Overview

"Moche murals of northern Peru represent one of the great, yet still largely unknown, artistic traditions of the ancient Americas. Created in an era without written scripts, these murals are key to understandings of Moche history, society, and culture. In this first comprehensive study on the subject, Lisa Trever develops an interdisciplinary methodology of ""archaeo art history"" to examine how ancient histories of art can be written without texts, boldly inverting the typical relationship of art to archaeology. Trever argues that early coastal artistic traditions cannot be reduced uncritically to interpretations based in much later Inca histories of the Andean highlands. Instead, the author seeks the origins of Moche mural art, and its emphasis on figuration, in the deep past of the Pacific coast of South America. Image Encounters shows how formal transformations in Moche mural art, before and after the seventh century, were part of broader changes to the work that images were made to perform at Huacas de Moche, El Brujo, Panamarca, and elsewhere in an increasingly complex social and political world. In doing so, this book reveals alternative evidentiary foundations for histories of art and visual experience."

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9781477324271

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Reviews

[Image Encounters] offers a vibrant and compelling study of Andean mural painting, especially for the Moche (or Mochica) culture. It revels in the complexity that the subject demands...as a highly original study of the medium in Moche culture, not to mention its innovative theoretical apparatus to consider the logic, understandings, and experience of Andean mural painting more broadly, Trever’s volume is absolutely essential and there is much to recommend...Image Encounters affords a breath-taking tour of this least studied of Andean monumental arts, and extends guidance to consider Moche imagery, image-making, and society anew. Demanding, eclectic, and thoughtful throughout. * 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual * Image Encounters is an exceedingly thoughtful and carefully crafted book . . .  It will not only serve as the defining study of Moche murals for years to come but also substantially reframe scholarly understandings of the origins of wall art—and perhaps even art generally—in the ancient Andes. * Latin American and Latinx Visual Art *

[Image Encounters] offers a vibrant and compelling study of Andean mural painting, especially for the Moche (or Mochica) culture. It revels in the complexity that the subject demands...as a highly original study of the medium in Moche culture, not to mention its innovative theoretical apparatus to consider the logic, understandings, and experience of Andean mural painting more broadly, Trever’s volume is absolutely essential and there is much to recommend...Image Encounters affords a breath-taking tour of this least studied of Andean monumental arts, and extends guidance to consider Moche imagery, image-making, and society anew. Demanding, eclectic, and thoughtful throughout. * 21: Inquiries into Art, History, and the Visual *

Author Information

Lisa Trever is the Lisa and Bernard Selz Associate Professor in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology at Columbia University. She is the author of The Archaeology of Mural Painting at Pañamarca, Peru and coeditor of El arte antes de la historia: Para una historia del arte andino antiguo.

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