Nuestra Señora de Belén is one ot the patron saints of the Peruvian city of Cuzco. This painted representation is based on a famous sculpture that is paraded through the streets of Cuzco on the feast of Corpus Christi. After celebrations, the statue is returned to its niche above the altar at the Convent of Santa Clara, a lay community founded in 1549 for the education and protection of young women of mestizo (indigenous and European) ancestry.
Though the artist and the donor are unidentified, the scale of the painting and the specificity of the donor’s features speak to the stylistic and technical virtuosity of Catholic painting by and for Indigenous communities in the Andes during colonial rule. The visual language of ‘Cuzco School’ paintings draws equally upon Indigenous cosmologies, local expertise in pigments and textiles, and European conventions of pose, gesture, and scale to compose works that are both sumptuous and didactic.
The Arts of Golden Age Spain and the Hispanic World 