A stone, a tree, a negro. Rhetorics of transmutation in Alonso de Ovalle's historica relación del reyno de Chile

Abstract

The Historica relacion del Reyno de Chile (1646) has usually been studied in relation to the Arauco War and colonial Chilean society. In this article, we will analyze some aspects of this text that are ordinarily overshadowed: the descriptions of two wonders of nature and the conversion to Christianity of a black man sentenced to death. We will relate these stories to the fascination experienced in the seventeenthcentury by the transmutation of objects into their opposites (quevedo, Gracián). Likewise, we will focus on the representation of the sacred from the indeiniteness of forms (Palomino). We will understand these descriptions as exercises of the Jesuit’s accommodatio, and we will pay attention to the diferent ways in which these descriptions were meditated, imitated, combined, and transformed into new texts, images, metaphors, and comparisons available in the Bible, Jesuit missionary literature, emblem treatises, nature studies, and the art of the period.