INTRODUCTION
During the Spanish colonization of South America in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, Spain promoted an influx of Italian Renaissance art and culture
into colonial Peru, in an attempt to create a new Rome in the capital of Lima. The Italian
impact in colonial Peru was prominent owing to the authority of Rome, the center of the
Catholic Church, and the artistic prestige of Italy in the culture of the sixteenth century.
Works of art, such as prints, drawings, paintings, sculptures, and books, were imported to
serve as visual tools for disseminating Counter-Reformation iconography and Italianate
forms in the Americas; then, between 1575 and 1599, three Italian painters, Bernardo
Bitti, Mateo Pérez de Alesio, and Angelino Medoro, arrived in Peru. The viceroyalty of
Peru was established in 1542 and remained intact until 1824, when the modern country of
Peru won its independence from Spain. At its height, the viceroyalty controlled all of
South America, including not only modern-day Peru, but also Bolivia, Ecuador, and
Colombia, countries that contain cities visited by the Italian artists discussed here.
Connections between the New World and Italy are to be expected due to the reliance on
Italian models on the Iberian peninsula throughout the sixteenth century and the fact that
half of Italy was under Spanish dominion by 1556. Distinct examples of Italian influence
are evident from early in colonial Latin American history. For example, in Santo
Domingo, the first city of the New World, established in 1510, the governor’s palace is
starkly classical in style, reminiscent of Brunelleschi and the Florentine Renaissance.
However, profound Italian influence is unique to the viceroyalty of Peru in comparison to
Latin America as a whole, and began with the dissemination of Italian ideals through the
establishment of a Jesuit College library in Lima in 1568, which was stocked with Italian
religious and artistic texts. The connection with Italy became even stronger with the
arrival of the Italian artists in Lima between 1575 and 1599. South
American artists of the next generation continued to draw on Italian style: for example,
Gregorio Gamarra trained with Bitti and perpetuated that artist’s distinctive elegant
Mannerism. Italian impact persisted well into the seventeenth century, in the work of
artists such as Luis de Riaño, an apprentice to Medoro, who was still working in Cuzco in
1643. Even later, the important commission of a sculpture of Saint Rose of Lima was
awarded to the Italian artist Melchiorre Caffà, whose piece was installed in Lima’s church
of Santo Domingo in 1665. These artists and events have been mentioned by scholars,
but have not been fully studied or related to each other, and many other Italianate
Peruvian artists and works of art have been ignored.
The historiographic disregard for Italian influence in Latin America has been
widespread. Spain’s control over much of the New World in the sixteenth century has
made Spanish art and that of Spain’s political possession, the Southern Netherlands, the
most frequently cited European sources for colonial art. However, Italy’s prestige as the
homeland of the Renaissance and the center of the Catholic Church gave Italian art
primacy in the New World, although the extent and quality of Italian influence has not
been studied. In this dissertation, I offer an analysis of the careers and contributions of
Bernardo Bitti (1548-1610), Mateo Pérez de Alesio (1547-1616), and Angelino Medoro
(1567-1631), in an effort to better understand their contributions to the Lima art world. I
will look at their prolific careers in Lima and the influence of their presence in the
viceregal capital and beyond in order to better understand Italy’s impact on colonial
Peruvian painting. I am concerned with identifying Italianate components of their work
and considering the dissemination of Italian ideas, but also with the reception of Italian
Renaissance paintings in the context of colonial Lima, whose patrons had certain goals of
conversion and Counter-Reformation in mind, and whose audience was not a
homogeneous group of Europeans, but instead composed of Spaniards, criollos, mestizos,
Indians, and Africans.
Scholarly attention in the United States to colonial Latin American art began in
the early twentieth century; the most significant early contribution was the study by
George Kubler and Martin Soria in 1959, wherein the two scholars outlined major artists
and monuments. Their view of colonial art, however, was that it was merely a provincial
version of European art: paintings, sculpture and architecture produced by artists that
lacked the proper Old World training and exposure to high art. The authors attributed the
differences they observed between colonial art and that made in Europe at the time to the
lesser ability and education on the part of New World artists.
Over the last two decades, however, scholarship has become more closely tied to
a careful study of indigenous as well as European cultures, and to archival and field
research. Sparked by the 1992 Quincentennial, scholars have begun to investigate the
Renaissance as an international rather than solely a European phenomenon, expanding
the boundaries of Renaissance scholarship both chronologically and geographically.4
This approach has produced interest in the art and culture of previously neglected parts of
the world, such as Latin America, and scholars have begun to investigate colonial art as
the product of a unique collaboration between cultures, rather than simply as art that is
provincial and therefore unimportant. Several major survey publications of the past
decade illustrate the increasing study of the New World, highlighting some of the most
important artists and themes of its art, including various European, Asian, and
preColumbian influences.5 The authors and contributors to these texts have outlined
some of the more important themes and considerations involved in studying colonial
Latin
4 The first important example was an exhibition catalogue: Jay A. Levenson, ed., Circa 1492: Art
in the Age of Exploration (exh. cat., Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1991). The first
monograph following the Washington exhibition was Claire Farago, ed., Reframing the
Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America: 1450-1650 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995).
5 See, for example Gauvin Bailey, Colonial Latin America (London: Phaidon, 2005); Kelly
Donahue-Wallace, Art and Architecture of Viceregal Latin America, 1521-1821 (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2008); Joseph J. Rishel and Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, eds., The
Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820 (exh. cat., Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006);
Juana Gutiérrez Haces and Jonathan Brown, eds, Pintura de los reinos identidades compartidas :
territorios del mundo hispánico, siglos XVI-XVIII (Mexico: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 2008).
American art, but these sweeping texts are too broad to address the trajectory of influence
from a particular source.
There is also scholarship focused specifically on the art of Andean colonial Peru,
where scholars over the past few decades have begun to publish studies of the
viceroyalty’s most important artists, schools, and works of art. Bolivian scholars José de
Mesa and Teresa Gisbert are perhaps most important in their contribution to the field of
Andean painting. They have written numerous texts focused on individual artists, with
particular attention to artists who worked in their native Bolivia. In their Historia de la
pintura cuzqueña, the authors surveyed some of the best-known painters of the famous
and influential Cuzco school , and provided a history of events leading up to its
formation. These studies are invaluable in setting up a basic map and timeline of the
careers of major artists as well as providing many of the first published photographs of
Peruvian painting. However, the text tends to be largely descriptive, often lacking
analysis and contextualization.8 In more recent publications, Mesa and Gisbert have
taken on more specific themes such as the persistence of indigenous themes in the
iconography of Andean painting as well as the medium of mural painting in the Andes,
both of which have contributed a more precise understanding of the sources and
influences of colonial painting.9
Like Mesa and Gisbert, more recent scholars have become interested in
uncovering the persistent indigenous impact on colonial Peruvian painting, and have
successfully proven that local beliefs, ideas, and aesthetics did not dissipate with the
Spanish arrival, but in fact remained a strong part of the culture; the results were complex
works of art embedded with layers of significance and influence. Carol Damian, Sabine
MacCormack, and Gauvin Bailey are important contributors to this field and new
scholars, such as Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, are embarking on studies rich in archival
research and nuanced visual analysis.10
8 Gauvin Bailey, “Art in Colonial Latin America: The State of the Question,” Renaissance
Quarterly 62 no. 1 (Spring 2009): 2-27. Bailey similarly recognizes the strength of Mesa and
Gisbert’s documentation and the lack of intensive analysis, both iconographically and
contextually.
9 José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, Iconografía y mitos indígenas en el arte (La Paz: Apartado
195, 1980); idem, La pintura mural en Sudamérica (Vaduz, Liechtenstein: Verlag, n.p. 1979).
10 Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Carol Damian, The Virgin of the Andes: Art and
Ritual in Colonial Cuzco (Miami Beach, Grassfield Press, 1995); Gauvin Alexander Bailey,
Andean Hybrid Baroque: Convergent Cultures in the Churches of Colonial Peru (Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, Object and Apparition:
Envisioning the Christian Divine in the Colonial Andes (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press,
2013).
Most of the more recent studies of colonial Peruvian art are focused on the second
half of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when indigenous culture had powerfully
reasserted itself, resulting in fascinating examples of hybrid art. Peruvian artists of this
later colonial period produced painting, sculpture and architecture that are unique
products of the complex and diverse atmosphere of colonial culture. Far fewer scholars
have considered the earlier part of colonial Peruvian art history. Peruvian scholars
Francisco Stastny and Ramón Pinilla Mujíca are important exceptions, who have
produced several critical considerations of the complex situation of art in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries in Peru. Their work stands out because of their recognition of
the viceroyalty of Peru’s, and especially Lima’s, complicated strata of cultural influences
in the early colonial period. In 1981, Stastny published a lengthy article about
Mannerism in Latin America, and remains to date the only scholar to not only recognize
traits of Mannerism in colonial Peruvian painting, but also consider on the erudite style’s
meaning and significance in Europe and the Americas. In 2006, Mujíca contributed an
essay to an exhibition catalogue edited by Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt based on paintings
from the Thoma Collection, where he addressed issues of visual culture in the Catholic
Counter-Reformation context of late-sixteenth-century Peru with a precise understanding
of how church dogma and propaganda filtered into colonial art. Both scholars analyzed
the early colonial situation with a consideration of both indigenous culture and the impact
of Europe’s own complex cultural situation in this period, and each helped to inform
some of the assertions and ideas laid out in this dissertation.
As for the Italian artists considered in this dissertation, the amount and type of
scholarship on each varies. Mesa and Gisbert have contributed the most to this area of
study, with monographic publications on each of the three Italian artists, as well as
considerations of some of the most important students and followers.13 Nearly every text
on colonial Peruvian painting mentions Bitti, since he worked in a great number of cities
throughout the viceroyalty and therefore had a geographically expansive impact. Alesio
has attracted much more attention, but with particular scholarly focus on his work in
Europe, where he had a productive career for two decades before traveling to the New
World. His Latin American oeuvre is unfortunately sparse because most of his paintings
were destroyed in earthquakes that occurred in Lima. Angelino Medoro has received the
least amount of scholarly attention, although he has left behind the largest body of work
in Lima of all three Italians. Although individual studies dedicated to each of these artists
are limited, histories of colonial Peruvian art consistently mention all three; scholars
1600-1825 from the Thoma Collection, ed. Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt (Palo Alto, CA: The Iris and B.
Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2006), 41-56.
13 José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, Bernardo Bitti (La Paz: Biblioteca de Arte y Cultural
Boliviana and Dirección Nacional de Informaciones de la Presidencia de la Republica, 1961);
idem, "El pintor Angelino Medoro y su obra en SudAmerica," Anales del Instituto de Arte
Americano e Investigaciones Esteticas 18 (1965): 23-47; idem, El pintor Mateo Perez de Alesio
(La Paz: Instituto de Estudios Bolivianos, 1972); idem, Gregorio Gamarra (La Paz: Direccion
nacional de informaciones de la Presidencia de la Republica, 1962); idem, “El pintor y escultor
Luis de Riaño,” Arte y Arqueologia 3-4 (1975): 145-158.
clearly recognize that they had a significant impact. However, much remains to consider
in the careers of Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro; iconographic analysis of their paintings and
accurate, unbiased considerations of style are particularly important here. This
dissertation is the first in-depth study of the careers of all three Italian painters in Lima.
While many of their paintings have been published and mentioned by scholars, very few
have received detailed stylistic and iconographic analysis, which I provide here. For
example, in previous scholarship, all three Italians have been labeled Mannerists.
Mannerism itself is a term that has been used to refer to a variety of styles that emerged
in Europe in the sixteenth century, often most commonly associated with an exaggeration
of forms, attenuated bodies, shallow space, elegant poses, asymmetrical compositions,
and erudite iconography, but also became associated with diverse schools of artists
including those from northern Europe and Fontainebleau, for example. The study of
Mannerism in Europe reveals great variety of art and individual responses, but there were
also some popular tropes, such as those mentioned above. While there are tendencies
toward some Mannerist formal decisions in the work of Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro, each
cultivated his own individual style and elements of Mannerism composed only one
component. Additionally, Mannerism is a loaded term, and a style that is specific to the
cultures that produced it in Europe. The influence of Mannerism on Italian painters
working in Lima is related to a specific set of circumstances due to the colonial climate of
art; essentially, the original meaning and significance of Mannerism in Europe could not
have had the same meaning in sixteenth-century Peru as it did in late
Renaissance Italy, or royal France. For a more complete discussion of the historiography
of Mannerism, see chapter 1, and Bernardo Bitti, who has been most frequently linked
labeled as Mannerist. Finally, although all three painters received training and began their
careers in Italy, their work in Lima must be understood within the context of the New
World, with consideration for the diversity of the audience as well as the unique goals of
art, intending to convert the local population. The artists and their patrons made decisions
based on the particular needs of the religious and cultural climate of colonial Lima, which
make the products of these Italian transplants unique and not wholly connected to their Old
World origins.
Additionally, I investigate the context of the Italian phenomenon and presence in
Lima and consider why these three artists rose to greater prominence than other European
artists working in the viceroyalty. I argue that the Italian impact in colonial Peru was
prominent due to the authority of Rome, the center of the Catholic Church, and the
artistic prestige of Italy in the culture of the sixteenth century. Italy was an important
center of art-making throughout the Renaissance and as a result artists trained in the
Italian schools enjoyed status as a result of their highly respected training and
background. As a model, Italian art had a weight in the Catholic world of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, for being exemplary of appropriate style and iconography of
sacred art.
Additionally, the case of Italian influence in Peru is unique in colonial Latin
America because in other New World art centers, Spanish and Flemish painters
dominated the market. To date, Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro are the only Italian painters in
the colonial world known to have achieved such a magnitude of success. Additionally, it
is not only the individual accomplishments of each Italian that are significant. Rather, it
is important to recognize that through the achievements of these three artists, a
phenomenon of Italian dominance in Peruvian painting took place. Not only were all
three prolific in Lima, but they also trained and influenced painters of the next
generations, so that Peruvian painting from the late-sixteenth through the middle of the
seventeenth century demonstrates a consistent reliance on the Italian school. It is worth
noting that while there is no explicit documentary evidence of the Italians’ high regard in
Lima, the fact that they were employed collectively by every one of the city’s religious
orders and contributed to most of Lima’s great churches, suggests that they worked with
some acclaim in their time. Additionally, while it is likely that other European artists
worked in Lima in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, it is only the names
and careers of the Italians that have been recorded and remembered.
The Impact of the Old World
Although the culture of colonial Peru was unique and certainly distinct in many
ways from that of Europe, the religious and artistic climate of the Old World had a critical
impact on the development of the viceroyalty, and the development of the three
Italian artists who traveled to Peru to paint. All three received initial training and likely
completed at least some work as painters in Italy; for Alesio the Old World experience
was particularly extensive, having worked in several cities throughout Italy, as well as in
Malta and Seville, before heading to Latin America. One likely reason that the Italians
might have appealed to New World patrons was that they brought with them not only
skills of painting, but perhaps just as importantly, knowledge of current Italian culture.
When considering Italian Renaissance art, there are many styles and many ideas that can
be associated with the period. Evident in the work of Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro is a
familiarity with the Renaissance interest in Classicism, but also some of the
manipulations of classical art often associated with Mannerism, another style with many
facets. Each of the three Italian painters had particular connections to Italian Renaissance
art that will be discussed here. For example, Alesio had experience painting the widely
popular grotteschi inspired by ancient wall paintings, and, for a portion of his Lima
career, Medoro painted figures with robust three-dimensionality and physical presence,
according to the naturalism heralded by painters in Italy for much of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. There is no single Italian style in the sixteenth century and therefore
there is not one way to discuss the impact of the Italians working in Lima.
At the end of the sixteenth century and into the early seventeenth, the Counter-
Reformation preoccupied Italian culture. Spurred by the campaigns of the
CounterReformation and the dictates of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), artists made
necessary renovations to Catholic art in the late Renaissance. Although the Council of
Trent addressed issues of sacred art only briefly--on December 3, 1563 at the twenty-fifth
session of the meeting, in a discussion titled, “On the Invocation, Veneration, and Relics
of Saints, and on Sacred Images” -- its decrees had a significant impact on artists and
patrons.16 However, the Council’s decrees included only general statements that
defended the use of art in a sacred context, resting most of the responsibility of reforming
art in the hands of local bishops. Thus, the responses that came from critics and writers
helped to formulate ideas about what was incorrect and inappropriate in the past and what
reformed art should be. Gabriele Paleotti, a bishop from Bologna, penned his own
assessment of the situation in religious art. He stressed that art had a serious purpose; he
called painting God’s instrument, and addressed art’s responsibility to spread the ideas of
the faith, not to celebrate the fame and skills of the artist.17 Giovanni Andrea Gilio and
Pietro Aretino joined the conversation by singling out Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as
the most characteristic example of a painting impacted by the errors of Renaissance
painters.18 They lambasted the artist for his inclusion of nudity in a sacred context,
contorted poses, and straying from iconographic standards.19 In response, artists
attempted to create art that fit the new qualifications asserted by theorists.
16 Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, trans. Rev. J.
Waterworth (London: C. Dolman, 1848), 234.
17 Gabriele Paleotti, Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (1582) (Vatican City:
Libreria editrice vaticana, 2002); A.W.A. Boschloo, Annibale Carracci in Bologna: Visible Reality
in Art after the Council of Trent (The Hague: Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Recreation and Social
Welfare Office, 1974), 121-144, offers the most in-depth interpretation of Paleotti’s ideas.
18 Paola Barocchi, Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento fra Manierismo e Controriforma (Bari:
Giuseppe Laterza e Figli, 1961), 2:10; Melinda Schlitt, “Painting, Criticism, and Michelangelo’s
Last Judgment in the Age of the Counter-Reformation,” in Marcia Hall, ed., Michelangelo’s Last
Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 118. Schlitt astutely summarizes
Gilio’s attack on Michelangelo’s Last Judgment as well as Aretino’s sentiments.
19 The inclusion of a beardless Christ was of particular offense to both writers.
In a scholarly context, this late-sixteenth-century art has largely eluded many
scholars. Most have focused on either the earlier sixteenth century with the High
Renaissance and Mannerism, or the early seventeenth century when the Baroque began to
flourish in Italy. In the last few decades of the sixteenth century, artists and patrons
cultivated styles and iconographies that suited the call for reform, but also catered to the
tastes of the time. Responses varied, but all focused to a certain degree on the need for
art to be arte sacra, art that was made for and promoted sacred devotions. Rome served
as the center of the Catholic Church and so represented the standards and expectations of
the pope and the Catholic world. The extensive Jesuit archives contain evidence the ways
that Rome communicated with missions around the world about art.
Artists and patrons of this period intentionally drew connections between art of
the late sixteenth century and that of the early Christian period, in order to underscore the
legitimacy of art throughout Christian history. The renovation and decoration of the
Lateran Basilica, which Constantine established as Rome’s Cathedral and the seat of the
popes, was one of the most important projects to represent this campaign to tie together
early Christian and the Counter-Reformation. As the central focus of papal patronage
throughout the Counter-Reformation, the Lateran also became an opportunity for several
successive popes to demonstrate their attitudes towards art. The paintings made to
decorate the Lateran were consequently clear, legible, and meant to inspire devotion and
piety above all else; painters at the Lateran complied with the need for arte sacra.
However, the painters maintained many of the formal traditions of Mannerism, with
graceful poses, elongated figures, and exuberance in color and composition, as late
Renaissance patrons continued to prefer the elegance of earlier sixteenth-century
painting, but complied with the need for art to be didactic and moving, rather than erudite
and distant. The art at the Lateran must have served as an example that followed a set of
guidelines for the decorum necessary in the Counter-Reformation period.
Significantly, all three artists who traveled to Peru spent some of their formative years in
Rome during this period of reform, where they would have encountered the artists
responsible for formulating a new reform style. Thus, the Roman connections of Bitti,
Alesio, and Medoro made them well-informed about the current state of religious art in
the tumultuous period of the Counter-Reformation, which certainly contributed to their
reception in Lima.
While the Italians brought with them knowledge of and experience with Italian
Renaissance ideas and norms, they did travel to the Iberian peninsula. Their backgrounds
were well suited for the Spanish, due to Spain’s reliance on Italian art throughout much of
the Renaissance. As Jonathan Brown has asserted, in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, Spain was among the most powerful kingdoms in Europe, but was on the
margins of the art world. Throughout the Renaissance, Spanish painters absorbed ideas
of Classicism and then Mannerism from Italian prototypes; Alonso Berruguete
(14881561) and Pedro Machuca (1490-1550) are important examples. The Spanish
reliance on Italian prototypes is clear and significant throughout the Renaissance, and
often took on greater meaning than simply that of borrowed forms, serving to tie the
Spanish to the status of Italian culture. For example, the architecture of Charles V’s
palace at Granada, a block-like structure with an interior courtyard, was inspired by the
austere classicism of Italian Renaissance architecture. Here, the classically inspired,
Renaissance style of Charles V’s palace symbolized a connection between the leader and
the great Roman past; Charles used the iconography of Italian classicism to conjure
connections between his own empire and that of the ancient world. As Earl Rosenthal
asserted, the palace was “symbolic of rulership.” Thus, the architecture at Granada is an
example of how the
Spanish applied Renaissance prototypes to project their own imperial power and status.
Italian impact was also disseminated with the commissioning of Italians to work for the
Spanish crown. When Phillip II ascended to the throne in 1556, he made his preference
for Italian artists well known by consistently hiring Titian as his principal painter.
Additionally, Spanish artists working for Phillip were encouraged to paint directly from
Italian prints, rather than invent compositions and style of their own; imitation was far
prized over invention in Spain.
The decoration of the Escorial in Madrid further solidified Italian art’s profound
presence in Spanish culture. The Escorial was an important project for Phillip II; it was
intended as a lasting monument to the family and thus was significant to the king, but
also was constructed during Spain’s battles with the Reformation and the struggle to
maintain control of the Netherlands, so the Escorial also came to symbolize Spain’s
power. For the building itself, Phillip hired an architect who had worked with
Michelangelo on St. Peter’s in Rome, Juan Bautista de Toledo, the result being a highly
classical, Italianate structure with a central dome and austere ornamentation. Italian
connections continued in the decoration of the interior with paintings and sculptures,
some by Italian artists, including Luca Cambiaso, Pellegrino Tibaldi, and Federico
Zuccaro, and others by Spaniards often working in Italian Renaissance styles, such as
Alonso Sánchez Coello and Luis de Carvajal.
The Spaniard Juan Fernández Navarrete became Phillip II’s preferred local artist;
he had worked with Titian and traveled throughout Italy, returning to Spain to cultivate a
style akin to that of the great Italian, but with more sharply defined contours. Navarrete
also filtered into his painting an understanding of the needs of the Counter-Reformation
and produced the piety and decorum that Phillip II sought. Clearly, the Spanish
maintained a preference for Italian models throughout the sixteenth century. It is then not
surprising that Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro were awarded so many commissions in
Spanishoccupied Peru. What remains significant is the fact that these three artists were
the only
Italians known to experience such acclaim in the Spanish colonies, so the situation in
Lima was unique to the whole of Latin America.
Lima: A Unique Colonial Capital
The positive reception of the Italians in Lima may relate to the city’s unique
cultural identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a viceregal capital, after
Mexico City, Lima was the most important city in the New World. However, Lima was
not like other capitals and its unique origins made for a different kind of atmosphere;
unlike Mexico City, for example, which was founded at the Aztec site of Tenochtitlan,
Lima was a new city founded by the Spanish in Peru and designated capital and seat of
the viceroy. The site had been just a small village before the Spanish arrival. The choice
to establish capitals at sites like Tenochtitlan was common and allowed the Spanish to
proclaim European dominion over the indigenous populations in many symbolic and
propagandistic ways. For example, the Spanish built the Cathedral in Mexico City near
the ruins of the Aztecs’ Templo Mayor and the Viceregal Palace on foundations of the
Aztec emperor Moctezuma II’s residence. Using the indigenous capital as the seat of the
viceroy allowed the Spanish to present their propaganda that the Old World invasion was
merely a transition from ancient to modern and that their Christian churches and
European palaces simply took the place of the past structures dedicated to indigenous
beliefs and traditions. Lima was a coastal city that had little indigenous history; much
farther inland and nestled high in the Andes, Cuzco had been the capital of the Inca
empire and was the city that represented indigenous culture and strength. Cuzco would
seem the obvious choice as capital for the Spanish because of the concentration of the
local population that lived there as well as the symbolism of invading and conquering this
local hotspot. However, Charles V chose Lima. Cuzco, despite its rich connections to
the local past, was inconvenient and challenging to reach; Lima’s coastal location must
have seemed far more reasonable in terms of trade and travel. Additionally, the Spanish
perceived the cacique, the local leader, of the village of Lima as easy-going and so they
anticipated that the invasion and conversion would be straightforward. Additionally, the
fear of unrest and resistance among the powerful indigenous population of Cuzco likely
motivated the selection of Lima as seat of the viceroy. The result was that as a newly
established city, Lima had no identity, no history, and no ancestral claims to power, and
therefore was disconnected from the local foundations of Cuzco. The tension between
Cuzco’s ancient past and Lima’s modern foundations became particularly evident in the
early seventeenth century, in 1621, when Cuzco petitioned the Royal Council of the
Indies to be designated the true capital of Peru. In her recent study of early modern Lima,
Alejandra Osorio documented this case in careful detail. The people of Cuzco argued
that their city was more accurately representative of the viceroyalty because of its large
percentage of indigenous citizens and Lima countered with the rationale that a capital
should not be composed largely of subjugated people. Ultimately, Lima’s builders and
planners had no local history to build upon or symbolically evolve out of; instead, the
Spanish made Lima a European city in the New World. Rather than focusing on
architecture and design of conquest, the Spanish modeled Lima on the great cities of Italy
and Spain.
On January 18, 1535, Francisco Pizarro founded the city of Lima and called it the
City of Kings, after which the capital grew rapidly, becoming home to many Spanish
émigrés. The site itself, nestled on the Pacific coast and bordered by the Rimac river,
fulfilled the qualifications of an ideal city as discussed by Leon Battista Alberti in his De
re aedificatoria of 1450. Alberti’s inspirations as well as those of other important
Renaissance architects and theorists such as Filarete, Sebastiano Serlio, and Andrea
Palladio, came from the authoritative Roman author Vitruvius. In addition to this
consideration of the city’s natural surroundings, however, was the idea that a city’s
nobility was intimately linked to its architecture and the plan of its streets and squares.
Accordingly, Alejandra Osorio connected Lima’s creation to the classical concept of
civitas. Early modern writers conceived of civitas as a government that sought to civilize
and specifically to Christianize. Similarly, the ancient Romans saw civitas as an effort to
distinguish between the civilized and the barbaric. As Osorio explains, “the early modern
Christian idea of civitas implicated the notion of a civilized political animal uplifted by
God, and the city became the privileged site for that uplifting.”
Accordingly, building urban centers in global territories became of prime importance to
the Spanish. Planners imposed a western sense of order onto Lima by designing the city
according to a grid-like plan. The Spanish were experienced with the project of
transforming sites according to European standards as they had partaken in similar
ventures in regions taken from the Muslims in Spain.42 The project took on grand
proportions in the New World; in three centuries of Spanish history in Latin America,
they would establish almost one thousand cities. The process of founding cities,
however, involved much more than simply invading and assuming power; it included a
transformation of the location to represent the European presence. According to
mandates put forth by Charles V as well as the Aristotelian principles about urban centers
that informed his views, Lima needed to display certain characteristics, including a layout
that made political activities easily accessible and a location near natural resources such
as water. Most importantly for this discussion, it was necessary that the city also be
beautiful, that its external appearance mirror the virtuous and civilized nature of its
people and its government.43
By 1615, Lima’s population had reached 25,000, composed of about half Indians,
mestizos, and blacks, with the rest European.44 The city’s ceremonial center was the
Plaza Mayor, a space designed with the symmetry of western cities in mind. Despite the
great efforts to fashion Lima as a grand European capital, Old World visitors were largely
unimpressed, citing the city’s low, wide architecture, which was built to withstand the
Functions," in The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820 (exh. cat., Philadelphia: Philadelphia
Museum of Art, 2006), 23.
42 Ibid.
43 Osorio, Inventing Lima, 12-3.
44 Kagan, Urban Images, 169.
frequent earthquakes, as unattractive. Limeños, however, were proud of their city and
very much interested in its image on the global stage and in the seventeenth century
Lima’s European population celebrated its city in order to bolster its reputation. Bernabe
Cobo, a Jesuit who had been born in Spain but spent much of his adult life traveling
throughout Latin America, compared Lima to some of the most noble cities of Europe.
Fray Buenaventura de Salinas de Cordova, a native limeño, and avid supporter of the city,
included a celebration of “The merits and excellences of the city of Lima” in his 1630
History of Peru, wherein he praised Lima’s regularly planned streets, beautiful
architecture, and noble criollo population. His younger brother, Fray Diego de Cordova
Salinas, similarly wrote about Lima as a city with the attributes of all the great
metropolises of Europe:
Lima has no need to be jealous of the glories of the ancient cities [of Europe],
because it has the churches and divine cult of Rome, the Holy City; the style and
elegance of the men and women of Genoa, the magnificent; the gentle climate of
Florence, the beautiful; the busy crowds of Milan, the populous; the music and aromas
of Lisbon's convents; the generous exports… of Venice, the rich; the plentiful food
of Bologna, the abundant; and Salamanca, with its religious houses, colleges, and
university.
Others took on similar campaigns in writing; in 1681, Fray Juan Meléndez penned his
Tesoros verdaderos de las Indias, and in 1688, Francisco de Echave y Assu published his
Estrella de Lima convertida en sol. The prolific efforts to celebrate Lima in writing speak
to the interest of the Spaniards and of limeños to bolster the capital’s reputation locally, but
also on the global stage. The references to Lima as a European capital in the New World
legitimized its status and the work of Italian-born and -trained painters such as Bitti, Alesio,
and Medoro, must have fit perfectly into this scheme.
Lima was not only an administrative and religious center, but also a stage for the
meeting of diverse segments of the population and the origins of culture and education
according to Christian standards. In this regard, Lima’s growth was rapid. Already by
1551, Lima received permission from the pope to open the University of San Marcos,
where clergy would be trained for missionary assignments. Throughout the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries Lima’s elite most extravagantly asserted its power and status
through festival associated with the entrance of a new viceroy. In Lima, the arrival of a
new viceroy and his ceremonial procession through the city reminded the citizens of the
power of the Spanish crown; the viceroy represented the king and his physical movement
through the region reinforced Spanish dominion. Again, the citizens of Lima used visual
propaganda to assert the city’s direct link to the Old World.
Religion in colonial Lima, as in all New World cities, was intimately tied to the
campaign of the Counter-Reformation and the values of the Council of Trent. On July
12, 1564, King Phillip II ordered that the decrees of the Council of Trent be adopted as
law in all lands under Spanish control; one copy of the Spanish publication of Trent’s
proceedings remains in the library of the monastery of Santo Domingo in Lima.
Additionally, in 1565 and 1566, the decrees of the Council of Trent were recited in
churches throughout Peru; a Catholic notary was even present at these recitations to make
the events official. The Spanish openly expressed their responsibility as purveyors of the
word of the pope and many Europeans perceived the single goal of global travel to be the
spread of Christianity and the only justification for Spanish expansion into nonEuropean
territories to be the mission of bringing the light of Catholicism to those in darkness.
Evangelization, then, was not just an added bonus to the Spanish expansion, but a
primary objective. As a result, Christianity was a critical part of colonial culture from the
very beginning, and since language barriers made communication challenging early on
and illiteracy remained high throughout the colonial period, art was an
invaluable tool to missionaries and so developed alongside tactics of conversion.
Missionaries in Latin America used imagery to help the indigenous audience learn about
and remember the Christian narratives and ideals. A Mexican friar, Diego Valadés,
illustrated the intimate connection between imagery and Christian instruction in an
engraving that was part of his Rhetórica Christiana, published in 1579. In the engraving,
a Franciscan friar points at images with scenes from Christ’s Passion, as he preaches from
a pulpit; the audience is shown enraptured by the experience of both words and images.
The role of sacred images, then, was critical.
In Lima, it was Italian artists who fulfilled many of the city’s needs for sacred
paintings. In so doing, Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro answered Lima’s call to be a European,
Catholic city, powerfully connected to Rome for its religious significance and ancient,
imperial history. The art of all three Italians represented the informed point of view of
artists connected directly to the center of the Catholic Church, but also because of the
cultural prestige of Renaissance art. For example, Alesio’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel,
painted next to the work of the great Michelangelo, became a marker of his status. In
some Spanish texts, authors even mistakenly asserted that Alesio had been a student of
the High Renaissance giant. Apparently acutely aware of the significance of his Italian
origins, Medoro signed many of his paintings, Angelino Medoro, pintor romano.
Archival documents from Lima consistently reference the Roman origins of all three
artists.
The need for artists throughout the Spanish viceroyalties was great as
missionaries came to believe more and more that religious imagery would help to bridge
the language gap while the friars learned to communicate in the local tongue. In New
Spain, missionaries exploited indigenous practices of making images and employed local
artists. In the viceroyalty of Peru, no such relevant tradition of image-making was
recognized in the early years, as the only visual art the Spanish encountered was highly
abstracted. Thus, there was an immediate need for European artists to make pictorial art.
Bernardo Bitti was among the first European painters called to this task, by the Jesuit
Provincial in Peru, Diego de Bracamonte. Bitti began in Lima, the viceregal capital. In
other cities of the viceroyalty, monastic schools trained students in fine arts. In Quito,
Fray Pedro Gossael, a Flemish artist, taught painting. It is likely that other Flemish, as
well as Spanish, painters were in Lima during Bitti’s early years as well. Although, they
have not been documented. Therefore, it is only the impact of Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro
that is most evident in a consideration of European influence in early colonial Lima.
Bernardo Bitti arrived in Lima in 1575, as a Jesuit painter; Mateo Perez de Alesio in
1590, seeking greater fame and fortune after an already illustrious career in Europe; and
Angelino Medoro in 1599, having already worked in several South American cities.
Over the following four decades, these artists worked in nearly all of Lima’s churches and
monasteries and Alesio and Medoro established workshops in the city. They influenced
and trained many artists of the next generation who carried on the connection to Italian
Renaissance art well into the seventeenth century. In the following study, I will present
evidence of their success by surveying the wide scope of their contributions to Peruvian
art, through their own work as well as that of students and followers. I will consider the
significance of their high regard in Lima and the reasons for their extraordinary
popularity. Finally, I will consider how the paintings of these three Italians came to be
ideally suited for colonial Lima’s cultural and religious climate.
CHAPTER ONE
BERNARDO BITTI
Introduction
Hanging today in the parish church of Lima’s great Jesuit temple, the Church of
San Pedro, is a large oil painting of the Virgin, holding the Christ Child, surrounded by
angels who illuminate the divine figures with candles (Figure 1.1). This Madonna, tall in
stature, elegant in pose, bedecked in cool blues and pinks, and delicately lifting up the
attenuated, yet graceful baby represents the iconic style of Bernardo Bitti, an Italian
painter working in Peru in the sixteenth century.
In 1575, Bernardo Bitti was the first of three Italian painters to travel to Peru. He
was a Jesuit, whose time and experience in his hometown of Camerino, followed by
several years in Rome during his training, and a short time in Seville awaiting departure
for the New World, made him an ideal candidate to work for the Jesuits in their efforts to
convert the indigenous populations and establish a Catholic presence in the viceroyalty.
Bitti began and ended his Peruvian career in Lima, but in between traveled to at least six
other cities in Peru and Bolivia. The extensive time and geographical span of his career
made him one of the most prolific and influential painters in Peru in the early colonial
period.
In this chapter, I will offer a portrait of Bitti by first tracing his development and
formation as an artist in Europe and then following his career from his beginnings in
Lima, through his travels on behalf of the Jesuits, and his conclusion back in Lima.
Bitti’s widespread success and influence are remarkable and it will be critical to establish
an understanding of how and why Bitti came to paint in so many churches throughout
Peru and why the Jesuits consistently chose him as their artist.
Numerous scholars in the past have mentioned Bitti and nearly every colonial
Latin American art survey includes at least one painting by him. 61 In 1959, Martin Soria
called Bitti one of the best painters in South America in the sixteenth century.62 He
claimed Bitti’s influence extended across Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia through the
seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries. In 1961, José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert
wrote an early monograph on the artist, in which they laid out a preliminary timeline of
the artist’s work and posited some ideas regarding the artist’s background and
Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, El Hermano Bernardo Bitti: Escultor (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios
Hispanos-Americanos, 1984).
