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Ollaytaytambo and The Jesus Triplets
Jun. 7th, 2007 07:36 amOur last day of Cusco we signed up for a group tour of the Sacred Valley. Load you on the bus, drive you to scenic outlooks, everybody gets out to ooh and ah and take pictures, then back on the bus. Not exactly a deep dive into the culture experience of a place, but you do cover a lot of ground you otherwise wouldn’t be able to get to all in one day. They take us to Ollaytaytambo, the second-most impressive Inca ruin in Peru, it’s huge, terraced three hundred feet all the way up a mountainside, remains of a big temple at the summit, and you can look across to temple structures and stuff on the surrounding mountains too. If it were in the same unspoiled-by-man condition as Machu Picchu, it would totally give Machu Picchu a run for its money. But three hundred years of the locals taking the stones and building blocks for their own houses have reduced the site to foundations and base walls that give the impression of past grandeur, but you have to use your imagination. Still, it’s real impressive, and worth the climb.
They also take us to this church thingy high up some other mountain, it’s pretty cool, all the paintings and carvings and stuff. There was this art style called The Cusco School, artists growing up and painting in the colonial era developed a lush and moody style of their own, reminds me a bit of Dutch masters, with the deep shadowy play of light and dark. And it’s cute when they put indigenous foodstuffs like hot peppers and guinea pig on the Last Supper table. And there is one really cool thing I’d never seen anywhere else before, there was this representation of The Virgin, surrounded, as she often is, but the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. But where in most paintings you know how The Big Guy is an old dude with a huge beard, Christ is the classic thirtysomething long haired hippie, and the Holy Ghost is a dove or something else non-anthropomorphic, right? Well in this painting in the church the Trinity is represented as three identical copies of the thirtysomething hippie Jesus, and it’s so weird. The Jesus Triplets were originally seen as blasphemy, and it is a bit creepy the first time you see it, but eventually the Catholic establishment accepted it as a valid expression of local flava. Like the guinea pig.
They also take us to this church thingy high up some other mountain, it’s pretty cool, all the paintings and carvings and stuff. There was this art style called The Cusco School, artists growing up and painting in the colonial era developed a lush and moody style of their own, reminds me a bit of Dutch masters, with the deep shadowy play of light and dark. And it’s cute when they put indigenous foodstuffs like hot peppers and guinea pig on the Last Supper table. And there is one really cool thing I’d never seen anywhere else before, there was this representation of The Virgin, surrounded, as she often is, but the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. But where in most paintings you know how The Big Guy is an old dude with a huge beard, Christ is the classic thirtysomething long haired hippie, and the Holy Ghost is a dove or something else non-anthropomorphic, right? Well in this painting in the church the Trinity is represented as three identical copies of the thirtysomething hippie Jesus, and it’s so weird. The Jesus Triplets were originally seen as blasphemy, and it is a bit creepy the first time you see it, but eventually the Catholic establishment accepted it as a valid expression of local flava. Like the guinea pig.
