Last Day of Perusing Peru

A man and his camelid. Which, in Peru, usually means a llama or an alpaca.

As I drift deeper and deeper into my dotage, travel has become less and less about seeing sights. It's more about soaking in the atmosphere of a place and learning more about the place's history and its current state. Today was the day to soak in Lima on the last weekend before Christmas 2025.

Yesterday I headed north from my hotel. Today I head south. Where there are museums aplenty.

Such as this. El Museo de Arte Italiano. The Museum of Italian Art.

Lets look at the big murals on either side of the entrance.

This, however, was not among the museums I intend to visit. I don't want to sound like an art snob here, but one does not travel to Lima to see the major works from major Italian artists. And I have a limit of two museums per day. The Italian Art did not make the cut.

So let's keep on walking.

This is the Fuente de Neptuno, the Fountain of Neptune, in Parque Juana Alarco de Dammert. I do not know who Señora Alarco de Dammert. And I don't why she has a Neptune in her park.

She also has a former president of Peru in her parque, too.

Meet Don Manuel Candamo.

Her park is right on the other side of Avenida Paseo de la República from the Monumento a Miguel Grau.

I have finally learned that Señor Grau's monument is not accessible to pedestrians. It is on a traffic island between two extremely crowded of the divided Avenida Paseo de la República. Even if you were to survive crossing all the lanes of crowded traffic, you would have to navigate over the barriers blocking pedestrian access to Señor Grau's monument on Señor Grau's traffic island, which is called Plaza Miguel Grau even though you cannot access it.

And speaking of things I learned, if you remember, I have been looking unsuccessfully for ceviche in Lima. Well I found it:

I found it and I won't eat it. A ceviche cart. Given that ceviche is raw fish "cooked" in an acid bath of lime juice, I want my ceviche fish to have been stored at refrigerator temperatures. I don't trust a street cart to maintain proper fish cooling temperatures. You know how they say never to get sushi from a gas station? I would add: never order ceviche from a street cart. Churros, yes. Especially in Lima. Ceviche?  That would be a hard pass.

And once again we run into Christopher Columbus. 

Finally, after a grueling walk of around 550 kilometers, which is nearly the length of five football fields back to back to back to back to back, I arrived at my intended museum destination.

MALI. Not the country in Africa with Timbuktu in it. That would requiring walking much more than 550 km, including walking over open ocean for a significant part of the walk. The MALI is an acronym for Museum of Art of LIma.

From the second floor of the MALI, I could see the Pabellón Bizantino, the Byzantine Pavilion.

I could get no closer because it's behind massive barricades. A large section of the park is walled off, and an admission fee is being charged. I am guessing it is some large celebratory gathering related to this being the last weekend before Christmas. There's a lot of that going around in Lima. This is a town that takes its Christmas seriously, albeit with a massive amount of fun.

Let's tour the museum collection, shall we?

You walk through the collection of Peruvian art in chronological order. This means you start with pottery and, more specifically, the pottery of the pre-Incan cultures in the land that is modern-era Peru.

There are two things about this collection that absolutely defies how I ordinarily view art museums.

That is a hairless dog. The Peruvian hairless dog is a recognized breed of dog.  This, however, looks more like a Chihuahua. Or maybe one of those hideously ugly Chinese Crested hairless dogs which are the size of chihuahuas, but hideous. And the owners dress them up in pajamas because that's what you do when you have a hideously ugly hairless dog.

Anyway, when I go to an art museum and they display handicrafts from ancient cultures, or any less "sophisticated" cultures, I always think it is grossly condescending to equate a woven basket from some indigenous tribe with a painting from the Italian Renaissance or French impressionism. They are not equivalent. Here, the pre-Inca pottery is the star of the museum show. And deservedly so.

I mean, c'mon, just look at that cat. I have totally seen cats strike that pose in my lifetime. It's not shock they were doing that 1300 years ago or whatever.

The thing about the pre-Incan pottery on display here is that these are not handicrafts. These are not the equivalent of the "everyday china" that was unearthed at an archaeological site and declared to be fine art. This is art.

As are these.

There also are pre-Inca textiles on display.

And, of course, we have the obligatory wall of pottery.

Every museum with pre-Inca pottery always has at least one wall of pottery. The MALI is not exception.

Here is an interesting piece. The design is not abstract.

It's a series of interlocking snakes and fish. We know who is going to win that battle.

What this staged to look like one of those Darwinian Descent of Man representations?

We move out of the "pre-hispanic" era and into the "post-hispanic." This is an interesting work from the late 1700's

 

Procesión de Corpus Christi en el Cusco. Corpus Christi procession in Cusco, attributed to an anonymous Cusqueño/

This one I found to be very disturbing:

Trinidad trifacial. The three-faced trinity. I don't think I've seen any prior representations of the Holy Trinity of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost as three faces on one body. Bring back to the cat and dog pottery, please, I say.

