The exhibition that opened in July this year at the America Museum in Madrid represents a great success: for the first time in Spain, an exhibition dedicated to Cuzqueña virreinal paintings is organized with sources coming entirely from national collections. Enterprise progress Cuzquina painting: center and peripherywhich highlights a body of works that have lain dormant for decades in museum repositories, in churches or in Spanish private collections.
In the midst of the decolonization debate crossing museums around the world, the exhibition proposes a reading that attempts to approach this: presenting it as a continuous essence between indigenous memory, Catholic tradition, the Atlantic cycle, and an artistic identity that is supposed to assert itself over time despite earthquakes and colonial hierarchies. Francisco Montes, a specialist in Spanish-American art and a curator at the museum, points out that the concept of center and periphery shapes the path, but does not do so from a hierarchical perspective, like the horizontal map around Cuzco (Peru). “We chose a concept that has been used in the history of art: center and periphery, but not to give priority to one place in relation to another, but to present a geography that is clearly transmitted from Cuzco as a nucleus radiating a series of influences affecting its surroundings, both regionally and transatlantic,” explains Montes.
“Cuzco will generate its tools and resources to continue to project it in the economic plan, in the ideological plan, and in the artistic plan,” he speaks of this art that reached its maximum period of expansion in the seventeenth and eighteenth.
The American Museum has collected about 60 works, 25 of which have been presented. Major galleries of regional art in Peru now depend on loans from Peru, says Montes, who is also a senior professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Seville.
The Foundation’s foundations are the Toma Foundation, in the United States, which is considered one of the world’s great reserves of regional art and has donated seven works. Institutions such as the Archivo General de Indias, the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Museo del Prado, the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, the Museo Nacional de Antropología, the Museo de Bellas Artes de Seville, and the Museo del Greco, as well as Andalusian monasteries, parishes and cathedrals whose heritage has also contributed, in many cases, to Purchase a new read here.
The commissioner insists on indigenous memory as the key to understanding the uniqueness of Cuzco, the ancient capital of the Inca Empire. This identity is expressed, in particular, also in art, in the symbolic value of the text and in decorative techniques such as the use of gold plates, a technical and symbolic resource that defines Cuzquino art.
It took more than a year and a half between the initial idea and the final montage, says the commissioner. The process of selecting items was long and divided between archival work, bibliographic consultations, and research in monasteries and collections in which some works fell into oblivion. “We say it with unheard-of pieces,” support.
The exhibition also dialogues with the material objects accompanying the paintings: textiles bearing Andean symbols, a sculptural panel with icons of birds – key figures in the Andean cosmovision – and wooden objects such as candles, and a Surandean ceremonial vase. All things support, help to replant concepts such as “syncretic art” or “mestizo art,” terms that current historiography questions because of their rigidity or the hierarchical connotations they entail.
A replica of the altar of the Virgin of Copacabana, replicas of which were converted into souvenirs during the colonial period, appears in the exhibition as silver ritual furniture in the center of the gallery. It focuses on saints and Eucharistic inscriptions, such as small devotional theatre. “In these times, copies of the work were taken or given to their families in Spain,” comments Montes. The commissioner recalls that the plata work was not just a decorative gesture: the metal came from the mines of Potosi, the nerve center of its trade.
Montes also places the development of the Cosquina School within its historical context. The earthquake of 1650, which destroyed the city, activated an intense architectural and artistic reconstruction; The subsequent arrival of Bishop Manuel de Molendo y Angulo, with a valuable collection of European paintings, strengthened the local halls; The independence of the original guild from the Spanish guild gives the painters strength and independence. All of this coincided with an economic boom along the Camino Real route, generating such abundant production that, in the 18th century, massive exports began in neighboring places, such as Chile and Argentina.
The exhibition also displays the relationships between European models and local reinterpretations. Francisco de Zurbaran’s works and their longer dialogue with Cuzquina’s later editions, in which painters incorporate forest landscapes, birds and detailed fabrics define their own language. Peruvian painters Basilio de Santa Cruz Puma Callao and Diego Quispe Tito introduced iconographic and decorative elements that distinguished the Cuzquina School from others in the region. The taste for painted copper, the adaptation of flamenco recordings, and the persistence of icons such as the Virgin of the Leche, demonstrate how local artists reinterpreted global models from their own cultural environment.
“This exhibition wants to review and update Cuzquina’s painting within the framework of new historical perspectives,” Montes points out. The exhibition can be visited at the Museum of America until April next year.