Finding Caspicara: Double Identities, Hidden Figures, and the Commerce of Sculpture in Colonial Quito, Susan Verdi Webster, 2024, University of Texas Press
Artistic reputations have a way of taking on a life of their own, and there may be no better example of this than that of Caspicara, ostensibly Manuel Chil (ca. 1723–96), an Indigenous Ecuadorian sculptor who in his native land is today a household name and national icon.
The artist’s polychromed wood sculptures in the elegant Spanish Baroque style, which became emblematic of the Quito School of the 18th-century Andes, are as intriguing as they are beautiful.
When Caspicara was working in Quito, it was a city of just 25,000 inhabitants, a third of whom were Indigenous, but one in which the artistic professions, particularly that of sculpture, were dominated by Indigenous artists and craftspeople.
A prolific virtuoso, the sculptor created pieces that today are highly prized, with “Caspicaras” found in museums and collections throughout the world and routinely offered for sale in auctions, synonymous with the impeccable devotion to pious detail of colonial religiosity.
As author Susan Verdi Webster points out: “For all intents and purposes, the word ‘Caspicara’ became almost a trademark or denominación de origen, synonymous with ‘quality’ and ‘excellence’, connoting Ecuadorian national pride and particularly the identity, cultured status, and honour of his city of origin, Quito.”
Accordingly, throughout Ecuador, buildings, streets, schools, shops, hotels, parks, beauty salons, construction companies, and sports teams as well as artistic workshops, galleries, cultural foundations, journals, and postage stamps bear the exalted sculptor’s name. Nationalist historiography is nothing if not addicted to local genius.
Yet there is a problem. As VerdiWebster traces in this book, the artist remains an enigma, thanks to an almost complete lack of archival documentation that can link Chil and variants of this name to the prodigy known as Caspicara, but also in some cases that can verify works that are attributed to the latter.
This is the recurrent historiographical dilemma that greatly limits the ability of academics to recreate any aspect of Indigenous life, not only in the Americas, and makes skilful scholarship in this field both doubly challenging—but also doubly valuable.
Finding Caspicara is an eloquent detective story in the realm of art history in which the author explores reasons for the attribution—and hence the global reputation—of these artworks to a figure whose very existence is shrouded in mystery.
Not surprisingly, those reasons include a good measure of ambition among contemporaries seeking to establish a recognisable canon on a par with Europe, and also the endlessly imaginative assumptions of subsequent historians.
VerdiWebster writes: “It was precisely the absence of evidence that rendered Caspicara ripe for historiographical invention as the principal, magisterial, and immensely prolific creator of late-colonial sculpture in Quito.
“In the figure of Caspicara historians encountered a blank slate on which to inscribe their own desires, visions, and outright inventions in tales of Quito’s last great sculptor of the colonial period and the vast, myriad, and marvellous works of his hand.”
Her book is a splendid and captivating work of research worthy of the intricate attention to minutiae that distinguished the true genius of her artistic protagonist, Caspicara himself, whoever—when all is said and done—that really may have been.
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Categories: Ecuador, South America