Diego Quispe Tito (Cuzco, Peru, 1611 - 1681)

Diego Quispe Tito (Cuzco, Peru, 1611 - 1681) 'Saint Anthony with the Child' Oil on canvas. 57,5 x 44,5 cm. As we read in the Real Academia de la Historia Quispe Tito 'Member of a family of the Inca aristocracy, is considered among the main initiators of the Cuzco school for painting. He apparently came from the indigenous village of San Sebastián, which houses a significant part of his production. It is centred on the decorative works for the parish church in that town, for which he worked intensively between 1634 and 1669. During those years he produced four large pictorial cycles: Life of Saint John the Baptist, The Passion, Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and The Doctors of the Church. These groups of canvasses summarise Quispe Tito's original maturity, characterised by an ingenious reinterpretation of European prints and by a precise, agile brushstroke with lively colours. His fame soon spread beyond the confines of Cuzco, and in 1667 he was commissioned by the churches of Potosí to paint Jesus among the Doctors of the Temple and The Betrothal of the Virgin, both of which are now in the Museo de la Casa de Moneda of that city. In the Inca capital itself, Quispe Tito's most ambitious work is the canvas of The Last Things or the Last Judgement, painted for the porter's lodge of the Convent of San Francisco in 1675.Here the Andean painter abandoned the dynamic formulas for depicting the Last Judgement, in force until the High Renaissance and early Baroque periods in Europe, to return to the ordered scheme, in the form of successive horizontal layers, common among medieval painters. The Holy Family Returning from Egypt (National Museum of History), dated 1680, displays the virtuosity characteristic of his later works. Here the painter based himself on a widespread composition by Rubens, but Quispe Tito considerably reduced the proportion of the figures in relation to the background in order to place the scene of the sacred story within a vast idealised and fantastic landscape, thus heralding the emergence of one of the favourite genres of painting in Cuzco in the following century. At the same time he executed the well-known series of the zodiac, hung on the walls of the side naves of the Cathedral of Cuzco. Today only nine of the twelve signs exist, either because three of them were destroyed or because the artist died before completing the commission. It is a Christianised cycle, in which each of the zodiacal signs is identified with a parable of Christ or a Gospel story. In this case Quispe literally follows his Flemish graphic sources, while at the same time displaying a European-inspired pictorial craft, the high technical level of which is unsurpassed in the Cuzco context. In this way the artist, in the last stage of his life, seemed to adapt his work to the aesthetic preferences of a cultured, urban clientele, which may have attracted the attention of Bishop Mollinedo and his cathedral chapter.