Moving Parts: Sculpture in Eighteenth-Century Quito and Beyond

The proto-industrial workshops of eighteenth-century Quito employed a range of specialists in the production of polychrome wood sculptures, from sculptors, painters, and gilders, to metalworkers, glass-makers, and tailors. In addition to complete figures, Quito’s workshops conducted a robust trade in sculptural body parts – disembodied heads, limbs, hands, and cast-metal face masks, which were mass-produced in an almost assembly-line fashion and exported throughout the Americas and beyond. Both complete figures and body parts exemplify the additive, aggregate, and malleable properties of eighteenth-century Quito sculpture that lent themselves to modification over the longue durée. Many (though not all) of the sculptural body parts were intended for imágenes de vestir (sculptures clothed in actual garments) in far-flung regions of the Americas, where they were mounted on pre-existing or newly crafted bodies with articulated limbs. The recipients and patrons of sculptural parts frequently transformed and updated their images over time, routinely moving, retrofitting, and replacing their parts and other accouterments, a process that continues to the present day. Devotional identities, iconographic types, and genders were – and continue to be – physically modified for reasons ranging from the aesthetic and religious to the pragmatic and utilitarian. Such moving parts complicate and confront traditional art-historical, curatorial, and market-driven claims regarding the supposed monolithic "sculptural integrity," authorship, dating, and historical/market value of Quito sculpture, when such works were from their inception and throughout their afterlives inherently collaborative assemblages that were created, adapted, and changed over time by many hands.