61 Emilio Harth-Terré, “Las bellas artes en el virreinato del Peru: Pintura y pintores en Lima
virreinal” Revista del archivo nacional del Peru (1963), 118-20; Francisco Stastny, El manierismo
en la pintura colonial latinoamericana (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos,
1981); José Chichizola Debernardi, El manierismo en Lima (Lima: Pontifica Universidad
Catolica del Peru, 1983), 107-11; Damián Bayón and Murillo Marx, History of South American
Colonial Art and Architecture: Spanish South America and Brazil (New York: Rizzoli, 1989), 105;
Joséph J. Rishel and Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, The Arts in Latin America, 1492-1820 (exh. cat.,
Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006), 416.
62 George Kubler and Martin Soria, Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and their
American Dominions, 1500-1800 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959), 321-22.
formation. The monograph’s introduction is brief and lacks any in-depth discussions of
the artist’s oeuvre, but it does establish the prolific and far-reaching nature of Bitti’s
career. Most of the works of art mentioned by the important Bolivian scholars are those
that were made and remain in La Paz and Sucre, as the authors have a clear interest in the
art of their native country. Their focus leaves much work to be done on the paintings in
Lima and other cities around the viceroyalty. The scholars returned to Bitti for a more
indepth study in 1974, wherein they constructed a more complete narrative of his career.
Mesa and Gisbert mentioned Bitti briefly in their study of painting from Cuzco, where
they confidently deemed him the most influential painter in Peru in the sixteenth century.
More recently, in 2002, Gauvin Bailey called Bitti the founder of the Cuzco school of
painting, the most important style of art to emerge from colonial Peru. Scholars since the
1960s have recognized and documented Bitti’s influence in Lima, but the research on his
paintings remains incomplete and Bitti remains somewhat enigmatic in terms of a clear
definition of his style and an understanding of the reasons for the positive reception of his
work.
Bitti’s Formation as an Artist
Bitti’s story began in Italy when, as a young artist, he absorbed the two most
important elements of his artistic approach, the components that contributed to his
widespread appeal among Europeans and Peruvians alike: a taste for Mannerist formal
elements and an understanding of the reforms dictated by the Council of Trent. Once in
Lima, in his earliest paintings for the Jesuits at their Church of San Pedro, Bitti developed
his signature approach, composed of an elegant aesthetic and subject matter carefully
tailored to the needs of the Counter-Reformation campaign to present decorous, accurate,
and inspirational imagery.
After working with Bitti for eight years in Lima, the Jesuits, evidently sensing the
potential of his paintings to inspire and teach, sent him on a series of expeditions to
smaller cities in Peru to paint for Jesuit churches and monasteries. These travels took
Bitti to places that varied from the important and bustling city of Cuzco to the small town
of Juli on Lake Titicaca, and even to La Paz and Sucre in Bolivia. It was through these
journeys that Bitti’s art would gain its widespread recognition and influence. Not only
does each of these cities house at least one painting by Bitti, but many paintings that
show his impact on artists of the next generations.
Accordingly, a brief discussion of Bitti’s Old World experiences will help to
establish an understanding of his foundations as an artist. That Bitti had a great impact
on colonial painting is clear, but this impact deserves further inquiry. Why was he so
widely accepted? It seems that perhaps both Europeans and Andeans responded to his
paintings. For the Spanish, his elegant Mannerism represented the prestige of the Old
World, and specifically the reputation of the Roman Renaissance. Additionally, for the
indigenous viewer, Bitti’s flat forms and linear style may have been reminiscent of the
aesthetics of some native art forms, such as queros and woven textiles.
Bernardo Bitti was born in the city of Camerino, in the Marches region of Italy, in
1548. It was in his hometown that Bitti’s formation as an artist began. Unfortunately,
nothing is known of Bitti’s early training in Camerino, but by the age of twenty he had
decided to join the Jesuit order and he traveled to Rome. At the time, the Society of Jesus
was still a fairly new order, but it had quickly risen to importance and had taken on the
responsibility of spreading Catholic doctrine through many overseas missions associated
with the constantly expanding scope of European exploration. Bitti’s interest in painting
must have been one factor that brought him to the Jesuits, who from their beginnings had
made art a critical part of their process. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits,
had instituted the use of images for the purposes of instruction and inspiration, even
commissioning an illustrated book of the Gospel from the Spanish artist Jerome Nadal.
The book, Evangelicae historiae imagines, adnotationes, et meditaciones (Figure 1.2),
was published in 1593, but had been used extensively even before its publication. The
book would come to be used to instruct new converts, but it had an impact long before it
passed before the eyes of non-Christian populations. Ignatius meant to instill in his Jesuit
brothers the great potential of tying prayer and meditation to visual imagery.71 Herein lay
the early promise of art’s power to communicate and inspire, which would remain a
hallmark of Jesuit missionary activity. Two important qualities of the book helped to lay
the foundation for Jesuit practices. First, the book’s intention was didactic; to avoid any
confusion, key letters and captions were added to engravings of Gospels read at Sunday
masses. And the engravings, made by esteemed Flemish printmakers the Wierix brothers,
are consistently of high quality; the Jesuits believed in the educational potential of art, but
never sacrificed excellence. It is not surprising, then, that a young painter like Bitti
would have been drawn to the innovative order.
Bernardo Bitti joined the ranks of clergy at a critical time for the Catholic Church.
By 1568, when Bitti became a Jesuit, the Catholic Church was deeply entrenched in the
reforms planned in response to Martin Luther’s Reformation. The Council of Trent had
just held its last meeting in 1563, during which the bishops had finally discussed the issue
of images, although briefly. When Bitti arrived in Lima for training, he would have been
immersed in the issues of the Catholic Reformation, but his exposure to these issues
began even before his time in Rome. His hometown of Camerino also happened to be the
home of Giovanni Andrea Gilio, who, in 1564, published his “Dialogue on the abuse of
history by painters,” an attack on artists who Gilio felt had strayed from the decorum
critical to sacred art. Gilio felt that painting had fallen into the hands of uneducated
artists seeking fame and fortune, rather than allowing art to rise to its full potential as a
divinely ordained tool that should be used to teach and inspire. He felt that painters,
namely Michelangelo and the Mannerists, had lost the sense of responsibility that had
been synonymous with creators of sacred art. Gilio sought to enforce the idea that
painting a Christian image was a task of great importance and responsibility. Gilio’s
publication was widely read and it influenced artists and bishops dealing with the need to
reform art in the post-Tridentine era. The Council of Trent had defended the use of visual
imagery by the church and laid out some general suggestions for the appropriate use of
sacred images, but recognized that the church had to proceed with caution to avoid
further scrutiny from the reformers in the North. They left much of the responsibility to
the local bishops, who looked to Gilio and other commentators for guidelines. Gilio was
the first to publish a response to the Council, only a year after its last meeting. As a
young artist in Camerino, Bitti certainly would have been aware of Gilio’s text. So,
although there remains no evidence of Bitti’s training in Camerino and no paintings
survive at all from his time in Italy, it can be deduced that from early on his career, he
must have been aware of the need for reforms to art and also the great responsibility
afforded painters of sacred imagery by writers like Gilio. Painting was not just a creative
endeavor in this period, but a critical tool in rebuilding and strengthening the Catholic
Church. Moreover, this passion for the revitalization of the Church was particularly
strong among the young men who signed up for missionary assignments. Although many
members of missionary orders traveled because they were instructed to do so, there is
evidence in letters that many young Jesuits were inspired by the adventures and triumphs
of heroes such as Saint Francis Xavier in Asia, and strove for the same kind of success.
For the young Bitti, it is easy to imagine that becoming a Jesuit artist must have been
inspired by the power and agency accorded art in this period as well as the ambitions of
international missions.
Bitti arrived in Rome in 1568 to begin his Jesuit training and would remain for
five years. As mentioned previously, no paintings from Bitti’s time in Rome remain.
Bitti’s Jesuit education must have occupied much of his attention, although it is likely
that he must have engaged in at least some painting during this time. So yet again, little
information exists about Bitti’s early formation as an artist. However, a brief survey of
the situation of art in Rome in the early 1570s will shed light on the young painter’s
exposure and influences.
The art of the last four decades of the sixteenth century in Rome presents a
challenging undertaking for the art historian, because its diversity makes it difficult to
classify. While a High Renaissance style can be described in Rome of the early sixteenth
century, the artists of this late-century period did not produce paintings of any single
consistent style. Instead, content and subject matter became the supreme focus of painters
working in early Counter-Reformation Rome. If any continuity can be found in painting
from the late century it is that artists sought to create direct, clear, and legible art that
complied with the needs of the Council of Trent. The moment was one of reform,
spurred by the Council of Trent and the Counter-Reformation, in response to Protestant
attacks on the Catholic use of imagery. The Catholic Church sought to defend its use of
art, but also recognized a need for revision. In addition, Mannerist aesthetics had been
popular in central Italy for several decades. Artists had been making paintings of elegant,
graceful figures in impossible, contorted poses. Colors had diverged from naturalism and
works were laden with erudite references to art, literature and society. High-class patrons
enjoyed the secrets held in the most obscure of details in the paintings they
commissioned. These paintings hung on the walls of lavish palazzos as evidence of the
patron’s intellect and worldly comportment.
In her recent book, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, Marcia Hall has astutely
summarized the situation of religious art at this moment of crisis. She cites
Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck as an example of Mannerist painting’s
impossible erudition and asserts that this complication in art had to be erradicated in the
face of the newly reinforced need for art that could speak to the masses. The intellectual
“maniera” that Sydney Freedberg so accurately defined in the 1960sbegan to dissipate,
but the usual forms of Mannerism did not. Some artists, such as Girolamo Muziano and
Scipione Pulzone, did completely leave behind the distortion and elegance in favor of a
sober naturalism. But some, such as Taddeo Zuccaro and Jacopo Zucchi, continued to
call on the graceful forms of the past few decades. Evidence that the elegant Mannerism
was still favored late in the century lies in prominent commissions of Mannerist artists in
this period. Even the pope, Pius V, the most prestigious and high-profile patron in Rome,
commissioned from Giorgio Vasari The Stoning of Saint Stephen, from the late 1560s, a
painting that includes many of the formal experimentations common to Mannerism.
Herein lies the diversity of painting in the late sixteenth century. There was no single
solution to the problems facing religious art and the church did not seek to enforce a
particular style, only the goal of art as inspirational and didactic.
The diversity of style in the late-sixteenth century was not just the case for Rome
in general, but also characterized Jesuit art of the period. Scholars in the past have made
attempts to define Jesuit style, but more recently it has become clear that in fact there was
no Jesuit style. Gauvin Bailey’s compelling work on the Jesuits has shown that the order
was less interested in style and more consumed with content and the capabilities of a
work of art to teach and motivate devotion. When it came to style, the Jesuits granted
their artists a great degree of freedom. And many early Jesuit artists, including Bitti,
chose to pursue elements of the Mannerist aesthetics of the early sixteenth century, most
prominently the use of sinuous line, relief-like composition, and the serpentine twisting
of the body. However, as Bailey astutely points out, these Jesuit artists were using
Mannerist aesthetics only superficially, to create elegant paintings, not to produce the
complexity and confusion that contributed to the erudition of the Mannerism of the 1530s
and 40s.
All in all, as a young artist and new Jesuit in Rome in the 1570s, Bitti had the
opportunity to see and take in the formal approach of Mannerism’s elegant proportions
and compositions, and he learned from his order that as an artist he had the flexibility to
choose and cultivate his own artistic style. Bitti’s iconic ethereal figures, draped in cool
blues and pinks and standing in elegant poses must have come to him as a result of his
exposure to late Roman Mannerism and the Jesuit approach to art.
In 1573, only five years after his arrival in Rome, Bitti was in Seville, where he
would remain for over a year, awaiting departure for Lima on behalf of the Jesuits. At
only twenty-five and still very much being formed as an independent artist, Bitti used his
time spent in Seville as yet another opportunity to absorb the latest trends and ideas.
Much of Seville’s art would have looked familiar to the young Bitti, as Italianate styles
dominated in the city. Several scholars have noted that one Spanish painter in particular
must have been influential to Bitti: Luis de Morales. Although Morales was not in
Seville, his work was widely known and disseminated through Spain. Therefore, Bitti
could have had exposure to the Spaniard’s distinctive paintings. Even a cursory
comparison of Morales’s work with Bitti’s will reveal formal similarities. Morales, often
referred to as “El Divino” because of his highly spiritual approach to painting, was one of
many Spanish artists who adopted elements of Italian Mannerism. His Madonnas are
sweet, sorrowful and divine in their elegance. Morales used his paintings to evoke
feeling and devotion from his viewers by portraying holy figures as melancholy angels,
holy in their ethereal comportment and solemn in their facial expression, creating a tone
that was dramatically deepened by Morales’s choice of rich, smoky colors. A fine
example is the Madonna and Child with a Spindle (Figure 1.3) from the late 1560s, now
in the Staatliche Museum in Berlin. Perhaps most characteristic of Morales’s style is his
use of grace and delicacy as a mark of divinity. Morales’s choice of slender, attenuated
figures allowed him to mark these beings as something other than human. The
antinaturalistic nature of his figure design was meant as a visual mark of
otherworldliness, a stylistic choice that became a mainstay of Bitti’s painting in Peru.
Although many scholars have noted the importance of Morales’s painting style to
Bitti, the Spanish painter’s spiritual philosophy is another influential factor that has never
been linked to the young Italian. It seems, in fact, that Bitti’s education on all things
Counter-Reformation continued in Seville as well. Morales was deeply entrenched in the
spiritual revival of Spain’s church. However, although many of the Spanish painter’s
patrons were in Seville, he spent his entire career working in the small town of Badajoz.
Accordingly, there is no evidence that the Spanish painter spent much time physically in
the city of Seville, so any consideration of his influence on Bitti must be purely
speculative. Thus, while Bitti likely never met Morales himself, it seems reasonable to
consider that the reputation of “Il Divino” in Seville means that the Italian could have
known of his work and its significance in Counter-Reformation Spain. When Morales
was working in Badajoz, the bishop was Cristobal Sandoval y Rojas, who had
participated in the second session of the Council of Trent and was devoted to the Catholic
restoration in Spain. Morales was greatly impacted by the bishop’s ideas and used
painting to visually interpret his encouragement of spiritual renewal and mystical
practices as a way for the devout to connect to God. With his ethereal figures and moody
atmospheres, the Spanish painter sought to tug at the inner emotions of his viewers. His
paintings are evocative and consuming and were widely sought after. Thus, Morales was
an artist who was successful for his refinement of Mannerism’s graceful aesthetics to the
needs of the Catholic reform movement, within the dominion of Spain.
By the time Bitti boarded the ship that would take him to his new home in Lima,
he had come upon the two most important elements that made up his mature style, the
graceful divinity of sacred figures and the critical need for art of this post-Tridentine era
to inspire viewers according to the decorum of the Church. It is not surprising, then, that
an artist so steeped in the standards of the day rose to such preeminence in the eyes of his
Jesuit brothers in Peru.
Bitti’s Early Years in Lima
Almost immediately upon arrival in Lima, Bitti went to work on his first major
projects, several paintings for the Jesuit church of San Pedro. The Church of San Pedro
was connected to the Jesuit College of San Pablo, an important institution throughout the
colonial city’s history. The Jesuits, of course, were known for their widespread
missions overseas, but in colonial Peru, they played an even more prominent role, often
responding to the needs and requests of the viceroy.90 In this they acted not only as
missionaries, but also as educators of the faith to all those in the viceroyalty. In 1568, the
Jesuits founded a college in Lima, through a collaboration of the Jesuit General in Rome,
Francis Borgia, and his long time acquaintance, Francisco de Toledo, who had only
recently been appointed Peru’s viceroy. Borgia and Toledo had long hoped to build a
Jesuit college in the Americas, having developed early on a vested interest in Spain’s
religious well-being; Lima would be their opportunity to leave a permanent mark of the
Catholic Church and the Jesuit order in this new exotic land.91
The college became not only a place of learning and training for Jesuit brothers,
but also a cultural center dedicated to the education of the viceroyalty’s elite. The Jesuits
helped build up the European presence in Lima.92 The College brought many European
brothers as well as artifacts to the young capital. From its inception, the college was
stocked with literary, artistic, and religious texts from Europe. Luis Martin, who wrote
the most definitive book on the College of San Pablo, tells of the Jesuit Provincial, Father
Gerónimo Ruiz de Portillo, using his time in Seville while awaiting departure for the
New World to visit every bookstore in the city, beginning to build what would come to
90 See the following sources for more information on the formation of the Jesuit church and
college in Lima: Thomas M. Lucas, Landmarking City, Church, and Jesuit Urban Strategy
(Chicago: Loyola Press, 1997), 9-12; Sabine Macormack, "Grammar and Virtue: The
Formulation of a Cultural and Missionary Program by the Jesuits in Early Colonial Peru," in The
Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, ed. John W. O’Malley et al. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2006), 576-601.
91 Martin, The Intellectual Conquest of Peru, 8. The two were apparently brought together while
caring for the ill Emperor Charles V of Spain, and both were present for his last moments of
life.
92 Ibid. See Martin for a concise history of the Jesuit college in Lima.
be South America’s most extensive college library. Although the first team of Jesuits was
led by a Spaniard, connections to the home base in Rome remained strong. The Jesuit
General in Rome was in constant contact with the fledgling college. The authority of
Rome, then, was ever present in Lima and the College of San Pablo became much more
than an educational institution; it was a symbol of the Old World in the New. The
presence of the Jesuits was one reason Rome would be so influential in Lima. In
addition to education and the spread of Catholicism, the Jesuits had a much more direct
goal in Peru: the conversion of native populations, for which they relied heavily on art.
Although much has been written in recent years about the use of art on the Jesuit
missions, it is worth summarizing the unique perception of art by this order because of
Bitti’s connection to it.93 Gauvin Bailey’s literature is quite comprehensive on this topic,
so a brief overview of the situation is adequate.94 The Jesuit approach to
93 Bailey and O’Malley, The Jesuits; idem, The Jesuits II.
94 Gauvin A. Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1999); idem, "The Jesuits and the Non-Spanish Contribution to
South American Colonial Architecture," in Hilmar M. Pabel and Kathleen M. Comerford, eds.,
Early Modern Catholicism: Essays In Honour of John O'Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2001): 211-40; idem, “‘Just like the Gesu’: Sebastiano Serlio, Giacomo Vignola, and Jesuit
Architecture in South America” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu 70, no. 140 (2001): 233-64;
idem, “Creating a Global Artistic Language in Late Renaissance Rome: Artists in the Service of
the Overseas Missions, 1542-1621,” in From Rome to Eternity: Catholicism and the Arts in Italy,
ca. 1550-1650, ed. Pamela M. Jones and Thomas Worcester (Boston: Brill, 2002), 226-48; idem,
Between Renaissance and Baroque; idem, “Jesuit Architecture in Colonial Latin America," in
Thomas Worcester, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008): 217-42.
conversion was, in comparison to some others, gentle. The order’s founder, Ignatius of
Loyola, had instilled a need to teach Christianity, rather than force its tenets on people.
The Jesuits took an intellectual approach to conversion; brothers were expected to be
cultured, educated, and knowledgeable about art and literature. They studied European
culture as well as the cultures of their missions, seeking to bring the most informed
approach to preaching possible, but also a knowledge of the lives and traditions of their
parishioners. At first, the limeños were shocked by the activities of the Jesuits throughout
the city, having experienced in the past only the more traditional orders, such as the
Franciscans and the Dominicans. Jesuit brothers strove to communicate, rather than
impose, the ideas and beliefs of Christianity to native populations. Formed by the ideas
of Saint Ignatius, they recognized the universal nature of visual imagery and its potential
to break down language barriers. Unlike many other European groups, the Jesuits, so
invested in the use of art, were even willing to adapt paintings, sculpture, and architecture
to the needs and tastes of the local population. Eventually, in Peru, this meant that
painting became infused with indigenous aesthetics and iconography. In the early
colonial period, during which Bitti was working, the adaptations were mild, more subtle.
While there is no obvious Andean symbolism in Bitti’s work, his style did strike a chord
with local audiences, which is why the Jesuits were so willing to send him all over the
colony.
In order to ascertain what Bitti’s style actually was, what follows is a survey and
analysis of his extant works in Lima. Numerous scholars have discussed Bitti in the past,
but their analysis of his paintings has usually been left at a designation of Mannerist. In
his important and groundbreaking study of art in Spain and its colonies, Martin Soria was
the first to assign this title of Mannerist to Bitti. Others, including Teresa Gisbert and
José de Mesa, have continued to refer to the artist as Mannerist. The most sophisticated
discussion of Bitti’s so-called Mannerism was written by the Peruvian scholar Francisco
Stastny in his 1981 article, “El Manierismo en la pintura colonial latinomericana,” in
which he argued that Bitti’s painting was somewhat revised from the Mannerism of Italy.
Stastny was correct in his assertion that Bitti’s paintings were not made in Italy and
therefore cannot be seen simply as imitations of Italian Mannerism, but instead were
particular to the context of painting in colonial Latin America.
The question of how to define and discuss works of art labeled “Mannerist” has
plagued scholars since the 1950s, when Walter Friedländer wrote his iconic Mannerism
and Anti-mannerism in Italian Painting (1957) and ignited a debate that occupied some
of the most influential scholars of late Italian Renaissance art for the next two decades.
Sydney Freedberg and John Shearman responded in the 1960s, offering their own
interpretations of Mannerism as erudite, refined, and intellectual. Craig Hugh Smyth
made his own contribution by differentiating between the Tuscan Mannerism of the
1520s and the Roman Mannerism that began in the 1530s. While each scholar’s
definition of Mannerism was slightly different, they all agreed on the consistent formal
characteristics of painting made in Italy at this time. Friedländer described stretched
limbs, the elimination of three-dimensional space, and a striving for beauty rather than
naturalism. Freedberg noted the presence of conscious artifice, grace, and refinement.
Shearman famously labeled Mannerism “the stylish style,” arguing that these paintings
consistently included self-conscious stylization. Smyth described the flatness of figures
and the turning and twisting of bodies in space. Each author cultivated his own
interpretation of Mannerism, but all saw similar formal conventions in art deemed
Mannerist. The goals of Mannerist artists of the 1520s and 1530s are unclear, but all three
scholars also agreed that intellectualism and erudition were important parts of this art
intended for high-class patrons. It is the formal conventions of Mannerism that are
evident in the work of Bernardo Bitti. Whatever the goal of Mannerism was in the 1520s
and 1530s, by the time Bitti was painting, he was merely adopting common stylistic
manipulations of figures and compositions that had by then been popular for nearly five
decades in central Italy. Throughout this chapter, I will discuss the Mannerist qualities of
Bitti’s paintings, always referring to the formal characteristics of this much debated and
quite complicated period or style of art in Italy.
Thus, the taste for Mannerist styling in formal choices became a hallmark of
Bitti’s oeuvre, but his work lacked the confusion, erudition, and sometimes erotic sway
that were important elements of art made in Florence and Rome in the middle of the
sixteenth century. Instead, even in his earliest paintings Bitti glorified and exalted some
of the most important causes of the Catholic Reformation.
Bitti was first occupied in Lima with making paintings for the main retablo of the
Church of San Pedro, which was the second, larger structure to be the Jesuits’ church,
which was built between 1569 and 1574. The sculptural framework was designed and
built by the Spanish artist Pedro de Vargas, and Bitti completed the paintings that would
fill the large altar. The high altar was forty feet high and decorated with paintings,
statues, and relief sculpture. Unfortunately, the retablo did not survive the violent
earthquakes that rocked Lima in the seventeenth century.
After working on the retablo, over the next five years Bitti completed his next
three paintings, all for the sacristy of the church of San Pedro. In these three paintings,
Bitti cultivated the style that would bring him widespread success in Peru. His
development as an artist is clear when these paintings are studied chronologically. The
preoccupation of Bitti and his patrons with Counter-Reformation issues is also obvious in
the consistent theme of all three paintings: the glorification of the Virgin Mary, a critical
mission of post-Tridentine Catholics.
In 1575, Bitti painted the largest and most complex canvas of his career, The
Coronation of the Virgin (Figure 1.4). The painting is symmetrically composed with the
Virgin Mary occupying the central space. Christ and God the Father, both supported by
angels, flank the Virgin on the left and right. Each delicately reaches out a hand to hold a
gold crown over her head. The Virgin’s eyes shift dramatically up to the crown, signaling
her body’s upward movement, propelled by angels and seraphs who support her on a bed
of clouds. Above the gold crown, at the pinnacle of the painting, is a white dove
representing the Holy Spirit. Around this quartet of divine figures presiding over the
heavens, celebration ensues. Angels of varying sizes and ages float through the sky
surrounding the coronation, some playing musical instruments, some regarding the event
as it unfolds, and some in poses that seem to simulate dance or merriment.
Stylistically, Bitti made formal choices throughout this painting that were consistent in
his work for much of the remainder of his career. For example, Bitti’s taste for
Mannerism’s elegant aesthetics is evident. The overall color of the painting is cool,
composed largely of soft blues, pinks, and a variety of earth tones including muddy
yellows, browns, and greens and the value of color changes with the movement of the
drapery. For example, the soft, pale pink of the Virgin’s tunic becomes a deep rose in the
shadows and the drapery folds of her deep blue cloak become bright white. Bitti’s cool
color palette and his manipulation of value are consistent with the Mannerist penchant to
modulate color in order to achieve heightened elegance and visual interest. The artist
perhaps most famous for this practice is Michelangelo, who used cangiantismo, a style of
modeling with shifts in color, to activate the flowing draperies of his prophets and sibyls
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The poses of Bitti’s figures also recall the Mannerist approach. Bitti’s figures do
not stand still and they do not position themselves along straight lines, but instead twist
and turn to create sinuous contours throughout the composition. There is great variety in
the poses and stances of the many figures that occupy this painting; the angels are
perhaps the best examples as each takes on its own pose and gaze in its own direction.
Additionally, the drapery of each figure adds to this lively array of movements. For
example, the Virgin’s blue cloak billows around her body as if activated by some inner
force. The pale pink cloth that wraps around Christ creates a wave that surrounds his
small body. Rarely does this drapery respond to the volumes of the body underneath,
although there are exceptions; Bitti was careful to use light and shadow to create volume
around the area of the Virgin’s abdomen, a sure reference to her sacred womb.
Among his adoption of Mannerism’s most common formal characteristics, Bitti also
made choices that reflect the period’s call for reform. Despite the elegant comportment
of Bitti’s figures and their unrealistic poses and drapery, the composition is symmetrical
and focused. Bitti positioned the Virgin in the center of the painting, drawing the
viewer’s attention directly to her. The Virgin, Christ and God the Father come together
in this painting not only through their central placement, but through their gazes, all of
which are directed at the crown that hovers above them. There is no doubt in the
viewer’s mind that this moment of reunion of Mother and Son, sanctioned by God the
Father and the Holy Spirit, is the focus and the story of this painting, and that it deserves
attention. In Bitti’s work are echoes of the reform of sacred painting to a clear, didactic
art form that was then widely popular in Rome.
Counter-Reformation values are evident in Bitti’s treatment of the subject matter
as well. In addition to a celebration of the Virgin’s ascension into heaven, the painting
prominently features the Trinity: Christ, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit. The concept
of the Trinity was central to the Catholic belief system, but was criticized by some
Protestant reformers. Although many, like Martin Luther, supported the concept of the
Trinity, the complexities of this fundamental belief of Christianity were debated by some
and at the Third Session of the Council of Trent, the Trinity became yet another cause of
the Counter-Reformation when the council officially re-affirmed the Nicene Creed’s
commitment to the idea of the Christian Trinity and condemned all those who dissented.
Therefore, references to the Trinity became important as propaganda. Bitti’s
inclusion of the Trinity as part of the Coronation of the Virgin was exactly consistent with
current iconographic trends. Prior to the sixteenth century, Italian,
Northern European, and Spanish artists alike preferred to show Christ alone crowning the
Virgin in heaven; this tradition originated in French Gothic sculpture. Bitti’s use of the
Trinity for the moment of coronation is an iconographic trend that was popularized by
Albrecht Dürer, in his engraving of the subject, which he added to his widely known and
internationally circulated series, The Life of the Virgin, in 1510 (Figure 1.5). Dürer’s
engraving was inspired by his painting of the Coronation in the Heller Altarpiece of
1508-9, which was radical in its unusual use of the Trinity for this moment of the
Christian narrative. By the time of the Counter-Reformation, painters of the Coronation
of the Virgin from Italy, Spain, and northern Europe were consistently including the
Trinity, not the singular Christ, as the entity bestowing the Virgin with the
crown and designating her Queen of Heaven. Erwin Panofsky noted that Dürer opted for
the Trinity as a way to more emphatically demonstrate the dignity and importance of the
Virgin. In the case of images of the Coronation, the Catholic Church sought to not only
exalt the Virgin Mary, but also to remind viewers that she would act as an intermediary
between humanity and Christ, asking for the forgiveness of mortal sins. Bitti and
other Counter-Reformation artists made this choice for the same reason: the new scheme
allowed for greater exaltation of the Virgin Mary.
Bitti’s painting does differ from Dürer’s engraving, however, in that the lower
realm of mortal onlookers has been completely removed, in favor of a scene that takes
place among angels in heaven. This too reflects the demands of the day. In the
fifteenthcentury Italian tradition, artists normally represented the crowning of the Virgin
occurring above a group of earthly figures, most often the apostles, who look on in
wonderment, as exemplified in a work by Giulio Romano from the 1520s (Figure 1.6),
now in the Vatican. However, to avoid confusion, post-Tridentine artists began depicting
the coronation as a heavenly vision, removed from the mortal setting, in order to clearly
distinguish heaven from earth. Bitti’s painting clearly sets the scene in the clouds of
heaven, with no earthly reminder in sight.
For Bitti, painting for a mixed audience of Europeans and newly converted
Indians and others, there were other considerations in addition to those facing Italian
artists concerned with the needs of the Counter-Reformation. Representations of the
Trinity were potentially problematic in the Andes, where the indigenous populations had
for centuries followed polytheistic religions. Christian missionaries sought to stamp out
any residue of such pagan beliefs and traditions. One can imagine that a painting
presented by Christian clergy of three beings, representative of the triune God, could be
confusing for some sectors of the local audience. These very same missionaries were
vehemently prohibiting the worship of multiple gods. Additionally, some Andean
religions represented their gods in threes. For example, three statues of Inti, the sun deity,
stood in Cuzco: Apointi, Churiinti, Intiquaoqui were the father Sun, the son Sun, and the
brother Sun. Upon learning of this predisposition for a conception of a trinity in the local
indigenous religions, the clergy attempted to use this potential complication to their
advantage. They preached the idea that the pre-Christian existence of a trinity was
merely a precursor for the true Trinity that the Indians were now learning about. The
Christian missionaries were presenting the truth that had been lying in wait, but obscured
for centuries.
Accordingly, images of the Trinity are common in colonial art. They were used as
tools to engage the indigenous peoples with an image that conjured up some familiarity.
But these images, as conveyers of the new, correct doctrine, needed to be appropriately
presented. To this end, priests and friars acting as patrons turned to the artistic and
religious commentary of the day. One important source was Jacobus Molanus’ De
picturis et imaginibus sacris liber, a manual for artists to use in representing Catholic
themes and subjects. Similar guides and manuals were not uncommon in the post-
Tridentine period when artists and patrons were sensitive to the need for decorum in
sacred art. Molanus’ treatise was widely used throughout Europe and evidence of its
dissemination in the Spanish art world is clear in Francisco Pacheco’s heavy reliance on
the book for sections of his Arte de la Pintura. Both Molanus and Pacheco were careful
to outline the appropriate depiction of the Trinity; an artist should never paint a man with
three faces or an image of the Trinity in the Virgin’s womb. Instead, the preference was
for the Father and Son to appear as distinctly different individuals, of different ages, and
for a dove to represent the Holy Spirit. It was this respected iconography that Bitti used
for his Coronation of the Virgin. His usage is in contrast to the more problematic imagery
that would prevail in the seventeenth century, as exemplified by an oil on copper painting
by an unknown Lima artist (Figure 1.7). In his earliest extant Peruvian
painting, Bitti began to develop his signature approach, steeped in the aesthetics of Italian
Mannerist form, but tailored to the atmosphere of Catholic reform in both style and
subject matter. In this an early work, however, the ambitions of the young artist seem to
have gotten the best of him. Unlike every other painting from Bitti’s oeuvre, this painting
has a figural confusion and crowding that results in a somewhat awkward composition.
The angels are perhaps the most confusing to the focus of the composition; their
contorted poses and odd gestures create confusion. The symmetrical focus of the overall
painting is challenged by the many directions of their gazes and gesticulations, which
force the viewer’s eye to jump around the painting, the mark of a young artist just
beginning to hone in on his skills and talents. Bitti’s later compositions were more
simple, concentrated, and centralized, often featuring only one or two figures (Figure
1.16).
Shortly after completing the early Coronation, in 1576, Bitti began work on the
first version of what would be his most common subject, the Virgin and Child. His first
large-scale exploration of the subject, known as the Virgin of the Candles (Figure 1.1) and
made for the same Church of San Pedro in Lima, introduces the composition and format
that he adhered to for much of his career. As in so many other paintings by Bitti, the
Virgin stands tall in the center of a vertical composition. He used her stature to illustrate
her importance; she consumes much of the space of the painting. Her elongated, oval
face, plump rosy cheeks, and impossibly long, bent neck became hallmarks of the
painter’s portrayal of the Holy Mother. Here, she holds the Christ Child effortlessly,
balancing his long body on the tips of her fingers. At each of the four corners of the
painting, angels raise lit candles in the Virgin’s honor. She gazes up, and to her right, as
if to signal the future reign of her young son at the right hand of God, in heaven.
Bitti’s painting of the Virgin Mary here is characteristic of nearly all of his future
paintings. Aside from consistent formal decisions about color and pose, Bitti also
maintained a singular goal throughout his depictions of the Virgin: to present her as holy
and divine. He draped her in a pink gown and a blue cloak, the same pale pastels that he
chose for the Coronation. More important than color choice here, however, is the
distinctive modeling of the drapery. The fabric falls in crisp, angular folds with a rhythm
and movement that does not always correspond to the volume of the body underneath.
Instead, the gown flows out around the Virgin’s body and then delicately gathers at her
feet. The bend of the Virgin’s knee is reflected by a sharp horizontal line, indicating the
most subtle of contrapposto poses. The movement of the drapery also reveals that this
woman does not have the proportions of an ordinary human body. Instead, her legs are
long and attenuated and her pose is somewhat anti-naturalistic and contorted. The slight
contrapposto and the turn of the neck and head harken back to a subdued figura
serpentinata, a favorite formula of many Mannerist painters. Finally, here, and in most of
Bitti’s paintings, the artist denied any illusion of three-dimensional space. There is no
recognizable setting. This too was a hallmark of Mannerist paintings in Italy, where
artists opted for what Sydney Freedberg deemed “the relief-like style,” in which figures
do not move freely in three-dimensional space, but twist and turn in a shallow space,
close to the picture plane. In the case of some Mannerist painters, and certainly in Bitti’s
paintings, this denial of space further removes the figures from the earthly, mortal realm,
placing them in some other sphere.
In The Virgin of the Candles, Bitti applied some of his experiences of Mannerist
aesthetics in Rome and Seville to his own work. The elegant but unrealistic proportions
of the Virgin, coupled with her graceful pose and demeanor, are reminiscent of Giorgio
Vasari in Rome and Luis de Morales in Seville. The former may have chosen grace and
elegance merely as a way to present a stylish, fashionable painting. Luis de Morales
adapted these popular formal choices to the needs of the spiritual renewal of the
CounterReformation and here Bitti adopted the same technique. The grace and elegance
of Mannerism, which informed Bitti’s painting, designate the Virgin as holy, divine, and
otherworldly. In addition, he surrounded the Virgin with a mandorla, a traditional symbol
used to designate her supreme holiness. The mandorla had been used by Christian artists
for centuries, most often to surround Christ, but also sometimes to emphasize the
importance of the Virgin or another holy figure. Never used to surround a living figure,
the mandorla is reserved solely to glorify the heavenly soul. Therefore, Bitti used the
mandorla to further remove the Virgin from the mortal, earthly realm and present her as
divine.
Bitti rendered the divinity of the Virgin clear and obvious because he was aware
that her status was of the utmost importance in this period. Over the last century, the
exalted status of the Virgin Mary had come under attack by Martin Luther and other
Protestant reformers. One advocate of the Reformation, Constantine Copronymus,
famously wrote, "When she bore Christ within her womb, she was like a purse filled with
gold. But after giving birth she was no more than an empty purse." Luther also asserted
that the Virgin was only as holy as any other believer in Christ, but the Catholic Church
vehemently contested this doctrine and defended the Virgin’s divinity. Paintings and
sculptures devoted to the Virgin from the Counter-Reformation period comprised part of
a campaign to showcase her holiness. Accordingly, in its celebration of the grandeur of
the Madonna, Bitti’s painting was very much of its time.
