The guild of painters in the evolution of art in colonial Cusco

Abstract

"This article aims at reappraising the role of the painters' guild in the evolution of art in colonial Cusco by critically assessing the theory proposed by José de Mesa and Teresa Gisbert, according to which the Indian painters' separation from this organization in the last decades of the seventeenth century caused the emergence of a local school of painting. Based mainly on an analysis of the sources used by these authors and on Francisco Quiroz's research on the situation of guilds in colonial Lima, it is argued that, whereas Indian painters might effectively have separated themselves from the painters' guild of Cusco around 1688, the historical narration constructed by Mesa and Gisbert erroneously assumes that this organization effectively enforced, before its split, ordinances similar to the ones approved for the painters' guild of Lima in 1649. Therefore, one should not assume that this event had decisive consequences in the evolution of art in this region. This article further argues that, by integrating Francisco Stastny's characterization of colonial peripheries and Niklas Luhmann's conceptualization of art as a form of communication, both the stylistic and the institutional histories of art in this region during the colonial period can be given account for as responding to a more encompassing societal context in terms of a non-differentiated art form characteristic of colonial peripheries." [author's abstract]