Paper short abstract:

The ambiguity between the creatures of the grotesque and the local iconographies observable in Iberian colonial art from India to America, although often read as a form of indigenous resistance, might be instead the result of a strategy of the Church to visually associate “idolatry” with “savagery”.

Paper long abstract:

We often read that the hybrid creatures that ornate the baroque pulpits of Portuguese churches in India are inspired from Hindu iconography. Nevertheless, if many of those creatures might indeed derive from it, many others descend from the European grotesque as it was copied from prints. A similar situation is observable in the sacred art of the Iberian viceroyalties of America (16th - 18th c.), where hybrid figures inspired from the grotesque are easily mistaken for indigenous motifs.

Speaking either of India or Latin America, many historians have tended to interpret this phenomenon as a form of resistance to the Iberian colonizer by opposing whatever appeared to be "naïf" or fantastic in colonial art to the supposed "rationality "of European canons. Paradoxically, this point of view probably derives from the well-known colonialist posture that intends to depict every colonized subject as irrational and unruly.

We will ask ourselves if this situation could have been the result of a long term iconographical strategy initiated in the 16th century by the Catholic Church, who might have consciously mingled elements of the "idolatrous" religions she was fighting with the European grotesque, where references to the unbounded universe of Pan abound. One of the main goals of this strategy would have been to achieve that the religions of the conquered peoples of Asia and America under the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns would become visually associated to wantonness, bestiality and deceptiveness in order to justify the desire of the Church to subdue and abolish them.