Immaculate Virgin, Victorious over the Serpent of Heresy

Basilio Santa Cruz Pumacallao, a contemporary of Diego Quispe Tito and one of the handful of Cusco painters whose individual hand art historians can track across multiple works, here paints the Immaculate Conception in an explicitly combative register — Mary standing victorious over a serpent that stands in for heresy itself, a Counter-Reformation theme exported wholesale to the Andes.

Next to his quieter Saint Bonaventure and Saint Anthony elsewhere in this collection, the range on display is real: the same hand working in devotional intimacy and doctrinal triumphalism, both.