CUZCO - 17TH CENTURY

This paiting is similar to other works by Santa Cruz Pumacallao. The light of Heaven breaking through the clouds and the half-nude angels suggest an affiliationi with the painter's body of work.

The canvas clearly owes its influence to the renowned painter Diego Quispe Tito Inga, whose works dating from the second decade of the seventeenth century are known. The scene is taken, like so many of the paintings from the viceregal period, from a work by P.P Rubens engraved on copper by Lucas Vosterman in 1620.

Quispe Tito discarded the vertical composition of the engraving to use a horizontal Andean landscape, which had great influence on the Cuzco school.

A painting representing a hermit saint depicts an unusual iconopraphic type that is quite rare in colonial art collections. The anchorite or hermit saints are saints whose biographies focus on their flight to the solitude of the desert or the forest in search of silence and prayer.

The anchorite saint in the Pedro de Osma collection reflects the rendering of the landscape and the profound spirituality typical of Quispe Tito's workshop.

There is also a Saint John the Evangelist associated with the workshop of Juan Espinoza de los Monteros, another painter master, whose work reflected the hybridization of Flemish and Spanish styles.