We then enter the gold room:

The display tried to indicate that gold was not valued by the indigenous people of Peru, pre-Pizarro and, instead, they valued spondylus shells more. Bullship, I declare. Bullship. We now for certain that the Inca valued gold more than seashells. That's why there was so much gold in Cusco to ship back to Spain. And so much gold in Moche culture. And Mayan culture. Yes, they may have liked the seashells, too. Some indigenous people valued particular feathers. But everybody everywhere has always loved the uncorruptible allure of gold. This was not a Spanish or even a European obsession. It was a global obsession.

This is the Funerales de Santa Rosa. The Funeral of St. Rose.

It is by Peruvian impressionist artist Teófilo Castillo, He completed it in 1918 a few years before his death. Given the popularity of Peruvian Saint Rose de Lima, of course her funeral would have been worth memorializing in a work of art. The use of the impressionist style is a worthy choice.

We now move into the "modern art" section.

And it's not all crap-tasmic, as I was expecting. This is "Portable Alter," a take on the the medieval era alter pieces that one design on the exterior and a different one in the interior to be opened on special occasions. It's by Peruvian artist Joaquín López Antay, It was completed in the 1970s or early 1980s.

I'm not sure why this was in with the "modern" era.

And then we get to something I should hated and didn't: Psicoanálisis del Lanzón de Chavín. The psychoanalysis of the Lanzón de Chavín by the artist Fernando Gutiérrez "Huanchaco." I've stopped labelling the artists now as "Peruvian artists" because all of the artists in this museum are Peruvian artists.

This is labelled an "installation." Normally, calling something an art installation is telling me I am going to hate it. But I don't hate this. It's inventive, clever and respectful of history while having a bit of fun with that history.

This is a recreation of an ancient artifact, the Lanzón de Chavín, a stela from the Chavín culture, which flourished from 900 to 200 B.C. It is an upright stela, but here it appears to be draped over a psychoanalyst's couch, with a loudspeaker blaring. Apparently, the Lanzón de Chavín is exhausted and "burned out" from all the years of being an important national symbol. It works. So I learned something today. Not all modern art sucks.

It's from this decade, which means we've reached the chronological end of the MALI tour. Time to find the next museum. And time to find what is going on in the space next door.

This is the Pabellon Morisco. Don't know much else about it other than it looks great and is behind chainlink fencing.

This is the Monumento a Ricardo Palma.

Ricardo Palma is an important figure in Peruvian literature. Which is why his monument is near an important national library. And that important national library is next to (or contained within) the next museum I intended to visit: El Museo Metropolitano de Lima, the Metropolitan Museum of Lima.

It seemed to be closed.

Why do I say that? In front of the entrance was a small house for children to talk to Santa Claus. And I wasn't about to elbow my way past Santa with a "get out of my way, Old Man, I got museum-ing to do.:

So, because of all of the various activities in Parque de la Exposición, I only could walk the perimeter.

It is, as we know, Christmas in Lima. The city is put on its Christmas finery. The police motorcycles are done up as reindeer (more or less). They are guarded by the Grinch because why not? Since it's still before Christmas Day, the Grinch's heart still would be two sizes too small. Which makes him perfect for police work. I kid. I kid.

There was a tourist train parked in the parking lot.

And the nativity scene had a very wide variety of animals in attendance.

And with that, my Lima and Peru tourism has come to an end. I never made it the Circuito Mágico del Agua, the incredible light and water show another half of a mile to the south because, with the Christmas crowds, it promised to be an absolute zoo there. Next time. And there will be a next time, if life continues down this path.

The May Break Starts in Lima, Peru. With Museums.

Good doggie: the best boy at the Museo Larco in Lima.
The museum was generally light on dogs. But cats were plentiful. I question the priorities of a whole culture.

I have said this before and I will say it again;  Emergency vacations are much better than vacation emergencies.

Even though the rough contours of this vacation were planned out in the final days of 2023, whether I would take this vacation was in doubt up until the night before I left.  Work load and dog health were both concerns.  But things fell into place and off I went.  Destination: Lima, Peru.

For the next few days, I am staying at the Aloft Hotel in the upscale Miraflores neighborhood of Lima.  The hotel is very nice.  It's part of the Marriott family of hotels.  (You know you're staying in a Marriott branded hotel when you see the Book of Mormon next to the Bible on the hotel room desk.)  I'm on the top floor.  My room looks toward the Pacific Ocean, which is nearby.  

But you can't see it.  Or, to be more precise, I can't see it from my hotel.

This is an "unfinished business" trip.  I am visiting two cities in South America where I have been before.  I only had three nights, which meant two days, before in each.  I allocated too little time to both on prior trips, having heard that each was boring and dangerous.  Both were neither.  Both warranted a second look.  This trip is the second look.

The second look started with the Museo Larco, an archaeological museum of the pre-hispanic cultures of Peru that included, but by no means is limited to, the Inca.  I will say this once to avoid repetition:  the pre-hispanic cultures of Peru go back many thousands of years.  The Inca were the last 120 years or so of that several thousand year period.  There is much much much more to pre-Columbian Peru than the people who showed up right before the Spanish conquistadors -- and their advance party -- deadly germs -- arrived.