By the time Bitti painted his Virgin of the Expectation (Figure 1.8), the last of his
triad of paintings for San Pedro’s sacristy, completed sometime between 1577 and 1582,
he had solidified his goals as an artist. Bitti’s Virgin is yet again tall and elegant,
gracefully posed in a subtle contrapposto, and draped in cool colors. Her cloak again
billows around her body and her now familiar long neck extends her gaze into the
heavens. The surrounding angels pose in sometimes contorted, but always graceful
positions. In the Virgin of the Expectation, however, Bitti has refined his style. The
figures’ bodies are more refined, with careful modeling and fluid poses, and the
composition is more focused; the figures and they rays of divine light emphasize the
importance of the central focus, which the Virgin occupies. Bitti’s handling of the
drapery is more sophisticated here so that its movement around the Virgin allows her to
float elegantly in this space. There is something distant in her effortless demeanor that
signals her holiness. The use of grace to suggest divinity, which had been a hallmark of
Bitti’s paintings since his first, is more subtle and delicate here. In these earliest extant
paintings, Bitti matured as an artist and cultivated the style that ensured his success in
Peru over the next thirty years.
In terms of subject matter, Bitti yet again created a painting in celebration of the
Virgin with learned, specific references to her holiness. The painting references the
Catholic Feast of the Blessed Virgin of the Expectation, a holiday that was particularly
popular in Spain and was celebrated on December 18. The feast day, and this painting,
are sometimes also referred to as the Virgin of the O, a reference to the long chants of “O”
made by clerics after evening prayers on December 18, in eager longing of the birth of
Christ. Herein lies the painting’s real subject. Again a celebration of the Virgin Mary,
this painting takes her importance even further, making her the supreme focus, without
visual mention of Christ, as the painting is about the anticipation of Christ’s birth. In it,
Bitti incorporated clues of the baby’s future arrival and gave the viewer a sense of the
significance of this approaching moment. The Virgin stands in awe, her hand to her
heart, light illuminating her slightly distended abdomen. The surrounding angels here do
not yet play their instruments as they did in the Coronation and they do not yet extend
candles as they did the Virgin of the Candles. Here angels begin to wave banners that will
serve as swaddling clothes for the Child. They only just prepare to play music in
glorification of His birth; at the bottom left, an angel is uncovering his cello. The
painting carries an emphatic message of the Virgin’s importance, and her love of and
devotion to Christ is clear in her reverent pose and focus on heaven. This moment
anticipates the event of Christ’s birth that will demonstrate the communion of heaven and
earth that occurred through Mary. The subject of Bitti’s painting has further importance
in this particular moment and setting because, although the day had been celebrated by
the Spanish for centuries, Pope Gregory XIII had only just approved the feast day in
1573.
In studying Bitti’s earliest extant paintings, it becomes clear why the Jesuits might
have been so attracted to him. The elegance and grace of his paintings were signals of
the artist’s prestige as a product of the Italian culture that was so widely admired
throughout Europe. These qualities also allowed Bitti to suggest the otherworldly
holiness of his figures that placed them on a pedestal to be worshipped by viewers.
Despite this elegant styling, however, Bitti’s paintings remained legible, focused, and
didactic, qualities that the Counter-Reformation Church demanded. In subject matter as
well, Bitti addressed some of the most important issues of the post-Tridentine world. All
three paintings celebrate the Virgin, each presenting a specific manifestation of the
Catholic defense of the Mother of Christ. The paintings must represent the careful
collaboration of the learned Jesuits brothers who acted as patrons and advisors with a
trusted painter, who as a Jesuit and artist himself also understood the issues at hand.
Portraits at the University of San Marcos
Although religious paintings make up nearly all of Bitti’s oeuvre, there is one
portrait in Lima that he painted early in his time in the city. In 1575, the year of the
young artist’s arrival, he may have painted a portrait of Gerónimo López Guarnido
(Figure 1.9) for the University of San Marcos, where Guarnido was a professor. The
portrait does not have a signature and has only been attributed to Bitti. The city’s two
other Italian transplants also contributed to the large collection still housed in the museum
at San Marcos; Mateo Pérez de Alesio painted Luis López de Solís, and signed the
painting, (Figure 1.10) and there is a portrait of Fray Juan de Lorenzana (Figure 1.11)
attributed to Medoro. In this section, I will discuss the portraits of all three artists
because they are so closely related. In addition, as some of the earliest portrait painters in
Lima, the three Italians collectively influenced the genre of portraiture in Lima well into
the seventeenth century.
The University of San Marcos was the first university in Peru and it is still active
today. In the colonial period, the faculty was composed of many of the most important
and influential members of Lima society. Professors were drawn from the noble classes,
and often from the government. For example, Bitti’s sitter, Gerónimo López Guarnido,
was a successful lawyer and teacher from Seville who originally came to the New World
to aid the Spanish in dealing with a rebellion in Panama. He came to Peru following his
time in Panama and worked as a lawyer for the city of Lima and a fiscal advisor to the
government. The viceroy Francisco de Toledo, impressed with his abilities and with his
loyalty, deemed Guarnido “defender of the Indies.” Later, he started the law school of the
University of San Marcos and would eventually become the school’s rector. The
University, then, was a prestigious center of learning from its beginning, employing only
the most elite of Lima society; officially, the school admitted only descendants of
Europeans as students and graduates were considered of the highest class in colonial
Lima. Lavish ceremonies were thrown to introduce new graduates to the city, with
celebrations in the streets and students parading through the city, as bystanders cheered.
These young men were, after all, not just new college graduates, but representatives of
the new generation of European presence in Peru. Quite early in its history, then, the
University of San Marcos became a symbol of the Old World in the New and a vehicle
for bringing European knowledge and ideas to colonial Peru. European history and
culture were taught to students by the noble, learned, and experienced of European
society, and all three Italian painters working in Lima were hired to commemorate
powerful participants in the university.
A recent catalogue of the holdings of the university’s museum showcases the
school’s tradition, which began in Bitti’s time and still prevails, of commissioning painted
portraits of important and influential professors. The catalogue illustrates fifty portraits
of past members of the faculty, with the function of commemorating the men who helped
to establish and build the university’s curriculum. While the portraits had a specific, local
significance in Lima, the practice of collecting portraits of great men is one that relates to
more universal customs of the European Renaissance.
Portraiture enjoyed prominence throughout the Renaissance in many parts of
Europe and while the first goal of portraiture was certainly commemoration and often
propaganda, there developed a belief that portraits could do more than just establish a
memory. As the status of portraiture rose in the Renaissance, portrait collections became
common in Europe and came to include not only images of ancestors and friends, but also
of great people of the past. Andrea del Castagno’s fifteenth-century series of frescoes of
famous men and women, made for the Villa Carducci, exemplifies this tradition; it
includes portraits of Filippo Scolari and Farinata degli Uberti who, as military leaders,
were representative of the virtues of an active life, as well as portraits of Giovanni
Bocaccio and Francesco Petrarch, both writers, whose images were meant as a
celebration of the contemplative life. Many in the Renaissance believed that images of
great men had the power not only to commemorate achievement, but also to inspire
greatness in viewers. A well-known patron of the portraiture genre was Paolo Giovio,
who collected portraits because he believed, in his own words, “that through emulation of
their example good mortals might be inflamed to seek glory.” Accordingly, the collection
of portraits at the University of San Marcos can be understood in the same context; lining
the walls of the university were images of the individuals responsible for teaching
European ideas in the viceregal capital. The series of portraits serves as a visual
representation of the importation of European culture and intellect into Lima. Perhaps
the sitters served as inspiration to students to embrace the ideals of the Old World.
The sitters captured by Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro are representative of the high rank and
reputation of the university’s faculty. As mentioned, Guarnido was influential in Lima’s
government and the university; having arrived in the city already with much acclaim and
experience, he quickly rose to local prominence. Alesio’s sitter, Luis López de Solís, was
an Augustinian who came to Lima from Salamanca, Spain and became the university’s
first professor of sacred theology. After his time in Lima, he went on to become the
bishop of Quito and Popayán and then the archbishop of Charcas.
Medoro’s portrait captures the likeness of perhaps the most famous of the three, Fray
Juan de Lorenzana. A Dominican, he was educated by the order in Salamanca, and
invited to Lima to work at the court of the Inquisition, but he would also come to serve as
a professor of theology at the University. However, Juan de Lorenzana is best known
for his relationship with the New World’s first saint, Saint Rose of Lima, for whom he
served as confessor. Juan de Lorenzana knew Saint Rose well, heard many of her
confessions throughout her short and difficult life, and played an important role in the
campaign for her canonization.
The three men captured by Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro represented the elite of Lima
society and their portraits, commissioned for the university, could have acted as vehicles
for presenting exemplary citizens that should be followed. As capital and seat of the
viceroy, Lima was built up as a new European city in the New World and these men
represented the prestigious European presence in Lima, and in the viceroyalty. That all
three Italian artists were called to complete a portrait for this collection is the introduction
to a revealing trend. Time and time again, the Italians received the most prestigious
commissions in Lima.
The collection of portraits at the University of San Marcos should also be
understood within the larger context of portraiture in Europe. Portraiture enjoyed a
resurgence during the Renaissance, after a lapse in the Middle Ages. Humanism inspired
a celebration of the individual, a phenomenon that is nowhere more apparent than in the
widespread practice of commissioning portraits. It became common to have portraits
painted of nearly every member of a royal court, often many versions done in different
combinations of sitters. Portraits of individuals were common, but family portraits and
portraits of couples were also popular. Traditions of portraiture were established and at a
certain point, both sitter and artist began to recognize that portraits could be manipulated
to convey a desired message or present an approved persona of an individual. Costume,
setting, company, gaze, and facial expression contributed to the creation of portraits that
did so much more than simply present a visual likeness of a man or woman. For
example, profile portraits of fifteenth-century Italian men recalled the images of Roman
emperors that adorned coins of the ancient period, young ladies bedecked in lavish
fabrics and expensive jewels announced wealth and status, and sprawling landscape
backgrounds alluded to territory owned and controlled. When artists turned their sitters
towards the viewer, facial expressions and gazes helped to suggest personality. The
portraits by Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro came after these transitions in portraiture towards
more complete images of both physical likeness and personality, and fit into a moment of
the late-sixteenth century in Italian portraiture, a period consumed by Mannerist
approaches to painting. Status and persona were always important parts of Renaissance
portraiture, but never so much as in the second half of the sixteenth century when people
became more interested in adopting high-class demeanor as dictated by the elite and
learned in society. Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier taught etiquette to those
who wished to be perceived as noble and educated. In portraiture, the Italian Mannerist
painters found new ways to suggest status and prestige by distancing their sitters from the
audience, both physically and psychologically. This slight remove from the viewer,
suggested by cold glances and stiff poses, was common, and popularized by painters such
as Agnolo Bronzino. Fashionable among the courtly classes of Italy and Spain in the
sixteenth century, the Mannerist approach was adopted by these three Italian transplants.
In all three Lima portraits, the sitters convey a cool distance from the viewer’s world in
order to suggest status and importance. For example, in Bitti’s portrait, Guarnido stands
in a three-quarters position, turns his body and head slightly away from the audience, but
gazes deliberately and confidently back out at the viewer. His gaze, however, is certainly
not engaging or inviting, but cool and distant. Alesio and Medoro used similar
compositions to convey the psychological distance of
their sitters.
The lack of emotion and expression in these three portraits is also consistent with
the goals of many examples of colonial Latin American portraiture. Portraiture was a
popular medium in the New World, but it has been largely overlooked by scholars, likely
because colonial portraits generally lack the personality that was increasingly attributed
to sitters in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. However, colonial patrons and
artists did not seek to portray the inner experiences and feelings of sitters; instead,
portraits were about conveying status and heritage. In this regard, the portraits in San
Marcos by Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro were successful.
Unfortunately, these three portraits are today in poor condition. All have been
heavily damaged and then restored, resulting in paintings that retain little of the original
brushwork of the artists. Therefore, any attempt at stylistic analysis is difficult. In Bitti’s
Guarnido, however, are reminders of the painter’s tendency for sharp lines to indicate
facial features.
Still easily perceived, however, are the nearly identical compositions of the
portraits. In each, the painter has captured a full-length image of the sitter. Each stands
next to a table, on top of which are books and other objects that contribute to the
presentation of a biography and persona of the man. In each, also, the painter has
included a cartouche with an inscription detailing the sitter’s name, title, and position,
and any other details that might have seemed pertinent. In the earliest of the three, Bitti
has included a headpiece on the table that must indicate rank or profession, although the
murkiness of the painting’s current state makes any identification of the attribute
impossible. Additionally, Alesio and Medoro chose to include headpieces as well. In
Alesio’s painting, the three identical caps signify López’s three occasions of serving as
bishop in various cities throughout Peru. In each of the three paintings, too, the artist has
included the heraldic shield of the sitter’s family, as European heritage was of course
imperative for anyone hoping to rise to prominence and power in the viceroyalty. In
addition, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the university only accepted those of
purely European ethnicity; the university’s regulations were symbolic of the stratification
of society in colonial Lima, within which those of Indian blood were placed on the lowest
rank. The shields reinforce here the importance of Old World lineage. The visual
similarities among all three portraits discussed here are related to conventions of
Renaissance portraiture, but may be indicative of the artists having viewed each other’s
work, since all of the portraits were displayed at the University of San Marcos. It seems
likely that one must have influenced the next. Certainly, also, the patrons likely wanted
some continuity among the paintings since they were intended as a sort of group.
The influence of the Italian portraits in the San Marco collection is clear upon examining
examples from later years. As early as 1619, an unknown painter completed a portrait of
Feliciano de Vega y Padilla (Figure 1.12), and followed the same compositional format
as the Italians. The identity and standing of this sitter are similarly conveyed through
costume and accompanying attributes. But perhaps most akin to Bitti, Alesio, and
Medoro, this artist too has carefully crafted a slight remove in the stance and facial
expression of Feliciano in order to suggest his elevated status. As late as 1646, another
unknown artist painted a portrait of Diego de Vergara (Figure 1.13), and
followed the same guidelines.
In addition to composition, there is one final quality shared by all three portraits
by the Italians that influenced future artists working on the San Marco collection. Artists
who made portraits from the series before those by Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro rendered
their sitters in a style that is somewhat flat, without much three-dimensional modeling in
the faces and bodies of the sitters. An example is the earliest in the catalogue, a portrait
by an unknown artist of Fray Tomás de San Martín (Figure 1.14), from 1554. In
comparison to Medoro’s Juan de Lorenzana, Fray Tomás lacks refined volume,
especially in the face. Once the Italians introduced this more naturalistic approach in
their portraits, subsequent artists followed. Later portraits from the San Marcos
collection, such as that of Feliciano de Vega y Padilla, mentioned earlier, show
threedimensionality and naturalism in the use of light and shadow well into the middle of
the seventeenth century, when tastes began to change and artists reverted back to a flat,
more abstract style of construction. The impact of Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro at San
Marcos is evident in the consistent use of their styles and compositions for subsequent
commissions. The collection at San Marcos is a microcosm of the kind of influence the
Italians went on to have throughout Lima and Peru. Patrons saw them as the highest and
best in their craft, so they were hired for important projects and their paintings stood as
examples for younger artists to follow.
Bitti and the Doctrina Christiana
In his first years in Peru, Bitti solidified his appeal with the Jesuits and beyond,
and by the early 1580s, the order began to send him to cities throughout the viceroyalty to
make paintings for other churches and monasteries. Bitti’s became the style that the
Jesuits hoped to use and spread. Before leaving Lima for the first time, however, Bitti
may have been involved in another important project. In 1583, the first printer arrived in
Lima and set up shop. Antonio Ricardo was a native of the Piedmont region of Italy, but
he had spent the previous ten years in Mexico City, printing books, and came to Lima
seeking more opportunity, which he found. Although many books had been imported
from Europe into Lima, books were not printed in the city itself before Ricardo’s arrival.
The need grew for books specific to the workings of the viceroyalty and it seems that
Antonio Ricardo was the best candidate for the job of printer. Early American
printers used the books housed by monastic libraries as inspiration and models. It took
only a year in Lima for Ricardo to be granted permission by the viceroy and the king to
open a print shop, which is another instance of an Italian who was quickly welcomed into
the city’s culture, much like Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro. According to the city’s records,
by 1583, a large population of Italians, of many different trades, were living in Lima so it
is possible that Ricardo had connections to some of the city’s residents. In addition,
Ricardo had spent much of his time in
Mexico printing books for the Jesuits and it was the Jesuits who housed his print shop in
Lima and gave him his first assignment. This first task was to print the Doctrina
Christiana, also sometimes referred to as the Major Catechism, which was completed in
1584. Jose de Acosta, a well-known and influential Jesuit, coordinated the writing and
printing of the book, which reflected his own and the Jesuits’ efforts to communicate with
the indigenous populations in the most successful ways possible by printing the text in
Spanish, and the native languages, Quechua, and Aymara.
This early book also provided the first opportunities for images to be printed in
Peru, including four woodcuts: The Trinity, The Coronation of the Virgin, a profile
Portrait of Christ, and The Last Supper. The style of all four images is distinctly
Mannerist and thus points to Bitti’s likely involvement. Teresa Gisbert has asserted that a
skilled European master must have designed the drawings for these images and has
suggested the Bitti was the probable artist of the Trinity and the Coronation of the Virgin
(Figure 1.15). Unfortunately, there remains no documentary evidence for this proposal,
and while the attribution is possible since Bitti was also in residence with the Jesuits in
Lima when Ricardo was working on the Doctrina, it seems more likely that it is his
influence that is clear in these prints. More specifically, his Coronation of the Virgin
(Figure 1.4) from the Sacristy of San Pedro is related to both prints. The arrangements of
figures in both of the woodcuts are visually close to the composition of Bitti’s painted
figures. There are, however, some key differences that may indicate the hand of a less
experienced and less knowledgeable artist. In the printed Trinity, Christ is shown on the
right and God the Father is on the left, while the standard iconographic tradition, which
Bitti adhered to in his painting of the Coronation, is the reverse. This practice served to
reserve the right, and holier, side for God the Father. The reversal could have resulted
from an artist copying Bitti’s painted composition without making the necessary reversal
of the image for the printing process. In the printed Coronation of the Virgin, the older
man, presumably God the Father, is represented on the right, but he holds the cross
normally given to Christ, another confusion of traditional iconography that is unlikely to
have been done by Bitti himself. Ultimately, no secure evidence can link the prints in the
Doctrina Christiana to the hand of Bitti and in the end, it is unlikely that he himself
designed the prints, as there is no documentation of any involvement with printmaking in
any stage of his career. In addition, an artist, and Jesuit brother, who consistently
adopted the most up-to-date and accurate sacred iconography in his work, likely would
not have made the errors and confusions pointed out here. However, his influence, in
both composition and formal style, is clear.
Travels through Peru
By 1584, Bitti was in Cuzco, the first city outside of Lima that he visited and a
very important city in the viceroyalty. As the former capital of the Inca empire, Cuzco
had a rich native history, unlike Lima, so the need for European and Catholic presence
was great. The Jesuits had built a large church, The Church of the Compañia, in Cuzco in
the late-sixteenth century and when Bitti arrived in 1584, they immediately put him to
work making paintings for the main retablo. Initially, Bitti was called to Cuzco for this
very commission, by Padre Jose Teruel, the head of the Jesuit church in the city. Bitti
worked side-by-side with Pedro de Vargas, the sculptor who contributed to the altarpiece
for the Church of San Pedro in Lima. The largest panel of the Cuzco retablo was an
image of the Transfiguration and other panels told of the life and miracles of Christ and
several of stories from the life of the Virgin. Many of the paintings for the retablo,
including the Transfiguration, as well as the framework and sculpture, were lost in the
massive earthquake of 1650. However, one painting, The Coronation of the Virgin
(Figure 1.16), is extant and in good condition, although it now hangs in the Monastery of
the Merced, a block from its original location.
This was Bitti’s second painting of the subject and in comparison to his Lima
version, some consistency of style is clear, but also evident is the greater maturity of the
now slightly older Bitti, in the more refined understanding of composition. The earlier
Coronation (Figure 1.4) is busy and crowded and many of the angels are scattered in their
poses and gazes. For the later painting, Bitti streamlined his presentation of the narrative,
by condensing it into fewer figures and arranging the composition in a more orderly and
focused manner. By shifting from the horizontal composition of the Lima painting to this
vertical form, Bitti intensified the focus on the Virgin Mary. She stands tall along the
central axis of the painting and the other figures react to her presence. The angels in this
painting, although still in the midst of various kinds of celebration through pose, gesture,
and music-making, now converse with each other or regard the Virgin; those that appear
behind the Virgin and the Trinity are lined up in neat rows.
Notwithstanding the compositional changes, Bitti’s style and approach remained
consistent with his work in Lima. His figures are characteristically sweet, graceful and
elegant, with elongated proportions, stylized drapery, and twisted poses, all to indicate
holiness and divinity. The heavenly setting of this scene, with clouds, sacred and angelic
figures, removed from the mortal realm, is evident in the flatness of the space and the
lack of reference to anything earthly. Bitti was clearly maintaining the style that brought
him success and acclaim in Lima.
After several years in Cuzco, in 1586 Bitti traveled next to Juli, a city that took
him farther into the hinterlands, to work again for the Jesuits. Juli is a small town on
Lake Titicaca, in southern Peru. The city occupied part of the former Lupaqa kingdom,
which predated the Inca and had maintained much of its power in the region throughout
the sixteenth century. The religion of the Lupaqa was similar to that of the Inca and other
Andean belief systems and remained a powerful part of the occupants’ lives when the
Jesuits arrived. A past attempt at conversion to Christianity had failed as the people of
Juli were resistant to a small group of Dominicans who had traveled there before the
Jesuits, who consequently gave up and abandoned the monastery they built in the city.
The Jesuits arrived in 1576 and were also tempted to flee, but stayed due to political
pressure from the viceroy, Toledo.
Father Diego de Bracamonte, the superior of the Jesuits in Juli, had recently
suffered a failure on his last mission in the town of Huarochiri, so his success here was
critical. It seems that the Jesuit learned from his experience in Huarochiri and made
some changes to his approach. In Huarochiri, Bracamonte and his fellow Jesuits had
been pleasantly surprised by the natives’ willingness to participate in the Church’s rituals
and allowed them to maintain some local traditions, including the performance of Indian
dances during the Feast of Corpus Christi. Although the missionaries were sure that this
ancient religion should not be supported, they believed that the strong religious base of
the natives would help in their efforts to build up a connection to Christianity. As it
turned out, however, much to the dismay of the Jesuits, the Indians were not merely
performing some of their own rituals, but were holding strongly onto the beliefs of their
own religion, while essentially playing along with the requests of the missionaries.
Upon arrival in Juli, the Jesuits recognized, perhaps more than ever, the need to assert
European presence and dominance. Therefore, all indigenous religious activities were
banned. Under these circumstances, the need for a European artist, such as Bitti, to create
appropriate religious images would have been significant.
Bitti delivered the Mannerist-inspired paintings that followed the dictates of the
Council of Trent and had already garnered him success. Five paintings by his hand can
be identified today in Juli: The Holy Family, The Baptism of Christ, Saint John the
Baptist in the Desert, and St. Catherine and Saint Margaret (Figures 1.17, 1.18, 1.19, and
1.20). Although the sharp modeling of the facial features and the cool coloring of the
drapery are clearly characteristic of Bitti, some elements in these paintings are new. In all
but the painting of Saint Catherine, Bitti set his figures, for the first time, in landscapes.
They do, however, remain close to the picture plane; he clearly was not interested in or
not able to place these figures convincingly into an illusionistic space. Instead, the
landscape is merely a backdrop to the theatrical performance of these actors who are
close to the audience. It would have been a common Mannerist trope to place the figures
in the foreground, positioned close to the picture plane, in the “relief-like style” discussed
earlier. In the past Bitti had consistently denied any sense of deep space or perspective,
but usually he achieved this shallow field of vision by using a dark gray or brown
backdrop behind his figures. In these paintings in Juli, the backdrop is landscape,
signaling that these figures occupy an earthly setting.
Several scholars have asserted that this sudden change in Bitti’s style to include
landscape and consider depth might have been a result of meeting another Italian artist,
Mateo Pérez de Alesio, who was in Europe longer than Bitti, until 1589, and therefore
was exposed to the interest in naturalism that began to creep into Italian and Spanish art
in the end of the sixteenth century and flourished in the seventeenth century. Alesio was
in Rome with artists such as Scipione Pulzone, who popularized a highly naturalistic,
although somewhat static style of painting to satisfy Catholic patrons during the
CounterReformation. Alesio never left Lima once he arrived, but Bitti did make several
trips back to the capital throughout his travels, and must have known Alesio and his
work. This experiment with landscape and perspectival space, however, did not last in
Bitti’s work, and so does not mark a definitive shift or change in his style. In subsequent
paintings, although he implemented a landscape setting in a painting or two from later
years, Bitti, for the most part, returned to his use of dark, dim, flat backgrounds.
After six years of traveling between Juli, several cities in Bolivia, and Lima, Bitti
returned to Cuzco and stayed until 1598. During this stay in Cuzco he completed a
number of small paintings, including The Virgin and Child with the Parrot (Figure 1.21),
for the Cathedral, and Christ Carrying the Cross (Figure 1.22), which is now in a private
collection. His biggest project was a commission to paint eight canvases depicting the
Passion of Christ and the Virgin Mary, for the current rector of the Jesuit church in
Cuzco, Father Manuel Vázquez.166 This group included the Agony in the Garden (Figure
1.23), which is now housed in Lima’s Museum of Art. Like his recent paintings in Juli,
in this image, Bitti included a landscape backdrop and experimented with foreshortened
figures. Also in this group from the Compañia was the Immaculate Conception (Figure
1.24), a commission that gave Bitti the opportunity to paint one of the most popular
subjects in colonial Latin American art. This subject that was common in Europe at this
time as well; the Catholic Reformers took as one of their most important causes the
defense of the immaculate conception of the Virgin, a doctrine that the Protestants had
wholeheartedly rejected. In Latin America, where the Virgin Mary became protectress,
and where this image had appeared to the Indian Juan Diego in Mexico, causing
widespread devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, paintings of the Immaculate Virgin were
widespread. Bitti’s Immaculate Conception would have been one of the earliest in Peru
and so probably helped to establish iconographic traditions and standards for the image.
Bitti’s painting typifies images of the Immaculate Conception, in which the
Virgin Mary, radiating golden light, stands on a crescent moon. Surrounding her, tucked
into bunches of white clouds, are emblems that represent her story and her purity. The use
of emblems of the Virgin in the border of the painting was common in Spanish and Latin
American versions of the Immaculate Virgin. Bitti’s painting of this subject was but one
of many to spread this composition and this iconography to the many artists who would
take up this theme in the coming centuries. However, there is evidence of his direct
influence in the Monastery of the Merced, where the painting hangs today. An
anonymous work from the mid-seventeenth century (Figure 1.25) is almost an exact copy
of Bitti’s painting and serves as evidence that Peruvian painters occasionally worked
directly from the Italian master’s pieces.
Bitti’s most direct impact on art in Cuzco is perhaps evident in the work of
Gregorio Gamarra, his most famous follower, who spent much of his career in Cuzco.
Bitti’s influence in Cuzco was much more widespread than a few paintings that are copies
of his work, as it was here that Bitti’s most famous follower spent much of his career.
Gregorio Gamarra (active 1601-1630s) first encountered the Jesuit in Potosí, and later
moved to Cuzco, where he had the opportunity to see many more of Bitti’s paintings. A
Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (Figure 1.26) in the Church of the
Recoleta in Cuzco has been attributed to Gamarra. The artist’s style, here, is closely
linked to Bitti’s Mannerism, in its reliance on linear, abstract figures and flat space, and in
the delicacy of the Virgin’s features. As Mesa and Gisbert have pointed out, it is likely
that Gamarra’s painting was directly influenced by Bitti’s version of the subject in the
Monastery of the Merced.
The Italian’s influence continued to flourish in Cuzco, as evidenced in the
painting of an artist who could not possibly have met Bitti, Lázaro Pardo Lagos, who first
appears in archival documents in 1630. Bitti was back in Lima by the early seventeenth
century and died in 1610, but his legacy lived on in Cuzco not only through his paintings,
but through his many followers. Mesa and Gisbert have suggested that
Lagos knew Gregorio Gamarra and absorbed Italian Mannerist style through him. His
Assumption of the Virgin (Figure 1.27), made for Cuzco’s Church of Saint Christopher, is
a copy of an engraving by Cornellis Galle I, after a painting by Peter Paul Rubens. Both
Galle and Rubens were influential in Peru, but the musical angels surrounding the
hovering Virgin are closely indebted to Bitti. Those angels first appeared in Bitti’s Lima
Coronation of the Virgin and reappeared in his later version of the subject, made for the
Church of the Compañia in Cuzco. In Pardo Lagos’s Calvary (Figure 1.28), in the
Church of Saint Catherine in Cuzco, the delicate, linear modeling of his figures’ features
is also reminiscent of Bitti.
Through artists like Gamarra and Pardo Lagos, Bitti’s Italian Mannerist legacy
lived on in Cuzco, but it did not end there. Chapter 4 will discuss Bitti’s influence on
painting in Cuzco and beyond more extensively; here, it suffices to note that Bitti’s mark
on painting in Cuzco was profound and long-lasting.
After Bitti’s time in Juli and his two stays in Cuzco, he continued to travel as the
Jesuits’ principal artist. The assignments took him to Puno, on Lake Titicaca and even to
La Paz and Sucre, in Bolivia, which was part of the viceroyalty of Peru in the colonial
period. In Sucre, Bitti completed numerous paintings, including Saint John the
Evangelist, Child Jesus, and Christ at the Column (Figure 1.29, 1.30, and 1.31), all for
the Church of San Miguel. Bitti’s influence in Bolivia was great, as noted by Gisbert and
de Mesa in many of their publications. A recent catalogue illustrates numerous Bolivian
paintings that are evidence of Bitti’s influence there. A painting of the Virgin and Child
(Figure 1.32) now in the Museo Nacional de Arte in La Paz, made by an unknown artist
sometime between 1610 and 1620, belongs to the school of painters formed around Bitti’s
style. The distinctively linear modeling of the figures, the tight space of the composition,
and the attenuated physical features are reminiscent of Bitti.
Bitti’s Popularity
Bitti’s familiar style is consistent through all of the paintings just discussed and
the geographical spread of his activities is illustrative of his popularity. Unlike the other
Italian painters, Alesio and Medoro, who remained in Lima for their entire Peruvian
careers, Bitti traveled throughout the viceroyalty and so was afforded the opportunity to
widely disseminate his style of painting. Unfortunately, the precise dates for all of Bitti’s
travel are not known and his exact path cannot be retraced, but, the extant paintings
scattered around colonial Peru make it possible to reconstruct a rough outline of his
career. For example, Bitti was in Arequipa early in the seventeenth century, for one of his
last trips. At the Church of the Compañia in Arequipa, Bitti completed numerous
paintings, including The Risen Christ (Figure 1.33) and The Virgin and Child (Figure
1.34).
In the Arequipa Virgin and Child, the elements that are consistently recognizable
in Bitti’s paintings are familiar and the flirtations with naturalism have been eliminated.
The cool color palette of the drapery of both Mother and Child along with their attenuated
bodies and sharp features convey their divinity. Here the Christ Child is particularly large
for a baby, and must fold his body to fit into his mother’s arms. Bitti emphatically
demonstrated the extraordinary nature of this child through his otherworldly, anti-
naturalistic proportions.
A consistent element of Bitti’s style since his beginnings in Lima, the overall
flatness of the figures and the space that they occupy, is particularly evident in the
Arequipa Madonna and Child. His elegant Mannerist styling was reminiscent of the
prestige of Italian Renaissance culture and served to represent the presence of the Old
World in the Spanish colony. His understanding of the reforms dictated by the Council of
Trent and ability to adapt his paintings to those iconographic and stylistic needs certainly
also contributed to his acclaim. However, it is crucial to consider that the majority of the
audience for his paintings was not European, but indigenous. There must have been
qualities in his paintings that appealed to the native viewers as well, or the Jesuits would
have found him less useful.
To summarize, Bitti’s figures are often flat, lacking in three-dimensionality and
volume. Rather than detailed modeling of light and shadow that would suggest robust
bodies underneath drapery, Bitti tended to rely much more heavily on line to define his
forms. His figures are linear, often surrounded by outlines to define their bodies. Bitti
used linearity and flatness to demonstrate that these beings were not human, but divine, to
give to them an ethereal quality that removed them from the earthly, mortal world. By
removing humanity from his figures, these qualities also made them more symbolic than
real. The paintings are not meant to be human embodiments of the saints they depict, but
merely symbols of them.
Linear, abstract design was also a hallmark of some indigenous Andean aesthetics.
Although much ancient art from Peru was lost or destroyed during the conquest and many
traditions of art-making died out or were intentionally extinguished by the Spanish as part
of the spread of Christianity and the extirpation of idolatry, plenty of local art forms
continued to flourish throughout the colonial period. Andean artists continued to make
textiles, ceramics, gold and silverwork, and the queros. In its characteristic decoration,
the quero cup can serve, here, as one example of indigenous aesthetics. A wooden vessel
used in Andean rituals, quero cups provide a unique opportunity to study pre- and post-
conquest indigenous art because, first of all, a number of examples from the pre-
Columbian period remain. However, the decorations on the queros did undergo a change
in the colonial period. Pre-conquest quero imagery was mostly composed of abstract,
geometric designs incised into the wooden vessel (Figure 4.29). In the colonial period,
the makers of queros incorporated painted figural designs, a change that, as Thomas
Cummins argues, was most likely spurred by Andean exposure to European image-
making (Figure 4.32). Although the imagery changed dramatically, one formal
characteristic of quero designs remained the same; the decoration was always stylized
and linear in nature. The artists typically depicted the figures frontally or in profile, along
a flat ground line, rarely with the inclusion of a background or setting. These figures are
emblematic: they are not part of any explicit pictorial narrative, much like the lack of
narrative in Bitti’s paintings. Bitti’s paintings are iconic; he does not seek to tell a story
in his compositions, but to present a holy figure to be revered. His figures tend to stand
alone or with minimal additional figures, in front of either a blank or simple landscape
background, much like the figures painted on a quero.
There may be a relationship between Bitti’s consistently flat, linear style and the
aesthetics of some indigenous art; perhaps Bitti chose this style, at least in part, to allude
to indigenous art he had seen in colonial Peru. A famous example of flat linear style
associated with an indigenous artist of the colonial period is the work of Guaman Poma
de Ayala in his Nueva Corónica y buen gobierno, completed in 1615, and intended for the
King of Spain, Phillip II. Guaman Poma wrote this book to express his dissatisfaction
with the situation in colonial Peru. As it was intended for the king, he used a format that
would have been familiar to a European viewer, even hoping for the book to be printed,
recognizing the status of printed books in Europe. In it, Guaman Poma told the history of
the Andean people from creation to the conquest through a combination of text and line
drawings. Some of the drawings illustrate his assertion that the Andeans were devout,
believing Christians, who contributed to the spread of the religion in the viceroyalty.
Guaman Poma’s use of text and illustration to tell his story is representative of the
adoption of European pictorial and literary narrative traditions by many colonial Andean
artists. However, Guaman Poma did incorporate some Andean conventions in his
images.
The manuscript is a hybrid of Christian European beliefs and local Andean
conventions. Christian narratives consistently inform the subject matter and in many
instances, it is clear that Guaman Poma understands European Christian iconographic
traditions, either from having read texts such as The Golden Legend, or from seeing
works of art by European artists in Peru. However, the style of the images is steeped in
indigenous traditions. Valerie Fraser has suggested that the artist maintained traditional
Christian iconography but consistently “Andeanized” the images. By this she reflects on
the way that he flattened the figures and denied any illusion of threedimensional space,
relying heavily on line, rather than mass to define form (Figure 4.27). As an advocate for
the indigenous Andeans, Guaman Poma needed his book to assertively broadcast his
Indian blood and allegiance, and creating according to the flat indigenous aesthetic was
one of the artist’s tools. Teresa Gisbert has also commented that the significance of
Guaman Poma’s linear style of draughtsmanship additionally references what he saw as
the prestige of Peru’s ancient past. In other words, perhaps to Guaman Poma,
maintaining the conventions of his native past somehow paid homage to the greatness of
that history.
