JOHN CARTER BROWN LIBRARY

SHORT-TERM FELLOWS TALKS

IN THE MACMILLAN READING ROOM

Our Lady of Copacabana, Fernando de Valverde, Santuario de N.Seora de Copacabana en el Peru. Poema Sacro. ... Lima, 1641 (detail)
Original in the John Carter Brown Library.

Ambiguous Copies

Religious Prints, Reproduction, and

Originality in the Colonial Andes

Emily Floyd
Tulane University

John Carter Brown Library Associates Fellow

Copying religious images is neither a one-to-one exercise in reproduction nor is it a neutral
practice. In the colonial Andes, copies of such miracle-working statues as the Virgin of Copacabana circulated widely, existing in ambiguous connection to the originals they supposedly
reproduced. Copies might strengthen ties between devotees and a sacred image, or might
themselves transform into miraculous images, maintaining only tenuous links to their prototypes. For seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Andeans, copies were multivalent: creative,
potentially threatening, reproductive, and miraculous.

Wednesday, December 9, 2015 4:00 p.m.

MacMillan Reading Room, John Carter Brown Library
Talk at 4 p.m., Q & A follows with a show & tell of relevant JCB materials
For more information, call 401-863-2725, or email: jcb-events@brown.edu