Focus on this artwork and analyze the Themes.
Church, like Cole, continued to evoke Christian themes in his landscapes. Two small staffage figures visit a stone cross near the palm trees at bottom left, and a red-roofed Spanish mission appears at the end of the path near them. Most significant is the intersection of the sun's golden vertical rays with the plateau's line, forming a large but subtle cross.Church's art encouraged contemporary viewers to ponder on the spiritual and cosmic questions evoked therein. Church scholar David C. Huntington wrote in 1980 of The Andes of Ecuador:Like Adam at the dawn of human consciousness the beholder awakens to the beauty of the earth which has been so long preparing for him. Yet this first awakening is, in effect, the type for a reawakening into a higher consciousness, which is the consciousness of a soul reborn in Christ, as with fresh eyes he "sees all things new". The old dispensation is manifest in the guise of the church and wayside shrine, each marked by a cross. The new dispensation is manifest in the guise of a heavenly cross whose all-pervasive radiant light blesses and hallows all nature. As the crosses made by human hands adumbrate the cross made by divine hands, so has the sequel of ever higher orders of life through aeons adumbrated the mind-spirit which now, for the first time, contemplates Creation with "Intelligence". As he "soars" suspended between earth and heaven in the presence of Andes of Ecuador and looks out upon the world's divinity, the spectator becomes a "demi-god".
staffage Andes