In the case of colonial New Spain, Eileen Baird studied the work of Bernardino da
Sahagún, a Spanish monk in Mexico. Sahagún spent sixty years on an evangelical
mission in Mexico, seeking to convert the indigenous populations, but during that time he
also collected information about the life and customs of the people he encountered. He
recorded his findings and enlisted local artisans to illustrate his manuscripts. Sahagún
used this understanding of Indian aesthetics to direct the creation of work that would
appeal to native audiences. In an article about two of the Spanish Franciscan friar’s
manuscripts, Primeros Memoriales, from 1561, and the Florentine Codex, written and
illustrated between 1575 and 1580, Baird argues that for the earlier manuscript, which
was informed by many interviews and interactions with local indigenous people, the
monk formulated the text in the European format, but ordered that the images be
fashioned according to pre-conquest styles, which Baird defines as conceptual, with
twodimensional figures who do not relate to each other or to the space around them.
Accordingly, the images lack the illusionistic naturalism of most European art. Baird’s
thesis is that Sahagún made this decision because the information in the book came from
interviews with natives and therefore the images are meant to reflect the source of his
information. Hence, Sahagún relied on the assumption that native aesthetics would have
been familiar and relatable to a viewing audience with an indigenous past.
Much like the aesthetics of Peruvian quero cups and Guaman Poma’s imagery,
which share a linear, flat aesthetic, Bitti’s figures are similarly two-dimensional in their
style. As Guaman Poma knew that his linear style would symbolize indigenous
aesthetics, and Sahagún commissioned native artists to make images that suited the native
viewer, it seems possible that Bitti’s work may have similarly been appropriate for an
audience accustomed to the flat, symbolic style of some indigenous art forms. Of course,
there was great diversity in Andean cultures and languages and art forms in the pre- and
post-hispanic periods, and quero cups represent only one well-known example of
indigenous art that persisted after the arrival of the Spanish. Quero cups were widely
known by Europeans living in colonial Peru and therefore could have likely been seen by
Bitti and his patrons. In 1959, Martin Soria hinted at the possibility of a link between
what he called the “earnest visual simplicity” of Bitti’s style and the response of his
largely Indian audiences, but he never fully explored this fascinating proposition. It is
impossible to know if Bitti consciously exaggerated the linearity of his paintings to this
end, but it is reasonable to consider that it must have factored into his popularity among
Europeans and Andeans alike.
The possibility that Bitti’s non-narrative, flat, linear style was somehow
intentionally aimed at imitating local aesthetics as observed by sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century Europeans in Peru is fitting in the context of Jesuit art and missions.
The Jesuits had a unique approach to communicating with and converting the Indians and
a particular interest in understanding the language and customs of the people they
encountered. While this Jesuit philosophy was part of their missions throughout the
world, its practice was particularly emphatic in Peru because of the influence of then
Provincial Superior of all Jesuits in Peru, José de Acosta. Acosta posited that the Indians
should be seen as human beings, and should be treated as such, and urged the Jesuits to
see the Indians as no different from Europeans. In his book, Historia natural y moral de
las Indias (1590), Acosta argued that these indigenous people had descended from Adam
and Eve, just as the Europeans had. As a result of Acosta’s beliefs, the Jesuits in Peru
were expected to interact with the local populations in a civilized and respectful manner.
Back in Italy, the Jesuit General, Claudio Aquaviva, even ordered that no Jesuit could be
ordained a priest until he had attained a good knowledge of the native languages. Thus,
in Peru, the Jesuits said mass in the vernacular language of the area and were able to
communicate one-on-one with the Indians they hoped to convert. Just as the Jesuit
priests recognized the value in using local languages to reach out, perhaps these same
Jesuits saw the agency of Bitti’s paintings in the Andean context, and in addition to their
appreciation of Bitti as a painter of great Italian style, their recognition of the success of
his painted images contributed to his widespread popularity.
Conclusion
Bernardo Bitti spent the last few years of his career back in Lima, where he
continued to paint until his death in 1610. The Madonna of the Rose (Figure 1.36) in the
Monastery of the Descalzos is probably one of his last paintings. Elements of the
painting are consistent with the style Bitti clung to from the beginning; the Virgin floats
ethereally in a dim, shallow space, bedecked in cool colors, and modeled with sharp lines.
This painting of the Virgin, much like the earliest he painted in Lima in 1575, praises and
celebrates the unique character of the Virgin through traditional Christian iconography.
This Virgin holds in her right hand a pink rose, a flower that was often associated with the
Virgin as a reference to the belief that she was like a rose without thorns, or a mortal
without sin.
During his time in Peru, Bitti developed a style that catered to the needs of the
unique and diverse audience of colonial Peru. As the choice of the Jesuits throughout
Peru from his arrival until his death in 1610, Bitti gained opportunities for wide exposure
and his mark on colonial Peruvian painting did not end when he died, but continued for
several generations in the art of students, followers, and sometimes even entire schools of
painters who adopted elements of his elegant style and used his compositions and
iconography as templates.
The Jesuits were an important force in the formation of colonial Lima, so their
consistent reliance on Bitti set a precedent in the city for a respect and prestige accorded
to Italian art and culture, which will be reflected in the later success of the two other
Italians, Mateo Pérez de Alesio and Angelino Medoro, citywide, and outside the circle of
the Jesuits.
CHAPTER 2
MATEO PÉREZ DE ALESIO
Introduction
Mateo Pérez de Alesio spent two decades painting in Europe, with excursions to
various cities in Italy, Malta, and Spain, before arriving in Lima in 1590. Of all three
Italians discussed in this study, Alesio came to Lima with the most experience and
acclaim. He had worked on several major commissions in Rome and had also completed
projects in Malta and Seville. His New World expedition was motivated by a desire for
fame and fortune, which he found in Lima. He was prolific, making paintings throughout
the city for churches and monasteries. Moreover, Alesio’s mark on Lima extended
beyond paintings by his own hand, as he trained as many as six or seven students, who
went on to have their own careers.
As a young artist in Rome, Alesio had gained the experience and connections he
would need to develop a reputation as a respected artist. Among a handful of high-profile
projects, he is most famous for a painting in the Sistine Chapel, where he developed an
ability to mimic the grand, muscular figures of the great Michelangelo. Always
interested, it seems, in the opportunity for adventure and to further his career, Alesio went
from Rome to Valletta, where he painted a series celebrating the defeat of Muslim
invaders to the city. His career would next take him to Seville, where yet again he
embarked on several ambitious projects, such as a large painting for the city’s cathedral.
His work in Spain afforded Alesio the chance to move then to Lima and due to his
reputation in Seville he traveled as part of Viceroy Don García Hurtado de Mendoza’s
entourage.
After the devastation of two major earthquakes in the seventeenth century, there
remain only a few paintings in Lima that can be securely attributed to Alesio. However,
archival material and contemporary publications reveal that Alesio worked in nearly
every important church and monastery in the city. A survey of his European and South
American paintings reveals his propensity to change his style to suit the project at hand.
In some of the larger works, the dramatic style of gargantuan, Michelangelesque figures
remains, while in other, smaller, more intimate paintings the figures are more naturalistic
and the style more subtle.
Alesio’s influence on painting in Lima is evident in even the few objects that
remain in the viceroyalty, paired with archival references to his activities in the New
World.
Alesio’s Early Years in Italy
Since there are so few paintings by Alesio that remain in Peru, discussing his
importance in South America is based primarily on his reputation, which can be
established through his background, influences, and known paintings in Europe. Mateo
Pérez de Alesio was born in the Tuscan town of Leccia, in 1540, to the prominent Godi
family; his father’s name was Pierantonio Godi. His father and grandfather had been part
of the Savonarolan republic in Florence and much of Alesio’s success, especially early in
his career, was due to the connections his family had made with elite members of society,
so it is worth noting the status of his lineage. For example, it seems that in 1555, during
the Spanish occupation of Florence and Siena, Alesio’s father came into contact with the
future viceroy of Peru, Andrés Hurtado de Mendoza. This connection may have later
influenced Alesio’s decision to travel to Lima. His 1598 marriage contract from Lima
should shed some light on his origins, but the document identifies Alesio as “ser natural
de Roma.”188 No other document provides evidence of Alesio’s birth in Rome, and in
fact, when Alesio signed his paintings, as well as contracts, he signed his name, followed
by the suffix “italicus,” not “romano,” as Angelino Medoro frequently did. Instead, it
seems likely that the connection to Rome stemmed from his work in the city and the
prestige that must have been attributed, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, to any person linked to the center of the Catholic Church. As will be shown,
the most important accomplishment of Alesio’s past, in the minds of contemporary
chroniclers, was his participation in the decoration of the Sistine Chapel and the
proximity to the famed Michelangelo. Advertising a connection to Rome certainly must
have boosted Alesio’s reputation and reception in Lima. Similarly, Alesio changed his
name upon leaving Spain for Lima. In most sixteenth-century European documents,
authors identify the artist as either Matteo da Leccio or Matteo da Lecce.
And, while it is not unusual for an artist’s name to be translated into the local language,
tree in the State Archives in Florence.
188 José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, El manierismo en los Andes (La Paz, Bolivia: Union Latina,
2005), 14.
the addition of “Pérez,” part of his father’s lineage, must have been intended to add a
certain familiarity to his Spanish-speaking patrons.
Alesio’s exact path from Lecce to Rome is not known, but scholars have
speculated that the young artist may have spent some time in Naples, and perhaps even in
Venice, although no documentation exists to provide solid evidence of Alesio’s
whereabouts. During his time in Rome, Alesio met and worked with a number of artists
whose influence is evident in much of his work. Many were part of the reform
movement of the later sixteenth century, including Palma Giovane (1548-1628) who
recorded the only known portrait of Alesio (Figure 2.1) in a drawing now in the Morgan
Library in New York. An inscription affectionately names Alesio as a close friend and
notes that he died in Peru, suggesting that they remained in contact even later in Alesio’s
life.
However he got there, by 1568, Alesio was in Rome, and in that same year, began
working on frescoes at the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, which is his earliest documented
project. Since Alesio’s training is not known, it is important to consider the artists he
collaborated with at the Villa d’Este, who would have offered the young painter early
exposure to the styles and trends that were fashionable in and around Rome at the time of
his arrival. The decorations at the Villa began in 1568, so it seems that Alesio was part of
the team from inception. Others who were present in 1568 included Girolamo Muziano,
Livio Agresti, Cesare Nebbia, Federico Zuccaro, and Lelio Orsi, but Alesio worked in the
Tiburtine quarters (Figure 2.2), as part of a team led by Nebbia. The subject matter of
the frescoes in the Tiburtine rooms was mythology related to Tivoli.
More important than the subject matter, however, is the style, rich in illusionistic devices,
Mannerist playfulness, and distortions of form. Thus, at the Villa d’Este, Alesio must
have encountered the then-fashionable manipulations of Mannerist aesthetics. It is likely
that the young painter had previously come across similar styles, but it is significant to
note that in his first documented project, he painted alongside successful artists working
in the Mannerist mode and therefore learned of the style’s popularity. Although the artists
working with Alesio at Tivoli are more widely recognized for their contributions to the
reform movement in art, at the Villa d’Este, in a private setting, the illusionism,
distortions, and eruditions of Mannerism were desirable to the patrons.
In addition to prominent Roman painters, the patrons at Tivoli also hired a handful
of artists from the Marches region, a part of Italy known for artists adept at producing
painted grotteschi. The Tiburtine rooms as well as most of the other interiors of the Villa
include elaborate grotteschi decoration, which was quite popular in the late Renaissance.
Once in Peru, Alesio likely relied on the exposure he had to grotteschi in some of his
most important commissions.
Perhaps just as important as Alesio’s interaction with artists at Tivoli was the
contact he made with two dignitaries, Cardinal Rambouillet and Monsignor Fantino
Petrignani, who oversaw some of the decorations. These two men were also in the circle
of Pope Pius V, and may have provided the link between the young Alesio and his next,
most prestigious project.
In 1573, Alesio began working on his fresco The Defense of the Body of Moses
(Figure 2.3), opposite Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel, a project that
would help promote his reputation for the remainder of his career. Mentions of Alesio in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts nearly always include a reference to
Michelangelo. For example, when Francisco Pacheco wrote about Alesio in his Arte de
la pintura, he recalled seeing Alesio’s drawing for the Sistine fresco when he met him in
Seville at a young age and noted that it was the best of all of his drawings “because it was
painted in front of the Judgment of Michelangelo and assumed his grand manner.” In
some cases, the information is erroneous, stating that the young artist had been trained by
Michelangelo, even though the High Renaissance master had been dead for nearly a
decade by the time Alesio was in the Sistine Chapel. It is likely, also, that the Sistine
fresco qualified Alesio for acceptance into the Academy of Saint Luke in Rome, in 1573.
He had just reached the age of twenty-five, which was the recommended age for painters
seeking admission, and this would have been his first major public commission, which
was the other critical requirement.
Alesio, along with a little-known Flemish painter, Henri van den Broeck, were
hired in the 1570s to paint frescoes to replace two that had been destroyed in the Sistine
Chapel. The frescoes replaced scenes of the same subjects by the fifteenth-century
painters Domenico Ghirlandio and Luca Signorelli, which had been badly damaged when
the nearby doorway was rebuilt. Since no documentary evidence exists to support the
attribution of the fresco of Moses to Alesio, debate has arisen and other suggestions of
artists have been made. However, two contemporary sources linked Alesio to the
commission; Carel van Mander, who was in Rome between 1574 and 1576, discussed
Alesio’s involvement in his Schilderboeck and, as mentioned previously, Francisco
Pacheco referenced the project in the seventeenth century, having seen firsthand a
preparatory drawing made by Alesio. As for dating, while there are no documents to
confirm, it seems likely that Alesio painted the fresco of Moses between 1573 and 1575,
during the pontificate of Pope Gregory XIII. In an article about the two late-
sixteenthcentury Sistine frescoes, Francisco Stastny astutely pointed out that Alesio
included a tailless, winged dragon, the emblem of the pope, on a cartouche in the
foreground.
Stastny also posed a question that others have considered: why were two nearly unknown
artists given commissions in the most prestigious chapel in all of Rome? Stastny
convincingly argued that by the first few years of the 1570s, largely under the influence
of Pope Pius V, an artist’s reputation and status were no longer deciding factors in
religious commissions; the celebrity of the artist did not influence patrons the way that it
had in previous decades. Pius V saw art only as a vehicle for proper Catholic dogma, and
so the reputation of artists hired to restore the Sistine Chapel had become unimportant.
Stastny concluded that the commission for Alesio and van den Broeck must have
originated during Pius V’s time and was completed early in the time of Gregory XIII,
which explains the inclusion of his Buoncompagni emblem.
The atmosphere of reform in religious art is evident not only in the choice of two
unknown artists, but also in the style of the paintings. Adjacent to the Sistine Chapel,
nearly thirty years before Alesio’s arrival, and shortly after the completion of the Last
Judgment on the chapel’s altar wall, Michelangelo painted his last two frescoes, The
Conversion of Paul (Figure 2.4) and The Crucifixion of Peter (Figure 2.5), in the Pauline
Chapel, a project often heralded as one of the first to take into account the Church’s
reform movement. In Alesio’s Moses fresco, it is clear that that young artist incorporated
elements of the younger Michelangelo’s style of the Sistine Chapel ceiling as well as
some of the alterations he came to develop on the altar wall and in the Pauline Chapel.
First, Alesio’s figures are unmistakably akin to the gargantuan, muscular bodies that, by
the last quarter of the sixteenth century, had become iconic examples of Michelangelo’s
paintings. Alesio’s bright color palette is also closely related to the Sistine ceiling, in the
predominance of high values in blues and oranges, for example. Evident also are echoes
of the adjustments Michelangelo made to his style in an effort to respond to the need for
reform in the later sixteenth century. Michelangelo had developed, much earlier in his
career, a tendency to give figures blessed with divine grace elegant, energized poses and
idealized bodies. For individuals lacking such grace, Michelangelo painted figures that
take on awkward positions, often stand in murky shadow, and lack the same kind of
perfected beauty. Marcia Hall has comprehensively discussed this important part of
Michelangelo’s painting style, noting that it is evident as early as his painting of the
Temptation and Expulsion of Adam and Eve on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (1508-
1512), where Alesio would have seen it. By the time of the Pauline frescoes,
Michelangelo had adopted this new idea, painting many of the figures with grotesque
facial features, in hunched, uncomfortable poses. Alesio used a similar tool to distinguish
good from evil in his Sistine fresco. The Archangel Michael and his divine companions
soar onto the scene with grace and elegance, their muscles tensing as they wage violence
on their demonic opponents, who stumble and fall awkwardly. The modeling of the
demons’ musculature, too, has become gray and murky, particularly in contrast to the
gleaming physiques of those on God’s side.
It is important to note, however, that Alesio did not wholeheartedly adopt
Michelangelo’s little-appreciated and little-copied style of the Pauline frescoes, which
also lack ornament and in which the figures are stripped of the familiar graceful,
serpentine poses of the High Renaissance master. Where Michelangelo stripped most of
the figures in his Pauline frescoes of any beauty and ornament, Alesio maintained the
lighter touch of the younger style, with fanciful decoration of Moses’ sarcophagus and an
airy sense of movement in the arrangement of the figures in the composition.
Much as in the case of Bitti, who has been largely classified by scholars as a
“Mannerist,” Alesio’s style too has been consistently labeled in the same way, its nuances
and specifics ignored. This brief survey of his early formation as an artist makes it
evident that in fact Alesio was engaged in a style of painting from early in his career that
incorporated some iconic formal elements of Italian Mannerist painters, but also
integrated alterations made according to the need for reform in sacred art. Ultimately,
there is no need to thoroughly analyze Alesio’s Italian work because several scholars have
already engaged in surveys of the Italian work, but this brief discussion has served to
highlight the most important components of the young artist’s early influences.
Alesio in Malta
Although the precise date is not known, by the late 1570s, Alesio had arrived at
his first foreign destination: Valletta in Malta. The decade prior, in 1565, the country had
been attacked by the Ottoman Empire, an invasion that had been long threatened and thus
anticipated by Malta. Therefore, the local knights and their armies were able to
successfully defeat the Ottoman invaders and expel them from Malta. The victory had
obvious political significance to the small country, but its importance went beyond
merely defending territory and came to symbolize the triumph of Catholicism over Islam.
As part of the celebrations, the Grand Master Jean Levesque de la Cassière commissioned
Alesio to paint scenes from the Great Siege in the reception room, known as the Room of
the Ambassadors, of the city’s great palace. An Italian scholar, Lucio
Maiorano, illustrated Alesio’s extensive, fifteen-fresco series in a publication from 2000.
The information in Maiorano’s book is somewhat scant, but he did provide a basic
framework for the history of the frescoes’ creation, as well as the best images published
to date. The frescoes function as a single narrative, moving the audience through the
major events chronologically and spatially, creating a sweeping, dramatic viewing
experience. In the first three frescoes (Figures 2.6-2.8), Alesio illustrated Malta from a
distance, with the encroaching Turkish invaders visible. In scenes four through ten
(Figures 2.9-2.17), Alesio took the viewer into the battle, with closer images of the armies
fighting.
Maiorano observed a Baroque tendency in the composition of the series, in
particular in the choice to paint a series of images that connect to one larger battle. The
engaging, experiential nature of the series seems in line with Baroque ideals; Alesio was
attempting to create a moving, dramatic visual journey for his audience. In his
construction of space and perspective, however, it is clear that Alesio was still relying on
the vernacular of Mannerist artists. In most of the battle scenes the figures crowd into a
shallow foreground and the artist provided little suggestion of the threedimensional
recession of deep space. For example, in the scene representing the defeat of the Turks
and their retreat to Antioch, led by the Grand Master, Bertrand de Compes (Figure 2.13),
Alesio has tightly stacked the soldiers. He painted a handful in the foreground with
detailed uniforms and facial expressions, but the crowd behind dissipates into a mass of
heads and swords. In composition, then, the painting is similar to the relief-like style
made popular by Raphael and his workshop in the Sala di Costantino (Figure 2.18) in the
Vatican, a series of paintings that Alesio certainly could have seen while working in the
adjacent Sistine Chapel, as well as the late antique sarcophagi that likely inspired
Raphael.
There are echoes, also, of some of Alesio’s other influences, most evident in the
allegorical figures painted to flank some of the scenes from the battles, which recall the
robust musculature and serpentine poses of Michelangelo. For example, in the eighth
fresco of the series, Alesio painted a figure representing nobility (Figure 2.19); the figure
watches over the scene labeled as the assault of the sea and land. His legs are powerfully
muscular and he extends his right arm across his body elegantly to point to the moment of
battle.
Alesio’s experience in Malta must have had a great impact on his future career
and the decisions he would make. First, on this first foreign expedition, Alesio learned of
the potential for the success of a trained Italian artist abroad. As were the Spanish in
Seville and in Lima, the patrons in Valletta were likely impressed by his résumé, given
the status of the Roman art scene in the end of the sixteenth century. Additionally, since
much of the impetus for art-making in Lima would be about establishing a Catholic
presence in a pagan land, it is important to note that in Malta, Alesio was exposed to his
first passionate celebration of Christianity over a non-Christian entity.
Alesio completed one additional painting in Malta, an altarpiece for the Church of
San Giovanni in Valletta, The Baptism of Christ (Figure 2.20). Most important here is an
analysis of the painting’s style, which is different from other works discussed thus far.
Most obviously different are the figures, whose bodies are not robust and muscular, but
slim and elegant. Alesio’s oeuvre is no longer complete and there are questions of
attribution that will be discussed in the section on his work in Lima, but in a brief survey
of his work in Europe it seems that he absorbed the influences of the artists tha
surrounded him and experimented with various styles.
After completing the fresco series in Malta, Alesio returned to Rome, where he
worked on several projects in the first few years of the 1580s. Even this brief survey of
Alesio’s time in Italy and Malta is illustrative of the artist’s youthful success and early
influence from some of the most important Roman painters of the still developing
Catholic reform movement.
Alesio in Seville
By 1583, Alesio was in Seville, Spain, where the prestige of his Roman training
and background would be part of his positive reception. A handful of Spanish texts
celebrate Alesio and highlight what must have been considered his most important
experience, working in the Sistine Chapel. In his Diálogo de la pintura, written in 1633,
Vicente Carducho mistakenly cited the young Italian as a disciple of Michelangelo
Buonarroti, who worked beside his famed Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. As late
as 1800, Cean Bermúdez and Juan Agustin introduced Alesio as having studied in the
circle of Michelangelo, in their Diccionario histórico de los más ilustres profesores de las
bellas artes en España.
Some of the earliest evaluations of Alesio’s work in Spain seem to have come not
from the paintings he produced there but from the drawings he brought with him from
Italy. It was fairly common for Italian artists to carry drawings on foreign visits as a way
to demonstrate the creativity and working process of the Italian school and to serve as
models and sources for their work. Pacheco mentioned Alesio’s drawings in his
biography of the artist, noting his skills as a draftsman, especially when he was in the
shadow of his greatest influence, Michelangelo. Pacheco paid special attention to a
drawing of the Death of Moses, which he found particularly skilled, explaining that
“the reason the drawing excelled over the others was that he had executed it at the foot of
Michelangelo’s Judgment, and had clothed it in his grand manner, but it was ascertained
to be his for that very reason, on the information of some who had been to Rome and
seen the same painting.”
It is not surprising that the first appraisal of Alesio would be through his
drawings, since artists routinely brought drawings with them on travels since they were
far more portable than paintings. Additionally, the drawing medium had come to be more
and more greatly appreciated by collectors and theorists, as well as other artists, over the
course of the Renaissance. The function of drawing prior to the fifteenth century, in the
Middle Ages, had been almost entirely practical, as a means for an artist to prepare for a
project, and the process had been largely formulaic, based on patterns and templates. In
the Renaissance, the functions of drawings multiplied, to accommodate the new
expectation that artists should have the ability to replicate the natural world, with
particular attention to the movements and emotions of human figures. The function of
drawing was also transformed in the Renaissance into a practice that was deemed
essential in training the hand and the eye of a young artist to observe carefully and
closely, but also throughout the career of an artist, as a medium through which a painter
or sculptor could experiment with ideas. Such shifts in the conception and status of
drawing resulted in a greater appreciation for the drawings of masters and the beginnings
of drawing collections. Julius Held, in his exploration of this very topic, discusses the
elevation of drawings to objects worth collecting among artists, connoisseurs, as well as
individuals he deemed “amateurs.” He goes on to cite Leonardo da Vinci as the
originator of some of the ideas that would motivate such appreciation of drawings, noting
that Leonardo discussed his belief that the inspiration and first thoughts of the artist were
held in a drawing. Likewise, Giorgio Vasari argued for the supremacy of drawings over
finished paintings because of a drawing’s proximity to the thoughts of the artist. Thus,
Alesio’s drawing made in the Sistine Chapel must have represented an artifact of his
experience and education to his Spanish viewers.
One drawing by Alesio’s hand is still extant: a sketch in ink of Jupiter (Figure
2.21). Atop Mount Olympus, the God is just about to release his lightning bolt. It is
unknown whether the drawing corresponds to a completed painting, as no related works
exist. In a recent catalogue of the collection of drawings that holds this example, the
authors assert that there is evidence of the influence of Federico Zuccaro in the pen
strokes and the use of lead white for highlighting. The style of the drawing also reflects
contemporary Italian interests, with a particular nod to Michelangelo. Alesio sketched
Jupiter in a pose that is full of vigor and dynamism: the musculature is tensed from the
fingers to the toes and the body is strong and robust.
The positive reception of Alesio’s drawings must have contributed to his getting
the commission to paint a large fresco depicting Saint Christopher (Figure 2.22) in the
city’s cathedral. The painting is in the cathedral’s right (or south) transept, in a prominent
location. The project came shortly after Alesio’s arrival; in October of 1583, the same
year he came to Seville, Alesio received payment towards the project. Pacheco described
Alesio’s working process, noting that the Italian had made several preparatory drawings
(bozzetti), including a cartoon of the same size as the fresco, which was fully realized.
This seems another opportunity for the Spaniard to celebrate Alesio’s Italian training.
The fresco of Saint Christopher is an important project to discuss in documenting
Alesio’s reception and reputation in Seville, but it is also significant because he was
commissioned to paint a replica in Lima’s Cathedral, likely due to the acclaim of the
Spanish painting. Unfortunately, the Lima fresco was destroyed in an earthquake in the
seventeenth century, so the original is the only source available to recreate Alesio’s
involvement in the important Lima church.
The choice of Saint Christopher for Seville’s Cathedral was appropriate due in
part to the popularity of the saint’s cult from the thirteenth through the sixteenth
centuries, but perhaps even more importantly because of Christopher’s designation as
patron saint of travelers. As a port city and the departure location for all ships headed to
the New World, Seville was a city of travel, and so it makes sense that its people would
want Christopher to look on from this most important building, and today, in a nice
coincidence, he looks down on the tomb of an important mortal namesake, Christopher
Columbus.
The popular story of Christopher recalls that he was a Canaanite of great size who
devoted himself to Christ by carrying the unfortunate across a river, with the guidance of
a hermit. On one occasion, he carried a young boy who seemed to become heavier with
each movement. Only after crossing did the boy reveal himself to be Christ, who told
Christopher that he had just carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. In his
fresco, Alesio followed many of the descriptive notes common to the saint’s story as told
in Jacobus da Voragine’s Golden Legend and as established by Flemish painters and
engravers of the fifteenth century. Christopher is a large, robust man with powerful
musculature. He carries on his shoulder the Christ Child, who holds a blue orb in his lap.
In the left background the guiding hermit stands at the edge of the river. The inclusion of
the hermit is noteworthy because it was not a common convention in Italian depictions of
the saint, but rather was made popular by northern European artists. German artists
made numerous prints depicting Christopher in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and
all include the aged hermit; Martin Schongauer’s engraving (Figure 2.23) from the late
fifteenth century is an example, but Albrecht Dürer also took on the subject five times,
three in woodcut, and two in engraving. Working out of what seems to have been
common convention in northern European Renaissance art, Dürer also included the
hermit in all five. He made the woodcuts early in his career, in 1496, 1501, and 1511.
Each is unique in the pose and composition of the saint, as well as the details of the body
and costume. The earliest (Figure 2.24), from 1496, is most closely related to Alesio’s
painting in the similar use of a strong, muscular body for Christopher. A link
between Alesio and Dürer is not surprising considering that there is evidence that while at
Seville’s Cathedral, the young Italian bought a book that included prints by Dürer and
that at least some of these prints were with Alesio in Lima as well. Additionally, the
engravings of Saint Christopher are closely related to a series of drawings that Dürer
made for Joachim Patinir, who then used them in preparation for a painting housed in the
Escorial, outside Madrid.226 Therefore, Dürer’s images of Saint
Christopher must have been well known in Spain.
In addition to the connection to Dürer, the Saint Christopher fresco is also
representative of Michelangelo’s influence. Saint Christopher is large and robust, with
the overblown musculature that is an iconic element of Michelangelo’s figures. The vast
stature of Christopher is common in depictions of the saint, and is part of several of
Dürer’s versions, but it cannot be ignored that the body type is also reminiscent of the
prophets on the Sistine ceiling and the saved figures in the Last Judgment on the altar
wall, which Alesio saw and studied. Alesio gave the saint strength and stature, but he has
also exaggerated the musculature. Evident in the knees and elbows, in particular, this
saint has more ripples of muscle than the real human body. Finally, Alesio also posed
Christopher in the figura serpentinata made popular by Michelangelo and the other
Italian Mannerists of the sixteenth century.
Above the scene of Saint Christopher, Alesio also included two angels (Figure
2.25) flanking a coat of arms. The angel on the left holds a heavy gold crown and gazes
downward, as if to designate the young child in the fresco as the Son of God. The angel
on the right holds a large palm, the conventional symbol for martyrdom, and looks
heavenward, referencing Christ’s ultimate sacrifice. In the center is a stylized coat of
arms containing a vase with seven lilies. As lilies had long been a symbol of the Virgin
and her purity, it seems likely that these flowers have the same significance. The choice
to depict seven is noteworthy, as the number seven has several symbolic references in
Christian art. In this case, it seems possible that Alesio was referring to the seven
sorrows of the Virgin, since he has paired the number seven with lilies, in order to
correspond to the moments from Christ’s life referred to by the angels and their emblems.
In the same year that Alesio left Italy for Seville, he hired a young Italian artist,
Pedro Pablo Moron, to work as his apprentice. Moron joined Alesio in 1583 when he
was only fifteen years old, immediately traveled to Spain with his master, and eventually
joined him on the journey to Lima. Therefore, along with bringing his own experience
and knowledge of European art to the New World, Alesio also brought another Italian
artist, who worked with him for the remainder of his career. Moron’s name appears in
many documents associated with Alesio’s projects in Lima. The earliest known
document dates from November 14, 1592, when Moron signed a contract stating that the
two artists would maintain their professional relationship until one of them died.
Unfortunately, at this time, it has not been possible to attribute any paintings to Moron.
As mentioned, his name appears in contracts associated with Alesio’s work and several
will be discussed here, but there are no extant paintings that can be securely connected to
him, so his style remains completely unknown.
Alesio in Lima
Alesio differed from the other two Italians because of the level of his experience
upon reaching the New World. Bitti and Medoro were young and virtually unknown and
were, it seems, accepted largely because of their Italian heritage. By the time of his
arrival in the New World, however, Alesio had already developed a reputation as an
accomplished artist, celebrated for his skills as a trained Italian painter.
Unfortunately, of all three Italian painters, it is Alesio whose oeuvre has suffered
the most loss from Lima’s earthquakes; nearly all of his paintings were destroyed in the
seventeenth century. Therefore, it is impossible to establish a firm understanding of his
style and contribution to Lima’s art world. However, documentation exists that allows
for the reconstruction of Alesio’s career. While documents stating when and where
Alesio worked cannot substitute for the actual objects, they can be part of a
demonstration of the artist’s widespread success in Lima, as archival documents reveal
that Alesio worked in many of the city’s most important churches and monasteries.
One of the greatest losses was at the Church of Santo Domingo, where Alesio and his
workshop made numerous paintings to decorate the choir stalls as well as several side
chapels with fictive architectural decoration, as well as images of virgin saints, prophets,
and sibyls. After extensive study of the church and its records that coincided with a
restoration that took place in the late 1990s, Peruvian scholar Francisco Stastny has also
concluded that Alesio painted a series of murals in the nave around 1600.
Several years earlier, between 1593 and 1594, Alesio was commissioned to complete a
series of paintings for a retablo in the same church, this time for the family chapel of
Juana de Aliaga, the niece of Jerónimo de Aliaga ,the conquistador. It is significant that
Alesio’s earliest commissions in Lima connected him to the elite of the city. Only one
painting, Saint Jerome (Figure 2.26), remains from the retablo and its attribution to Alesio
has been debated.
In the painting, Saint Jerome prays to a sculpture of the crucified Christ in the
wilderness. He wears only a simple red drape that wraps around his legs.
Compositionally, the painting is close to a work of the same subject by the Italian artist
Girolamo Muziano (Figure 2.27), completed between 1585 and 1592, now in the Vatican
Museums. Muziano’s painting was originally commissioned for the Chapel of Saint
Jerome in the church of Santa Marta in the Vatican and so the date for the painting is
based on the time during which the chapel was built. The paintings are so close in
coloring and composition that they must be somehow linked. However, Alesio was in
Seville by 1582, three years before Muziano may have begun the painting. It is possible
that the dating for the Muziano painting is incorrect and Alesio saw it before leaving
Rome for Spain. Alternatively, Alesio could have seen a sketch for the painting, as he
was acquainted with Muziano, having worked with him at the Villa Tivoli, or both artists
could have been working from the same print souce. In any case, there is a link between
the Lima painting and that by Muziano, even if Alesio is not the artist.
Stylistically, the painting does not resemble others by Alesio. The figure is much
more slim and the composition lacks the energy seen in much of Alesio’s European
oeuvre, including the Moses painting in the Sistine Chapel, the Saint Christopher in
Seville’s Cathedral, and the drawing of Jupiter, all discussed earlier. However, judging
from what remains of Alesio’s work, he seems to have been somewhat of a chameleon,
altering his painting style numerous times and catering to the needs of the particular
commission. His later extant work in Lima, for example, lacks the robust
Michelangelesque bodies of his younger years. Instead, his figures became more graceful
and delicate, which will become clear in the upcoming discussions. Unfortunately, in the
case of Alesio, because of the sparse nature of what remains from his oeuvre, it is
challenging to establish attributions based on style.
Despite the close connections to Muziano’s painting, there are several significant
additions. In the right foreground of the painting, the artist included a parrot, a figure that
also appeared in Alesio’s Saint Christopher fresco from Seville’s cathedral. The inclusion
of the parrot is one clue that Alesio might have been the artist. In the Saint
Jerome painting, the parrot holds in its talons a scroll that reads, “speculum penitentia.”
In the lower left is a portrait of Jeronimo de Aliaga, the conquistador to whom the
painting is dedicated. Finally, a praying monk kneels on the cliffside in the background.
Primary sources and modern scholars have noted a number of paintings that have
since been lost or destroyed. These paintings will be mentioned in order to demonstrate
the breadth of Alesio’s work in Lima. Unfortunately, the documents for these paintings
are not always helpful in establishing firm information about dating and patronage.
Alesio made substantial contributions to Lima’s Cathedral, but all of the paintings were
destroyed in seventeenth-century earthquakes. In addition to the painting of Saint
Christopher, purported to have been a replica of his Seville fresco, Alesio worked on a
handful of additional projects. In 1606, he painted the doors of the cathedral’s organ and
soon after he contributed paintings to the Chapel of Saint Bartholomew, including
portraits of Saints Peter and Paul and scenes from the life of Christ.
Alesio also made a painting of the ten doctors of the church for the Church of San
Agustín in Lima. On at least one documented occasion, in 1606, Alesio’s reputation took
him outside of Lima, to several small churches in Huanaco, where he completed seven
paintings depicting scenes from Christ’s Passion. Finally, an inventory of works left in
Alesio’s workshop after his death counts eighty-four paintings, varying in subject matter
from portraits, to religious narratives, to mythological scenes.
Scholars have attributed a series of paintings in a chapel in the Church of the
Merced in Lima to Alesio, but others have debated the validity of the attribution. The
project includes a series of frescoes that decorate a small chapel that adjoins the sacristy.
It is covered with a dome, which the artist has decorated with eight angels holding
instruments of the Passion (Figure 2.28). The chapel was dedicated in 1628 to a
benefactor of the Mercedarians, Captain Bernardo Villegas, as his funerary chapel and the
dedication states that Villegas would have the opportunity to commission a painter of his
choosing to complete the altarpiece, but it does not mention the decoration of the chapel
itself. The dedication has led some scholars, including Francisco Stastny, to believe that
the entire chapel was painted in 1628, by which date Alesio would have been eighty-one
years old and likely not the artist. In contrast, Mesa and Gisbert have argued that the
frescoes are closer to Alesio’s style than to the style of any other artist working in Lima in
the early seventeenth century and suggest that the frescoes must have been painted in the
decades prior to 1628. Another Peruvian scholar, Ricardo
Estabridis Cardenas, has used the painting of Saint Michael (Figure 2.29) at the Capilla
Villegas as the strongest evidence of Alesio’s involvement, pointing out that it is
reminiscent of the artist’s work in the Sistine Chapel. The pose of the Saint Michael in
Lima is close to that of the same figure in the fresco in Rome, and thus provides a
convincing link. The body of the archangel lacks the robust musculature of Alesio’s
Roman work, but is in line with the change in style recognized in the Saint Jerome, from
the Church of Santo Domingo. The slimming of the figure is also reminiscent of Alesio’s
Baptism of Christ (fig. 21) in Valletta.
