Our Lady of Valvanera

Valvanera is a monastery Virgin from La Rioja, Spain — one of many Iberian devotional images that colonial patrons specifically requested Cusco workshops reproduce, carrying a piece of home iconography into the new viceroyalty. That two-way traffic (European models painted in an increasingly Andean technique) is the whole engine of the Cusco School.

By the time a Spanish shrine Virgin like this one had passed through a Cusco workshop, she had usually picked up brocateado gold leaf, a distinctively Andean textile sensibility in the drapery, and — often — a rounder, more Andean facial type in the surrounding angels or donor figures, even while the central composition stayed faithful to the European original.

This is a large, altar-scaled canvas — meant to anchor a chapel, not sit on a side table.