Page 290 - Perú indígena y virreinal

massive circulation of Flemish prints which became an essential wellspring of inspiration for artists. These engravings were no longer limited to the already well- known compositions of the Roman masters but also the dynamic full Baroque style of Peter Paul Rubens. All of this created the conditions whereby the artists of the country, faced with the demands of their medium, selected some components while discarding others and thus gradually developed the solutions which went to make up the painting schools of the viceroyalty.
Leonardo Jaramillo (active 1619–1643) was the most important Spanish master during this time of transition. He was born in Seville and was a minor cleric. Belonging to the generation of Juan de Uceda and Alonso Vázquez, his artistic training in the Andalusian capital must have taken place in the group of humanists centred on the painter and theorist Francisco Pacheco. Moving to Peru around 1619 Jaramillo began working in the northern towns of Trujillo y Cajamarca. He was in the latter when he made out the papers for the apprenticeships of Tomás Ortiz de Olivares and Juan de Sotomayor. The following year he would travel with them and settle for good in the capital.
It was in 1636 when Jaramillo put his name to the great oil painting La imposición de la casulla a San Ildefonso (Lima, Convento de los Descalzos) which showed the suitability of his style to the Italianate tastes which still prevailed in the city, although it already shows a chiaroscuro treatment in the figure of the saint. A similar stylistic harmony can be seen in the section of the mural painting which was assigned to Jaramillo inside the Franciscan cloister, dated around 1640. Some of the scenes of the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, though quite deteriorated now, allow us to see surprising representations of contemporary characters: friars, aristocrats and peasants, all of whom confirm the emerging realistic tendency in Jaramillo’s mature work.
At the same time in Cusco painters such as Gregorio Gamarra, Francisco Padilla and Luis de Riaño represented the most provincial and old-fashioned Italianate style. The case of Gamarra is of particular interest. He was an artist from Alto Peru who had trained and worked in Potosi before coming to the Cusco region. He was there in 1607 when he signed the painting Aparición de San Francisco al Papa Nicolás V in the Franciscan collection. Meanwhile the Creole Reaño played his part in flowering of mural paintings designed to decorate the Indian settlements created by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo from 1672 onwards. Among his colleagues there was an already well-known indigenous painter Diego Cusi Huamán who had been active in Urcos and Chinchero since the beginning of the century.
In contrast to the relative isolation of the artists in Cusco, Lima was in constant contact with the latest metropolitan trends through the growing importation of oil paintings from the peninsula. One of the first important shipments was the Sevillian series of the life of Saint Dominic by Miguel Guelles and Domingo Carro (1608) which was intended for the main cloister of the Dominican convent in Lima. Later new styles would break through thanks to the thriving transatlantic commerce in art. Spanish Baroque would reach its peak through the great monastic series of Francisco Zurburán. Between 1637 and 1647 we can find reference to several paintings in the style of Zurburán being sent out to the viceroyalty of Peru in response to the enormous success this style had had in the Andalusian capital.
THE RISE OF THE VICEROYALTY SCHOOLS
Several generations of painters, mostly Creoles who had been trained in local workshops, were working in the country’s principal cities by mid-century. Proof of this is the concerted effort that the craftsmen of Lima made in 1649 to form a guild. At that time they numbered thirty-two masters of painting, polychrome and guilding and they named Bartolomé Luys, Francisco Serrano and Juan de Arce as their representatives. Their immediate concern was to defend themselves from the competition which had arisen from workshops which were concerned with purely commercial goals—including some which were controlled by clerical entrepreneurs—and where the artist’s profession was exercised in an informal manner. In exactly the same way as the Seville guilds, the painters in Lima had proposed that the workshops be controlled by a series of by-laws such as those which were in operation in Seville.
