Emblemática e iconografía virreinal. Las apuestas de Diego León Pinelo y Francisco De Ávila (Lima, siglo XVII)

Emblematics in the Viceroyalty of Peru functioned as an intertextual system that established connections between models of emblems already consecrated and the shared use of symbols, Latin phrases and compositions that are related to —but also oppose and divert from— Western symbolic traditions. Hypomnema apologeticum pro Academia Limensi, by jurist Diego León Pinelo (1608-1671), and Tratado de los Evangelios, by the slayer of idolatries and Canon of the Cathedral of Lima, Francisco de Ávila (1573-1647), both published in Lima in 1648, had each front covers that are analyzed based on the visual set they incorporate, which is made up of allegorical images and emblems, and their contexts of production. The vice-regal visual rhetoric reveals that it was not only aimed at exalting monarchical and counter-reformist power and politics, but also at developing the identity of the artists in charge of the engravings. Paradoxically, both images can be considered as a failure on different levels, but also as a triumph within the symbolic struggle of every affirmation of identity whose verb-visual rhetoric remains fixed in memories that many people could decipher.