Provenance:

Fernandez Jimenez, Spain; part of a family collection for over 80 years.

Prints transported to the New World for use in missionary work and religious instruction often served as source images for artists in the Spanish Colonial world. The present depiction of the Virgin and Child with Angels Carrying the Cross can be associated with a 17th-century Flemish engraving of the Vision of the Cross (Fig. 1) made after a drawing by Maarten de Vos (1532–1603). The iconography of the Vision of the Cross was disseminated widely in Peru and across the Americas through paintings made after this print, of which ours is a particularly accomplished example.

The author of our painting brilliantly translates the essence of the engraving into the quintessential style of the Cuzco school. The composition is rendered with striking red hues and is punctuated throughout by gilt details executed in brocateado, an ornamental mordant gilding technique that is characteristic of Cuzco School paintings. Interestingly, the artist has reworked elements of the print, particularly the angel on the lower left, who is now clad in armor and has acquired the identity of the Archangel Michael, a figure beloved subject of the Cuzco painters and their patrons (Fig. 2).