Francisco Tito Yupanqui and the image of Copacabana
The most venerated image in the colonial Andes was carved by an Aymara-speaking Indian of Copacabana who had no training and no licence to practise the art. An Augustinian printed at Lima in 1621 what it cost him: the bishop's circle laughed at the piece, a man told him to leave that art to the Spaniards, and the rival moiety of his own pueblo demanded a Spaniard's work instead.
Why this wins its question: The Virgin of Copacabana is a famous object and its maker is usually a footnote: English-language coverage names him, if at all, as a devout Indian who carved a statue, and the story is told either as pious legend or as an example of colonial imposition. Neither version uses the pages. This object prints, from a Lima 1621 imprint opened here, the specific mechanics that make the case worth making at all: that painting and carving images required a licence he did not have and went to the bishop to ask for; that the bishop and his officials laughed at the work and someone told him to leave the art to the Spaniards; that the friar answering that insult did so in print with Deuteronomy and Romans; that a corregidor kicked the image taking it for a corpse; and that the demand for a Spaniard's work instead came loudest from the rival moiety of his own pueblo, while the man who blocked the sale and paid forty pesos toward the cost was a Spanish corregidor. It also prints, rather than editing out, the same author's contemptuous generalisations about the people of Copacabana and his frame that God works through insufficient ministers - which is the only way the defence in the same chapters can be believed.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The source read for this object is the Historia del celebre Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, y sus Milagros, e Invencion de la Cruz de Carabuco, by the Augustinian preacher Fray Alonso Ramos Gavilan, printed at Lima by Geronymo de Contreras in 1621 and dedicated to Don Alonso Bravo de Sarabia y Sotomayor, oydor of Mexico. Place, printer and year are read off the printed title leaf of the copy digitised, not taken from a catalogue record. It is a devotional history by a friar attached to the sanctuary it describes; what follows reports what the book states about human events, and this corpus binds no claim to the miracles it also reports.
The undertaking began as a piece of indigenous corporate politics, not as a Spanish commission. The heads of the Anansaya moiety of Copacabana resolved to found a confraternity in honour of Our Lady under the advocation of the Candelaria, whose feast falls on 2 February. The Urinsaya moiety objected that the matter touched the whole pueblo, that they had a confraternity of San Sebastian in view, and that a place whose people were as poor as they were ill agreed could not carry so many confraternities; the objection stopped the work for a time.
The sculptor and the promoters were kin and both were Andean lords or their relatives. Don Alonso Viracocha Inga, governor of the Anansayas of Copacabana, travelling to Potosi, found there Don Francisco Tito Yupangue, described as his kinsman, who had already begun a bulto en talla entera for an image of the Candelaria. The book says he pursued the art from a natural inclination to it and from a vow to give his pueblo an image of the Virgin made by his own hand, "aunque en la demanda gastasse, y padeciesse mucho".
He worked from study rather than from a pattern given him. Not knowing what a Candelaria looked like, he went about the churches of Potosi registering the chapels and altars, learning the advocation of each image of Our Lady, until he found one he was told was of the Candelaria, and fixed it in his mind so as to work afterwards "conforme al prototipo, y estampa, que tenia". The book gives the date on which he began the carving as 4 June 1582.
The book records, without embarrassment, that painting and carving images was a licensed activity from which an Indian was in practice excluded. Tito Yupangue travelled with the confraternity petition to the bishop at La Plata carrying an image of his own hand on canvas, hoping to obtain with it a second licence he wanted for himself, "para poder libremente pintar, y entallar Imagines". It went the other way: the bishop and everyone else through whose hands the work passed laughed a great deal at the work of "aquel tan nueuo como simple entallador", and "no falto quien vltrajandole le aconsejò, que dexasse aquel arte para los Españoles" - there was no lack of someone who, insulting him, advised him to leave that art to the Spaniards.
