San Agustin Church

This guide to San Agustin Church in Lima follows Baltazar Gavilan, a sculptor who was already fleeing prosecution when he took up the chisel: after attacking a woman named Mariquita Martinez in the early 1700s, he escaped the law by joining the Augustinian order behind these very doors. You'll hear how he became one of colonial Lima's most gifted and most tormented sculptors, and how his masterpiece, a nearly two-meter wooden skeleton archer kept locked behind the sacristy, grew so unsettling the friars paraded it through Lima's streets only once a year, on Holy Thursday night. Look closely at the drawn bow before you step past it.