Cuzco School of Painting

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Cuzco School of Painting

Cuzco School of Painting, the most distinctive major school of painting in Spain's American colonies, which evolved during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the old Inca capital of Cuzco. Indian and Mestizo artists transformed formal and iconographical types from European art to create a uniquely American style of religious painting, characterized by brilliant color, flattened space, and a strongly decorative aesthetic. Favorite subjects include anecdotal biblical narratives, hieratic figures of the Virgin and saints, and gaily dressed archangels, as well as brightly colored tropical birds and idealized imaginary landscapes without reference to local geography.

The origins of the school can be found in the many Flemish engravings and European paintings that were taken to Peru from Spain, as well as in works by European artists such as the Italian mannerist painter and Jesuit Bernardo Bitti, who was active in Peru and Bolivia between 1575 and 1610. The key figure in establishing the new style was the Indian painter Diego Quispe Tito (1611–after 1681), from a village outside Cuzco, whose uniquely American sensibility exerted a powerful effect on cuzqueño painting for over a century.

The popular style of painting that evolved in the eighteenth century from the work of Quispe and his immediate followers is frequently labeled "mestizo," a racial term that suggests a mixture of foreign and indigenous elements. From busy workshops in the prosperous city, painters such as Marco Zapata (active 1748–1764) produced sophisticated baroque compositions for major patrons and religious institutions while other, mostly anonymous painters worked in a more simplified, decorative style to service a vast market that stretched from Ecuador to Chile.

See alsoArt: The Colonial Era .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The principal study of viceregal painting in Cuzco is José De Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, Historia de la pintura cuzqueña, 2d ed., 2 vols. (1982), which incorporates many earlier studies by this prolific Bolivian couple. Gisbert focuses on the distinct iconography of Andean painting in Iconografía y mitos indigenas en el arte (1980). Two of the most characteristic subjects of Cuzco painting are studied in the exhibition catalogue, Gloria in Excelsis: The Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Painting of Peru and Bolivia (1986). Earlier, more general catalogues in English are Leopoldo Castedo, The Cuzco Circle (1976); and Pal Keleman, Peruvian Colonial Painting (1971).