Images in transit: the Virgins of Luján and Sumampa and the colonial circuits in South America in the first half of the seventeenth century

Abstract

This article seeks to analyze the materiality and part of the trajectory of two seventeenth-century terracotta statuettes - one of Nossa Senhora da Conceição and another of Nossa Senhora da Consolação - who respectively became the Virgin of Luján, patron of Argentina, and Virgen of Sumampa. Both are understood here as intertwined in the various networks and connections between the Portuguese and Spanish America in the contiguous areas of South America in the first half of the seventeenth century. In the text, we discuss a possible "Paulista" origin of these images which, in addition to an apparent coincidence, attests that the great "Peruvian space," articulated by Potosí, also included distinct regions of Portuguese America. Ii is in this expanded space marked by the traffic of people, goods and objects linked to the networks of smuggling that we follow the paths of these two images, trying to visualize how they got peculiar meanings in different contexts and environments.