In the most recent Colonial Latin American Review (15:2), Jeanette Favrot Peterson reviews Gabriela Siracusano’s recent book El Poder de los colores. De lo material a lo simbólico en las prácticas culturales andinas, Siglos XVI-XVIII: “[This] is a groundbreaking book that bridges the divide between science and art, conservation and aesthetics, or between praxis and disegno … This study moves beyond the parameters of attribution and style generally associated with paint and canvas analysis to demonstrate that the kinds of pigments incorporated into colonial representations had a powerful resonance as ‘protagonists’ in the socio-economic, political and religious spheres of Andean culture … The Andean palette often displays a chromatic subtlety and unorthodoxy at odds with materials in European painting manuals … Pigments, resins, oils, and other substances in the ‘kitchen’ of painting had qualities associated with the human body … [and] colors were associated with the healing of physical and spiritual pain.” A given color could mean different things in the Christian and Incan traditions, leading to “ambivalence in the reception of sacred images [that] provoked consistent anxiety in the colonial discourse of evangelization.” “In the cauldron of encounter and extirpation, colors acted in and on the world with a reflexivity that the author rigorously explores.”