Basilio Santa Cruz Pumacallao

Biography

Art historians long believed that the paintings signed Basilio de Santa Cruz were the work of a Spanish friar. The error was corrected by the historian Jorge Cornejo Bouroncle, who found contracts for commissions in which the artist is named Basilio de Santa Cruz Pumacallao. The Quechua surname showed that they were dealing with an indigenous man of the Andes.

Almost everything else about him is less well known than one would like.

He was born in Cusco, in the Viceroyalty of Peru; the year is given differently, as 1636 or 1635. He died there in 1710. I have no information on whom he studied with or how his life went outside his commissions, and I will not invent any. He is known to have belonged to the Cusco School, a colonial movement of painters, many of them indigenous, who were trained in Spanish Baroque religious painting. He is usually named alongside Diego Quispe Tito. His main patron was Bishop Manuel de Mollinedo. The bishop is believed to have brought paintings by Spanish artists back from Madrid, and this, apparently, is the basis of the difference between Santa Cruz and Quispe Tito. Quispe Tito relied chiefly on European engravings, while Santa Cruz also looked at canvases by Spanish painters, notably Murillo and Valdés Leal. His compositions are dynamic, decorative and very large. His studio produced an extensive series on the life of Saint Francis.

The series is in the Convent of San Francisco in Cusco. Only the last canvas in it is signed, and it is dated 1667.

In the Cathedral of Cusco hang two enormous paintings by him, “Saint Christopher’s Apotheosis” and “Saint Isidore”. Near the transept are “Chasuble Imposition to Saint Ildephonsus” and a scene with Philip Neri; the title of this picture varies from one description to another. There is also a series of female martyr saints. In the Chapel of Saint Joseph is “Royal Saint Mary of Almudena”, an image especially revered in Spain. The cathedral’s holdings are also said to include “Charles II and the Queen of Spain Adoring the Virgin of Almudena” and “Virgin of Bethlehem with Bishop Mollinedo”. In the Church of La Merced is the “Martyrdom of Saint Laurence”; its angels are painted as Murillo painted them. The “Corpus Christi Procession in Cuzco”, a late seventeenth-century work in the Museo Arzobispal de Arte Religioso, is also attributed to him.

Of special interest are the arquebusier angels, that is, angels with firearms. They are common in the Cusco School, and were not painted in Europe at the time. Santa Cruz developed this image together with José López de los Ríos and Leonardo Torres.