<i>El cielo del justo observador</i>. Constantino Malinovsky y el giro copernicano de la estética peruana

Constantino Malinovsky y Harlamoff, Peruvian engineer, archaeologist and aesthete, was an immigrant from White Russia who became a Peruvian citizen and made important contributions to the study, divulgation and interpretation of Pre-Columbian art in Peru. What emerges through the reading of his works is an honest, fair and sincere look at Peruvian pre-Columbian art —which we will call the Copernican turn in Peruvian aesthetics— free from all essentialism and artificialism typical of archaeologists and art scholars contemporary to Malinovsky. Our paper will proceed in three sections. 1) To define —contrary to Kant and other authors— what we will call the Copernican turn, tracing more geometrico, and to distinguish it from the transcendental or failed turn, tracing more ethico. 2) We will review the adverse circumstances in which Malinovsky achieves his naturalization as a Peruvian at the same time as he develops his “chromatic” theory regarding pre-Columbian Peruvian art according to visual fields not previously explored archaeologically. We will argue why Malinovsky’s proposal is more of a philosophical aesthetic more geometrico than the contemporary ones from anthropology, archaeology and history more ethico. 3) Finally, we will apply the new concept of Copernican turn to Malinovsky’s aesthetic proposal and provide conclusions regarding why their joint work is a Copernican turn in Peruvian aesthetics.