The Invisible-Substantial-Presence of Painted Landscapes in seventeenth-century Cuzco

In the context of the traditional scholarship on Cuzquenian painting, landscapes are considered accessory and irrelevant in number. Their presence is associated with the backgrounds of religious scenes, and ignored by their seemingly repetitive and formulaic nature, mostly taken from engraved sources. In this presentation, I want to explore the extent, and reasons around that definition of “irrelevance.” With a documentary focus that demonstrate significative evidence of landscape paintings in private collections, as well as a critical intervention on the traditional scholarship of Cuzquenian painting, I plan to question the assumptions around depictions of nature present in seventeenth-century Cuzco. Since landscape paintings appeared in significative number in private collections, and as backgrounds of religious paintings in several important commissions in the city, the refusal of considering landscape paintings as a relevant phenomenon of Cuzquenian painting shows not only a scholarly bias but also cloud the relation between the codification and representation of nature to the colonial project. This re-consideration of the presence and importance of landscape depictions in seventeenth-century Cuzco, allows us to understand the use and relevance of depictions of nature within the colonial centuries in the territories of present-day Peru. Not only to gauge how the specific taste of the colonial Cuzquenian elites relates to the local artistic production, but also as a way to situate the presence of landscape depictions in the context of the ideological and cultural project of Spanish Imperialism.