Haravicu

Location
Peru
Date
1860-1868
Materials
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
103 x 139.3 cm
Credit
Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Lima, Peru.
Photo by Daniel Giannoni
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Considered one of Peru’s first “modern” landscapes, Haravicu takes as its subject one of the final stops in a series of pascanas, or resting places, in the Peruvian mountains. “Haravicu” refers to the poets of the Incan Empire who transmitted their work through oral recitation. In Laso’s painting, the speaker on the left raises his hand while the group of figures waits attentively. In placing this transmission of oral history and culture in the Peruvian mountains, Laso suggested that the memory of the ancient past remains alive within the Indigenous people of Peru, who were in turn conflated with the eternal peaks of the Andes.