The friar's answer to that episode is an argument from scripture against the exclusion, printed in 1621 in a book with a licence. He writes that the sculptor asked God to make easy for him what the Spaniards held impossible "por ser Indio rudo", since before the divine Majesty there was no acceptance of persons, and he cites Deuteronomy 10, "Personam non accipit", and the Apostle to the Romans, that there is no distinction of Jew from Greek because one and the same Lord is of all. He then reads the outcome as God choosing "pintor tan abatido" over the most singular craftsmen. The defence is theological rather than legal: nothing in the passage says the licence was afterwards granted, and this object does not claim that it was.
The humiliations continued on the road, and the book prints them. Leaving La Plata for Potosi and then carrying the nearly finished image toward Copacabana, he stopped at Chuquiabo twenty-four leagues short of his pueblo because the image was not gilded and lacked its follajes and esgrafiado and "no estaua para ver". At Hayohayo the image was set down in the zaguan of the cabildo houses, where a corregidor of Arecaxa was lodged; taking the bulto on its litter for a corpse, he gave it a kick and scolded the Indians for putting it there.
The sharpest rejection came from other Andeans, and the book does not hide it. When the matter was put to the pueblo the Urinsayas came in on the confraternity but not on the image, insisting with tight voices that it must not be the work of Don Francisco Tito Yupangue "sino de Español y esse muy buen oficial, ò se embiasse a España por vna" - but of a Spaniard, and a very good craftsman at that, or else they should send to Spain for one. Don Alonso Viracocha walked out and wrote to the sculptor advising him to sell the piece and take the price, because the Urinsayas would not look at anything of his.
A Spanish magistrate is what stopped the sale. Buyers appeared and the image was all but contracted to the church of Guaqui, with Calamarca and Hachacachi disputing it. Don Geronymo Marañon, corregidor of Omasuyo and of the pueblo of Copacabana, then at Chuquiabo, ordered that none of the agreements go forward since the image had been made for Copacabana, gave forty pesos of alms towards its cost so that the sculptor would not sell outside his pueblo, and undertook to the owner that he would have it received there. Don Diego Churatopa, head and governor of the Urinsayas - the moiety that had refused it - was also at Chuquiabo, and on seeing the image and his corregidor's determination offered to carry it to Copacabana himself in person.
Even after the image was installed the criticism did not stop, and the book's own frame for the sculptor is condescending. The priest Montoro called him "con alguna aspereza" and ordered him to mend a fault - the Child stood so high on the Mother's breast that a crown placed on it covered much of the Virgin's face - and the sculptor, finding no way to repair it, resolved to unglue the Child. Ramos Gavilan explains the whole history as God doing great things "por mano de insuficientes ministros" and says that had the sculptor been sufficient the image would not have needed miracles, since it "quedò imperfeta". That judgement is the period's, not this corpus's, and it is recorded here because the same pages carry it alongside the defence in c6.
The book's opinion of the people of Copacabana is unflattering in the same chapters and belongs on the record next to the achievement. On the page that narrates the confraternity quarrel the author writes that quarrelling over trifles "no es nueua entre estos Naturales", that they are so unagreeing that they keep no respect to flesh and blood, and that those of Copacabana especially, being of divers naciones, each pull their own way, so that popular fury is kindled among them for very little interest. A later page calls the pueblo a "cabeça de Idolatria" in which gentility still endured before the image was there. These are a friar's judgements offered without evidence; they are printed here because omitting them would make the rest less credible, not more.
What this object does not establish should be said plainly. It rests on one source, a devotional history written some forty years after the events by a friar of the order that held the sanctuary, whose account of the sculptor's vow and prayers is what he says the man himself confessed and what his brothers and relatives then living affirmed and certified. No notarial contract, no bishop's licence, no confraternity book and no accounts were consulted, because none is reachable from this container. The object makes no claim about the year the image reached Copacabana, about the sculptor's later career or death, about any licence to paint and carve being granted, and no claim whatever about the miracles the book reports. Libro I, libro III and the Carabuco material were not opened.