In addition to the archangel Michael, the angels in several sections of the chapel
(Figure 2.30) are related to others painted by Alesio, this time in the Seville Saint
Christopher fresco. In one of the lunettes of the chapel are two seated angels holding
skulls, flanking an elaborate set of grotteschi. Their attenuated bodies and graceful poses
recall those of the Seville fresco and Alesio’s familiarity with grotteschi design was
established early in his career in Tivoli.
The Virgin Lactans
In 1604, Alesio painted a small image in oil on copper of the Virgin nursing the
Christ Child. The painting is widely identified as the Virgin of Belén (Figure 2.31) (or
the Virgin of Bethlehem) and is part of the tradition of representations of the type known
as the Virgin lactans. Alesio composed the painting with a tight focus on the two holy
figures; he included only their torsos and pushed both figures close to the picture plane,
illusionistically in great proximity to the viewer. He did not include any background or
setting, opting instead to omit extraneous details and focus all of the viewer’s attention on
the figures themselves. The Virgin holds her breast in her right hand and uses the left to
support the young child, who places both hands on his mother’s bosom and turns
deliberately in the direction of the audience as if to emphasize the demonstration of his
feeding. The Virgin gazes down poignantly towards the Child, a slight hint of
melancholy evident in her wilting eyelids. The tradition of depicting sadness on the
visage of the Virgin is quite common in the history of art, a device used to remind the
viewer of the Virgin’s knowledge of her Son’s inevitable sacrifice.
There is a poignant intimacy to Alesio’s painting that would have made it an ideal
object for private devotion. In this way, Alesio’s treatment of the subject is in line with
Counter-Reformation sentiments that reinforced the need for sacred art to be moving.
Alesio’s Virgin of Belén also relates to the sober poignancy of Italian reform artists, such
as Girolamo Muziano and Scipione Pulzone, with whom Alesio worked in Rome. One
example by Pulzone (Figure 2.32) is very close to Alesio’s composition. The
medium of oil on copper gained popularity in Europe through the end of the sixteenth
century; its origins are thought to be Italian, among some of the late Mannerists such as
Giorgio Vasari, Agnolo Bronzino, and Alessandro Allori, who exaggerated the artifice and
technical virtuosity that come along with the medium. The medium offers vivid, detailed,
rich imagery and was typically used for small-scale works. In a recent exhibition
catalogue about oil-on-copper paintings, Clara Bargellini argued that it was the Italians
who brought the medium to the New World. Its most prominent manifestation was in
Peru, where at least three Italian painters worked, in contrast to New Spain, where the
medium was rarely practiced. Most oil-on-copper paintings made in Peru were small and
intended for private devotion. Two examples from private collections in Lima date from
the early-seventeenth century and both represent the Coronation of the Virgin (Figures
2.33 and 2.34). Both paintings are small and richly detailed and colored. Since it is
known that Alesio made at least this one oil on copper painting in Lima, it is evident that
some of the medium’s influence came directly from transplanted artists, but Bargellini
has also suggested that oil on copper paintings might have been imported to be used for
training purposes, as prints most certainly were. The full extent of Alesio’s influence in
this field is not known, but there is one very close copy (Figure 2.35) of his Virgin of
Belén in the Sanctuary of Saint Rose in Lima, dating from the early seventeenth century,
also painted on copper, so it is possible that Alesio’s painting was part of the
dissemination of the medium.
The composition of the early copy on copper is nearly an exact duplication of
Alesio’s painting. The artist has placed the Virgin and Child in the same position, and
even the proportions of the figures in relation to one another are strikingly similar,
suggesting that the anonymous painter must have seen Alesio’s original. The copy even
includes the soft brush of hair that caresses the shoulder of the Virgin in Alesio’s painting.
Alesio had many students in his workshop and a handful of close followers as well, so it
seems likely that an artist in close proximity to the Italian made the painting, but
unfortunately no documentation has been found to attribute the painting to a particular
hand. Alesio’s students and followers will be discussed at more length later in this
chapter, but it is worth noting here that very few have enough, if any, paintings securely
attributed to them at this point in time to determine their authorship on stylistic qualities.
There are some distinct differences between the two paintings, indicating that
Alesio himself was likely not the artist. Alesio painted his figures with sharper facial
features, the line of the nose as well as the lids of the eyes particularly linear in quality.
The copy is softer in its modeling of the facial features. The unknown artist has also
made some changes to the color of the Virgin’s hair as well as her costume. This painter
has altered the proportions of the Christ Child’s face, elongating the forehead. Alesio’s
painting is akin to Bernardo Bitti’s Mannerist paintings of the Virgin that include flat
figures and the dominance of linear modeling. The unknown painter of this copper
painting worked in a more naturalistically toned mode. The faces of both Virgin and
Child have been more subtly modeled, with less linear flatness and more volume.
This close copy is not the only painting seemingly inspired by Alesio’s original.
In fact, many related paintings were made in Lima in the seventeenth century. As
mentioned previously, Alesio’s painting seems to be directly related to a work (Figure
2.32) by the Italian reform painter Scipione Pulzone, with the important distinction that
Alesio transformed Pulzone’s images of the Virgin and Child into a representation of the
Virgo lactans. The great significance of this choice lies in the fact that many paintings of
the nursing Virgin were made as small devotional objects in Lima over the next couple of
decades. A survey of some of these paintings will demonstrate the scope of the subject’s
popularity.
The Convento de los Descalzos, a monastery in Lima with an extensive collection
of religious paintings from the colonial period, holds one such example (Figure 2.36).
The museum dates the painting to the seventeenth century, but a more precise date or
attribution cannot be established. In studying the examples of paintings of the Virgin
lactans based on Alesio’s work, I would suggest that the painting must date from the early
seventeenth century due to its close visual connection to the original. In this case, the
artist has painted with oil on wood panel, not copper, but has remained quite close to the
composition of Alesio’s painting. The changes include variations on the costume of the
Virgin, a fairly dramatic aging of the Christ child from a young baby to an older child
with a full head of hair, as well as the addition of a parapet to separate the space of the
figures from that of the viewer, a common trope used in European portraiture. The
monastery of Santa Rosa in Lima owns another related painting (Figure 2.37) of the
Virgin lactans, again without any secure dating or attribution. In this case, the artist has
made some major alterations to Alesio’s theme, suggesting most likely that this artist may
not have seen Alesio’s painting, but that the composition had become so widespread that
artists had begun to adapt the theme to their own styles and needs. Here, the scene of the
Virgin nursing her child has become much more symbolic. The artist has adorned these
figures with elaborate crowns and composed the figures as if revealed after rich curtains
have opened, essentially no longer showing a humble, intimate moment. The Virgin
wears additional jewelry signifying her importance and regal stature. Despite the myriad
alterations, however, the composition of the mother and child is still quite close to that in
Alesio’s painting, from the slight tilt of her head to the heavy eyelids and the direct turn
of the child towards the viewer. Stylistically, the soft modeling and threedimensional
nature of the figures’ bodies are suggestive of the possibility of this artist’s connection to
the Italian school in Lima, whether he was a student or follower of Alesio or one of the
other Italians working in the city.
In another example (Figure 2.38), it is clear that the approach has shifted from one
motivated by some degree of naturalism to the flat, stylized qualities of colonial painting
from the mid-seventeenth century and later, when indigenous artists and aesthetics
became more prominent. This painting, owned today by the Museo Pedro de Osma in
Lima, is still compositionally close to Alesio’s painting and the essence of the
interpretation of the theme is apparent. However, the modeling has lost its subtlety and
the relationship between the figures and the space they inhabit is cramped and incoherent.
Additionally, there are examples that bear less resemblance compositionally to Alesio’s
painting, but that are related in the use of the Virgin lactans as the subject. A small oil-
on-wood painting (Figure 2.39) in the Cathedral in Lima is a representation of the Virgin
nursing her child, but the artist has reversed the composition seen in Alesio’s original and
its close copies. The reversal may be due to a print source made after Alesio’s original
painting. Alesio himself was a trained printmaker, and Lima’s first printer, Antonio
Ricardo, had arrived in Lima in 1583, so it is possible that prints were made after Alesio’s
original painting, although no originals have been found to date. Additionally, the
position of the figures is slightly different. Although there are some important
differences, it seems reasonable still to trace the theme of the Virgin lactans back to
Alesio, due to the multiple copies that do seem closely related, as well as the high profile
of the Italian artist in Lima culture of the seventeenth century.
Similarly, there are paintings of the Cuzco school that take on the same subject,
but infuse the composition with some of the common tropes of the region’s artists. The
example in Lima’s art museum (Figure 2.40) includes the gold patterning, the colorful
flower frame and the flat figures that are reminiscent of the Cuzco school.
The Virgin lactans subject had early beginnings in European art, but had largely
fallen out of favor by the end of the sixteenth century. The subject’s lack of popularity in
Europe during Alesio’s time makes his choice to paint his Virgin of Belén and the
abundance of copies in Lima important to consider. Alesio’s motivations or the ideas of
his patrons, unfortunately, cannot ultimately be known. However, it is possible that the
painting was related to the artist’s or the patron’s own interpretation of the needs of the
Counter- Reformation. In some cases, late-sixteenth-century artists looked back to Early
Christian themes and subject matter for inspiration as a way to draw attention to the
legitimacy and legacy of the Catholic Church. Since the Virgin lactans had a long
history, perhaps it seemed an apt subject.
The theme of the Virgin lactans was not new in the seventeenth century and not
exclusive to colonial Lima, but had a long history in European art. Several scholars have
dated the earliest example to the second century, in the catacomb of Saint Priscilla in
Rome, where an artist has painted the seated Virgin as she nurses the child. The subject
remained common through the Early Christian period and reached its height of popularity
in the fourteenth century. By the end of the Cinquecento, however, and certainly in the
years following the Council of Trent, the subject had largely fallen out of favor. Naomi
Yavneh has cited two reasons for the subject’s decline in the end of the sixteenth century.
First of all, it reflects the concerns about nudity in a sacred context; the nude figures in
Michelangelo’s Last Judgment were famously covered in this period. Additionally, the
Virgin lactans is an image that celebrates the humility and humanity of the Virgin; in the
post-Tridentine era, the Church and its artists focused their attention on celebrating the
majesty and divinity of the Virgin, in defense against the Protestant attacks on her
holiness and importance.
In studying colonial Latin American art, however, it is critical to remember that
the patrons and the audience were quite different from those encountered in Europe and
so must be studied with attention paid to the impact on a diverse set of viewers.
Accordingly, it is possible that one reason for the popularity of the Virgin lactans image
in Lima was related to Alesio’s influence. The status of the Italian artists working in
colonial Lima has already been established and Alesio’s reputation was great even in
Europe, so it seems plausible that copies were made by artists and requested by patrons in
Lima due to Alesio’s involvement. It is not known whether other examples of the theme
were sent to or made in Lima. Alesio’s painting is the only extant example and its close
visual proximity to many of the others supports this case.
However, it is critical to consider that of all the paintings made by the Italians in
Lima, this Virgin lactans theme became more common than any other. Accordingly,
there must have been something about this representation of the Virgin that made it
appealing. Perhaps the subject’s appeal was related to reasons why it had became popular
in Europe through the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Margaret Miles has argued
that images of the Virgin lactans routinely became popular during times of tumultuous
social transformation. She argues that these representations of the Madonna with one
bare breast, feeding her child, might reinforce the power of women to nourish and sustain
life, at times when life appeared tenuous. As an example, Miles discusses the popularity
of these images during the late Middle Ages, when the Black Plague took the lives of vast
populations throughout Europe. Similarly, colonial Peru was certainly experiencing a
time of great change that often included violence, illness, and persecution. Images that
reminded viewers of the pure, natural ability of women to sustain life might here have
had a similarly comforting and powerful message. Unfortunately, as Miles has noted, no
documentation exists that records the reception of these images, especially by women of
the time.
The images of the Virgin nursing the Christ Child must also be interpreted as
theological symbols that may have seemed particularly powerful to an audience that the
Church sought to convert wholeheartedly. As stated, Mary feeding Christ marked her
role and ability to nurture, but the action was interpreted in a much more profound and
symbolic way, as a symbol of the care of the Christian people as a whole. Marilyn
Yalom has noted that “the example of the baby Jesus suckling at his mother’s breast
became a metaphor for the spiritual nurturance of all Christian souls.” In the midst of the
colonial era’s tumult that accompanied the establishment of the viceroy and the spread of
Christianity, images of such nourishment, both physically and spiritually, may have had
particular currency.
Additionally, scholars have connected images of the Virgin lactans to campaigns
seeking to encourage women to breastfeed their children. Early modern medicine made
laypeople aware that it was dangerous to feed young babies the milk of animals. For
example, it was thought that milk from a goat might make the child look “stupid and
vacant and not right in the head.” It was also thought that breast milk was a whitened
form of the blood that the child fed on while in the mother’s womb. Thus, the woman
from whom the breast milk flowed had some influence on the development of the child
both physically and mentally, as people believed that milk from a woman of low moral
fortitude might negatively impact the baby. One important Italian preacher of the
fifteenth century weighed in on this matter, instructing, “If the one who cares for him has
evil customs or is of base condition, he will receive the impress of these customs because
of having suckled her polluted blood.” However, a conflict arose between popular social
behavior and the instruction of preachers and childrearing manuals. It was customary for
a woman of an upper class to employ a wet nurse, as a mark of status. Accordingly,
scholars have suggested that preachers went so far as to commission paintings of the
Virgin lactans in order to instill this maternal responsibility in Christian women, who
were many times over encouraged to model themselves on the saintly
Madonna. This occurred, however, largely in the fourteenth century in Europe. As the
Spanish and their missionaries sought to teach the indigenous populations not only the
Christian religion, but also the proper way of life and family, these images may have once
again served an instructive purpose.
A recent publication surveying images of Saint Joseph in the Spanish empire
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries serves as a useful parallel to my
argument here. In an exhaustive and astute study, Charlene Villaseñor Black has
documented the extraordinary popularity of Saint Joseph in art of the Spanish empire.
Most importantly to this context, Black makes the point that this subject, although
lacking in prominence in other European territories, enjoyed great popularity in Spain and
colonial Mexico and she argues that images of Christ’s foster father, either alone, or with
the Holy Family, helped to promote appropriate familial structures, an issue that the
Spanish were particularly tied to in their European territories, and which, it seems, was
imported to Mexico as well. In this example, a subject that was not a significant part of
sacred art elsewhere gained significance within Spanish-controlled regions due to the
social context. Similarly, it seems possible that images of the Virgin nursing the Christ
Child, while out of fashion in Europe, became common in Peru due to the unique
circumstances of painting in the New World.
Images of nursing mothers did emerge in other contexts through colonial Latin
America, most commonly in allegorical representations of the New World. In an essay
on an eighteenth-century Peruvian depiction of America, represented by a bare-breasted
woman, suckling allegorical representations of Spain, Carolyn Dean addressed some of
the issues of paintings of the Virgin lactans in Europe and in Peru. She too has noted the
prominence of these images in colonial Peru, despite the lack of support from the
Counter-Reformation Catholic church. Her focus, however, was largely on paintings of
the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, made by indigenous artists, that took on a
type akin to the example discussed here in figure 2.40. To be added to this discussion are
the earlier examples from the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries that might
have been inspired by Alesio’s original oil-on-copper painting. Accordingly, there seems
to be an unbroken tradition of paintings of the Virgin lactans in Peru from the
latesixteenth century through the eighteenth.
The prominence of this theme deserves one final avenue of consideration.
Scholars of colonial Peruvian art have come to recognize that throughout the viceroyalty,
paintings of the Virgin Mary often took on meaning beyond visual representations of the
mother of Christ. Instead, the indigenous populations often saw these representations as
references to female Andean deities. Interest in Marian devotion, in fact, grew with great
fervor in colonial Peru, due at least partially to this link made by local viewers between
the Virgin and their own deities. Carol Damian has explained that the Inca were quick to
understand and embrace the concept of Mary’s virginity, which is complex, but was
reminiscent of a class of Inca women, known as the Chosen Women, who were also
celebrated for their virginity, and who, like the Virgin Mary, were associated with certain
symbols and attributes. Additionally, the Christian missionaries taught the Inca that the
Virgin had great status and sat at the right hand of God. These Inca virgins too were
given special privilege and were the only individuals who had access to the emperor’s
sacred quarters. Andean chronicler Guaman Poma de Ayala offered further insight into
the status of these women in Inca society: “the people greatly respected these women.
They looked up to them as saints who had intimate dealings and communication with
their gods.” Damian also details ways in which the Inca ensured that indigenous
traditions would not be lost, but sent down through younger generations; Dean and
numerous other recent scholars have made it clear that the Spanish were not successful in
their campaigns to eliminate all pagan beliefs and rituals.
Andean celebrations of and devotion to female figures did not end with the
Chosen Women, but were far more widespread, evidenced by the veneration of specific
female deities, such as Mama Quila, the moon goddess and perhaps most importantly,
Pachamama. Pachamama was the Earth Mother of the Andean peoples. The Inca saw the
earth as a source for food, but also a sacred entity and so formed a close attachment to the
land, which in its regenerative abilities was linked to a female deity, an earth mother,
known as Pachamama.271 Damian explains that the Catholic priests destroyed idols and
burned sacred locations in order to remove the power of pagan beliefs. However, the
destruction of idols and huacas, which are sacred locations or monuments from Andean
religions, did not eliminate the power of the spirits. Instead, the indigenous populations
often transferred that power to other entities, and often the receptors of these powers were
Christian saints and images, the foremost being the Virgin Mary. Some scholars have
posited that the most obvious manifestations of the conflation of the Virgin Mary with
Pachamama are paintings of the Virgin that take on the shape of a mountain, thus linking
the Christian deity with the sacred nature of the Andean landscape. However, recent
scholars have uncovered a tradition of statue paintings in Spain that predates those in
Peru and may have been the source for the colonial paintings referenced here. Thus, the
paintings of the Virgin with a bell-shaped dress that have in the past been linked to the
mountains of Peru, may instead be ideas imported from Europe. Most recently, Maya
Stanfield-Mazzi surveyed Spanish statue paintings and discussed this issue. She
assertsthat these Peruvian statue paintings of the Virgin Mary may have at times
references Pachamama to the colonial audience, but that the imagery likely was not
meant always as a direct link and in fact may have often had more explicit references to
the moon goddess Mama Quilla. Accordingly, the colonial statue paintings may have
held some layered meaning in reference to indigenous beliefs, but the objects were
steeped in European tradition as well and therefore must be studied as such.
Additionally, the idea of images of the Virgin as references to pre-Hispanic female deities
must remain only a hypothesis since there is no absolute proof that these paintings served
that distinct function for the colonial audience. That being said, there were connections
made between Andean deities and the Virgin Mary that established a link.
Paintings that may have represented a conflated image of Christian and
preChristian female deities were most common in the more remote areas of the
viceroyalty, with particular prominence in Cuzco, and became most abundant in the late-
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, once indigenous artists had a stronger hold on the
art scene.
The paintings of the Virgin lactans that I have discussed here represent a tradition that
flourished in Lima much earlier, in the first half of the seventeenth century. However, it
is worth considering that there may have been a similar situation arising in Lima, or at
least an early manifestation of some of the ideas that would take hold later.
In addition to gender, the Virgin Mary came to be associated with the Andean
Earth Mother because of their similar abilities to reproduce and nurture. An image of the
Virgin nursing her Child seems potentially like an evocative representation of these
regenerative female powers, and perhaps could further explain the popularity of the
image in Lima at the end of the seventeenth century. Certainly, there are no implicit
references to a pre-Christian entity in the paintings discussed here, as European influence
was most dominant. However, the audience for these paintings was not uniformly
European, but also composed of indigenous viewers, who may have responded to
paintings of the Virgin lactans as reminiscent of the powerful, nurturing qualities of the
earth, which the Andeans happened to picture in female form. It has been noted, here and
in the work of other scholars, that consideration of the diverse audience was a factor from
early in the colonial period.
Alesio’s Students
Alesio’s impact in Lima went beyond his own production due to the large
workshop he built and the numerous students and apprentices he took on. There is a list
of names of artists who worked with the Italian, but no individual paintings can be
securely attributed to most of these men. There are, throughout the city, in churches and
monasteries, paintings that show clear Italian influence and that have been dated to the
first and second quarters of the seventeenth century. Some, if not many, of these
paintings may likely have been completed by students of Alesio, but at this point in time,
the documentation to support any attribution has not come to light. Further research into
the period following the death of Alesio and the other Italians is required to connect many
unattributed paintings to names of artists that appear in documents.
The following artists have been associated with Alesio’s workshop: Cosme
Ferrero Figueroa, Domingo Gil, Francisco García, Francisco Sanchez, Francisco
Bejarano, and Pedro Pablo Moron, the Italian who is known to have traveled to Lima
with Alesio. Scholars have published fragments of information about some of these
artists. For example, a document from 1600-1602 relates that Domingo Gil left Alesio’s
workshop to pursue an independent career at age thirty-four, but the information is not
precise and does not include the date of this departure. Since Alesio only arrived in Lima
in 1590, however, it is safe to assume that Gil must have worked with Alesio during the
early part of his South American career. Francisco Bejarano was an Augustinian monk
who also worked with Alesio, for whom several works are documented. Bejarano
worked with Alesio for four years, during which time he learned the art of intaglio
printing, which he practiced on at least several occasions later in his career. He designed
the engraving for the frontispiece (Figure 4.8) for a book entitled Sanctuario de Nuestra
Señora de Copacabana en el Peru, which was printed in 1641. Bejarano’s known works
will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 4, as part of a discussion of the role played
by students of the Italians in the transformation of colonial Peruvian art from styles
impacted greatly by Europe to approaches influenced much more heavily by indigenous
aesthetics.
Alesio also trained his son, Adrian, to be a painter, although as with all of his
other students, no single painting has been attributed to the younger Pérez de Alesio.
Adrian entered the Dominican order and so likely painted for the church and monastery
of that brotherhood.
Conclusion
An assessment of Mateo Pérez de Alesio’s career is challenging due to the vast
loss of paintings in Lima by his hand. Archival documents and seventeenth-century
sources reference his prolific career and are essential tools in the reconstruction of his
production, but cannot replace the works of art themselves. Fortunately, Alesio worked
as an artist for more than two decades in Europe before venturing to the New World, so it
is possible to assess his background and style. Even among the very few paintings by
Alesio that are extant in Lima and the documentation that references his other work,
however, it is clear that he had an impact. In his workshop he trained a number of artists
whose bodies of work have not been catalogued or studied. However, the Italian-
influenced paintings that still hang in Lima’s churches and monasteries are evidence of
the presence of Alesio and the other two Italians in the city and it is likely that many of
those paintings might be connected to his students, although that research remains to be
done.
CHAPTER 3
ANGELINO MEDORO
Introduction
The third of the three Italian painters to arrive in Lima was Angelino Medoro, in 1599,
after working in Rome, Seville and Tunja, Colombia, where contemporary writers
celebrated his paintings. By the time he got to Lima, his reputation as a great artist was
already somewhat established, and he received many high-profile commissions. Medoro
was prolific in Lima, and many of his canvases are signed, often with the subheading pintor
romano, and remain in good condition. His popularity and success are evident in the great
number of commissions he received, the followers that studied with him or were influenced
by his work, and contemporary texts that celebrated his accomplishments. However,
Medoro has received little scholarly attention, despite his productive career and the
numerous students he trained who went on to have their own illustrious careers as painters.
A survey of Medoro’s signed paintings in Lima, as well as archival evidence of
several that were destroyed in earthquakes of the seventeenth century, will serve as the
first in-depth analysis of his oeuvre. The vast number of paintings by his hand that remain
throughout the city is illustrative of the mark he left on colonial Lima. Medoro’s
oeuvre is challenging to analyze as a whole because his style of painting underwent
changes in the early seventeenth century, likely owing to changing fashions and the needs
of commissions. However, with an analysis of several consistent formal and aesthetic
choices throughout his paintings a more complete understanding of the artist’s style will
be evident.
Evidence of Medoro’s influence extends beyond his own paintings, as his students
were numerous and many of their paintings survive. For example, the works of Leonardo
Jaramillo and Antonio Mermejooffer clear evidence of the adoption of their master’s
Italianate style. Medoro also trained the young artist Luis de Riaño, who entered the
Italian’s workshop at only fifteen and became an important link between the Italians and
later styles of painting in Peru. In Riaño’s early paintings is evidence of the long-lasting
presence of the Italian Renaissance in Peruvian painting; in his later work is the
beginning of the colonial migration towards a style less closely tied to European
Renaissance standards and ideals.
Despite the apparent mark Medoro made on Lima’s artistic culture, there is a lack
of substantial scholarly literature on him, due in part to the negative reputation that
several scholars have established. In 1959, Martin Soria called even Medoro’s most
celebrated paintings “weak in drawing” and “poorer in quality than his predecessor,
Bernardo Bitti.” Teresa Gisbert and José de Mesa perpetuated this evaluation of Medoro,
especially in their criticism of his paintings in Peru, noting that his work began a great
decline once he was in Lima, due to his abandonment of Mannerism and inability to
adjust to the changing tastes of the seventeenth century. Judging Medoro’s work in terms
of quality seems an anachronistic endeavor, since despite modern scholarly opinions of
his oeuvre, his work was esteemed and influential in the seventeenth century. It is true
that Medoro had strengths and weaknesses as a painter; for example, he had a clear
preference for and ease with compositions containing a single figure, painted
monumentally, while he struggled with the unity of more complex compositions that
involved the interaction of numerous characters. Over the course of his time in Lima
from 1599 until 1620, it is also true that Medoro changed his style and approach at a
certain point, from one dominated by the linear, attenuated aesthetics of Mannerism to a
more robust, classical approach, and finally to a sober, naturalistic style akin to the
development of the reform movements of painting that were spreading through Europe
and Latin America by the first decade of the seventeenth century. Medoro tended to adjust
his style as he interpreted the needs of the subject matter and commissions, which is a
demonstration of his versatility as an artist. He remained up-to-date throughout his
career; after he left Lima in 1620 to return to Seville, he became trained in the
seventeenth-century style of Spain. Documents remain that show that he worked with
Alonso Cano in Seville and completed the examinations to enter the city’s painting guild.
Medoro was well received by the city’s patrons, and received commissions throughout
his time in the city. In fact, his importance has been downplayed; he was one of the first
artists working in Lima to experiment with the new trends of seventeenthcentury Europe,
which he must have learned about much as everyone else in the New World did, through
imported works of art. Therefore, even these later works have importance in the study of
art’s history in colonial Lima and should not be dismissed as weak.
In addition, the focus on style and painterly skill has resulted in a dearth of
analysis of the subject matter and context of Medoro’s paintings. Unlike Alesio, Medoro
is still well represented by numerous paintings hanging in their original locations in
Lima. These paintings, however, have never been interpreted and their meaning and
function have thus been obscured. The goal of this chapter is to analyze and interpret
Medoro’s complete oeuvre from Lima and consider not merely its quality, but its
contribution to his career as well as its meaning and its influence in the city, which was
substantial.
Medoro before Lima
Angelino Medoro was born in Rome in 1567 and likely received his training
there, although no documents exist that provide any insight into his early years. He
traveled to Spain in 1586 and was on his way to the New World by the next year. His
formative years as an artist must therefore have been in Rome, where he encountered
many of the same trends and artists that Bitti and Alesio came into contact with during
their early years. By 1580, art in Rome was consumed by the movement of the
Counter-Reformation and the reforms of the Council of Trent. Thus Medoro, much like
Bitti and Alesio, was steeped in the contemporary valuation of the responsibility of sacred
art to communicate and inspire.
Also much like Bitti and Alesio, Medoro adopted many of the elegant formal
characteristics of Mannerism that were widely popular in both Italy and Spain at the end
of the sixteenth century. And, like his fellow Italian transplants, he subscribed to the
reformed Mannerism that satisfied the needs of the Counter-Reformation, but retained
“stylish” formal aesthetics.
Medoro arrived in Seville in 1586 with the intention of traveling to the New
World. He did so by 1587, when he left for Colombia. Unfortunately, the only works
that have been identified from his early years in Europe are a painting of the Flagellation
(Figure 3.1) and a drawing (Figure 3.2) in a private collection in Seville. The extant
drawing comes from his short Spanish sojourn; it is a preparatory drawing of the
Adoration of the Kings for a painting that is now lost. The drawing has evidence of
Medoro’s influences as a young artist, which harken back to his Italian Mannerist roots;
more specifically, the drawing is reminiscent of the designs of Taddeo Zuccaro, who was
working in Rome while Medoro was there. In a recent catalogue of the private collection
that currently holds the drawing, the authors noted that the use of short, vibrant hatching
in Medoro’s drawing was a technique common to the Roman tradition. This
demonstrates that Medoro brought Italian techniques with him to Spain, techniques that
would have been openly accepted in Seville where Italianate style was widely popular. In
fact, in Seville, Medoro must have encountered many artists working in the elegant
Mannerist style of late-sixteenth-century Rome, so his penchant for this style must have
been encouraged. However, since he was there for such a short time, it is safe to deduce
that much of his artistic formation must have occurred in Rome. Further evidence of
Medoro’s Italian roots came to light after a study of a number of his Lima paintings by a
group of art conservators between 2004 and 2007. Rocío Bruquetas embarked on an
investigation of the materials and processes that Medoro used in works of art he
completed in the first decade of the seventeenth century and found that in most cases, he
relied on the basic techniques common to Roman painting of the sixteenth century and
espoused in Italian treatises of the Renaissance. Thus, even without documentation of
Medoro’s early years in Rome, it seems likely that his training must have happened in the
city of his birth and that he relied on that education throughout his career.
When Medoro left Seville in 1587, his destination was Colombia, which was part
of the viceroyalty of Peru in the sixteenth century and remained tied to Lima until the
formation of the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Granada in the eighteenth century. It was
here, in the city of Tunja, where Medoro made his earliest Latin American paintings and
where his career began to flourish. Founded by the Spanish just four decades earlier,
Tunja was in the midst of a boom in building activity when Medoro arrived and he
encountered many opportunities for commissions. His first known work was the
Virgin de la Antigua (Figure 3.3), made for a chapel in the Church of Santo Domingo.
With this project, the young Italian started his New World career on a high note; his
patrons were among the most elite in the city. Diego Hernández Caraballo was the
caballero of Tunja and his wife, Polonia de Roa, was the daughter of one of the
conquistadors who had discovered New Granada.
Medoro’s most reproduced paintings from his time in Tunja, however, are two
that he made for the Chapel de la Mancipe in the Iglesia Mayor. The patrons for the
chapel were the conquistador Pedro Ruiz García and, after he died, his son, Antonio Ruiz
Mancipe. Yet again Medoro worked for the most elite patrons in the city. The 1598
commission was for three paintings, one of the Virgin and two paintings from the Passion
of Christ, Agony in the Garden (fig. 4) and Descent from the Cross (fig. 5); the Passion
scenes are the only two that remain. Shortly after Medoro completed the paintings in the
chapel, a Spanish chronicler named Juan de Castellanos celebrated the chapel’s
decorations in his seventeenth-century book Elegias de varones de Indias, dedicated to
the valuation of achievements of artists and writers working in Spanish America. In his
description of the Mancipe chapel, Castellanos related its paintings to the greatness of the
work of the ancient Greeks, Phidias and Polykleitos. The comparison has significance
here, as Castellanos linked the classically trained Italian artist, Medoro, to the classical
tradition of Renaissance art. The prestige of the Italian artist in the New World has been
cited previously here; in Castellano’s book is a specific example of the agency of an
arbiter of Old World tradition. Thus, from the earliest moment in his New World career,
Medoro created works of art that satisfied the needs and tastes of his patrons and
audience, who celebrated classical training. In the two extant works from the Mancipe
chapel, elements of Medoro’s youthful style are clear, including the creation of shallow
space with figures whose bodies lack robust three-dimensionality, positioned close to the
picture plane, with little attention paid to the setting. The body of Christ in the Descent
from the Cross, and those of many other figures, are angular and broken in their poses.
Also in these two paintings are the first appearances of a formal decision that Medoro
made in many paintings; in both works, Medoro showed Christ in profile and created a
dramatic side view of the features of his angular face and pointed beard. The profile is
quite common in Medoro’s paintings and serves as an aid in attribution. The Descent
from the Cross is an appropriate example of Medoro’s early concerns. In addition to the
cramped space, angular bodies, and profile poses that were part of Medoro’s style in his
early period in South America, stylistic and iconographic choices reflect his sensitivity to
the reforms of the post-Tridentine period. Medoro may have taken as his source a
painting of the same subject by Giorgio Vasari (Figure 3.6), now in the Casa Vasari in
Arezzo, but originally made for Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici in Rome and so conceivably
seen by Medoro in Italy. The compositions are quite similar; alike is the placement of
Christ’s body in the center, surrounded by mourners and those carrying his body to the
tomb. However, Medoro made several significant adjustments to Vasari’s concept. This
painting serves as an example of how Medoro catered to the needs of the reforms dictated
by the Council of Trent. As discussed below, in comparison to Vasari’s painting,
Medoro’s is more serious and decorous in its presentation of sacred imagery and more
directly moving and inspirational to the viewer. Commentators of the Counter-
Reformation criticized a number of Italian
Mannerist painters, including Giorgio Vasari, for losing sight of the sacred function of art
in favor of style and creative experimentation. In Vasari’s Descent from the Cross, he fell
victim to many of the criticisms launched by prominent theorists, such as Gilio and
Gabriele Paleotti; some of the differences between the painting by Vasari and that by
Medoro reflect these critiques, especially those of Paleotti, whose ideas seem to have
been particularly influential in this painting by Medoro.
Gabriele Paleotti was a bishop in Bologna, Italy who, at the end of the sixteenth
century, wrote one of the most influential treatises on art in the post-Tridentine period:
Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane, published in 1582. In it, Paleotti detailed
his instructions to painters set with the task to make sacred imagery. First and foremost,
he focused on the need for religious art to powerfully communicate and inspire and his
belief that the legibility of the work of art should be at the forefront of the artist’s mind at
all times, ahead of concerns for fame, style or invention. In these instructions, Paleotti
countered many of the most common tropes of then popular Mannerist painting,
asserting, “address yourself to all men and inspire them to new and intense devotion by
means of instruction, edification, revelation, the arousing of emotion or terror.” Paleotti
instructed painters in a fashion nearly the opposite of how Renaissance commentators
had; all other treatises had taught artists how to elevate their art through erudition and
style, always taking into consideration only the most elite and intellectual of viewers, but
Paleotti encouraged artists to paint for the common man and woman.
By the end of the sixteenth century, Paleotti’s treatise had become a canonical text
and the bishop’s influence was widespread in Europe and likely could have had an impact
in Latin America as well. The Council of Trent discussed the issue of sacred art only
briefly, leaving the administration of post-Tridentine regulations to the local clergy.
Paleotti was among the only commentators to directly interpret artistic reforms, and thus
his writing had great agency in the late-sixteenth century. Although copies of Paleotti’s
text have not yet been found in Latin American libraries, it is certainly possible, and
highly probable, that the text made its way to the viceroyalties. In addition, if physical
copies of the treatise cannot be traced to Colombia or Peru, Catholic clergy in the
colonies, as well as European artists such as Medoro, would have known the ideology of
the text. Art historian Pamela Jones has suggested that Paleotti’s treatise, or at least the
ideas of it, must have had an impact on colonial Latin American art. Thus, it is
illuminating to consider Paleotti’s advice in the context of the differences between the
two paintings of the Descent executed by Vasari and Medoro.
Careful analysis of Medoro’s Descent from the Cross makes clear several
instances in which the artist seems to have followed Paleotti’s instructions, especially
when compared to Vasari’s version of the same subject. For example, Medoro focused
his composition on the most important characters in the narrative, Christ and the Virgin
Mary, who are both centrally located, with Christ’s body occupying much of the width of
the painting and the Virgin standing slightly taller than all other figures. This
composition leaves no question in the viewer’s mind about the identification of the most
holy characters. Paleotti instructed artists to avoid disjointed compositions that tended to
obscure the critical protagonists; this kind of confusion in the composition is certainly
present in Vasari’s painting. Vasari pushed the body of Christ to the middle-ground,
behind one of the figures who carries his body, and the Virgin Mary is almost completely
obscured in the dark background setting. Medoro’s painting makes clear the importance
of his protagonists through a more focused layout.
