Cusco school
The Jesuit introduced in Cusco one of the fashionable currents in Europe of the time, Mannerism, whose main characteristics were the treatment of figures in a somewhat elongated way, with the light focused on them.
In the words of the Bolivian historians José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, authors of the most complete history of Cuzqueño Art, Riaño lords in the local artistic environment between 1618 and 1640, leaving among other works, the murals of the church of Andahuaylillas.
The presence of Baroque style in Cuzqueña painting is mainly the result of the influence of tenebrism through the work of Francisco de Zurbarán and through inspiration from engravings of Flemish art from Antwerp.
The increasing activity of Amerindian-Quechua and Mestizo painters towards the end of the 17th century, makes the term Cusco school conform more strictly to this artistic movement.
This new Cuzqueño art is characterized thematically by the interest in Costumbrista subjects such as the procession of Corpus Christi, and by the presence for the first time of Andean flora and fauna.
From an anonymous painter of the late-17th century (some researchers attribute them to the workshops of Diego Quispe Tito and Pumacallao), these canvases are considered true masterpieces because of the richness of their color, the quality of the drawing and how well they achieved the portraits of the main characters of each scene.
It is in the work of Diego Quispe Tito that some of the characteristics of Cuzqueña painting are prefigured, such as a certain freedom in the handling of perspective, a previously unknown role of the landscape and the abundance of birds in the leafy trees that are part of the same.
Another outstanding painter of the Cusco school is Basilio Santa Cruz Pumacallao, of indigenous ancestry like Quispe Tito, but unlike him, much more attached to the canons of Western painting within the Baroque current.
Active in the second half of the 17th century, Santa Cruz leaves the best of his work in the Cathedral of Cusco, as he was commissioned to decorate the walls on the side of the choir and the arms of the transept.
In the picture of the Virgin of Bethelem, located in the choir, there is a portrait of the bishop and patron Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo who helped the development of the Cusco Painting School and the city.
Industrial workshops made canvases in large quantities for merchants who would sell these works in cities such as Trujillo, Ayacucho, Arequipa and Lima, or even in much more distant places, in the current Argentina, Chile and Bolivia.
Though the Cusqueño painters were familiar with prints of Byzantine, Flemish and Italian Renaissance art, their works were freer than those of their European tutors; they used bright colors and distorted, dramatic images.
Other known artists of the Cuzco school include Diego Cusihuamán, Gregorio Gamarra, Basilio Santa Cruz Pumacallao (1635–1710), and Antonio Sinchi Roca Inka.
According to them, the Cusco school is a symbol of the power of the colonizer "representing images with Caucasian features, imposing ideas, religion and Western stereotypes" and the project re-poses them with new signs that refer directly to the descendants of the former victims.
