Late eighteenth-century depictions of Peruvian primates in the Codex Martínez Compañón and the Quadro de la Historia Natural Civil y Geográfica del Reyno del Perú

Abstract

King Carlos III of Spain supported numerous scientific and intellectual enterprises in Spanish America during the eighteenth century. One was the compilation, between about 1782 and 1785, of a vast ‘paper museum’, the ‘Codex Martínez Compañón’ or ‘Codex Trujillo del Perú’, in the province of Trujillo, Peru. There, the Bishop of Trujillo, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón, directed the preparation of hundreds of coloured illustrations of the people, geography and natural history of the region. Included were 17 images of mammals classified as primates from Peruvian forests. In 1789, this compilation was shipped to Madrid where some of these illustrations were copied into an impressive oil painting by Louis Thiébaut under the direction of the bishop’s nephew, José Ignacio de Lecuanda. This painting, the Quadro de la Historia Natural Civil y Geográfica del Reyno del Perú (1799), not only included images of almost a dozen primates, but also accompanying descriptions. Forming part of an unusually large painting, these depictions of New World primates served as channels for ideas about exoticism and potential European initiatives in the forested regions of Spanish America before independence. This paper discusses the identification of the primates and some other mammals portrayed in both Martínez Compañón’s Codex and in the Quadro del Perú of Lecuanda and Thiébaut.