fraser and Wake suggest that in an early colonial Mexican context the motifs on church walls would have held a different meaning for the craftsmen who carried out the workfrom the one they held for the priest who ordered them to be made.72 The baroque scrolls and geometrics were intended by Schmid and his colleagues to disguise an essentially local style of building and foliate Renaissance adornment was no doubt regarded by them as decorative (fig. 2.7), but in the context of the Chiquitos mission the marks were probably seen by both parties to perform the same function, that of protection.