This period marked the definitive arrival of the naturalist tendencies and the Baroque
coming out of Spain and Flanders. This realistic representation reached its somewhat ephemeral peak in a group of portraits of religious figures and scholars finished around mid-century among which we can find an outstanding example by Diego de Vergara y Aguiar (Lima, Museo de la Universidad de San Marcos), a true masterpiece of the genre which we can compare with the Sevillian style of the young Velázquez. Another fruitful subject were the cityscapes which reflect the civic pride of the emerging Creole identity. Around 1665 two large scale oil paintings were commissioned by the brotherhood of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad—which was comprised mainly of Creole architects and carpenters—describing, in a similar fashion to Sevillian painting of the time, the procession of the Santo Sepulcro in Lima during the Good Friday celebrations.
THE SUMMIT OF THE SCHOOL OF LIMA
However, the Lima School would only reach its zenith during the last third of the century. One of the most outstanding examples of its work is the cycle of paintings on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi (1617–1672) which were used to decorate the cloister of the order. These works drew together the most prestigious Creole artists of the city. According to the chronicler friar Juan de Benavides four painters who “had been chosen from among the best” painted the series. He was referring to Francisco de Escobar (active 1649–1676) who it seems was in charge of the work, Pedro Fernández de Noriega (+1686), Diego de Aguilera (1619–1676) and the slave Andrés de Liébana, whose skill in his craft continues to command attention given the context of the colonial society of the time. The results of the work show the eclectic and European inflected spirit of the Lima school, capable of reconciling—in the words of friar Miguel Suárez de Figueroa—“the scholar curiosity of the Flemish countries, the peculiar studies of Rome and the painstaking care of Florence”. In the middle of this ingenious artificial narrative world, made up of classical architecture and Flemish woods, Francisco de Escobar, painted his own portrait—accompanied by one of his children—in the first painting. It is significant that Escobar emphasises in this way the image of the gentleman artist echoing the fight for social recognition which characterised the Spanish artists of the Golden century.
The movement of artists from the capital towards the Andes continued to be a clear indication of the vitality of Lima as an artistic centre. Several members of the thwarted guild of 1649 moved to Cusco in the years that followed. The earthquake of 1650 had devastated the city and for that reason it was necessary to rebuild almost all its ecclesiastical buildings. Juan Calderon and Francisco Serrano left Lima, drawn by the demand in the Cusco of those years. Serrano who arrived around 1659, decorated the nave of the church of Tinta with scenes of the life of Christ taking inspiration from prints by Schelte Bolswert and Carel van Mander.
THE BEGINNINGS OF THE SCHOOL OF CUSCO
By that time the use of printed prototypes was general practice among painters in Cusco. One of the first artists to use prints of Rubens was Lázaro Pardo de Lago (active 1630–1699). His Asunción de la Virgen (1632) for the parish church of San Cristóbal used as its starting point the composition of the same subject which was engraved by Paul Pontius after an original design by Rubens. The resultant formal mix lessens the dynamic complexity of the Flemish painter. Meanwhile Lázaro Pardo was exploring an unsettling naturalism in paintings commissioned by the Franciscan order. Outstanding among these are a pair of oil paintings dedicated to the Martirio de los franciscanos en el Japón (1630), works which are exceptional in their delicacy of treatment and the clarity of colouring and which are enlivened by the realism of the heads of the martyrs which show startling portraits of contemporary figures.
Juan Espinosa de los Monteros (active 1639–1699) is the most important painter in Cusco around mid-century enjoying like Pardo before him, the patronage of the Franciscans. In 1655 he began the huge composition the Epílogo de la Orden for the convent of San Francisco. It is a monumental composition made to exalt the memory of the illustrious members of the order and its shadowy treatment harks back to Sevillian models. Another allegorical canvas in the same cloister reveals similar characteristics and shows La fuente de la gracia presidida por la Inmaculada Concepción. This kind of work stands in contrast to the paintings Espinosa produced later in life when the influence of Murillo, which had been so successful in Seville, can be felt in a more open, colourful and
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