Sculpting Quito: Religious Art Across Domestic Spaces, Leslie E Todd, 2026, University of Texas Press
In the colonial capital of Quito, sculptures mattered—and none more so than the wooden polychrome religious figures that spoke to the Ecuadorean city’s immersion in Roman Catholicism.
Quito is now considered to have been an artistic centre of sculptural production for the South American territories of the Spanish Empire, given the large quantity of figures made in and exported from the city.
Today we see these icons in museums behind glass screens and the Catholicism of the Spanish colonial era is no more, displaced by Vatican II vernacularisation but also increasingly irrelevant anyway in a turbulent post-modern capitalist society.
Art historian Leslie Todd has set herself an interesting task of what we might call devotional archaeology: to unpick what these objects, which in the eighteenth century would be found in homes and not museums, meant to the population in that era.
In doing so, she embarks on a fascinating effort to read these sculptures beyond their simple visual form in a way that would probably escape the uninitiated rest of us.
Sculpting Quito explores how individuals and society as a whole saw, perceived, and engaged with wooden sculpture by focusing on figures displayed in a domestic context
The author aims to reconstruct the historical meaning of the art form by questioning the diverse beliefs about what these images were, what they did, and how viewers interacted with them, and her observations are surprising and challenging.
Sculpture, writes Todd, “both upheld and undermined cultural hegemonic norms. It united the community, and yet divided individuals via hierarchical social lines of self-fashioning. It made room for Indigenous interpretations of Catholic spirituality.
“It likewise sustained both visibility and invisibility. It expressed a beauty and pleasure that coexisted with ongoing colonialist violence against Indigenous peoples, whose agency was consistently (and often brutally) negated.”
In some ways this is a materialist art history, bringing to mind the spirit if not the methodology of John Berger’s classic Ways of Seeing, that places significant relevance on how social groups engage with their world through popular religion and culture.
Todd suggests that the scultptural mastery achieved in Quito was both empowering—and potentially suvbversive, writing: “The invitation to connect with the divine and the choice to think freely that sculpture implied were the seed of revolutionary thought.
“This fed into changing attitudes toward the colony-metropole relationship throughout Spanish America in the eighteenth century and first decades of the nineteenth …
“… the sense of local pride and autonomy that sculpture validated did not challenge established authority, but rather pushed for a more direct relationship with Madrid and legitimised the desire for the local voice to be heard.”
Please help the Latin American Review of Books: you can subscribe on Substack, make a donation through Stripe . . . or just buy us a coffee
BUY THIS BOOK: UK/Europe
Categories: Ecuador