Restoring Pride in Arequipa.

• Author: Werner, Louis

From stonecutters to politicians, residents of this colonial city in Peru are joining together to rescue a rich artistic legacy

THE SCENE ON THE MORNING AFTER IS EERIE. THE LOCKED DOOR SWINGS OPEN WITHOUT A KEY. INSIDE, BOOKS HAVE FALLEN ONTO THE FLOOR. ONE SHELF HAS COLLAPSED, SENDING LEATHER-BOUND VOLUMES SLIDING OFF THE END. PLASTER DUST FALLEN FROM THE CEILING OF THE INFIERNILLO, THE SECRET READING ROOM FOR VATICAN-CENSORED BOOKS, LOOKS LIKE FLOUR STREWN ABOUT A BAKERY. BUT THE RAREST BOOKS IN THE COLLECTION--TWO FIFTEENTH-CENTURY INCUNABULA, A FIRST EDITION OF THE SECOND PART OF Don Quixote, AND A 1602 LAW TEXT PRINTED IN LIMA--ARE SAFE.

ANOTHER EARTHQUAKE HAS STRUCK AREQUIPA, AND THE CUSTODIAN OF LA RECOLETA, A MID-SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY FRANCISCAN MONASTERY, IS MAKING HER FIRST SWEEP THROUGH THE LIBRARY. THE ITALIAN CONSERVATION TEAM CHARGED WITH CATALOGING AND SETTING ASIDE THE MOST VALUABLE OF THE TWENTY THOUSAND OLD BOOKS IN THE COLLECTION HAS JUST LEFT THE CITY.

"No major damage," says the custodian, "just a little tremor. One of many that Arequipa survives every year." And not, she hopes, a harbinger of the next big one, like those of the years 1600, 1868, and 1960 that have famously wrecked everything.

By all other counts, Arequipa is the epitome of peace itself. A low-rise, stone-built city founded in 1540 halfway between the arid coast and the windswept altiplano in southern Peru, Arequipa managed to escape the worst of the nation's last two troubled decades of terrorism and refugee flows. The temperate climate, the reserved people, and the easy tempo of life in an oasis-like valley gives it the feel of a place outside the passage of time.

That is wrong, however, for Arequipa does hear the clock and does show her age. Tremors have cracked the walls of churches. Poorly mixed plaster has made a mess of colonial polychrome murals. Smoke from burning candles has blackened religious paintings and statuary. Dust has dulled the gold leaf of retablos and altar fronts. And yes, rough treatment--whether at the hands of God or the hands of man--has damaged old books and manuscripts.

But, unlike many other colonial cities, Arequipa is doing something about it. A new mayor has announced a long list of historical preservation works. A European-educated art objects conservator is founding a university institute to train restoration artists. Young priests have taken over old parishes containing neglected treasures with a mission to protect them. And in the nearby Colca Valley, where more than a dozen seventeenth-century churches stand in precarious condition, a program is under way to restore and protect them for the long term by training and employing village craftsmen.

The farming hamlet of Sachaca, built on a steep hill surrounded by potato and onion fields, seems an out-of-the-way place to begin a tour of Arequipa's religious art. The village church, Santa Gertrudis, was built in 1807, rather late for Arequipa's golden age of religious architecture, and displays a style edging away from the densely carved baroque toward the simpler lines of the republican age. Inside, a lone eighteenth-century painting in bad repair, an image of Saint Thomas from what was once a matched series of the twelve apostles, hangs from the sacristy wall.

What strikes the eye is not how little is here but how much is missing. Just down the hill from the church is the country house of the Goyeneches, a family of religious benefactors and art patrons who presided over Arequipa in the last century much like the Rockefellers presided over New York. They endowed Santa Gertrudis with an Italian baptismal font and presumably much else. All but the font and the painting is now lost--stolen, traded away, or damaged beyond repair.

Father Pedro Bustamante, an amiable young priest who fondly recalls his four years of liturgical studies in Rome, has newly arrived in Santa Gertrudis to set things right. "We have a missionary cross outside our church with everything intact," he says, "and I intend to do the same for what we have left inside."

Bustamante is referring to the fifteen-foot cross adorned with the elements of the Passion of...