Cuzco School

The Cusco school (escuela cuzqueña) or Cuzco school, was a Roman Catholic artistic tradition based in Cusco, Peru (the former capital of the Inca Empire) during the Colonial period, in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. It was not limited to Cusco only, but spread to other cities in the Andes, as well as to present day Ecuador and Bolivia. Many colonial Cusco school paintings are preserved, most of them currently at Cusco, but also in other areas of Peru, the town of Calamarca (Bolivia) and in museums of Brazil, United States and England. HistoryThe tradition originated after the 1534 Spanish conquest of Peru, and it is considered the first artistic center that systematically taught European artistic techniques in the Americas. The Spanish contribution, and in general European, to the Cusco school of painting, is given from very early time, when the construction of the Cathedral of Cusco begins. However, it is the arrival of the Italian painter Bernardo Bitti in 1583, that marks a beginning of the development of Cuzqueño art. The Jesuit introduced in Cusco one of the fashionable currents in Europe of the time, Mannerism, whose main characteristics were the treatment of figures in