Let's go in.  Shall we?

The museum was started from the collection of Rafael Larco Hoyle, the first pre-eminent Peruvian archaeologist.  Before Mr. Larco arrived on the scene and start digging around Peru, people in the western world thought pre-Columbian Peru was all about the Inca and only the Inca.

Larco changed that.  Now his collection is a museum.

It's most pottery, including a very large collection of pornographic pottery, but there is more.  There are stone carvings for example.

Before the museum tour is over, we will see mummies and metal-working.

But, for now, it will be all about the pottery.

This Janus-looking head illustrates the duality of nature.

Which was a common theme of all the pre-hispanic cultures of Peru (and, generally, the world over):  Sun / moon.  Day / night.  Wet / dry.  Gold (representing sun and the day) / silver (representing the moon and the night).  Male / female (a duality well represented in the pornographic pottery collection).

Well, not everything was illustrative of the duality of nature, but much was.

In addition to the duality, there was the three levels of existence, something which exists in Judeo-Christian culture, too.  The gods in heaven above.  Man at the level of surface earth.  The realm of the dead in the underworld.  

And each level was represented by an animal.  Bird for the gods in heaven.  Serpents who can travel into the underworld.  Felines who ... rule ... the earth.

All three of those are represented on this piece o' pottery.

Cat.  Draped by serpents on either side,  There is bird in their somewhere, too, but I'm not seeing it now.

Deer were important, too, mainly as sacrifice animals.  But the importance of deer is completely eclipsed by the worshipped cats.

This looks like a salamander -- maybe the GEICO gekko -- on the side of a cup, but I'm sure the symbolism is not that.

And, again, not juts pottery:

But, yes, pottery aplenty:

And the Inca are in the house, represented by quipus.

This is the Inca system of recordkeeping by knotting strings to serve as numerals in a base-10 counting system.

(The Inca did not have a zero in their counting system.  The Maya, like the people of India, did.  Just sayin'.)

Then things got dark.

Not thematically.  It's just that this part of the museum had very low lighting.

Say, is this turquoise?

When turquoise shows up in meso-American art and jewelry, usually from the Maya, it meant that the trade routes extended into the American Southwest.  The four corners region of the USA is the only source of turquoise, at least in any quantity, in the New World, as far as I know.  So I believe the presence of turquoise here indicates that trade routes from Peru extended into modern-day Arizona and New Mexico.  Which I think is interesting.

And here's a mummy:

Mummification was popular in the dry desert regions of Coastal Peru.

And here are a collection of heads:

This is how the warriors wore the nose-plate jewelry that you occasionally see in these museums of pre-hispanic America artifacts.  Kind of reminds me of the look of COVID masks.  Only even more uncomfortable.

Finally, there were several rooms of uncategorized, undescribed pottery just sitting on shelfs.

It is very loosely organized by theme, but only very loosely organized:

This shelf reminded me of the figures in the New Order "True Faith" video.

So much of this.  Here's a self-portrait in a wall of pottery:

At this point, I thought I had completed my walk through the museum.  And I had a sad thought.  Where was all the pornographic pottery that I heard was in the museum collection?  Of course, my interest was purely scientific.  Not prurient.  Banish that thought.

I didn't think I could ask where the pr0n collection was.  But then I saw this sign with an arrow that was just an arrow:

This way to the adult part of the collection.

From this point, things may not be safe-for-work computer viewing.

Let's start with the "Tree of Life".  That's an innocent start to thing isn't it.  Yes, there is fertility imagery inherent in the "Tree of Life," but it's not erotic.

And those guys are relatively innocent looking, no?

But then we hit:

And things go completely off the rails at this point:

A giant stone phallus with a circumference that no phallus should ever have.  At this point, there is nothing left to the imagination:

If you need to stop at this point, I will understand.  If you choose to continue, you were warned:

Of that.  I actually have a ceramic flower-watering kettle that I bought on my last trip to Peru -- at the airport souvenir shop no less -- that looks just like that one.  I guess this was a common motif in Moche culture in Northern Peru, circa 600 AD.

And speaking of that motif, once again we lose all sense of proportionality:

And let's not leave the ladies out of this exaggeration of the naughty parts:

I hope these weren't the everyday stoneware.

Congress is now in session.

That was not a reference to what the politicians in D.C. do to constituents.  I was merely using an alternative meaning of the term "congress."

You might want to reconsider your decision not to bail as we move into the next section of the museum.  I will call this:  The Erotic Dead.

Sexual imagery with death imagery.

As the Beach Boys would say:  Fun fun fun 'til her Daddy took the T-Bird away.

And on that, we end the tour of our first museum of Lima, the Museo Larco.

We can visit the gift shop on the way out.

It sells a lot of jewelry, but, alas alack, no pornographic pottery.  I guess we will have to go to the airport gift shop if we need to fill out our collection with additional pieces.

Across the street from the museum entrance, in a small park, is a statue of the man from whose loins this museum sprung, metaphorically of course:  Rafael Larco Hoyle.