Maya Stanfield-Mazzi's Object and Apparition stands as a wonderfully useful resource for university courses and scholars in religious studies and Latin American history as well as art history. Stanfield-Mazzi makes three original arguments in this book that transcend the Andean region. First, as indicated by the order of her title, she stresses that material objects prefigured Christian belief in this zone of conversion: physical, three-dimensional art came first, with metaphysical visions and ideas next. Second, she points out the multiple hands involved in making these religious objects. Both Spaniards and Andeans contributed to the process, and it is her goal to highlight their congruence in this project rather than their differences. Third, Stanfield-Mazzi thoroughly details the movement and the materiality of Andean Christian statues and two-dimensional paintings. Andean religion is generally characterised as being rooted to sacred places (Lake Titicaca) and local sites (huacas). However, Stanfield-Mazzi highlights these other critical facets instead, bringing us figurines that arrive in chests from afar (pp. 29–31), and stone, cedar and clay with the power to manifest into new holy shapes.

Beyond these important interventions, Object and Apparition is a boon to professors and specialists for its conciseness, comprehensiveness, and generous inclusion of visuals. Stanfield-Mazzi's single volume covers in seven trim chapters topics which are normally relegated to separate studies. In her first chapter, she addresses both the destruction of pre-Columbian Andean religion and its reconstruction under Christian auspices. In her second and third chapters, she considers two new prominent local advocations of the Virgin Mary in the countryside around Lake Titicaca; in her fourth and fifth chapters, she moves from the rural to the urban centre of Cuzco, and from Mary to a sculpture of Christ crucified. She finishes this sweeping survey with two chapters that cover the wider (and portable) diffusions of local imagery, the experience of miracles, and devotion in domestic settings. The whole is visually bolstered by no less than 50 black-and-white illustrations, nine well-chosen colour plates, and three detailed maps. Notably, these illustrations include both the rare, such as three photographs of stolen, no longer extant, seventeenth-century miracle paintings of the Virgin of Pomata (Figures 3.7, 6.1, 6.5), and the canon, such as seven line drawings from the native Andean Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala's 1615 Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (Figures 1.2–1.6, 3.2, 5.5). With these inclusions, Stanfield-Mazzi does more than prove ‘how a new religion was forged through images in the early modern Andes’ (p. 1). She models how to take colonial religious images seriously as historical sources, giving one persuasive ‘alternative reading’ (p. 28) after another of the artworks that at first seem propagandistic, conventional or distant, but are then revealed to show native agency, imagination, vibrance and power.

Stanfield-Mazzi organises her analysis in three chronological phases of evangelisation. The first, immediately following the conquest, was a period of ‘rough’ translation’ (p. 2) in which the new religion of Christianity was ‘envisioned’ or made manifest through small paintings and textiles. She discusses this period in chapters 1, 2 and 4, her contextualising introductions. The period that interests Stanfield-Mazzi most, however, is the second ‘most vital’ wave of evangelising in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when three-dimensional statues of Mary and Christ ‘helped initiate more convincing and lasting forms of Christianity’ (p. 3). This moment is covered in her richest chapters, 3 and 5, which focus respectively on the statues of the two Virgins of the Altiplano, Pomata and Copacabana, and on the statue of the Lord of the Earthquakes in Cuzco. Finally, Stanfield-Mazzi considers a third period of two-dimensional paintings of statues (chapters 6 and 7), which mostly serve to illustrate the many ways in which the three-dimensional statues took root in local Andean religious practice.

Stanfield-Mazzi's work is about ‘bicultural resonance’ (p. 113) between Spanish and Andean nascent Christians. Although Spaniards acted ‘as if Andeans were unaware of the concept of representation’ (p. 11) and condemned Andean images as idols, Stanfield-Mazzi digs deep for early Andean images that represented the divine in terms quite similar to sixteenth-century European Christians. She describes the statue of Punchao, or ‘day’, in the Coricancha temple complex in Cuzco (p. 13): a young boy made of gold, three-dimensional and resplendent with light, like later Christian sculptures. Likewise, the Virgins of Pomata and Copacabana resembled the earlier Inca moon deity, Mama Quilla, visually represented as a statue on the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca (p. 38). Dominicans appear in her account not just for their 1572 forcible removal from Pomata for abusing the native population, but because they set the scene for ‘a Christian resurgence on local terms’ (p. 58). The Virgin of Copacabana and the native Andean sculptor Tito Yupanqui appear in broad company, not as unique, but as part of a wider movement of Andean and Spanish artistic collaboration that also produced the Virgin of the Rosary sculpture venerated in Pomata (pp. 72–7). The origin myth of the Christ of Earthquakes statue in Cuzco is also a fruitful point of both overlap and dissonance. In the seventeenth century, this ‘real processional workhorse’ (p. 111) of a statue was believed to be a gift of the Spanish King Charles V, but restorers in the twentieth century have since determined that the statue was of local construction. Stanfield-Mazzi brilliantly reconciles these opposing ‘Myths of Origins’ (pp. 102–8) by first parsing both origin narratives for historical fact, and then by reading them as reflecting overlapping ‘patterns of thinking’ (p. 104) of seventeenth-century Spaniards and Andeans. She argues against the notion that the triangular Virgins prominent in two-dimensional Andean Christian images were a ‘uniquely Andean invention’ (p. 140) rooted in pre-Christian visualisations of mountains and the Pachamama, by setting these images alongside Marian prints from the European Wilhelm von Gumppenberg's 1659 Atlas Marianus. Indeed, Stanfield-Mazzi is so adept at demonstrating the ‘collective envisioning of the Christian divine’ (p. 97) for the Andes that one hopes her model might be applicable for understanding other contested religious frontiers.