Franciscan Poverty and Imperial Prosperity: Visual Contradictions and Symbolic Power in Viceregal Peru

This paper examines the paradox between Franciscan ideals of poverty and the material opulence of their artistic and architectural legacy in the Peruvian viceroyalty. Although the Observant Franciscans advocated apostolic poverty and renounced property, their convents in cities such as Lima, Cusco, Arequipa, and Ayacucho accumulated a vast movable and immovable heritage: they built monumental churches and promoted a visual culture where oil paintings in gilded frames coexisted with silver monstrances, litters, and chalices.

The study reviews documents related to property holdings and analyzes how, in practice, the friars deployed legal fictions and theological justifications to reconcile spiritual poverty with material abundance, turning mendicancy into an effective institutional discourse. Through the analysis of funding sources (alms, donations, confraternities, wills), artistic workshops, and miraculous images, the paper argues that Franciscan visual culture operated as a mechanism of colonial cohesion. It reinforced the friars’ authority, concealed structures of Indigenous exploitation, and promoted narratives of innocence and humility that masked their role in imperial expansion.

Through specific case studies, this research contributes to a broader critique of missionary visual culture, showing how Franciscan aesthetics blurred the boundaries between sanctity and domination, and invites a reevaluation of mendicant visual legacies in the Americas as strategic instruments of colonial power.