The Virgin of the Pilgrims and Child

This canvas shows Mary and the Christ Child in the pilgrimage-Virgin format — crowned, gold-worked, enthroned for veneration — but its own object history is a small pilgrimage in itself: a colonial Peruvian workshop painting that eventually entered the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, thousands of miles and an ocean from where it was made.

That itinerary is a useful corrective to any idea of the Cusco School as a purely regional phenomenon — these images, and the devotions behind them, moved through global collecting networks long before any of them reached a website.