Anónimo cuzqueño (active during XVI, XVII, XVIII, and XIX cent.)

• Anónimo cuzqueño refers to the many unsigned painters and workshop-produced works from the Cuzco School.
• Cuzco School of Painting, the most distinctive major school of painting in Spain's American colonies, which evolved during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the old Inca capital of Cuzco.
• Indian and Mestizo artists transformed formal and iconographical types from European art to create a uniquely American style of religious painting, characterized by brilliant color, flattened space, and a strongly decorative aesthetic.
• Favorite subjects include anecdotal biblical narratives, hieratic figures of the Virgin and saints, and gaily dressed archangels, as well as brightly colored tropical birds and idealized imaginary landscapes without reference to local geography.

• The origins of the school can be found in the many Flemish engravings and European paintings that were taken to Peru from Spain, as well as in works by European artists such as the Italian mannerist painter and Jesuit Bernardo Bitti, who was active in Peru and Bolivia between 1575 and 1610.

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