The Holy Family
Attributed to Gregorio Gamarra, Viceroyalty of Peru, 1600–1620
Oil on canvas
102.3 × 80.2 cm (unframed)
The Virgin holds the Christ Child while Saint Joseph offers a dish of fruit and Saint Anne looks on. The close grouping, luminous haloes and rich red and green garments...
The Virgin holds the Christ Child while Saint Joseph offers a dish of fruit and Saint Anne looks on. The close grouping, luminous haloes and rich red and green garments create an intimate devotional image rooted in the Mannerist tradition introduced to the Andes by painters such as Bernardo Bitti.
Adrián Contreras-Guerrero proposes an attribution to Gregorio Gamarra, an early painter active in Cusco and Upper Peru. The treatment of the faces, drapery and decorative details is compared with Gamarra’s signed works of 1607–1609, including the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Adoration of the Magi in La Paz. The painting offers a distinctive example of the emergence of a local Andean pictorial language in the early seventeenth century.