In addition, Vasari’s choice to highlight some of the less significant figures seems
to be related to his interest in experimenting with their twisted, contorted, unrealistic
poses. While Medoro was still interested in the elegant proportions of his figures, their
poses are far more naturalistic, another quality that Paleotti championed. Paleotti
instructed that figures should be accurate and based on the human body, not on classical
sculpture, which was the inspiration of so many Mannerist painters. If exaggeration was
to be part of the painting, it had to have a purpose. And, yet again, Medoro followed this
guideline: the Virgin dramatically tilts her head back and directs her eyes to the sky.
However, this exaggeration of pose serves to focus on her sorrow as she desperately
looks to the heavens for solace.
Finally, Paleotti instructed painters to include only figures who would have been
present at the scene depicted, to follow the Bible carefully, and to dress these figures in
costumes appropriate to the period of the narrative. Again, this seems an attack on artists
such as Vasari who committed these very errors in Figure 3.6, by including several
figures dressed in sixteenth-century costume, who most likely are portraits of
contemporaries. The man in the red hat to the far right, who looks out directly at the
viewer, is particularly conspicuous, with individualized features and a portrait-like
appearance. Beginning in the fifteenth century, a number of Italian artists took to
including portraits of patrons or society elites in their religious paintings in order to pay
tribute and solicit acclaim, while Medoro refrained from any such inclusions.
Medoro also made specific choices in his painting in order to enhance its somber tone
and to better inspire his audience. The overall color of the painting, which is dim and
murky (although this may be exaggerated because of it age and lack of cleaning) and the
focus on Christ’s bent and broken body, emaciated and bleeding from the wound to his
chest, intensify the emotional qualities of the narrative. The melancholy of the painting
reflects the requirement, espoused by Paleotti, to make evocative art that would reach
viewers. In this case, the somber tone was also directly related to the context, as the
painting was intended for a funerary chapel.
The paintings in the Mancipe chapel, celebrated by contemporaries, earned
Medoro early acclaim that helped propel him into important commissions. Medoro’s
success in Colombia took him to other cities in South America, including Bogota, Quito,
and Lima. Archival documents date his work in the Chapel de la Mancipe in Tunja to
1598, but there is evidence that he was in Quito in 1592, so it seems that he may have left
Colombia for a brief sojourn in Quito and then returned, all before setting foot in Lima in
1599. His work in Quito is not well documented, but scholars agree on the attribution of
two paintings: a painted shield, which Medoro signed and dated 1592, and a large
painting of the Virgin and Child with four saints.
Medoro’s Work at the Monastery of the Descalzos
By 1599, Medoro was in Lima, most likely drawn to the city because it was the
center of the viceroyalty and a site of lucrative commissions but also perhaps because of
the precedent of success by Italians already set by Bernardo Bitti and Mateo Pérez de
Alesio. By 1600 he was working on his first Lima project. Although the painting is no
longer extant, documents and contemporary chronicles describe a painting of the Holy
Trinity that Medoro made for the refectory of the monastery of the Merced. Archival
documents record that Medoro was paid 6,000 pesos for this painting; as he had made
only 400 pesos for both Passion scene paintings in the Chapel of the Mancipe in Tunja,
clearly his reputation had grown and the economic situation made for much more
lucrative projects.
By 1601, Medoro was working in the Monastery of the Descalzos, a Franciscan
monastery with one of the most extensive collections of colonial art from Lima that is
still in existence. Medoro alone painted at least seven paintings for various sections of
the monastery, all of which are in good condition. Therefore, analysis of Medoro’s
paintings in the Descalzos affords an excellent opportunity to study his style and
approach to painting once in Lima. In order to fully understand the intent and purpose of
these paintings, however, it is also critical to consider the setting. The Monastery of the
Descalzos was unique in its time in Lima and its founders and directors sought art with a
particular purpose, especially in its earliest years. Therefore, a brief history of the
beginnings of the monastery is essential.
The Descalzos is one of several Franciscan monasteries in Lima. The order had a
presence in Latin American from quite early in the formation of the colonies. The
Franciscans were established in Mexico and Central America in 1493, and expanding
missions into Peru by 1532. On January 18, 1535, the same year as the foundation of
Lima, Fray Francisco de la Cruz asked Francisco Pizarro for permission to found a
Franciscan monastery, which was granted eleven years later, in 1546. In that year, the
Franciscans began construction of their first monastery in Lima, on the spot where it
remains today, close to the Plaza Mayor, in the center of the city. Founded several
decades later, the Descalzos is not in the center of the city; instead it is located on the
north side of the Rimac river, the body of water on which the city was founded. The local
indigenous people who inhabited the area before the arrival of the Spanish considered the
river a sort of oracle, naming it Rimac, which in Quechua means “the river that talks.”311
The Spanish built much of Lima on the south side of the river, and reserved the north side
for the sick and destitute, including those suffering from leprosy. Thus, one of the first
structures built on the north side of the city was the Church and Hospital of San Lorenzo,
which catered to lepers. When an earthquake destroyed the hospital in 1586, the
organization and its claim to this land changed; much of the territory was divided up
among wealthy, elite citizens of the city and construction in this area rose. One wealthy
limeña, Doña Maria Valera, donated her large parcel of land in this northern sector to the
construction of the Descalzos.
From its formation, the Descalzos had some particular objectives in mind that
were related to recent reforms of the Franciscan order and particularly prevalent in Spain.
This movement encouraged Franciscan monks to return to the most basic and essential
ideas
apostolica (Lima: Convento de los Descalzos, 1995), 3-5. Heras includes a concise history of the
Franciscans in Lima.
311 Ibid., 7.
of their founder, Saint Francis of Assisi, and by the end of the sixteenth century,
Franciscans all around the world had gained a powerful reputation in the Church and had
cultivated the tradition of building three different monasteries in a city, each with a
separate purpose. The first was the main, central monastery, which in Lima was the
structure built close to the center; the second was a place of study; and the third was
reserved for monks dedicated to prayer, meditation, and penance and was often in the
outskirts of the city. The Descalzos took on this third designation and was the first of its
kind, a monastery dedicated solely to devout prayer, in Peru.
Medoro’s relationship with the Descalzos began early in the monastery’s history,
when he painted the first major work of art commissioned there. The founder and first
guardian of the Descalzos was Fray Andreas Corso, an Italian, hailing from Corsica,
which was then controlled by the Genoese. The choice of an Italian painter for this first
commission might be related to the heritage of the monastery’s founder. It is impossible
to determine precisely what the first monastery looked like, but the first chapel built was
devoted to the Virgin of the Angels and Medoro painted the altarpiece (Figure 3.7), which
is still extant today. In it, angels crown the Virgin, who stands on a crescent moon, a
reference to her immaculate conception. Stylistically, the body of the Virgin is robust in
its three-dimensionality and naturalistic in its modeling.
The tradition of art-making at the Descalzos began early, with the commission of
Medoro’s altarpiece. Shortly after, in the beginning of the seventeenth century, a series of
portraits of the most important friars who had resided there were commissioned. These
images served as inspiring exemplars for current inhabitants, an objective of much of the
art at this locale. As a monastery that offered a space for the prayer and meditation of
Franciscan monks, it required art somewhat different from those for monasteries intended
for study, administration, or missions, as the audience here was penitent monks, not
laymen and women. Medoro’s subsequent work at the Descalzos catered to the specific
needs of the monastery’s inhabitants.
In 1601, Medoro completed two paintings of Biblical narratives, The Baptism of
Christ (Figure 3.8) and The Crucifixion of Christ with Saints Dominic and Francis
(Figure 3.9), as well as four paintings of saints, which responded to the monastery’s
objective of using art to inspire the monks living within. Medoro signed and dated Saint
Anthony of Padua (Figure 3.10), Saint Bonaventure (Figure 3.11), Saint Catherine of
Alexandria (Figure 3.12), and Saint Diego of Alcalá (Figure 3.13). Paintings of saints
were common in the Counter-Reformation period as the Catholic Church celebrated and
defended the cult of saints, a devotion that had been heavily criticized and rejected by the
Protestant reformers. Therefore, this series of images of saints should be seen in the
context of the larger Catholic world, where similar objects were becoming more popular
than ever before. However, it is also critical to consider the context of colonial Latin
America and the context of the Monastery of the Descalzos in attempting to understand
the purpose and function of Medoro’s paintings. Images of European saints were
common in colonial Latin American art and often served the purpose of aggrandizing the
European past and reaffirming its presence in the New World. Carolyn Dean has astutely
pointed out that the trajectory of European saints in New World art changed and
developed through the colonial period as indigenous artists and audiences began to
interpret these saints and their stories in uniquely local ways. It is also important to
consider that even before indigenous contributions became evident in colonial art, the
situation of any painting of a European saint in colonial Latin America, even if painted by
a European artist for a largely European audience, as was likely the case at the Descalzos,
was specific to its setting.
First and foremost, the inclusion of European saints connected the Franciscan
monastery in Lima to all those in the Old World, but the choice of these particular saints
was also significant. Most obviously, all but one were connected to the Franciscan order,
but more importantly, all had stories that could relate to the plight of Franciscans working
in colonial Lima. Themes of Christian triumph over paganism and the uniting of
different faiths characterize the narratives of Anthony, Bonaventure, Diego, and
Catherine.
The choice of Saint Anthony of Padua is perhaps the most obvious for the context
of the Descalzos. A Franciscan monk born in Portugal in the twelfth century, Anthony
devoted himself to missionary work, journeying first to Morocco and later, after contact
with Saint Francis himself, teaching divinity at colleges in several cities, including Padua.
His success as a missionary came from what has been described as his ability to be both
persuasive and eloquent in his preaching, as well as the numerous miracles he
performed.318 Among all the various narratives of Anthony of Padua, it seems that
Medoro’s painting depicts one of Anthony’s less commonly depicted miracles, but one
that appears in his biographies. The story began with the murder of a young man in
Anthony’s native city of Lisbon, where his family remained after Anthony had left. The
young man in the narrative was the son of parents who were enemies of another
prominent family in the city, and having entered into the territory of his family’s enemies,
the young boy was killed and his body was buried behind the home of Saint Anthony’s
family. When the body was found, Saint Anthony’s father was arrested for the murder.
According to the legend, although Anthony was in Padua at the time, he learned of the
event through divine inspiration and miraculously traveled to Lisbon where he
resurrected the murdered boy in order to exonerate his father. The protagonists of this
story are easily identifiable in Medoro’s painting; Saint Anthony stands on the left of the
composition, his hand raised as he resuscitates the young boy and relates his story.
Anthony’s father stands next to the saint, his hands still bound, and presumably a city
official, dressed in lavish costume, stands to the right in the composition, witnessing the
miraculous event. The miraculous abilities of this Franciscan saint as well as Anthony’s
lifelong devotion to missionary activities must have made him an apt choice to inspire the
monks of the Descalzos, as a role model. Stylistically, the painting is similar to the Tunja
Descent from the Cross, in its cramped space, angular bodies, and attenuated proportions.
The color, on the other hand, is much brighter, denoting the joyful tone of the miraculous
scene Medoro portrayed.
Medoro also painted Saint Bonaventure (Figure 3.11) in 1601, in a composition
dedicated solely to the saint. Bonaventure stands in the iconic red garb and galero, the
wide-brimmed hat of a cardinal, a position he took in 1273 in the city of Albano. Medoro
has also included, to the side, a bishop’s miter, as a reference to the offer Bonaventure
received but declined, to be archbishop of York. Born in Tuscany, Bonaventure entered
the Franciscan order at twenty-two and became known for his humility, but his most
famous contributions had to do with his defense of the Franciscan order. He became
general of the order, and participated in the second Council of Lyons, where the pope,
with great help from Bonaventure, successfully (if temporarily) united the Greek
Orthodox Church with the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, Bonaventure was not only a
remarkable Franciscan, but also a man who had successfully brought a large population
of people into the Roman Catholic Church, a feat that must have resonated with the
Franciscans at the Descalzos. In addition, like Saint Anthony, Bonaventure had direct
contact with Saint Francis of Assisi in his life; his name came from the exclamation of
Saint Francis upon witnessing the young saint’s recovery from a grave illness, and he
became Francis’s official biographer. Finally, Bonaventure’s story includes Saint
Anthony as well; Bonaventure oversaw the translation of his relics to the church
dedicated in his name in Padua. Legend relays that when Bonaventure opened the
sarcophagus where Anthony’s body had been interred he found that the entire body had
become ashes, except for his tongue, which Bonaventure kissed.
Medoro’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria was similarly related to the mission of
the Franciscans at the Descalzos, as Catherine was known to have been a brilliant speaker
with the ability to convert even the least willing. Catherine, like the Franciscans in Lima,
made it her life’s goal to convert those following pagan beliefs to the true Christian faith,
and thus would have been a powerful role model. Her presence here, though, reflects her
widespread popularity in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It seems that
Catherine experienced a kind of resurgence in the end of the sixteenth century because of
the inspirational impact of her story. In a recent study of early modern Italian chapbooks,
inexpensive printed texts with narratives and prayers, from the Counter-Reformation
period, Pamela Jones found that among all of the lives of saints depicted, Saint
Catherine’s story was one of the most common. Jones makes the conclusion that images
of Catherine in the post-Tridentine period tended to focus on her martyrdom rather than
her debates with high-minded thinkers of the time because her sacrifice was more
important than her wisdom in the role she came to play as exemplar for pious women.
The resurgence of Catherine in the post-Tridentine period is related to a widespread
renewal of interest in stories and figures from the early Christian period, plotted as an
attempt to establish links between the Catholic Church and its respected origins. The
Catholic Church sought to present itself as the one, true Christian faith, in contrast to the
new, divergent Protestant sects. Works of art devoted to early Christian content became
popular in this period as a response. Thus, Medoro’s painting is both relatable in its local
context and connected to larger trends in Catholic art. Medoro’s treatment of Catherine
as heroic and monumental is also characteristic of representations of the saint’s story in
the post-Tridentine period.
Medoro’s painting includes the traditional iconography of Saint Catherine, such as
the wheel and the martyr’s palm. Less common is his inclusion of the sword, the
instrument used to behead the young saint, and extremely rare is the head of the emperor
Maxentius, who ordered her martyrdom and was later replaced by Constantine. Here the
sword is surely intended as a reference to the fall of the pagan past and the ascension of
Christianity, through the brave devotion of people such as Catherine. This theme must
have had resonance in Lima where great brutality, violence, and killing had been one
result of the Spanish invasion.
In the last of the four paintings of saints, Medoro depicted the most famous
Spanish saint of the previous century. Diego de Alcalá, like the other male saints
included, was a Franciscan friar, but his presence in the Spanish viceroyalty of Peru had a
more pointed significance. Born in the town of Alcalá, Spain in the fifteenth century, he
worked on overseas missions to the Canary Islands, and therefore would have been a
relevant role model for the Franciscans at the Descalzos. Diego’s significance, however,
extends beyond the deeds and experiences of his life. In fact, Diego de Alcalá’s life was
much like the lives of many other Franciscans, until after his death, when he became
celebrated as the savior of a young Spanish prince. It is this part of Diego’s story that
warranted his inclusion at the Descalzos. The narrative recounts the life of Carlos, son of
King Phillip II, who had a troubled story from the beginning, having lost his mother in
childbirth and then apparently experiencing irrational, psychologically unstable episodes
as a young boy. Later, the legend around Don Carlos would come to include the
elaboration that he had fallen in love with his stepmother and subsequently was killed by
his own father in his early twenties.
Prior to death, however, there is another critical moment in his story that involves
a fall and a serious illness that nearly resulted in death, at age eighteen. The king sent
him to the University of Alcalá, where some of the best physicians attended to him.
However, their dramatic efforts seemed unsuccessful as the infection he suffered spread
through much of his body. After all of the medical attempts appeared to have failed, the
Franciscans in Alcalá resurrected the body of Diego, who they believed had been a
miraculous figure and who they hoped would one day be canonized as a saint, and carried
it to the sickbed of the young prince. Don Carlos, who could not see the body of the
deceased monk because his eyes were forced shut by the infection, reached out and
touched it, and miraculously, the next morning, began his road to recovery. The people of
Alcala, and then people from villages throughout Spain began to spread the word of the
miraculous healing powers of San Diego, and Don Carlos too came to believe that he
recovered due to the aid of the Franciscan, claiming to have had a vision of Diego the
night before his recovery. He said that a man dressed in a Franciscan habit and carrying a
small wooden cross had visited him and told him that he would safely recover. Medoro
has included this vision of the sick prince in the background of his painting; Diego floats
over the bed of Carlos, surrounded by a halo of light. Even before he had fully
recovered, Don Carlos made it his mission to ensure that Diego would be canonized, and
included the stipulation in his will that his father should carry out the cause if he were to
die.
The canonization of Diego de Alcalá, then, became one of the most important
missions of King Phillip II, who successfully convinced Pope Sixtus V to approve the
canonization, after attempts to persuade two preceding popes. When Sixtus canonized
Diego, he became the first saint of the Counter-Reformation, a fact that is representative
of the power of the Spanish monarch in the Catholic landscape of the sixteenth century.
Part of Phillip’s campaign for Diego’s canonization was built on the idea of saints as
inspirational figures. He argued that making Diego a saint could powerfully support the
Catholic Church’s promotion of the cult of saints and more specifically could prove the
existence of miraculous saintly figures in the contemporary landscape. The inclusion,
then, of San Diego of Alcalá in the Monastery of the Descalzos in Lima was tied jointly
to Diego’s place as role model and as a nationalistic artifact of the great strength of
Spanish dominion at this time. The king’s victorious campaign to make Diego a saint
was a demonstration of the strong ties Spain had built to Rome and the Vatican. Thus,
all four saint paintings by Medoro share a single function: to inspire the local Franciscan
monks through the legends of Old World saints faced with similar obstacles. Stylistically,
the strongest of these paintings are the three that concentrate on isolated portraits of the
saints: Saint Bonaventure, Saint Diego of Alcalá, and Saint Catherine. It is in this type of
focused, simple composition that Medoro really thrived as a painter. Moreover, all three
have similarities that are worth noting to begin to develop a sense of connoisseurship for
Medoro’s work. In each case, the saint is the largest component of the composition,
standing in a shallow space, with little suggestion of setting. These characteristics are
also evident in his paintings in Tunja. His figure style, however, is somewhat different in
the Descalzos paintings. Only the painting of San Diego retains the broken body and
attenuated proportions of the Mannerist aesthetic that Medoro relied on in Tunja. In the
other three, Medoro naturalistically modeled the bodies of the saints with convincing
three-dimensionality, giving their bodies robust presence. The naturalistic modeling of
three-dimensional figures was one component of his style that proved particularly
influential on his students and followers.
Medoro’s Work at the Monastery of San Francisco
Medoro’s relationship with the Franciscans in Lima continued and brought him
next to the central Franciscan monastery, located in the heart of the city, just several
blocks from Plaza de Armas. There he completed a second painting of Saint Bonaventure
(Figure 3.14) in 1603 and a retablo (Figure 3.15) with scenes from the Passion, some time
after 1610.
Medoro depicted Bonaventure, the scholar saint, in the midst of divinely inspired
writing; seated at a desk, the saint dips his pen into a pot of ink and with the other hand
holds open a large tome, in which he is writing. However, his attention is not on the book
or the pen, but instead on the figure of a small crucifix, at which he stares intently. To
further bring attention to the crucifix, the saint points a finger of his left hand directly at
the sculpture. The prominence of the crucifix, which Medoro has painted with a high
degree of realism and detail, is most likely related to the saint’s strong belief in the
tradition of Imitatio Christi and his fascination with the importance of relating to the life
of Christ, which he discussed in his Quaestiones disputatae de perfectione evangelica.
Although he is seated, the saint’s pose is active, as if he is not quite settled in his chair,
but invigorated by the action of writing, a portrait of a man receiving divine inspiration
and translating it into the written word. Medoro included the slightest of halos to indicate
his holiness and the saint’s most common attributes, the galero, casually hung on the back
of the chair, and the bishop’s miter, in the bottom left foreground.
The painting hung in the monastery of San Francisco in Lima, which was the
administrative center of the Franciscan missions throughout Peru. The Franciscans had
been in Peru since 1531, and by the first decade of the seventeenth century, had
established missions, commonly called reducciónes in Spanish South America, through
much of the viceroyalty, with all of the friars of those distant locales reporting back to the
provincials in Lima. As learning was a central component of the Franciscan way of life,
it seems appropriate that Lima’s monastery would include a painting of this famous
Franciscan who was known for his intellect and scholarly activities. All new friars
working in Peru underwent a series of intensive examinations before gaining permission
to work with the indigenous populations, including tests on the sacraments, sacred
sciences, as well as the language of the local people. Many of the friars recruited for
missionary work in Peru were young because their youth meant that much time would be
available for them to learn a new and difficult language. In addition, schools were set up
for the Indians at every Franciscan reducción, again because learning was central to the
Franciscan mission. Accordingly, Medoro pictured Bonaventure in the rapture of divine
inspiration and in the midst of intensive study, books stacked on top of each other on the
saint’s crowded desk, an exemplar of the Franciscan way of life.
Here again, as with the paintings of single saints from the Descalzos, Medoro set
up a composition that shows some shallow depth of field and depicts Bonaventure with
robust three-dimensionality. Medoro has also added drama to the depiction through the
posing of Bonaventure with a strong profile, an attribute of many of his paintings.
In addition to the painting of Bonaventure, a painted retablo for the same
Franciscan monastery has been attributed to Medoro, but the attribution of all of the
panles is highly problematic. The interior includes a depiction of the Crucifixion of
Christ, flanked by the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Evangelist (Figure 3.15), and the
exterior doors of the retablo (Figure 3.16) include the scene of Christ’s journey
Flanking the Crucifixion scene on the interior of the retablo are ten painted scenes of the
Passion, including The Agony in the Garden (Figure 3.17), The Mocking of Christ (Figure
3.18), The Flagellation (Figure 3.19), Christ Blindfolded (Figure 3.20), The Torture of
Christ (Figure 3.21), The Crowning with Thorns (Figure 3.22), Christ Before Pilate
(Figure 3.23), On the Way to Calvary (Figure 3.24), The Nailing to the Cross (Figure
3.25), and The Raising of the Cross (Figure 3.26).
Teresa Gisbert and Jose de Mesa date the retablo to the same year that Medoro
completed the painting of Saint Bonaventure, 1603, but close analysis suggests that the
date must be later, at least for one or more of the panels, as the scene of the Raising of the
Cross is clearly a copy of the famous painting of the same subject by the Flemish painter
Peter Paul Rubens (Figure 3.27), which was completed in 1610 for the Church of Saint
Walpurga in Antwerp. Therefore, at least some of the panels from the retablo must date
after 1610 and the Lima Raising must have been based on a print made after Rubens’s
altarpiece. However, the relationship between Rubens’s painting and the Lima version is
complex; there is a series of problems with the dating, sources, and attribution. They will
be considered in order here; first is the short time frame between Rubens’s painting and
the altarpiece, and second is the issue of the transmission of Rubens’s composition from
Antwerp to Lima and how prints might have played a role.
Because Rubens completed the altarpiece with the Raising of the Cross in 1610
and Medoro left Lima in 1620, if Medoro painted this scene from the Passion retablo, he
would have had to see an engraving after the painting some time in the second decade of
the seventeenth century. However, the first authorized print after Rubens’s painting was
not made until 1638, by Hans Witdoeck (Figure 3.28), after an oil sketch (Figure 3.29)
provided by Rubens himself. The oil sketch dates to 1619. Therefore, it is potentially
possible, although unlikely, that Medoro could have seen an unofficial print after the
Rubens painting some time before his departure from Lima in 1620. However, the Lima
painting shares some compositional details with the oil sketch (Figure 3.29) that did not
appear in the original painting. When Rubens made his oil sketch, he made several small
changes from the altarpiece; for example, the Roman soldier on his horse in the right
foreground directs his scepter directly at the face of Christ, while in the altarpiece, this
same soldier angles the scepter down, as if directing the men who are in the midst of
elevating the cross. The Lima painting mimics this alteration. Thus, it seems impossible
that Medoro painted the Raising, as he would have had to see the 1619 print after the oil
sketch before he left Lima the following year. There is not enough time in this scenario
for a print to be sent from Antwerp to Seville and then to Lima, and for Medoro to
complete the painting.
It is illuminating, however, to consider the case of this painting’s known printed
source in order to better understand the practice of European prints serving as guides for
colonial painters in Peru. While it seems highly unlikely that Medoro painted the
Raising, it is clear that the artist who did complete it used a print after Rubens’s original.
From early in the history of colonial Latin American art, prints were sent to the New
World to serve as examples of Catholic style and iconography and in many instances,
woodcuts or engravings served as tools for training indigenous artists to paint. A
prestigious European source, such as the altarpiece by Rubens, carried cultural
significance in colonial Lima. Carolyn Dean has noted, in her investigation of the famous
Corpus Christi paintings in Cuzco, that it was common for contracts for colonial
paintings to specify a printed prototype for a commissioned painting. Dean succinctly
argued that the use of Spanish prints as inspiration for the Corpus Christi paintings
allowed Cuzco’s bishop to link his city to the Spanish city of Valencia, where the prints
had been made. The use of Rubens’s Antwerp prototype in the San Francisco retablo
similarly could have linked the altarpiece to a masterpiece of one of the Spanish empire’s
most prestigious cities. Additionally, the production of this Lima Raising of the Cross
demonstrates that prints imported to colonial Latin America were of the highest class, as
Rubens was successful and already quite popular by the early seventeenth century. The
choice of Rubens’s Raising of the Cross, specifically, as an engraving sent to Lima is
perhaps not surprising considering that it was an important and influential example of
paintings made in the Spanish Netherlands that took on post-Tridentine concerns. The
painting was one of many made in Spain’s European territories that included the
iconographic adjustments necessary in the Counter-Reformation period. Thus, Rubens’s
print must have been sent to Lima not merely as a guide to standard iconographic
practice, but as an example of high art in Catholic Europe, a tradition to which colonial
painters sought to be linked.
Given the preceding discussion, it seems likely that the work was wrongly
attributed to Medoro at some point after its creation and has been repeated since by
numerous scholars. As early as 1674, the chronicler Juan de Benavides described an
altarpiece in the monastery of San Francisco, painted by Medoro, with the Crucifixion of
Christ on the exterior wings and scenes from the Passion on the interior panels, including
the Raising of the Cross. The altarpiece does have a signature, but it is not necessarily
original; if Medoro did not paint the panel, the original misattribution must have been
codified at an unknown date. As will be discussed later, Medoro established a fairly large
workshop in Lima and took on many students. It is possible that when he left Lima a
student or follower completed the retablo with the Raising of the Cross and the project
was either mistakenly or intentionally misattributed to Medoro, given the prestige and
fame the Italian had in Lima. It is also possible that Medoro painted some or all of the
other panels in the retablo.
The misattribution of the panel seems even more likely given that the Lima
painting closely resembles the first authorized engraving after Rubens’s altarpiece, not
published until 1638. The only difference is that the Lima painting is reversed from the
print, suggesting either that the painter intentionally reversed the printed image, or that he
saw a print made after Witdoeck’s engraving that was doubly reversed. In any case, the
Lima painting is in fact closer to the Witdoeck engraving than to Rubens’s original
painting.
When Witdoeck made the engraving, he added well-defined architecture in the
background that was not part of the original painting or Rubens’s oil sketch. The
architecture is somewhat classical in its form, including two centrally planned domed
buildings, and the Lima painting includes nearly identical architecture. Since it was
impossible for Medoro to have seen the 1638 engraving or a copy after it, it seems
necessary to conclude that a student or follower of Medoro painted the scene of the
Raising of the Cross at least some twenty years after the Italian left Lima.
As for the other panels, it is possible, and in fact likely, that Medoro participated
to some degree in their creation, as the style of these paintings is consistent with other
multi-figure compositions made by Medoro in Lima, including Saint Anthony of Padua
(Figure 3.10) from the Monastery of the Descalzos, a painting signed by the artist. In this
work as in Medoro’s most complex compositions tend to be a bit incongruous in the
integration of space and figures; the space is often compressed and the figures lack any
real grounding in the painting, instead floating ambiguously. His multi-figure
compositions also tend to be set up with figures aligned in a somewhat shallow space and
a simple architectural or landscape setting. The figures are not integrated with the space,
but instead act on a sort of stage, close to the picture plane. Additionally, Medoro
struggled with foreshortening in some of these panels, as is also evident in the St.
Anthony at the Descalzos. In Christ Before Pilate (Figure 3.23), the figures that stand
below Christ lack realistic three-dimensional perspective as they wave and gesture. In
addition, at moments, Medoro adopted elements of Mannerist formal aesthetics, the most
frequent being the twisting of bodies in unrealistic ways. Examples include the man
draped in red in Christ Blindfolded (Figure 3.20), with his serpentine body, as well as the
torturers in The Flagellation (Figure 3.19), who gracefully twist towards Christ in the
center of the composition, and the body of Christ himself.
Medoro frequently used the profile pose for significant male characters in his
compositions. Mesa and Gisbert pointed out this feature of Medoro’s paintings, noting
that the nose of the figure is often most prominent. The earliest example is Medoro’s
profile of Christ in his Descent from the Cross in Tunja, but many examples are evident
throughout his oeuvre, including the profile of Saint Anthony in the Descalzos painting
(Figure 3.10) as well as the pose of Bonaventure at San Francisco (Figure 3.14). The
strong male profile makes an appearance in nearly every scene from the Passion series.
These include Christ in the Agony in the Garden (Figure 3.17); Judas, with a dramatically
prominent nose, in the Mocking of Christ (Figure 3.18); and several figures in the
Flagellation (Figure 3.1) and Christ Blindfolded (Figure 3.20), to name only a few. In all
of these instances, the profile pose draws attention to a particular figure in the painting
and in many cases, the figure is an enemy of Christ, the dramatic profile pose seemingly
used to exaggerate an almost monstrous nature of the face.
Although many elements of the style of the Passion series are consistent with
Medoro’s earlier work, there is also here a change in the artist’s style that is more akin to
seventeenth-century European aesthetics, most notable in the lessened exaggeration of
figural poses and proportions and a more dramatic use of color and light. It seems that at
this moment in his career, Medoro’s style changed from an approach imbued with
Mannerist stylings, yet reformed to be more legible and clear, to one more heavily
influenced by naturalism. Scholars in the past have noted this change in Medoro’s later
style; the Passion series marks the first examples in which it is discernible. These
compositions, in comparison to his earlier paintings, include much more detail in the
description of figures and settings. The costumes are richer and the settings no longer
simple black backdrops, but three-dimensional places with architectural and landscape
backgrounds, and often figures, suggesting a more complete world. For example, in the
Flagellation (Figure 3.19), Medoro painted detailed portraits of each figure involved in
the narrative, and included details of costume, facial features, and expression that
individualize each figure. Behind the foreground action, Medoro created a welldeveloped
setting with details of architecture and the marginal scene of Christ being led by his
torturers. Additionally, emotions are high throughout the series, as expressed in facial
expressions and gestures, as well as in the dark color palette of the entire sequence of
scenes. On first glance, the tenebristic approach to light and shadow is one of the aspects
that distinguish these paintings from his early works. The paintings are dark and gloomy,
with sharp highlights illuminating the most significant figures, communicating the
somber tone of the narratives depicted. In the Mocking of Christ, for example,
everything is dark except for the crowd of figures, the most light given to the face of
Christ as Judas initiates the telling kiss.
Many previous scholars and have designated this change in style as a decline, a
moment when Medoro misguidedly strayed from the Mannerist aesthetics that had made
him successful. Instead, it is likely that Medoro made changes to his style due to the
demands of the time. The first two decades of the seventeenth century correspond to a
period of reform in painting throughout Europe and this need for reform was also felt in
Latin America. In Spain, from where much stylistic influence would have come to Lima,
the Florentine reform movement had taken hold and quickly became the dominant
approach to painting in Spanish centers well into the third decade of the seventeenth
century. Because scholars of Spanish art tend to focus on the “Golden Age of Painting”
in the later seventeenth century, with superstars such as Diego Velázquez and Francisco
de Zurbarán, the trends of the first two decades have often been overlooked. Inspired by
the Counter-Reformation and the advice of the Council of Trent, the Spanish court, led by
the Duke of Lerma from 1574 through 1617, appointed the Italian painter Bartolomé
Carducho (originally Carducci), a former assistant of Federico Zuccaro at the Escorial, to
the position of royal painter.338 Carducho, like Zuccaro, was a practitioner of the sober
reform style popular in Florence, and he contributed to the establishment of naturalistic
Counter-Reformation painting as the dominant force in Spanish painting for at least two
decades. Carducho’s style is exemplified by his Death of Saint Francis (Figure 3.30),
illustrated and eloquently analyzed by Jonathan Brown in his volume on Spanish
338 Diego Angulo Íñiguez and Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Historia de la pintura espanola:
Escuela madrileña del primer tercio del siglo XVII (Madrid: Instituto Diego Velázquez, 1969),
14-46; Edward Goldberg, “Artistic Relations between the Medici and Spanish Courts, 15871621,”
Burlington Magazine 138 (1996): 112-3.
painting. This painting, from 1593, exhibits some of the naturalistic tendencies and the
use of light and shadow for effect that can be observed in Medoro’s Passion series. The
reform style marked a break with the Italo-Flemish Mannerism that had been so
prominent in Spain in earlier decades, and the new style spread rapidly not only through
the work of Carducho, but also through the import of paintings by other Florentine
reformers, through such avenues as the Duke of Lerma’s collecting habits, gifts from the
newly crowned Grand Duke of Tuscany, and the import business that Carducho
established himself.
Thus, the transition of Medoro’s style seems to relate to changes in taste in Spain
that must have spread to Lima. It is necessary to consider the possibility of Medoro’s
exposure to this newly popular style of reform painting. The Cathedral of Lima holds in
its vast collection of art a series of paintings of The Last Judgment (Figures 3.31, 3.32,
3.33, 3.34), painted by Vicente Carducho, the brother of Bartolomé, who learned from his
brother and practiced a similar style of reform painting in Madrid. In his Last Judgment,
Vicente mimicked many of the standard qualities of his brother’s style, including
naturalistic figures and settings, as well as dramatic light and shadow to enhance the
emotion of the paintings. Scholars have paid little attention to these paintings, only
mentioning the works in a survey of the cathedral’s collection, where the author has dated
the series to 1620-1630, the decade after Medoro’s departure. However, both Bartolomé
and Vicente were engaged in the commercial trading of painting with Lima and various
other New World cities from the last few years of the sixteenth century. For example, in
1630 Vicente sent sixteen paintings to Gaspar Astete, a Spanish man living in Lima.
Thus, Vicente’s Last Judgment paintings were not the only ones of their type imported to
Lima in the early seventeenth century. Medoro’s exposure in Lima to the popular
Florentine reform style seems likely. However, yet again, the loss of many seventeenth-
century artifacts to the city’s earthquakes prevents a definitive investigation of the
holdings of art in colonial Lima.
As mentioned above, scholars have noted the change in Medoro’s style in his later
years in Lima, which is evident in the Passion retablo, and have considered his
experiments with new aesthetics as largely unsuccessful. Whether successful or not,
however, it is important to consider what these experiments reveal about the artist and his
role in Lima’s artistic culture. Perhaps as a result of Spanish paintings imported to Lima,
Medoro explored new modes of painting, even after decades of success.
Medoro’s Later Work in Lima
In 1618, Medoro signed and dated two additional paintings in Lima, The
Immaculate Conception (Figure 3.35), made for and still housed in the Monastery of San
Agustín, and Christ Meditating (Figure 3.36), now in the private collection of the Moreira
family in Lima. For The Immaculate Conception, Medoro followed the standard
iconography of the popular Latin American subject, with the Virgin standing on a crescent
moon, surrounded by angels who present emblems that symbolize her purity. In this
example, among the emblems are the city of God, the lily, the tower of David, the mirror,
the rose, the closed door, and the church. In both The Immaculate Conception and Christ
Meditating, there is a change in Medoro’s style from bulky, richly modeled figures in
twisted poses to sweet, simple, thin figures, reflecting the shift to a more naturalistic
aesthetic. A comparison of Medoro’s Immaculate Conception with his earlier Virgin of the
Angels (Figure 3.7) from the Monastery of the Descalzos is particularly illuminating. The
Virgin at the Descalzos is full and round and modeled in rich colors. Her powerful leg bends
beneath the drapery to suggest a dynamic body, while the Immaculate Virgin is thin and
dainty, and stands in a frontal position without any twist or bend of the body. The body of
Christ in Christ Meditating is similar in its reduction of volume.
