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Course: Art of the Americas to World War I > Unit 4
Lesson 3: Viceroyalty of Peru- Introduction to the Viceroyalty of Peru
- Introduction to religious art and architecture in early colonial Peru
- Early Viceregal Architecture and Art in Colombia
- Textiles in the Colonial Andes
- Guaman Poma and The First New Chronicle and Good Government
- “Bad Confession” in Guaman Poma’s The First New Chronicle and Good Government
- San Pedro Apóstol de Andahuaylillas
- Luis de Riaño and indigenous collaborators, The Paths to Heaven and Hell, Church of San Pedro de Andahuaylillas
- Bernardo Bitti, Coronation of the Virgin
- Alonso de Ovalle, Tabula geographica regni Chile
- Diego Quispe Tito, Last Judgment, 1675
- Our Lady of Cocharcas and the Cuzco School of Painting
- The Coronation of the Virgin by the Holy Trinity
- The Child Mary Spinning
- Cusco School Artist, Saint Joseph and the Christ Child
- Conserving Cuzco School Paintings
- Parish of San Sebastián, Procession of Corpus Christi
- Master of Calamarca, Angel with Arquebus
- Melchor Pérez de Holguín, Entry of the Viceroy Archbishop Morcillo into Potosí
- Portrait Painting in the Viceroyalty of Peru
- Fourteen portraits of the Inka Kings
- Official Portrait of Bishop Luis Francisco Romero
- Portraits of Francisca Ramírez de Laredo and Antonio de Ulloa
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Conserving Cuzco School Paintings
This video explores the delicate process of conserving Cuzco School paintings. It highlights the importance of preserving historical artwork, the techniques used, and the challenges faced by conservators.
Featured object: Emblem of Folly, Unknown artist, Peru, 18th century. Oil on canvas, 49 5/8 x 43 5/16 in. (126 x 110 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Clifford Ming Teh Li, in honor of James Kung Wei Li and Julie Chu Lu Li, 2018 (2018.836.1) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/764089 Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies Managing Producer: Kate Farrell Producer: Sarah Cowan Associate Producer: Melissa Bell Editor: Alex Guns Camera: Alex Guns, Stephanie Wuertz Additional Camera: Wayne De La Roche Production Coordinator: Bryan Martin Production Assistant: Anna Oehklers, Rachel Smith Original Music: Austin Fisher Intro Animation: Stephanie Wuertz Graphic Design: Natasha Mileshina © 2021 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Created by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Featured object: Emblem of Folly, Unknown artist, Peru, 18th century. Oil on canvas, 49 5/8 x 43 5/16 in. (126 x 110 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Clifford Ming Teh Li, in honor of James Kung Wei Li and Julie Chu Lu Li, 2018 (2018.836.1) https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/764089 Supported by Bloomberg Philanthropies Managing Producer: Kate Farrell Producer: Sarah Cowan Associate Producer: Melissa Bell Editor: Alex Guns Camera: Alex Guns, Stephanie Wuertz Additional Camera: Wayne De La Roche Production Coordinator: Bryan Martin Production Assistant: Anna Oehklers, Rachel Smith Original Music: Austin Fisher Intro Animation: Stephanie Wuertz Graphic Design: Natasha Mileshina © 2021 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Created by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Video transcript
The first time I saw conservation was in Lima,
Peru, where I was born and raised. And I actually saw it on Cuzco School paintings. Little did
I know that I was going to become a paintings conservator. In the past decade, The Met has solidified
its commitment to collecting colonial Latin American artworks. Before 2014, the Museum
only had one painting from colonial Cuzco. That was actually the only painting of colonial
Latin America. These ten paintings are an outstanding gift by James Li's family to the
Museum. In the eighteenth century, there was a large
group of Indigenous entrepreneurial artists that were setting up workshops in the city
of Cuzco. And these were extremely prolific, taking inspiration from a global context,
looking at European prints, also imbibing the local traditions of the Andes, and then
making it their own. The Cuzco School has a predilection for idealized faces, a special
detail to textiles, a proclivity for bright palettes and bright colors. These particular
paintings have the traits of a cultural identity. This is the type of painting they requested. These paintings were for export as far as
Colombia or Buenos Aires, for religious buildings or even for private homes. In museums, we
have palace paintings; these are court paintings. That was not what everyone else consumed. Most of the paintings were in stable condition.
Some of them had been treated in the past. Several had layers of varnish that had oxidized
over time, as well as overpaint that was covering original material. The first one that I picked
from the group was "Emblem of Folly." This is a painting that's inspired by a print by
Boetius Adams Bolswert from 1624 that was almost a self-help guide on how to lead a
pious life. So the fool is dressed in a jester's costume. He's mounted on a hobby horse that
doesn't take him anywhere. He has a cat in the basket representing lust, and he's also
playing with a windmill toy that would have been used by a child. Love has just walked
into the scene, and she's ashamed. She's covering her face and pointing to the fool. The angel
is looking at the viewer; the viewer becomes the fool. This painting had been painted quite thinly,
and because of the coarseness of the canvas, there would be scatter abrasions coated with
overpaint very broadly, especially in the sky. So I was able to use the same solvent
to remove both varnish and overpaint. Freeing the painting through these strange layers
was extremely satisfactory. You could get a sense of the background, the landscape,
opening up behind the figures that you didn't really see before, taken directly from Flemish
paintings that traveled to the New World. After removing the varnish, textural issues
became apparent. In the upper right corner, there were all of these extraneous bumps.
I found that these were related to clumps of the wax that had been used originally to
line it. I was able to do testing with a small tacking iron with a controlled heat setting
to see if I could coax some of those down just a tad. The idea here was not to really
make the painting flat by any means, but really just to diminish the appearance of these deformations. After cleaning the painting, I looked at it
again with UV light, and there was a particular fluorescence on the angel's robe, which prompted
me to work with the scientific department here and look at the painting with a macro
XRF. This is an instrument that scans the surface of the painting and plots, in a map,
all the elements that are present. We've been able to develop a sense of the palette that
was used in this particular painting. We found indigo in the sky and in the vegetation. The
robe of the angel pointed to the presence of smalt, a potassium glass that is colored
with cobalt. It really shows that trade of European pigments. The left ear of the fool
has vermilion, whereas the right ear is actually painted in cochineal, which is a much darker,
deep, and even somewhat translucent color extracted from the female parasite that lives
in prickly pears. I’ve retouched just the most egregious areas
of abrasion and loss. One of the areas that really came together in this painting was
the face of the fool, the wrinkles that showed his age. By retouching and bringing those
together, you can get a sense of what the artist was trying to tell you: this is a human
soul that is tired, that is aged, that has been doing this for a long time. And you can
feel the weight of these distractions that his soul has had throughout his life. These works have been largely misunderstood,
because we learn to gauge value based on what's closer to to a European experience. In Western art we are almost obsessed with authorship. The fact that these paintings
come from unknown artists reflects better the type of artworks that were present in
the Andes. This is what people saw. So as a conservator, I'm trying to flesh out
the reality of these paintings in a way that will give us clues as to who these people
were and make connections to our present, to who we are as Latinx and Hispanics. For
me in particular, as a Peruvian, as a person that grew up with these works, I feel extremely
proud to see them at The Met. I believe that conservation can shine light
on the voiceless, on those communities or artists that have not had the focus before,
providing all of this information that may not be as obvious, and taking these works
for what they are, at their own value.