Mobility, Violence, and the Afterlives of a Peruvian Painting at Sea

Abstract Mobility has become a central focus of research into material culture. We chart the life-cycle of one mobile object: a painting commissioned in 1790s Peru by an indigenous man, painted by an indigenous artist, and intended for the king of Spain. Its history demonstrates the importance of exploring not simply the fact that objects moved around, but the particular reasons why they were in motion, and the particular ways in which they circulated. In the case of this painting, its creation, trajectory, disappearance, and afterlife were determined by two forms of damage characteristic of the eighteenth century: colonial violence and imperial warfare. These forces set objects in motion, and they conditioned the ways in which this painting was repeatedly reinterpreted and physically rearranged. Its history exemplifies the interconnections between imperial and colonial conflict, and the mobility and reception of artworks in this globalising era. Warfare and violence, we show, were powerful, and overlooked, factors that shaped the meanings and changing materiality of objects as they circulated.