It is clear that this change in his style was intentional because it continued once he
returned to Spain. In 1620, Medoro left Lima for Seville, where he would spend the rest
of his life. A painting from his late period in Seville was recently published, offering a
glimpse of the final phase of his career. The Holy Family (Figure 3.37), from 1622, is
part of the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Seville, although its original intended
location is unknown. The style of Medoro’s Seville painting is strikingly similar to that
of the Immaculate Virgin in San Agustín and the faces and poses of the Virgins are nearly
identical. Just five years after the Holy Family was painted, in 1627, Medoro went before
a jury of artists, which included Spanish painter Alonso Cano, to be examined in order to
join the painters’ guild in Seville. His return to Spain, then, seems to have been inspired
by an interest in continuing to work in the most up-to-date styles, as he went to the
trouble to become part of Seville’s artistic community, even after decades of success
abroad.
Medoro’s Destroyed Work
Medoro’s oeuvre is only partially revealed in this chapter because numerous
paintings were destroyed in earthquakes of the seventeenth century. Brief mention of
these lost projects, all of which are supported by archival evidence, can provide a broader
picture of Medoro’s career in Lima, especially the fact that he worked for many of the
churches and monasteries in the city. For example, in 1600, shortly after his arrival in the
capital, Medoro painted a Holy Trinity for the refectory of the Monastery of the
Mercedarian order. A document dated March 16, 1600, details the commission and
includes information about the friars who served as patrons and the payment promised to
Medoro. According to the contract, the friars hired Medoro to paint two large oils, one
depicting the Holy Trinity and the second a representation of the Virgin Mary of Mercy,
surrounded by saints chosen and prescribed by the order’s general.
In 1607, Medoro worked on several paintings for the Chapel of the Souls, in
Lima’s Cathedral, which included The Virgin of the Sorrows, Saint John, and The
Crucifixion, none of which are extant.348 In 1680, Peruvian chronicler Francisco de
Echave y Assu wrote of The Crucifixion’s acclaim in the city, describing the great
adoration it received.349
Circa 1616, a few years before he painted the Immaculate Conception for the
Augustinians in Lima, he painted a retablo in the Church of Saint Ildefonso that was also
destroyed in the seventeenth century.350 Mesa and Gisbert also posit that, in 1618,
Medoro made a lost Holy Family with Saint James and Saint Francis of Assisi for Santo
Domingo, although no documents for the commission exist.351
Medoro and Saint Rose of Lima
The project that has most solidified Medoro’s place in Lima’s colonial history is
the legend of his deathbed portrait of Saint Rose of Lima in 1617. Numerous scholars
spanning the last four centuries have relayed the story of Medoro’s postmortem portrait
document and included the following citation: Los Reyes 16 de Marzo de 1600, Arch. Nac. Not.
Gomez Baeza, fol. 491.
348 Villena, Sebastian, et al., Catedral de Lima, 271.
349 Francisco de Echave y Assu, La estrella de Lima convertida en sol sobre sus tres coronas el B.
Toribio Alfonso Mogrobexo (Antwerp: Juan Baptista Verdussen, 1687), 73.
350 Harthe-Terré, “Las Bellas Artes en el Virreynato del Perú: Pintura y Pintores en Lima
Virreinal,” 134.
351 Mesa and Gisbert, “Angelino Medoro,” 35.
of Saint Rose. One of the first documents to record the story is Juan Melendez’s book
about Saint Rose’s beatification, written in 1671 and published in Lima. The legend
recounts that in the last moments of her life, Rose’s patron, Gonzalo de la Maza, a
wealthy member of Lima’s elite class, summoned Medoro to her deathbed, where he
painted her likeness quickly and crudely in oil on a small wood panel. A work that is
purported to be that portrait (Figure 3.38), although in poor condition, remains today in
the Sanctuary of Saint Rose in Lima. However, as will be shown below, it is unlikely that
Medoro painted this portrait at Rose’s deathbed, and unknown if he painted the
portrait at all.
The portrait of Rose came to be the source for many future images of the New
World’s first saint. The basic physiognomy of the portrait and its iconography of Saint
Rose have been repeated many times over in paintings, prints, and sculptures, in Peru and
beyond. Examples span the continents; a seventeenth-century painting by the Italian
painter, Carlo Maratta (Figure 3.39), in a private collection in Lima, is one example of
the portrait’s influence abroad. Maratta’s depiction of Rose’s facial features, such as the
long narrow nose and sharply arched eyebrows, as well as the portrayal of the mouth
hanging slightly open, are consistent with the portrait allegedly painted by Medoro.
Additionally, artists often depicted Rose wearing a crown of roses, as she does in the
Lima original. An example is an eighteenth-century painting by a Cuzco-school artist
(Figure 3.40), now in the Casa Lorca in Lima. Numerous scholars have mentioned the
original portrait and several have devoted studies to its influence on later portrayals.
However, recent insight requires further consideration of its history.
Within a year of Rose’s passing, Lima’s authorities collected testimonies from
people regarding her miraculous life. Over seventy-five people testified, beginning only
eight days after Rose’s death and ending in April of 1618, immediately after which all
were sent to Rome as part of the campaign for her canonization. For example, Angelino
Medoro’s wife, who had known Saint Rose, testified about her experience at the funeral,
claiming that the body of the deceased saint had remained warm as if it were still
somehow alive. In a recent article, Peruvian scholar Teodoro Hampe-Martínez published
sections of several testimonies, including that of Angelino Medoro himself, who testified
on March 5, 1618. Medoro identified himself as a forty-five year old native of Rome,
and confirmed that he knew Rose and had been to her home on several occasions. He
also described a visit Rose made to his house to see his sick wife, whom Rose
miraculously cured, as well as his experience of her funeral and the city-wide reaction to
her death, claiming that the Church of Santo Domingo was so packed that day that he was
not able to get inside. Additionally, Medoro told a story of a student of his, Juan
Rodríguez Samames, who had been suffering from a disease but miraculously recovered
when a relic of the saint’s body was placed on him. Surprisingly, in detailing this series
of encounters with Rose, Medoro did not mention his presence at her deathbed and said
nothing of a portrait. It seems likely that if Medoro had been witness to Rose’s death, he
would have included it in his testimony. This evidence suggests that perhaps the story of
the postmortem portrait is in fact merely a legend. There are two other possible
scenarios: Medoro painted the portrait in question after Rose’s passing, and it was
presented as a deathbed portrait, or Medoro did not paint a portrait of Rose, and the
legend is a complete fabrication.
If Medoro was not at Rose’s deathbed, but did make the painting in question, he
could have found information about her appearance at the time of her death in written
descriptions or oral tradition. Like so many events from her life, the death of Rose had
its own miraculous tale. Rose’s hagiographers relayed that, upon her death, after days of
immense physical torture, at the end of a life filled with daily mortifications, a vitality
and beauty returned to her face: “Death appeared so lovely on the countenance of Saint
Rose, that those who remarked the freshness of her complexion and the redness of her
lips, which were separated so as to form a pleasing smile, doubted for a long time
whether her soul had quitted her body.” The portrait purportedly painted by Medoro is
faithful to this mythic description. In this work, her eyes appear slightly open and her
pink lips part, the left corner of the mouth turning up ever so slightly in a smile. Surely,
if Medoro had been witness to the miraculous moment, he would have included it in his
testimony. Since he did not tell this story, it seems likely that he was not there and did
not paint this portrait moments after she died, if he painted it at all.
Accordingly, the portrait does not appear to be an image made from life. It is
painted with only scant detail and lacks any individualized description of facial features.
The perspective is also confusing, as the painter presents her in a frontal position as well
as a three-quarter turn at the same time. Her right eye and mouth are seen from the front,
but her nose, chin, and cheeks are seen from an angle. In addition, the fall of her habit is
painted in a way that indicates an upright, not a supine position. Instead of painting her
deathbed image, the artist of this work likely created it according to the stories he heard
about her death.
It is important to consider the reason why this story might have been fabricated
and why it was told so many times in the literature. It is not surprising that Lima would
have desired a portrait of Saint Rose on her deathbed, but more significant was the choice
to associate Medoro with this painting. The connection of Medoro to the portrait of Saint
Rose likely was one part of an elaborate subsequent campaign cultivated to ensure the
beatification and canonization of Saint Rose.
Rose’s canonization was in fact a campaign, composed of the efforts of many
diverse and powerful parties. Saint Rose of Lima was born in 1586 and died at the young
age of thirty-three in 1617, having spent her life in complete devotion to Christ. She
claimed to have had experienced numerous visions and miracles, the first of which
occurred when she was a young child, and was witnessed by a maid and Rose’s mother.
Both claimed that her face miraculously became an image of a rose, which resulted in the
change of her name from Isabel. Rose modeled her life on that of Saint Catherine of
Siena, even staging a marriage to Christ. On several occasions that led to her widespread
devotion in Lima, Rose’s miracles contributed to the development of her reputation as a
protector of the city. In 1615, when Dutch pirates threatened invasion, Rose offered
herself up in sacrifice and successfully defended the city.
Rose’s official international recognition came in 1671, when Pope Clement IX
canonized her and designated her the patron saint of the Americas. Rose’s first
hagiographer described her as “the first spiritual flower which Divine Providence planted
and cultivated in the richest part of the New World.” Following her death, devotion to
Saint Rose became widespread throughout North and South America. Rose’s notoriety,
however, began during her lifetime and crescendoed in the years following her death as
the viceroyalty of Peru and the Spanish monarchy campaigned to make her the first saint
of the New World. Additionally, even in the ethnically and socially divided city of Lima,
the population united in dedication to Saint Rose.
That Rose’s rise to sainthood was significant to various sectors of the Spanish
colonial world is evident in the crusade launched to canonize the young girl that began
within months of her passing and involved the citizens of Lima, the viceroy of Peru, and
eventually the king and queen of Spain. To the Spanish, Rose was a symbol of their
success; they had ventured to the New World as crusaders of the Catholic Reformation,
militant in their mission to spread Christianity. Throughout the colonial period,
missionaries consistently sought ways to connect the local population to the tenets and
beliefs of Christianity. The widespread devotion to Rose was evidence that they had
reached the indigenous people. In 1631, to honor the birth of the Spanish prince Baltazar
Carlos, the viceroys even hung a portrait of Rose on the façade of the viceregal palace. In
addition, the Spanish must have recognized that the conversion of this local woman, who
was already adored and venerated, into a Catholic saint, could serve as another tool in
efforts to direct the religious beliefs and practices of the Peruvian people.
To the local creole and Indian populations, Rose’s canonization had different
significance. Many saw her as one of their own, since her father was from Puerto Rico
and her mother was a criolla from Peru; she had been born and raised in Lima, but had
the diverse background of much of the colonial population; and had been chosen by this
Christian God and thus had become a holy figure with whom they could identify. A
similar phenomenon occurred in colonial Mexico with Juan Diego’s miraculous vision of
the Virgin of Guadalupe; the appearance of the Virgin to the Mexican peasant inspired
widespread connections to Christianity among the locals. Additionally, devotion to Rose
broke through segregations in society because she herself was known to ignore skin color
and ethnicity; as a nurse she helped anyone in need, regardless of social standing. In a
painting from the eighteenth century (Figure 3.41), an anonymous artist from Lima
captured the saint’s widespread and diverse appeal by representing Rose surrounded by
the various ethnic classes of the city, including mestizos, Indians, and Africans.
The portrait allegedly painted by Medoro is famous not only for its direct connection to
the mythical life and death of Saint Rose, the New World’s first Catholic saint, but for
purportedly being the only portrait made from life of the young girl, as no living portraits
of Rose exist because she would not allow any to be made.
Contemporaries described her as a great beauty, but Rose found her physical identity
shameful and began deforming her own body at a young age in order to deflect any
attention from men. She rubbed pepper in her eyes and starved herself until she was, as
one biographer describes her, “a bag of skin and bones.” Rose was known for her
consistent mortifications throughout life, which brought her close to death on a number of
occasions. This, too, however, proved worrisome to Rose, who upon receiving pity and
praise for the tortures she forced upon herself, requested that God restore her beauty. The
fact that Rose forbade any portraits to be made of herself and that as a result the only
portrait that exists was done after she had passed served as a kind of memorial to her
great humility in life, making the portrait mistakenly attributed to Medoro that much
more precious.
The legendary deathbed portrait of Saint Rose was important to Lima’s culture
because the girl had been chosen by the city to be the first saint of the New World. She
was among many women in Lima in this period who had dedicated themselves to a life of
devotion to Christ and complete humility, but Rose was Lima’s choice.
Seventeenthcentury Lima was a city consumed by Christianity and its inhabitants were
distinctly aware of their connection to their religion. In a 2004 book about Saint Rose of
Lima, Frank Graziano compared Lima to a religious monastery, explaining that the city
was accepting of emerging saintly figures. As a result, fourteen candidates for sainthood
were produced in Lima between 1580 and 1680. The atmosphere of Lima as well as a
general increase in female mystics in the Counter-Reformation period meant that by the
early seventeenth century, Lima had ten candidates for beatification and the city was
forced to choose one. In other words, the viceroyalty of Peru was ready to elect the first
saint of the New World, and Rose was their choice.
From its beginning, the memory of Rose was cultivated as a symbol of the power
and success of the Spanish in conquering paganism and spreading Christianity. For
example, at the procession of Rose’s body to the church where it would be interred,
members of each of the separate and independent religious orders active in Lima took
turns carrying the body through the streets, as a demonstration of the unity of the city’s
religious enclaves. An engraving by Cornelis Galle (Figure 3.42) from the first half of
the seventeenth century illustrates the procession. Then, after receiving a letter from the
viceroy about Rose’s popularity in Lima, the King of Spain, Philip IV and his Queen,
Mariana of Austria, crusaded for Rose’s canonization. When Philip died, Mariana took
on Rose’s campaign as her cause and even discoursed directly with the Vatican. The
efforts of the monarchy played an important role in the eventual ascension of Rose to
sainthood; the bull of beatification read “we are persuaded by the pious desires of the
Catholic monarchs.”
The written story of Rose’s life was also begun soon after she died and was first
published in 1664. In it, the hagiographer manipulated Rose’s narrative in order to
present the most convincing representation of her life. For example, he exaggerated
Rose’s connection to Saint Catherine of Siena, saying, “all the characteristics of St.
Catherine were to be seen; the same manner of living, the same inclinations, the same
favors from God, and so great a similarity in figure and countenance that one might easily
have been taken for the other.” Rose had always modeled her life after that of the famous
Italian saint, and it is true that there were some coincidental similarities, including age at
death; both died at thirty-three. In some cases, however, the author tweaked the facts to a
certain degree. For example, he noted Rose’s birth date as April
30, the feast day of Saint Catherine, despite the fact that numerous documents designate
April 20. In discussing Rose’s childhood, early on, it is said that her mother, who was a
teacher, taught her how to read and write, but later on the story is augmented to suggest
that Rose had become literate without any instruction, just as Catherine had learned only
by divine inspiration. Such a strong link to a well-known saint was one powerful aspect
of Rose’s campaign, and this first biographer was careful to accent it. The goal was to
make Rose’s story mirror Catherine’s and make the Vatican see Rose as the new
Catherine of Siena, to link the New World story of miracles and sanctity to one from the
Old World in order to ground it in the prestige of the past.
The story of Medoro’s documentation of Rose on her deathbed can be seen, then,
as yet another tool in the campaign for her canonization. As has been discussed
throughout this dissertation, in Lima, from the end of the sixteenth century through nearly
the first quarter of the seventeenth, the three artists who were more successful than any
others, who received all of the most important commissions from churches and
monasteries throughout the city, were the Italians, Bernardo Bitti, Mateo Pérez de Alesio,
and of course, Angelino Medoro. The work of these Italian artists in Lima had a certain
prestige because it was made by the hands of men who had worked in Rome and
therefore were well acquainted with the most up-to-date styles and approaches in sacred
art. Angelino Medoro had been in Rome to learn from some of the most influential
Italian painters of the reform movement; as we have seen, he must have been aware of the
respect for his Roman heritage, as he signed many of his paintings Angelino Medoro,
Romano. Then, in his testimony about Saint Rose, Medoro again referenced his Roman
past, comparing the exuberance of Rose’s followers during her funeral to the kind of
Catholic pageantry that normally one can only experience in Rome. Medoro’s Roman
origins must have made him an attractive candidate to provide a portrait of Saint Rose.
A copy of the portrait was sent to Rome. This portrait of the saint, purported to record
the miraculous death of Rose and from the records of a Roman artist, certainly could have
seemed a powerful tool in the efforts to convince the Vatican of her worthiness. Upon
Rose’s beatification, the pope commissioned a marble sculpture of the saint (Figure 3.43)
and sent it to Lima. For this sculpture, which would represent the
Church’s approval of the first saint of the New World, the pope hired Melchiorre Cafà, an
Italian sculptor. In the sculpture Cafà depicted an angel comforting Rose, as she took her
last breath. Yet again, this actual last moment of life is significant to her story. While
visual analysis of the alleged Medoro portrait in comparison to the face of Cafà’s
sculpture yields only scant similarities, it seems feasible that a death portrait could have
been chosen due to the legendary story of Medoro’s painting. Additionally, as a copy of
the original portrait was in Rome at this time, it seems feasible that there may have been a
relationship between the two. Perhaps more importantly, when Cafà’s sculpture arrived
in Lima, the people insisted on carrying it by foot on the ten-mile journey to the city and
inaugurated its placement in the Church of Santo Domingo with an immense ephemeral
altar that imitated marble and lapis lazuli and was paraded through the streets. Yet again,
the Peruvian people paid respect to a Roman object commemorating their saint, its
origins in the home of the Catholic Church carrying weight in colonial Lima, just as
Medoro’s Roman heritage must have.
Ultimately, the story of Angelino Medoro’s posthumous portrait of Saint Rose was
most likely just a legend, created to serve as a tool in the campaign for her canonization,
an effort that was supported by elite and powerful members of Lima and Madrid society.
The prestige accorded Italian art and artists in Lima in the seventeenth century must have
inspired the legend and thus is a famous example of the agency of Old World culture in
early colonial Latin America.
Tangentially, this original portrait of Saint Rose was influential well beyond the
confines of the seventeenth century, as it became standard practice for Peruvian nuns to
be depicted in deathbed portraits. In a recent dissertation on Peruvian portraiture, Nenita
Ponce de Leon Elphik suggested that the example of the portrait allegedly painted by
Medoro might have helped to form the tradition of representations of Peruvian nuns for
several centuries. She pointed out that colonial Mexican conventions of images of nuns
lavishly adorned in habits and jewelry, surrounded by flowers and religious statuettes, did
not influence art practice in Peru, even though the lives and experiences of nuns were
similar in both viceroyalties. Instead, Elphik illustrates many examples of postmortem
portraits of Peruvian nuns that mimic the simplicity of the composition, arguing that the
early image of Saint Rose may have served as the example for future portrayals.
Considering the popularity of Saint Rose in colonial Peru as well as the prestige of
Angelino Medoro, the possibility of this portrait’s long-lasting impact seems likely. Just
as European artists created works of art that became templates for Christian style and
iconography in colonial Latin America, Medoro’s alleged portrait of the New World’s
first saint may have become the example of how to properly capture the likeness of a
contemporary holy figure.
Medoro’s Students and Followers
In addition to decorating churches and monasteries throughout Lima himself,
Medoro also established a large workshop where he trained numerous artists who went on
to have illustrious careers of their own. Mateo Pérez de Alesio also ran a workshop and
trained students, but Medoro was unique in admitting some of the first Indian students.
Several names are listed in the documents, including Pedro de Loayza, an Indian native
of Cuzco; Leonardo Jaramillo; Antonio Mermejo; and perhaps the most well-known, Luis
de Riaño. Pedro de Loayza entered the workshop in 1604, but there remain no attributed
extant works by him in Lima.
Leonardo Jaramillo, on the other hand, for whom secure dates and biographical
information do not remain, has been connected to two paintings in Lima; the first is a
dilapidated fresco in the Monastery of San Francisco, but the second is an extremely
well-preserved painting in the Monastery of the Descalzos. The badly damaged fresco
depicts Porciuncula, a scene representing the spot in Italy where the Franciscan
movement began (Figure 3.44), while The Defense of Saint Ildefonso (Figure 3.45) hangs
today in the same room of the Descalzos that holds many of Medoro’s own paintings.
The style of both clearly echoes that of Medoro, most evidently in the Ildefonso painting,
and most notably in some of the Mannerist formal choices that Jaramillo has made.
Numerous figures in the painting twist in the familiar figura serpentinata of Italian
Mannerism, and as seen in several of Medoro’s paintings, such as those from the Passion
series in the Monastery of San Francisco. Additionally, the figures possess robust bodies,
their drapery modeled in rich variations of color. Italian Renaissance aesthetics are
clearly at play here also in the creation of three-dimensional space through an attempt at
linear perspective as well as the stacking of figures to create a sense of depth. It was this
kind of painting, made by a Medoro student, that contributed to the extended lifespan of
Italianate painting in Lima, even after the death and departure of the Italians themselves.
The name Antonio Mermejo also appears in documents linking the artist to
Medoro’s workshop, but there is a dearth of biographical information on this individual.
There is, however, one painting attributed to Mermejo, The Penitent Magdalen (Figure
3.46), hanging in the Church of San Francisco in Lima. Yet again, the Italian taste for
volume in figures and drapery is apparent. Here, Medoro’s later experimentations with a
more tenebristic palette may have influenced the artist’s approach.
There are also unattributed paintings in locations in Lima where Medoro worked
that are stylistically similar to his paintings, and thus scholars have repeatedly given these
objects to “follower of Angelino Medoro.” Archives in Lima may hold information about
the creators of such paintings, but much research remains to be done in this area.
Research on the seventeenth century in Lima can be challenging due to the loss of many
documents in the century’s two earthquakes. For example, at the Archivo de la Nación,
the bulk of the collection dates from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Even without attributions, however, these paintings are evidence of the impact of
Medoro’s painting in the city over the next century.
For example, the Sanctuary of Saint Rose of Lima houses two paintings that
depict moments from the girl’s life: The Origin of the Name of Saint Rose (Figure 3.47)
and The Death of Saint Rose (Figure 3.48). In the first, the painter represented the legend
of Rose’s first instance of facial transfiguration when, at three months old, several people,
including her mother, witnessed the transformation of her face into a rose, after which her
cheeks remained rosy, and her mother changed her name from Isabel to Rose. In the
second painting, her parents and patrons witness her legendary death. Several scholars
have attributed both to Medoro, although neither is signed and no mention of his name in
connection to the paintings exists from the seventeenth century. Instead, it is likely that a
follower or student made the paintings who had absorbed some of Medoro’s style,
including the Italianate interest in volume and three-dimensionality as well as naturalistic
color and space.
Finally, Medoro’s most studied and most documented student was Luis de Riaño,
who entered the Italian’s workshop in 1611, when he was only fifteen. It is not clear how
long Riaño remained in Lima with Medoro, as much of his mature career was spent in
Cuzco, where he died in 1643. Riaño’s earliest documented work, as exemplified by his
Immaculate Virgin (Figure 3.49) in the Church of the Recoleta in Cuzco, is evidence of
his adoption of Medoro’s figures and forms. The composition is reminiscent of
Medoro’s painting of the same subject in the Monastery of San Agustín in Lima (Figure
3.35). Riaño later altered his style to one more akin to the aesthetics of
seventeenthcentury Cuzco painting.
Conclusion
Of all three Italian painters working in Lima in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, Medoro left behind the most abundant oeuvre, allowing an opportunity to trace
the artist’s career from start to finish and observe the multivalent impact he had on the
city. Like Bitti and Alesio, Medoro began as an inheritor of the forms of Italian
Mannerism, but tweaked the popular aesthetic to cater to the needs of the
CounterReformatory atmosphere. More importantly, perhaps, later in his career Medoro
was one of the first artists in Lima to experiment with the new naturalistic fashions of
seventeenth-century art. Baroque aesthetics would not begin to impact Peru until the
1640s with the import of paintings by artists such as Francisco de Zurbarán, who
represented the latest taste in Spain. After the death and departure of the Italians in Lima,
many of the city’s artists would perpetuate the classical Italian painting style before the
introduction of Baroque aesthetics in the 1640s and of more prominent indigenous
influence in the second half of the century. Therefore, Medoro’s influence can be felt not
only in his prolific contribution to the city’s major monuments, or in the work of his
abundant collection of students and followers, but in the work of those who came after
his departure, but were inspired by the mark he left on the city.
CHAPTER 4
THE TRANSFORMATION OF COLONIAL PAINTING IN PERU
The Death and Departure of the Italians
The Italian presence in Lima began to diminish with Bernardo Bitti’s death in
1610, followed by Angelino Medoro’s return to Seville in 1620 and finally Mateo Pérez
de Alesio’s death after nearly forty years in Lima, in 1628. However, the taste for
Italianate style lived on until mid-century and is evident in paintings by students and
followers of the Italians, both named and anonymous. Then, around 1650, the climate of
art-making began to transform in Peru. The change started in Cuzco but quickly spread
to Lima and other cities around the viceroyalty. The changes marked a resurgence of
local traditions that would influence painting throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Paintings based on Catholic European iconography and compositions became
infused with indigenous aesthetics and the style became flat, patterned, and often abstract.
The most influential of painters working in this new hybrid style were part of the now-
famous Cuzco school, which formed after a massive earthquake in the city resulted in the
destruction of many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century churches and paintings, and
perhaps even more importantly, due to the split of the painter’s guild into two competing
workshops run by Spanish artists and those run by Indian artists.
Indigenous and mestizo artists took control of Cuzco’s art scene and developed a new
Peruvian school of painting. The art of the Cuzco school is most commonly discussed as
a revival of local ideals and aesthetics, but the works of art produced by these artists also
retain at times a residue of the Italian art that had dominated for nearly seventy-five
years.
A brief note on the impact of the Italians is important here. After a thirty-five
year career in South America, Bernardo Bitti died in Lima in 1610, shortly after his final
return to the city following travels throughout the viceroyalty. His last surviving
painting, The Madonna of the Rose (Figure 1.36), hangs in the Monastery of the
Descalzos and is representative of his later work. By the time of his death, Bitti had
worked for many years in Lima, and had contributed paintings to churches and
monasteries in a number of other Peruvian cities. Of all three Italian artists, Bitti had the
most expansive impact because of his travels. His influence in Cuzco and specifically on
that city’s famous school of artists that formed in the middle of the seventeenth century
was particularly profound.
Mateo Pérez de Alesio, of all three Italians, spent the most time in Lima, landing
in 1590 and remaining in the capital for the remainder of his life, until 1628. He arrived
in Lima already an accomplished and well-known painter and, according to archival
documents and contemporary commentary, enjoyed a prolific career in the city. Alesio
also assembled a large workshop, training as many as six known artists.
Among the three, Angelino Medoro left behind the largest body of extant work in
Lima, making his impact on the city even more evident. He arrived in 1599 and returned
to Seville in 1620, having spent his time making paintings for many different churches
and monasteries. Like Alesio, Medoro trained quite a few students, including the
welldocumented Luis de Riaño. Medoro also left a geographical spread of paintings in
Tunja, Bogota, and Quito.
Three named students of the Italians are illuminating case studies of painters in
the generation following the initial European presence. Each began with a strong reliance
on Italian style, but later strayed from that model and incorporated something of his own
individuality as well as the impact of the changing art climate. Their work, as well as that
of some other influential painters, marked the early infusion of local creativity into
painting that prefigured the original qualities of the Cuzco school later in the seventeenth
century. Bernardo Bitti’s best known disciple, Gregorio Gamarra, may have been one
important link between the Italian style of early colonial Peruvian art and the hybrid style
of the Cuzco school. He worked for Bitti as a young painter and also became an
important artist in Cuzco early in the seventeenth century. Mateo Pérez de Alesio trained
the Augustinian monk Francisco Bejarano, who worked for his own order in Lima and
later in his career contributed engravings to at least two important publications, having
been taught the medium by Alesio. Angelino Medoro trained the young artist Luis de
Riaño, who entered the Italian’s workshop at only fifteen. In his earliest paintings, the
Italianate aesthetic Riaño learned is evident. However, by the time he reached maturity
as an artist, he had moved to Cuzco, where he was one of many artists who started to
diverge from the European school. Ultimately, the Italian painters trained and influenced
artists who would go on to participate in the development of later colonial painting in
Peru. At least ten names of students or followers of the Italians appear in archival
documents. Three will be discussed here, Gregorio Gamarra, Francisco Bejarano, and
Luis de Riaño, because each has extant work that is representative of the Italians’ impact.
Thus, among these Italians and their students is the story of colonial painting’s
beginnings and its most important transformation in Peru.
The Students
The most direct Italian impact can be traced in the careers of students who worked
with Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro. Gregorio Gamarra (c. 1575-c. 1630) likely first
encountered Bitti when the Italian was working on the Villa Imperial de Potosí in 1601.
Unfortunately, precise information about Gamarra’s origins, as well as the details of his
career, are unknown. There are, however, several dates associated with projects, from
which scholars have been able to establish a basic timeline of his life. The earliest date
recorded for Gamarra is 1601, when he was in Potosí. His activity in Cuzco occurred
between 1607 and 1612, as evidenced by a series of signed and dated paintings in
collections there. Gamarra died in Potosí in the third or fourth decade of the seventeenth
century. Of all the artists considered as followers of Bitti, Gamarra’s style is the closest
to the Italian’s. Mesa and Gisbert, who have written the only monograph on Gamarra,
argue that in his early work, his style was close to Bitti’s, but that a much more tenebristic
and creative, unique style emerged later. A brief survey of paintings spanning
Gamarra’s career shows that this analysis is oversimplified, as Gamarra waxed and
waned in his reliance on Bitti throughout his career, rather than making decisive changes
to his work at particular points in time. Additionally, documentation for Gamarra is so
sparse that it is impossible to establish a clear timeline for his career. In 1607, Gamarra
painted and signed the Immaculate Conception with Saint Bonaventure and Saint Diego
de Alcalá (Figure 1.26) for the monastery of the Recoleta in Cuzco. There are reminders
of Bitti in this painting, most notably the Virgin’s delicate and gentle features, as
exemplified by Bitti’s own Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (Figure 1.24), in the
monastery of the Merced in Cuzco. The facial features of Gamarra’s Virgin also recall
those of Bitti’s figures, particularly in the linear handling of the bridge of the nose and the
eyes. The Virgin’s neck is elongated, allowing Gamarra to create a sinuous curve to
exaggerate the poignant bowing of her head. The space is shallow and the figures are
close to the picture plane, creating, as in many of Bitti’s paintings, an intimate interaction
with the viewer. Although there are some significant links to Bitti, Gamarra’s painting
differs from the Italian’s style in some ways. For example, the figure of the Virgin has
less volume than those of Bitti normally do; while Bitti did not use modeling to a great
degree and his figures tended to be somewhat flat, there is always a sense for the s-curve
of the body and its serpentine movement under the drapery. In contrast, there is no
suggestion of physical movement in Gamarra’s figures.
In addition to Bitti, another source for Gamarra and other colonial Latin American
artists painting the popular image of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception was
engravings of the subject by Raphael Sadelerand other European printmakers (Figure
4.1), of which many were sent to the New World. The Sadeler engravings were sources
not only for basic composition, but also for the symbols of the Virgin’s purity that
traditionally flank the figure in this iconic image. While Gamarra did replicate many
such symbols in his painting, he paired the objects, while European artists such as Sadeler
included single, stand-alone symbols. Thus, even early in his career, despite his close ties
to Bitti, Gamarra explored unique iconographic compositions.
Gamarra also painted The Vision of the Cross (Figure 4.2), for the Franciscan
Recoleta in Cuzco in 1607. The face of the Virgin here is quite similar to that in the
Recoleta Immaculate; the Virgin’s facial features are delicate and linear and her eyes are
downcast, a decision that Gamarra made in nearly every known painting. It seems that
the half-closed eyes, gazing down, is how the artist consistently handled the face in his
paintings. Accordingly, through stylistic analysis of Gamarra’s oeuvre Mesa and Gisbert
have made the observation that he repeats the same figures in various paintings, simply
copying the model from one painting and adding it to another, a practice that seems
evident in this example.
In 1609, Gamarra painted The Epiphany (Figure 4.3), which is now in the
collection of the Museo de Arte in La Paz. While some of the qualities of Bitti’s style are
still present here, namely the facial features of the Virgin and the delicacy of the figures,
Gamarra’s figures have become far more stylized. They lack volume and are generalized;
the eyes are large and out of proportion with the composition of the face, while the nose
and mouth in contrast are small and simplified. He has almost completely avoided
modeling the face, so that it is flat and lacking any physical presence. Additionally, the
painting is dark and Gamarra chose to work with rich, deep colors, reminiscent of the
tenebrism gaining popularity in the European Baroque.
The painting with the most striking connection to Bitti is a late painting of The
Virgin Adoring the Child (Figure 4.4), signed and dated 1612, the latest date attributed to
a painting by Gamarra. The Virgin’s facial features are closely based on Bitti’s paintings
and the contorted body of the Christ Child is reminiscent of the Mannerist tendency to
manipulate the pose of the body, perhaps most famously accomplished by Bitti in his
Arequipa Madonna and Child (Figure 1.34). It seems that while Gamarra experimented
with various sources and styles, he remained tied to Bitti’s Mannerism throughout his
career.
Mesa and Gisbert have argued that Gamarra was responsible for spreading Bitti’s
Mannerism in parts of the viceroyalty, such as Potosí and other cities in the Charcas
region of the Andes. A painting of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception in the
Barbosa Stern collection in Lima (Figure 4.5) has been attributed to the circle of Gamarra
and is one example of Gamarra’s version of Bitti’s style living on in followers. It is
characteristic of both artists’ styles, in the linear quality of the figures and the delicate
features of the Virgin. Like Gamarra, this artist has not formed the Virgin’s body with the
volume and movement that is typical of Bitti’s work. Unlike both Bitti and Gamarra,
however, the artist painted the facial features more tightly arranged within the face and
with less of a bow of the head and neck. Ultimately, this painting is one of many that
make it clear that Bitti’s style of Mannerism became widespread in Peru in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Gamarra is one example of an artist who adopted the Italian’s
approach, contributed his own creative choices, and exposed other painters to
Mannerism.
Mateo Pérez de Alesio assembled a large workshop, from which records of many
of his students are extant. The names on that list include: Domingo Gil, Francisco
García, Pedro Pablo Morón, and Francisco Bejarano, among others. Unfortunately, very
few attributed paintings by Alesio’s students have survived. The few that scholars have
connected to his followers retain strong links to the Italian school. Below, I will review
several unattributed paintings in Lima that are reminiscent of Alesio and the other
Italians, which may have been made by his students. Nevertheless, it is safe to say that
Alesio contributed to the dissemination of Italian style in Lima, in part, through his large
workshop.
Of all of Alesio’s students, Francisco Bejarano is the only artist to whom a work
of art can securely be attributed. Bejarano was a friar in the Augustinian order and
worked in the order’s monastery in Lima after leaving Alesio’s workshop. Students in
Alesio’s workshop learned the techniques of intaglio printmaking. Alesio was one of the
few European artists who made prints in Peru. He painted The Virgin of Belén (Figure
2.31) on a piece of copper with an engraving of the Holy Family on the back (Figure 4.6).
One speculation is that he made the engraving plate in Lima, but did not have the
materials to print it, and thus used the copper to make the painting. In any case, Alesio
was a trained printmaker and he taught Bejarano the techniques of engraving. Many
years after working with Alesio, Bejarano designed an engraving for the frontispiece of a
book titled Sanctuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana del Peru (Figure 4.7), which
was published in Lima in 1641. The print was one of many depicting the Virgin Mary
that were popular in the Americas, many of which were imported from Europe.
Bejarano’s print does not include a narrative around the life of the Virgin; instead it is a
characteristically Andean manifestation of the iconic figure of the Virgin. The print
illustrates the Andean statue, the Virgin of the Candlestick, at her pilgrimage center in
Copacabana on Lake Titicaca. The tradition of statue paintings of the Virgin as well as
the iconography included here are connected to Cuzco painting in the seventeenth
century. Statue paintings were common in Spain in the seventeenth century and it is
likely that Spanish prototypes were among the many prints sent to Peru. The Virgin Mary
became a popular devotional figure in Peru due somewhat to connections with female
Andean deities, most commonly Pachamama, but also the Inca moon, Mama Quilla, and
the Inca queen. By the middle of the seventeenth century, painters in Peru had begun to
incorporate this connection to indigenous belief into images of the Virgin. The tradition
of dressing statues of the Virgin was prevalent in Spain and became common in Peru as
well with the commissions of local cofradias, groups of Catholic laymen who were
charged with the care of religious images, pilgrimages, and other church-related activities
for a town or village. Bejarano’s engraved image is consistent with the tradition of
Andean artists painting statues of the Virgin throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. Thus, this example places him firmly within the customs of local art-making.
