References to Morganatic Marriage in some of the Pictorial Versions of The Marriage of Captain Martín de Loyola to Beatriz Ñusta

Abstract

A closer, and alternative, look at the set of colonial Peruvian paintings depicting the marriage of a Spanish captain and the Royal Governor of the Captaincy General of Chile to a princess, heiress to the deposed Inca throne, in 1572 reveals that while in the earliest known versions –created between 1675 and 1718– the groom firmly holds with his left hand the bride’s right hand, a later version, made around 1750, represents both spouses holding each other’s right hands. Morganatic marriages, or “marriages of the left hand,” were those celebrated between a privileged man and a woman of inferior status, and only rarely the other way around. In this study, certain iconographical aspects of four of the several pictorial versions known to once have existed, as well as the social, historical, and religious context in which they were created and exhibited, are analysed in detail, in order to suggest the hypothesis that the earliest pictorial interpretations of this celebrated alliance understood it intentionally as a morganatic union, with the goal of stressing the submission of the Andeans, especially of their elite –personified by the Inca princess– to the Christians, whereas a later representation interpreted it as a betrothal between equals, in order to convey that the indigenous elite had successfully come to perform a more prominent role in the colonial system.