Museo Larco: The Collection

Rafael Larco Herrera was born into a wealthy plantation family. He studied agriculture at Cornell University, but returned to Peru to find his father had acquired a trove of apparently Incan ceramics. Then another trove. It was the Golden Age of Grave Robbing in South America. Anyhow, the artifacts interested Rafael greatly and, at length, he proposed the family create a museum to house them in Lima. The family agreed, appointed Rafael director (1926), and then things got interesting. Examining and classifying the artifacts--more troves were arriving--Rafael noticed they were not all cut from the same cloth. Subject matter, technique, material, shape, use, origin, all varied greatly. Rafael turned archaeologist/art historian at this point and took to the field. What he found convinced him that the Incas had been preceded by several, if not many, advanced cultures in Peru and its neighbors. Larco's classification scheme for these various cultures, I understand, is still in use. Museums are more often thought of as mere repositories of culture and knowledge. The Larco has it the other way around, too, a source of discovery.

Our founder

I won't attempt to describe all these things, which culture/place
they are from, etc. 

Paleo, obviously

Ceramics implements

Definitely Incan

Quipus, as close as they got to writing

Textile implements

Textiles

Painting attempting to show how Charles V
was the legitimate king of the Incas

Charming ways to kill people: #1, throw them off boats

#2, throw them off mountains

#3, slit their throats

Throat-slitting implements

Pre-Incan Conehead

Trepanation implements: never, ever tell the shaman you have
a headache (look it up)

Gold, lots of gold that didn't make it to Seville, Toledo, Madrid

Gold was pretty much for ornamentation of
the rich and famous; symbol of authority...
gold=sun=Inca king=son of sun...

So you think you're done; but then you notice you've covered
just half the building; the other half is open too and consists
of room after room of items not in the display collection...
thousands, hundred of thousands, all open to view

Plus, the Larco has a satellite facility, the
Pre-Columbian Museum, in Cusco

Museo Larco: Landscaping

The Museo Larco was the one good thing we found about Lima, at last so far. (We'll give Lima another chance at the end of our stay in South America). The collection is of historic significance. But the grounds and landscaping are wonderful, as are the restaurant and the museum of sexual artifacts (later posts).

Entrance to the block-size compound

Bouganvilleas everywhere

All colors and sizes

Entrance to the museum itself

Cacti, bromeliads, etc.

Grounds, looking toward the restaurant

And more bouganvillea

In the restaurant, 10-12 foot hanging ferns

Ditto

Ditto in better light

Largest staghorn fern ever

We don't close many bars, but we have closed a few museums,
especially good ones

Lima, 1

We were in Lima three days--it seemed like 30 or 300--saw some sights, including the awesome Museo Larco, and were very happy to leave. Perhaps I should explain: the temperatures were in the 90s, Lima is in a desert, our hotel did not have AC (and there were other problems), there are 10 million very poor people in Lima, and the pollution and poverty are comparable to the worst of India or Mexico. There are many good reasons to visit Peru. Lima is not one of them.

Plus it did not start well; in the Santiago airport is a bar called
The Last Pisco Sour and even Vicki agreed I should spend our
last pesos there; I have had perhaps a dozen or more pisco sours
on this trip, but the raw egg white used in the preparation
finally caught up with me; we passed through Peruvian customs
and immigration with Vicki exhorting me to look well...

Next day, me feeling fine, we went out to the national
archaeological museum, a must for seeing Costco and Mickie
Pickie; only it was closed for renovation; come back in 2016,
they said; undeterred, we ventured on to the Museo Larco,
one of the very best small museums ever...so good I'll do
several posts later

Another day we headed for the centro historico; however,
turning the wrong way at Pismo Beach, we passed by a military
installation, featuring this cool Soviet SU-22...our dear new
friends, the Russians

Art Nuvo

Art Deco; very few examples of either

Sic transit, Gloria; bank, now museum

Incredible ceiling of another bank; guard
wouldn't let me take further pix

Plaza de Armas and Catedral

Important state building where a band was playing and the
guard was changing; while Vicki went to investigate this, I
stayed inside, in the shade, looking at the Catedral

The principal claim to fame of this cathedral,
if you ask me, apart from having been rebuilt
from the rubble of earthquakes several times,
is that it contained and still contains the
remains of the Conquistador Francisco
Pizarro, the awfullest and cruelist of them all

Happier times

Contemporary accounts had it that Pizarro was
murdered by his brother and followers, stabbed
some 30+ times in the face (some sort of
statement?) and buried in the cathedral, although
no one was ever sure where; sifting through
the rubble of an 18th century earthquake, workers
found the remains of a body with 30+ stab
wounds to the head; voila! Pizarro; as others
have observed, the cruelty and bloodthirstiness
of the Aztecs and Inca were richly matched by 
those of the Conquistadors

I should have learned as a teenager in Miami that the larger Latin
American Catholic churches are not worth visiting

Helpful model #1,339

Pano of the Plaza de Armas; too bad your reader won't play
the pano

Former bishop's palace

Checking messages

Incas vs Conquistadors

Street scene: Englishmen and mad dogs

Next we did a tour of the monastery and church of San
Francisco. notable for having survived numerous earthquakes
since its founding in the early 16th; alas, they have a "no
fotos" policy

Except for the ossuary in the crypt

I did snag a few others--here the cloisters--out of my deep respect
for The Church

And here looking from the crypt up into the church proper;
the guide described the designs as Arabic...like no Arabic I
have seen...I prefer to think they are a bit closer to home

The library...some thousands of volumes under no preservation
whatsoever...except "no fotos" (off the web)

Also off the web, a famous painting of the Last Supper, in the
refectory, with a guinea pig on the central platter; guinea pigs
were and are a staple in Peru; seriously; Burger King features a
guinea pig bacon cheddar melt :-)