Cuzco School Painting (Esquela Cusqueña) as a Manifestation of Andean Identity in the Past and Present

The Polish version of the article was published in Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 65, issue 4 (2017). Painting of the Cuzco school developed in the city proper and in the Cuzco region in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its influence was not limited to this area; information about the presence of paintings from Cuzco in distant regions of the Viceroyalty of Peru can be found in numerous sources. The tradition which acknowledged Cuzco painting to be a manifestation of cultural mestization is extremely strong. We can easily point at Spanish (colonial) as well as native (Indian) features in both formal and semantic aspects of representations. However, Cuzco painting is not a matter of the past; nowadays there are still studies which produce neo-Baroque pictures, stylistically imitating old paintings. I would like to present neo-Baroque canvas and subsequent stages of work on them, using field research from 2013 and photographs taken in Galería de Artesanía “Fenix” in Cuzco, run by Luis Alfredo Pacheco Venero. What is important in the summary is reflections on cusqueñismo, a phenomenon typical of the city since the 1920s and wondering whether within its scope there is a place not only for the Inca tradition but also for colonial art. Modern search for regional identity is not limited to the pre-Columbian era, but more and more often highly assesses the colonial legacy.