Altar of Our Lady of Cocharcas with Saint Joseph and the Holy Child, Saint Vincent Ferrer, Saint Rose of Lima and Saint Jerome

Often portrayed under a monumental processional altar carried by fervent devotees who make their way through a vast Andean landscape, Our Lady of Cocharcas, has also been rendered as a statue placed on a church or private altar space, such as in the present composition. The so-called “statue paintings” genre was popular in the Andean regions in cities such as Cuzco in the seventeenth-century but by the following century, were also executed in other places throughout the vast territories of the Viceroyalty of Peru. These extraordinary paintings sought to replicate the three-dimensional devotional figures of the Virgin Mary holding the Holy Child closely identified with either a religious order such as Our Lady of Mercy associated with the Mercederians, or in her various advocations or apparitions.

The resplendent image of Our Lady of Cocharcas on a golden altar crowned by a choir of angels and surrounded by saints such as the winged figure of Dominican friar St. Vincent Ferrer with his trumpet; St. Rose of Lima; St. Joseph and the Holy Child and St. Jerome holding the Holy Church in his hand, served to inspire the faithful to contemplation of the sacred image of the Virgin. Standing before this dazzling form of the Virgin and her Holy Child served to inspire zealous devotion. Although the painter’s name is unknown, he was clearly one of the many indigenous masters of the so-called Cuzco School who received private and public commissions starting in the seventeenth century and included Gregorio Gamarra, Basilio Santa Cruz Pumacallao and Diego Quispe Tito among others (C. Damian, The Virgin of the Andes: Art and Ritual in Colonial Cuzco, Miami Beach, Grassfield Press, 1995).

The indigenous sculptor Francisco Tito Yupanqui is known to have carved a sculpture of the Virgin and Child in 1582-1583 of Our Lady of Purification in the city of Copacabana on the shores of Lake Titicaca, a sacred space to the Inca (S. MacCormack, “Human and Divine Love in a Pastoral Setting: The Histories of Copacabana on Lake Titicaca,” Representations, Vol. 112, No. 1, Fall 2010, pp. 54-86, University of California Press). Devotion to her sacred image grew rapidly due to the miracles credited to her and pilgrimages were made to her shrine by those seeking her holy assistance. Indeed, a young man, Sebastián Quimichi, who suffered an injury to his hand set out on a journey to the shrine in search of a miracle from the Blessed Virgin in 1598. His hand healed along the road due to his faith but he continued on to give thanks at the sanctuary where he hoped to bring back a replica of the statue of the Virgin to his hometown of Cocharcas so that Our Lady would protect others and they would venerate her (E. A. Engel, “Visualizing a Colonial Peruvian Community in the Eighteenth-Century Paintings of Our Lady of Cocharcas,” Religion and the Arts 13, no. 3, 2009, 299–339).

M. J. Aguilar, Ph.D.