La Virgen del Cerro

The painting of the Virgen del Cerro, the Virgin in the Silver Mountain, from Potosí in Bolivia documents how local artists hid motifs from the Tradition of the Andes in images with Christian iconography during the colonial period. With this resistant practice, they saved parts of their own culture and at the same time created a hybrid image theology. Their most important elements are deciphered in the work with the help of approaches from postcolonial studies, image philosophy and ethnology. It becomes clear that the combination of European-Catholic elements of piety with concepts from the Andean cosmovision, such as the holy mountains or Mother Earth, still shapes Bolivian popular religiosity today. In conclusion, the author points out that this kind of Andeto theology is astonishingly topical in the face of current challenges such as the ecological crisis.