Looking Through the Landscape: Colonialism and the Indigenous Painters in Seventeenth-Century Cuzco

Abstract

By looking at landscape depictions in seventeenth-century Cuzquenian paintings we can access the ways in which part of the colonial discursive apparatus was reflected and circulated in the ideas of nature, territory, and space, through the visual arts. Through an analysis of visual sources, chronicles, and other primary documents, this dissertation investigates the connections between the strategies of colonialism, the context of the labor of the indigenous painters, and the overall setting of the colonial city of Cuzco. One of the central proposals of the dissertation is that the landscape elements, as one of the least regulated elements of the composition of the paintings, became places for demonstration of technical prowess, as well as a space of display of the specific ability and wit of the painter, connected to claims of status, and the exercise of privileges and agency by indigenous artists within colonial Cuzco. This, in turn, made the landscape elements somewhat of a signature for several workshops, and because of that, the later pictorial school that is defined as the first original pictorial school of the Andes (the Cuzquenian school) in the eighteenth-century, took the specific style of landscape depiction of the painters of the previous century and turned them into one of the distinctive elements of the regional pictorial production.