Alice Creischer, Max Jorge Hinderer, and Andreas Siekmann.

POTOSI WAS A SIXTEENTH-CENTURY BOOMTOWN. Four hundred fifty years ago, it was one of the most important sites in the world for the mining of precious metals. To grasp just how important it was, it is crucial to understand that the silver extracted in South America was one of the decisive motors behind the development of modern capitalism. Quite simply, this metal capitalized Europe. It was mined via mita, or forced labor, and then, under Spanish monopoly, it flowed across the Atlantic, contributing to the creation of stock exchanges, to the rise of standing armies, to industrialization and labor migration. And the production of images in many ways paralleled the production of silver currency. A multigenerational army of indigenous painters (not only in Potosi, although we are exhibiting only Potosi paintings, but also in other colonial centers Cuzco and Lima) created mass-produced pictures in workshops. The images--like the silver coins minted in the sixteenth century in Potosi's Casa de la Moneda--then circulated around the globe under the control of the Hapsburgs, who ruled the Spanish Empire. This industrialized regime of reproduction should in turn be understood in the context of the Counter-Reformation: It both expressed and sustained a pictorial turn that was itself a strike against Protestant iconoclasm.

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SO THESE ARE THE SPECIFIC HISTORICAL circumstances we are exploring in this endeavor, but like all our [Creischer …