The Ephemeral and the Imperial City: Interpreting the Processional Arches Created to Celebrate Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Canonization in Early Seventeenth-Century Potosí, Bolivia.

This paper studies the spectacular ephemeral arches created for the 1624 procession to celebrate St. Ignatius Loyola’s canonization in Potosi, Bolivia. The arches were made of branches and flowers, from which mirrors, silverware, and silver trays were hung. Potosí is almost 4,000 meters above sea level, therefore people had to bring flowers from distant valleys that enjoyed warmer weather, which contributed to this theatrical, fantastic celebration in the Imperial City. Given the lack of surviving visual representations of this event or the artworks created for it, I will use an array of drawings and paintings to understand the role of these temporary artworks in the procession, and how they were incorporated into the colonial urban space. Among those sources, I turn to a drawing by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala depicting the city of Potosí, one of the few visual representations from this period. The author provides insights into what the city would have looked like by 1624. In the lower register of the drawing, we observe a group of buildings organized around the central plaza, erected at the foot of the Cerro Rico (Rich Hill) of Potosí: the Cathedral, the Casa de Moneda, the Cabildo, and the city’s urban plan. All of them worked as "stations" through which the arches stopped during the 1624 procession. My analysis focuses on the dynamic features of the arches and the ways in which these temporary artworks were activated during the procession to communicate and be part of the urban colonial society.