Although the print is reflective of Andean traditions and beliefs in the mid-seventeenth
century, there is still a connection to Europe. The flanking saints to the right and left of
the orb of the world are versions of the Virgin Martyrs painted by Francisco de Zurbarán,
many of which were sent to the New World. One example is Saint Apollonia (Figure
4.8), originally made for the Monastery of the Merced
Descalza in Seville, but now in the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
Finally, among all the known students of Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro, Luis de Riaño
is perhaps the most famous today. Riaño entered Medoro’s workshop when he was only
fifteen, in 1611, and remained for six years. The precise date of Riaño’s departure from
Lima is not known, but he was in Cuzco by 1626, a city so rich in culture and art in the
seventeenth century that it is not surprising to find a young artist like Riaño making it his
home. In Cuzco, Riaño worked for many of the city’s monasteries and parish churches.
Even a brief study of several of Riaño’s paintings is illustrative of the artist’s early ties to
Medoro and his later freedom and creativity. For example, he signed and painted The
Virgin of the Immaculate Conception with San Francisco and San Antonio (Figure 4.9)
for the monastery of Santa Catalina in Cuzco. The Virgin herself, as well as the male
saints on the bottom left and right, are reminiscent of Medoro’s style in the naturalistic
modeling of the bodies and the flow of drapery around the figures’ limbs. Riaño painted
the Virgin with fullness and volume, carefully modeling the folds of drapery over her
bulging abdomen and strong arms. Additionally, the faces of San Francisco and San
Antonio are detailed and precise, their facial bone structure carefully designed to reveal
prominent cheekbones and frown lines to the left and right of their mouths, naturalistic
details that are evident in many of Medoro’s paintings, such as his San Diego de Alcalá
(Figure 3.13) in the Monastery of the Descalzos in Lima.
Riaño’s first documented painting in Cuzco is another version of this same
subject, The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (Figure 3.49), for the monastery of the
Recoleta in Cuzco. It is nearly identical in composition to Medoro’s painting in San
Agustín in Lima (Figure 3.35). The figure of the Virgin stands in the same pose in both,
her hands pulled up to her chest in prayer, as she gazes down at angels beneath her feet,
her eyes all but closed in a serious and stoic attitude. The Virgin’s pose, however, is
conventional for the subject, and certainly not unique to Medoro. The more convincing
link between the two is the placement of the symbols of her purity in the same order and
location in both paintings, which may suggest that Riaño used Medoro’s painting as a
model or learned of Medoro’s iconographic program in his workshop. Riaño’s individual
style, however, is evident in this example. Mesa and Gisbert recognized an ease in
Medoro’s painting that is not present in Riaño’s version, perhaps evident in the position
and movement of the angels that hold the attributes of purity, but also the somewhat stiff
quality of the Virgin’s pose, most notably in the bowing of her head. In comparison,
Medoro painted his Virgin with an easy elegance; her body is naturalistically depicted,
and illusionistically physically present, but also light and ethereal. There is a heavy
weight to Riaño’s Virgin that contributes to her static pose.
Riaño’s most acclaimed project in the modern literature came in the early 1620s,
when he painted murals in the Church of San Pedro, in Andahuaylillas. The church has
intrigued modern scholars because it is one of few structures to withstand extensive
damage in the 1650 earthquake, but more importantly because the program of the mural
designs for the church’s interior was so carefully calculated to address the indigenous
Andean audience. The murals are an evocative example of how Christians used art to
convert the Andean population. The murals’ designer was a priest named Fray Juan Pérez
de Bocanegra, who created a program that addressed Christian dogma, but arranged the
imagery in ways that were familiar and relatable to the Andean audience he intended to
convert. The murals that decorate the walls above the entrance to the church include an
allegory of good and bad behavior in life and the consequences of those choices in either
heaven or hell, titled The Way to Heaven and Hell (Figure 4.10). The artist depicted the
roads that an individual might face in life and their consequences after death, one lush
and easy to navigate, but leading to the punishments of Hell, and the other, thorny and
precarious, yet ending in the splendors of Heaven. The source for the painting was a print
by the Flemish engraver, Hieronymus Wierix (Figure 4.11), but Riaño, guided by
Bocanegra, has departed from some of the decisions made by Wierix to better suit the
mural’s Andean context. Bocanegra also added certain elements in order to address his
particular audience. For example, King David appears in the lower left of the painting, a
notable figure who condemned the Israelites for worshipping false idols; the destruction
of idols was one of the most pressing matters for the Spanish in Peru in the seventeenth
century. Ultimately, the murals at Andahuaylillas are remarkable for their complex and
carefully planned program that was designed for the indigenous population who might
attend the church. The murals speak to the growing interaction of European and Andean
traditions in the seventeenth century; Luis de Riaño’s involvement in the church made
him an essential part of rapidly evolving colonial culture.
While working at the church in Andahuaylillas, Riaño also painted The Baptism of
Christ (Figure 4.12), an oil painting on canvas, which the artist signed and dated 1626.
By this time, Riaño’s style had become more distinctive and recognizable. Mesa and
Gisbert have identified several characteristics of his style, including angular, flattened
figures, pointed features, and oval faces, all of which are present here. In Lima, Medoro
painted a Baptism of Christ (Figure 3.8) for the Monastery of the Descalzos. In a
comparison of the paintings by master and student, it is clear that Riaño moved decisively
away from Medoro’s full, modeled figures, towards much more delicately linear bodies
and features. Riaño painted the anatomy of Christ and Saint John the Baptist by
delineating a multitude of individual muscles, giving the bodies segmented, patterned
surfaces and thus flattening them. They lack the subtly modeled, robust bodies of
Medoro’s figures. In fact, the figures are reminiscent not so much of Riaño’s Italian
teacher, but of Bernardo Bitti, who also painted a Baptism of Christ (Figure 1.18), for the
Church of San Juan, in Juli, in the late 1580s, whose figures are similarly light and
ethereal. Compositionally, Riaño’s painting also relates to Bitti’s, in the placement of the
protagonists and the space between and around them. Medoro’s painting does seem to
have been at least part of Riaño’s inspiration here, however, as he adopted some of
Medoro’s decisions from the Descalzos painting: cherubim appear in both, rather than the
full-bodied angels of Bitti’s version, and Christ delicately leans forward with arms across
his chest in each painting. In comparison to both Italian depictions of the Baptism,
however, Riaño’s is decisively less grounded, lighter, and more ethereal; the effect is
most evident in the feet of Christ and John the Baptist, which do not touch the ground,
leaving their bodies not planted firmly in this space, but floating ambiguously. Clearly,
by 1626, Riaño was extracting ideas from sources other than Medoro, and began to paint
with elements of the patterned flatness that would become iconic parts of Cuzco painting
later in the century. Riaño, then, is an important and uniquely well-documented example
of an artist in Peru diverging from the Italianate style that had dominated Peruvian
painting for decades. Riaño’s evolving style is still more evident in another painting from
Andahuaylillas, The Archangel Michael (Figure 4.13). In this example, the figure is
planiform, and covered in patterns and brocades. The effect has become far more
ethereal than naturalistic, as the gold ornament has so flattened the body that the
archangel does not possess the physical presence of a robust, weighty human figure.
The Italian School in Lima
The impact of the Italians’ students is clear, although further research is necessary
to construct a more complete history of their careers and relationships with other colonial
artists. Additionally, there is evidence of the Italian impact in paintings that unfortunately
cannot at this time be attributed to a particular artist. Hanging in churches throughout
Lima are paintings by artists clearly influenced by Italian style and iconography.
Unfortunately, as is the case with much colonial Latin American art, attributions have
been lost with time. It is possible that students or followers of Bitti, Alesio, or Medoro
made many of these paintings, but it is impossible to know with any certainty at this time.
Nevertheless, these paintings are evidence of one aspect of the
Italian influence. I will mention just a few here.
A painting of the Virgin and Child (Figure 4.14) in the Monastery of the
Descalzos in Lima is one example. The Virgin Mary glances down at a slumbering Christ
Child, as she pulls a blanket over the baby. The proportions of both figures are
attenuated, in the style of Mannerism practiced by Bitti and Medoro. Like Bitti’s
Madonnas, this Mary’s delicate fingers are long and elegant. The bodies of both figures
are full and carefully modeled to give them a real physical presence in the painting.
At the Sanctuary of Saint Rose of Lima, scholars have attributed a Virgin of the
Immaculate Conception (Figure 4.15) to a follower of Medoro. In the pose of the Virgin,
the painting is reminiscent of Medoro’s work of the same subject (Figure 3.35) in the
Monastery of San Agustín. Also at the Sanctuary of Saint Rose are two paintings
(Figures 3.47 and 3.48) that relay parts of the narrative of the young saint, both of which
have been attributed to a follower of Medoro, and do possess the fully formed bodies and
complex figural compositions of some of Medoro’s later work, such as the scenes from
the Passion of Christ from the retablo at the Monastery of San Francisco. (Figures 3.17-
3.26)
Finally, there is a painting at the Monastery of Santa Rosa de Santa Maria in
Lima, The Holy Family and Child of the Apple (Figure 4.16), that is reminiscent of
Alesio’s Saint Christopher (Figure 2.22). The painting more specifically recalls
Michelangelo’s work, in its bright coloring and sculptural modeling, which further argues
for Alesio’s influence, since he was the single most important carrier of the Italian
master’s style to Lima.
Ultimately, the study of seventeenth-century painting in Lima remains very much
incomplete, as many works of art that hang in churches do not have attributions and have
not received any kind of in-depth analysis. It is clear, however, that Italian art had an
impact on Lima’s artists in this period.
The Cuzco School
The dominance of Italianate tastes in Peru is evident in painting well into the
seventeenth century, but those close ties to Italy began to dissipate by mid-century as new
artists emerged and introduced revolutionary ideas. The emergence of a group of painters
known as the Cuzco school marked the most significant transformation of painting in
colonial Peru. In general, colonial Peruvian painting of the sixteenth and
earlyseventeenth centuries related to European models, with particularly strong
connections to the Italian Renaissance and Mannerism, due to the presence of Bitti,
Alesio, and Medoro. Painters of the Cuzco school introduced a style that was more
closely related and appealing to the local audience. One of the most commonly cited
characteristics of the Cuzco school, also sometimes called the mestizo baroque, is the
denial of European forms and standards and the adoption of indigenous aesthetics. It is
true that mestizo baroque paintings often lack naturalistic three-dimensional modeling of
figures and the space tends to be truncated. However, this is not to say that there was any
rigid separation between an indigenous style of painting and a Spanish style of painting in
Cuzco in the seventeenth century. Additionally, not all painters working in the Cuzco
school style were of indigenous ancestry. Instead, in the late-seventeenth century, criollo,
mestizo, and Indian artists in Cuzco, responding to a growing interest in the revival of
local culture, relinquished direct connections to European models, abandoned the dry
replication of Spanish, Italian, and Flemish works of art, and began making paintings that
combined various sources, among them the Inca past.
An example of the Cuzco school style is an oil painting of the Virgin and Child
(Figure 2.40), painted near the beginning of the eighteenth century, and now housed in
Lima’s Museo de Arte.410 Characteristic of the mestizo Baroque, the figures occupy a
shallow space close to the picture plane, and their faces and bodies lack extensive
modeling so that they appear flat. Additionally, the figures are highly idealized and
generalized, with ivory skin and rosy cheeks. The artist embellished the figures and the
painting with gold leaf through patterns on the costumes of the Virgin and Child, as well
as their halos. A delicate border of colorful flowers serves as an ornamental frame.
Paintings such as this example are immediately recognizable as typical of the Cuzco
school style.
The focus of this study has thus far been art in the city of Lima, due to the
extended stays there by the Italian painters. In order to consider the transformation of
painting in colonial Peru, however, it is imperative to look at art in Cuzco. By the
seventeenth century, Cuzco had become a great center of art. As the original capital of
the Inca empire, Cuzco had something that Lima lacked. Unlike Cuzco, Lima was not an
this time.
410 Donahue-Wallace, Viceregal Latin America, 133, offers this painting as an example of typical
Cuzco school painting.
important part of the pre-Columbian cultures that dominated Peru and therefore did not
have strong ties to the indigenous past, in the way that Cuzco did. Accordingly, it is in
Cuzco, not Lima, that the indigenous past most strongly reasserted itself in colonial art.
Additionally, Cuzco is worthy of discussion within a study of Lima’s art history because
the style cultivated by the so-called Cuzco school spread through the Andes and became a
widespread part of Peruvian culture.
Cuzco’s artistic significance, however, began before the advent of the city’s
nowfamous school; there was great diversity and talent among the city’s artists from early
in the seventeenth century. Although their sources remained closely tied to Europe, in the
first half of the seventeenth century criollo, mestizo, and Indian artists together composed
the city’s guild. Francisco Serrano, for example, was of Spanish descent, worked in Lima
before arriving in Cuzco, and specialized in a Mannerist style. Marco Ribera, on the
other hand, was born in Cuzco, and worked in a style closely related to Spanish Baroque
models, especially in his adherence to Zurbarán’s tenebristic compositions. Despite the
communal structure, official decrees granted rights to Spanish artists over those of
indigenous heritage and technically only those of pure Spanish blood were legally
allowed to study drawing, perspective, and classical modes required for advancement.
More personally, Spanish members were accused of insults and violence towards
indigenous artists and their tastes and skills. As a result, in 1688 the guild split and with
that split came the foundation of Indian and mestizo workshops. The tension continued
to be a part of Cuzco’s artistic climate, however. Even as late as 1704, Spanish painters
in Cuzco asked authorities to require that all painters pass examinations on perspective
and figure drawing, according to the European standards; clearly artists with indigenous
connections had begun more and more to stray from European models and European
masters felt the need to reinforce Old World norms. These attempts were unsuccessful
and the eighteenth century brought with it more freedom for the city’s painters. Out of
this new independence, Cuzco artists cultivated a mode of painting that was cut off from
new European developments in art, and instead based on a combination of older styles as
well as their own local tastes and traditions.
Revived indigenous creativity, however, began before the official split of the
painter’s guild, as is evident in the work of the artist Diego Quispe Tito (1611-1681),
whom scholars often point to as the source for the local resurgence. Quispe Tito was
active in Cuzco in the middle of the seventeenth century. His paintings have clear
connections to European art, namely Flemish engravings, especially those of landscapes,
and Mannerism in its formal elements, especially color. In his early work, it is clear that
he, like many other colonial artists, copied, dryly, European models. His 1634 Ascension
of Christ (Figure 4.17), from the Church of San Sebastian in Cuzco, is an example.
However, there are some dramatic changes that occurred in Quispe Tito’s more mature
work that anticipate some of the creativity of later-seventeenth-century artists. In fact,
Barbara Duncan sees Quispe Tito’s oeuvre as an illustration of painting’s transformation
in Cuzco: “Quispe Tito's work was the fountainhead from which sprang the exuberant
spirit typical of the Andean Baroque style in Cuzco painting.” A painting of the Virgin of
the Immaculate Conception (Figure 4.18) from 1650 is an example; the curving, linear
form of the Virgin’s body, accentuated by the elegant lines of her drapery, has antecedents
in Bitti’s Mannerism. The symbols of her purity are common in European iconography
and likely taught to Andean artists through engravings of the subject such as those by
Raphael Sadeler, whose prints were sent to the New World in great quantities, as
mentioned previously. However, Quispe Tito added joyful angels who hold those
symbols, as well as floral ornament that is distinct from European types. It would
become commonplace for Cuzco school artists, in an effort to aggrandize the Virgin and
visually demonstrate her royalty, to bedeck her in flowers and surround her with an
entourage of angels.
By the later seventeenth century, Quispe Tito had broken even farther away from
European models, although he never stopped using prints for inspiration. For example, in
his famous series of paintings of the zodiac signs (Figure 4.19), the artist’s landscapes are
certainly indebted to details from Flemish engravings, many of which have been identified
precisely. However, the paintings are unique and distinct from any found in Europe; they
mark the moment when Quispe Tito began inventing his own compositions, and
incorporating traditional iconography in new and inventive ways, in fact more creatively
than the work of most Cuzco school artists. As Gauvin Bailey makes clear in his survey of
colonial Latin American art, Quispe Tito cannot and should not be recognized as the father
of the Cuzco school. He was not alive during the ascendance of the important Cuzco
workshops, but also his work was much more original than that made by the artists of the
Cuzco school, who largely followed a style template. However, he can be seen as an early
example in Cuzco of indigenous artists claiming creativity and individuality that set them
apart from Europeans. Quispe Tito is important to a consideration of the emergence of the
Cuzco school because he is one early marker of the growing independence from European
standards in Peruvian art.
The other most important and successful indigenous artist working in Cuzco
during Quispe Tito’s time was Basilio de Santa Cruz Pumacallao (1635-1710). A
generation younger, Santa Cruz was active in Cuzco, where he remained for his entire
life, between 1661 and 1699. His style, in contrast to Quispe Tito’s, is highly
classicizing, indebted to European art throughout. In 1690, he received the extensive and
prestigious commission to paint a series for Cuzco’s Cathedral. In these paintings, for
example The Imposition of the Chasuble on Saint Ildefonso (Figure 4.20), Santa Cruz’s
connections to the High Baroque in Europe, and more specifically the work of Peter Paul
Rubens, are evident. His space is well-defined, his figures carefully modeled, and the
settings are grand and idealized. Santa Cruz was a highly skilled artist who learned how
to paint like a European master. His success, then, is significant not because he
introduced a revolutionary way to paint, but because he rose above any other indigenous
Andean artist of his time in the degree of success he achieved. It is not surprising to find
that the Cathedral in Cuzco was home to paintings of a highly Europeanized style, since it
was the administrative center of the Church in Cuzco, whereas paintings with more
evident indigenous influence were often found in the neighborhood parish churches.
While he cannot be recognized as a member of or contributor to the Cuzco school,
Basilio de Santa Cruz’s career, like that of Diego Quispe Tito, exemplifies the changes
that were taking place in Cuzco’s artistic climate in the late-seventeenth century.
Additionally, he lived and worked through the beginnings of the Cuzco school and even
in the work of this highly classicizing painter, the influx of indigenous culture is evident
later in his career. The Virgin of Bethlehem with the Bishop Gaspar de Mollinedo as
Donor (Figure 4.21), from 1699, is an example. The style is still classical, but the subject
is a characteristically Cuzco statue painting. Basilio de Santa Cruz was adept
at painting according to classical, European standards, but also influenced by the
contemporary interests in the Andean native past.
Accordingly, the cultural climate in Cuzco was evolving as Andean traditions
became increasingly pronounced. The independence and creativity of Diego Quispe Tito
and Basilio de Santa Cruz, as well as that of some of their students, coincided with the
beginnings of what scholars call the Inca Renaissance, a moment when Inca curacas,
members of the Inca nobility that took on administrative duties for local communities,
attempted to reassert their nobility and power; the uprising eventually culminated in 1780
in the rebellion of Tupac Amaru, an uprising of natives and mestizos against some of the
reforms of the Spanish in the viceroyalty. Although ultimately unsuccessful, the rebellion
illuminated local unrest as well as the power and pride of indigenous culture that lived on
so many years after the initial conquest. Therefore, the beginnings of the Cuzco school
coincided not only with the new opportunities available to indigenous artists as they
formed their own guild, but also with artists responding to a change in the cultural
climate.
Although Quispe Tito and Santa Cruz are antecedents of the Cuzco school, that
group’s iconic style did not emerge in painting until later in the seventeenth century.
Paintings by artists of the Cuzco school have some consistent formal characteristics, as
mentioned previously, such as gold patterning, flat figures and forms, and the inclusion of
colorful floral ornament. Cuzco school painting has excited scholars of colonial Latin
American art because it marked one important moment when indigenous artists asserted
their background and heritage. However, it can also be seen as a result of the encounter
of European and indigenous styles and iconographies.
The layered influence in Cuzco school painting is evident in an example of Saint
Joseph and the Christ Child (Figure 4.22), dated to the late-seventeenth or eighteenth
century, now in the Brooklyn Museum. The artist covered the garments of both figures
with elaborately patterned gold tooling, in addition to large gilded halos. The profusion
of gold in Andean Baroque paintings may have been a reference to the rich resources of
gold in Peru and the use of gold for pre-Columbian art and objects. It seems more likely,
however, in the context of Christian art, and in accordance with other examples of
colonial art, that the gold served instead to suggest a heavenly ethereal setting and to
aggrandize the holy figures depicted. Here too, a colorful floral border frames the scene,
which was another consistent characteristic of Cuzco school painting; the flowers were
likely references to local vegetation. Thus, a consideration of indigenous impact as well
as ties to Old World traditions is essential in understanding the Cuzco school.
Indigenous Art Forms and Aesthetics
The consistently flat figures, idealized features, and truncated space in Cuzco
school art seem to have been a result of the influence of indigenous aesthetics. The
Europeans of the Renaissance and Baroque tradition generally celebrated a naturalistic
aesthetic, with carefully modeled figures and precise linear perspective. Cuzco school
artists largely rejected these ideals, as part of their departure from the canons of the Old
World. Since this shift in painting occurred nearly two centuries after the initial infusion
of European techniques and styles, it is important to consider what could have been the
source for indigenous aesthetics. What local art forms were still made and available for
viewing by the seventeenth-century audience? As many scholars have recently discussed,
indigenous culture did not disappear with the arrival of the Spanish and the spread of
Christianity and European culture. In the first chapter of her book about Andean
paintings of the Virgin, Carol Damian summarized some elements of the Andean
contribution to colonial art. She made the important point that many of the ancient
Andean cultures, such as the Chavin and the Wari, powerfully influenced Inca culture and
cultivated artistic traditions and iconography that persisted for centuries. Two indigenous
art forms that had great significance to Peruvian cultures were tapestries, most
significantly in the form of woven tunics, and quero cups.
Textiles are perhaps one of the most ancient and more consistent art forms of the
Andean people. As early as the Pre-Ceramic period, dating 3000-1800 BCE, Peruvian
people made textiles in great quantities. At Huaca Prieta, a site from this period,
archaeologists excavated over 9000 cotton scraps. The artists of these textiles made
images by twisting thread, a non-loom medium that is simple in its technique, but that
artists used to create complex images. By the Early Intermediate Period of c. 200
BCE-50 CE, the Paracas people of the south coast had developed their own style and
techniques for textiles. The Paracas made embroidered textiles, lavished a great amount
of meticulous labor on each piece, and preferred intense color areas. Between 500 and
800, the Wari began making tunics, an art form that would persist through various
cultures in Peru. Wari textile traditions would come to feature prominently in Inca
culture, for example. Like Inca tunics, the Wari made these costumes for the elite, as
markers of status; the style was predominantly abstract and brightly colored, and the
artisans themselves were highly praised and celebrated for their efforts and creativity. An
example of a Wari tunic has been nicknamed the “Lima Tapestry” (Figure 4.23). The
Chimu of the Late Intermediate Period, between 900 and 1400, also made woven textiles,
and were among the first Andean artisans to depict humans and animals, although always
with the same bright color and abstraction that had been part of Andean tapestries from
the ancient period, as discussed here. An example is a Chimu cotton textile depicting two
large figures (Figure 4.24). By the time of the rise of the Inca in the fifteenth century,
then, the Andes already had a rich history of woven textiles. To the Inca, textiles became
the most highly valued art form. The Inca often used textiles as gifts to solidify political
relationships; their portability made them ideal for such a function. All people in the Inca
state learned the art of weaving, either in simply spinning fiber into thread or in much
more complex and skilled forms. The most highly valued textiles were tunics woven by
Inca women known as “Chosen Women” (Figure 4.25); the Peruvian author Guaman
Poma de Ayala represented these women in his iconic manuscript. The most important
element of Inca tunic design is the topacu, a square geometric design, often repeated in
small bands to decorate the textile. One of the most famous extant Inca tunics is known
as the Inca Royal Tunic (Figure 4.26) and is now housed in the Dumbarton Oaks
collection in Washington, DC. This example, made for the Inca king, is covered in
tocapus of a great variety unusual in typical tunics, but here used to signify the status of
the tunic’s wearer. The style, like that of many other Andean textiles, is characteristically
colorful and abstract, dominated by linear ornament and geometric shapes.
Queros were decorated wooden cups used in Inca rituals, and also exchanged as
diplomatic gifts. The style of decoration was largely abstract, and geometric in design
(Figure 4.27). Artists generally painted the designs onto the surface of the cup and
outlined shapes with incised lines. Queros were generally made in pairs and used to
exchange chicha, the corn beer popular in Andean rituals.
Most importantly for this study, both woven tunics and quero cups continued to be
made throughout the colonial period, and were among the most important examples of
pre-Hispanic artistry in Peru. Tunics and quero cups, in fact, continued to carry status
and importance in Peruvian culture even in the colonial period. Despite the fact that
many indigenous art forms were eliminated and replaced following the Spanish invasion,
Andean people continued to wear tunics well into the eighteenth century. According to
Joanne Pillsbury, who has written several studies on post-conquest tunics in Peru, by the
seventeenth century the elite no longer wore tunics on a daily basis; instead, these garments
were used in festivals and as symbols of local power.437 For example, in a seventeenth-
century painting of the descendants of the last Inca king (Figure 4.28), Tupa Yupanqui, the
artist and patrons used a traditional Inca tunic to symbolize the status and nobility of the
king.438 The famous series of late-seventeenth-century paintings recording the Corpus
Christi procession in Cuzco (Figure 4.29) includes figures wearing tunics, with a similar
purpose. By the early-seventeenth century, Andeans were also fashioning miniature tunics
to dress wooden statues of Christ. As late as 1781, the bishop of Cuzco, Juan Manuel,
complained that indigenous traditions were persisting in the form of sculptures of Christ
wearing Inca tunics.439
The presence of the Old World in the New did have some impact on indigenous
artistry. For example, tunics underwent some changes in the colonial period; craftsmen
added European materials and some European design elements. They worked in more
creative compositions, as the laws and regulations of the Inca were no longer in place for
Young-Sánchez and Fronia W. Simpson, eds., Andean Textile Traditions: Papers from the 2001
Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2006),
120168.
437 Ibid., 125; see also: Joanne Pillsbury, "Inka Uncu: Strategy and Design in Colonial Peru,”
Cleveland Studies in the History of Art 7 (2002): 68-103.
438 Kelly Donahue-Wallace, “Viceregal Latin America,” 62-3. The two heirs of the Inca royal
dynasty were granted a coat of arms by the Spanish king, which served as recognition of their
nobility.
439 Pillsbury, “Inca-Colonial Tunics,” 137.
the construction of textiles. However, the basic structure and design remained the same
as that used in the pre-Hispanic period. Therefore, woven tunics could have served as
faithful representations of indigenous aesthetics throughout the colonial period and could
certainly have been one source of inspiration for indigenous painters of the late
seventeenth century. Pillsbury explained quite eloquently, “Contrary to George Kubler's
belief that the elite arts of a vanquished culture are usually quick to disappear, these
colonial Inca tunics are an eloquent statement of the tenacity and complexity of
indigenous textile traditions in the colonial period. The basic Inca garment type was
retained (with certain modifications) for use on key occasions. The fundamental design
structure of the pre-Hispanic garment continued, and new imagery was added according
to Andean values.”
Quero cups also retained status in the colonial period and thus were consistently
produced. Just as queros often served as gifts from one leader to another in the
preHispanic period, the Spanish continued to recognize this function. In his important
study of quero cups, Tom Cummins relayed the story of the Inca king Manco Capac II
giving Francisco Pizarro a quero at a ceremony during which the Spanish informed the
local population of Cuzco that they were now under the leadership of the Pope and the
Spanish king. Cummins explains, “There was outward continuity in the act of exchange,
an act through which the vessel gained significance despite the disjunction caused by
Spanish colonization.” He goes even further and argues that not only were queros
produced and used in the colonial period, but they came to symbolize an artistic
resistance to the imposition of European culture.
Like Inca tunics, queros were also transformed by the influence of Old World
aesthetics. Specifically, while pre-Hispanic queros were decorated with incised linear
ornament in geometric patterns, colonial queros often included painted imagery that
included figures and animals. However, queros retained an aesthetic of flat abstraction.
An example (Figure 4.30) is in the collection of the Brooklyn Museum and dates to the
seventeenth or eighteenth century. The cup includes full-length figures of warriors and is
characteristic of examples made after the Spanish invasion. Thus, queros also were
available as examples of indigenous artistry and could, like tunics, have served as
inspiration for artists painting in the second half of the seventeenth century when the new
school of painting arose and a clear break with European styles took place.
Some scholars have recognized the impact of pre-Columbian art forms on
colonial art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his recent publication, The
Andean Hybrid Baroque, Gauvin Bailey meticulously identified Indian iconography and
symbolism in colonial architecture and its sculpture throughout the viceroyalty. On many
occasions, Bailey suggests that textiles and quero cups must have been significant
sources of inspiration. Additionally, the study of Andean art forms, like queros and
tunics, illuminates elements of the local aesthetic. For example, scholars such as Rolena
Adorno have identified the impact of the Andean moiety system in colonial art.
According to this pictorial device, Andean artists divided the composition along a
diagonal line moving from the upper right to the lower left. Those two spaces created by
that diagonal, the upper left and the lower right, reference the Hanan and the Hurin.
Adorno identified this compositional device in many of Guaman Poma de Ayala’s
drawings, where he consistently used this diagonal arrangement of figures in order to
suggest hierarchy. A study like Adorno’s makes clear that it was not only pre-Hispanic
artistic objects, such as queros and textiles, that persisted well into the colonial period,
but that aesthetic preferences and visual communication devices were still known by
local artists more than a century after the Spanish arrival. Thus, indigenous art was
available, still practiced, and well known by the Andean people of colonial Peru.
The Continued Influence of Europe
In addition to the rich resources available from pre-Hispanic traditions in Peru,
Cuzco school artists also drew from their training in and exposure to European art. And,
as I have discussed throughout this study, the most prominent European presence in Peru
was Italian. Although the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a time during
which indigenous artists invoked not only their own aesthetic tastes, but also elements of
pre-Hispanic belief and tradition, such as in depictions of the Virgin Mary that call to
mind the figure of Pachamama or other Andean goddesses, artists did remain indebted to
European examples for the depiction of standard Christian iconographies. The sources
were most often engravings, in addition to the training and encounters that indigenous
artists had with European masters. An example is a late-seventeenth-century painting of
the marriage of Mary and Joseph (Figure 4.31) by an unknown Cuzco school artist, now
in the Brooklyn Museum. The painting is immediately recognizable as a product of the
Cuzco school due to the elaborate gold tooling, which gives ethereal status to the scene
but also formally holds the composition together. Most interesting here is the meticulous
attention the artist has paid to the costumes of all three figures. As the Council of Trent
dictated, each wears his or her accurate and appropriate garments. For example, the artist
dressed the Virgin Mary in her three garments, the robe, mantle and veil, and the priest
wears the costume described in the Bible.
Additionally, the flat, linear figures and truncated space of many examples by
Cuzco school artists are also characteristics of much of the Mannerist-inspired painting
by Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro. Even in Bitti’s earliest works in Lima, such as the
Coronation of the Virgin (Figure1.4) and the Virgin of the Candles (Figure1.1), from the
late 1570s, the artist painted figures composed with elegant lines and sharp modeling.
Although he experimented with naturalistic aspects of painting, such as landscape
backgrounds and foreshortened figures, Bitti ultimately retained the ethereal,
antinaturalistic qualities of his figures. Although Medoro’s style underwent some more
permanent changes in the early-seventeenth century towards the sober naturalism of the
European Baroque, his earlier works have some of the Mannerist tendencies to flatten
figures and rely on line over volume. An example is his San Diego de Alcalá (Figure
3.13), in the Monastery of the Descalzos. As for Mateo Pérez de Alesio, his style of
painting is more challenging to discuss in a concrete way, due to the great loss of many of
his works, in addition to what seem to have been fluctuations that he went through in his
career, due to catering to the needs and tastes of the widely varying patrons that he
worked for in Rome, Malta, Seville, and finally Lima. However, one painting from his
time in Lima that is in excellent condition, The Virgin of Belén (Figure 2.31), is
characteristic of some of the formal tendencies to create flat, elegant, ethereal figures that
are evident in the paintings of Bitti and Medoro as well. Thus it seems probable that the
Mannerist tendencies of the Italians may have had some impact on the artists of the
laterseventeenth century. This is not to say that the paintings of the Italian artists resident
in Peru were the only influence on the ideals of these artists, but there are strong visual
connections between the work of Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro and the paintings of the
Cuzco school.
Conclusion
Ultimately, painting in Peru was transformed in the middle of the seventeenth
century; artists grew more independent, and indigenous interests and aesthetics became
significant influences on composition, figures, and iconography. Research over the past
few decades has shown that the arrival of the Spanish and their colonization of Peru did
not obliterate Andean beliefs and artistic traditions. Instead, local rituals remained a
consistent part of life for many people. Accordingly, when the indigenous past reasserted
itself in the seventeenth century, artists had plenty of native Andean sources that could
inspire them. Additionally, however, the art of the local schools that emerged in this
period continued to have some ties to the style of the Italians studied here. Thus, while
the Italian presence dramatically diminished with the death and departure of Bitti, Alesio,
and Medoro, which happened to coincide with the resurgence of native aesthetics, it
seems that the Italian and the indigenous met somewhere in the middle, with some
similar approaches to form and figure. Therefore, even after this transformation that art
underwent, there remained traces of the powerful and long-lasting impact of the Italian
Renaissance.
CONCLUSION
The goal of this study has been to illuminate the importance and the impact of
Italian Renaissance art on painting in colonial Lima. By tracing the successful careers of
Bernardo Bitti, Mateo Pérez de Alesio, and Angelino Medoro in Lima this dissertation
provides a clear vision of the prominent presence the three Italians had in Peru from the
end of the sixteenth century through the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The
predominance of Italian painters over Spanish and Flemish artists in Peru was unique in
colonial Latin America, and thus represents a significant branch of the far-reaching
effects of the Italian Renaissance as well as a critical part of understanding the complex
cultures that came to be from the meeting of the Old World and the New. The successes
of Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro were related at least in part to the prestige of Italian
Renaissance artists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Artists trained in Italy
throughout the Renaissance were considered to be of high pedigree; additionally, artists
with experience in Rome, the center of the Catholic Church, had opportunities to learn of
the latest and most appropriate styles and iconographies of sacred art.
Although many scholars have mentioned and studied Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro in
the past, this study provides the first opportunity to study their careers side by side, and to
consider their relationships with each other, as well as their comprehensive impact on
colonial painting in Lima. As individuals, each enjoyed immense success in Lima, and in
the case of Bitti, far beyond the viceregal capital. As a group, the Italians contributed
paintings to nearly every important church and monastery in Lima, as well as significant
secular institutions, including the University of San Marcos, where each Italian painter
completed a portrait of a professor from the prestigious center of learning. Although a
number of paintings, most extensively from Alesio’s oeuvre, were destroyed in
earthquakes, the extensive work of the three Italians is evident in the paintings that
remain as well as archival documents that reference work that is no longer extant.
Additionally, Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro trained and influenced young artists in Lima, as
well as Cuzco and other Peruvian cities, who went on to enjoy illustrious careers of their
own and carry on the styles and compositions of the Italians. Thus, although Bitti died in
1610 and Alesio in 1628, and Medoro returned in Spain in 1620, the Italian impact is
clear in colonial painting well into the seventeenth century and at least a residue of Italian
style remained a part of even later paintings made by artists of the illustrious Cuzco
school.
Perhaps just as important to this study as the goal of reinforcing the impact of
Bitti, Alesio, and Medoro in colonial Peru has been the opportunity to offer in-depth
analysis of the extensive oeuvres of all three painters. Most known paintings by the three
Italians have received detailed considerations of formal issues here, aimed at a more
subtle and attentive understanding of their styles. A more nuanced assessment of their
styles was critical due to the consistent trend of past scholars to simply deem all three
Mannerist and fail to expand upon the meaning and complexities of that term.
Additionally, each painting has been considered within its context, taking into account
iconographic choices that speak to both Old World concerns of post-Tridentine and
Counter-Reformation issues, as well as the concerns of artists painting for a diverse
audience of Europeans, criollos, mestizos, and Indians.
Ultimately, this dissertation includes considerations of influential and
understudied painters and paintings, and provides insight into the layered culture of
colonial Latin American art. Additionally, the study of three Italian artists working in
Peru further reinforces the growing understanding that the Italian Renaissance was not a
geographically isolated event, but instead a global phenomenon with impact reaching far
beyond the confines of the Italian peninsula or even Europe. In the past, the modern
conception of the world has been based on the idea that the global nature of society is a
recent aspect in the course of history, that diversity within a single city or country is a
modern idea. Recent scholarship, over the past two decades, has increasingly widened its
scope, accounting for the embryonic connections between Europe and the other
continents that began in the early modern period. This study contributes further to that
widening view of the world’s history, as colonial Latin America was a place where distant
cultures met, and lived, and worked together.
