Artistic Invention as Tradition in the Portrait Painting of Late-Colonial Lima

Abstract

José Joaquín Bermejo, Cristóbal de Aguilar, Cristóbal de Lozano, and Pedro Díaz are not household names outside of Peru. However, these artists are among the most influential painters in the history of art of the eighteenth-century world. As the premier portrait painters in the global capital of Lima, these artists made visible the identities of powerbrokers who helped to shape the Ibero-American empire in its twilight. Collectively, Bermejo, Aguilar, Lozano, and Díaz facilitated a pictorial shift within a traditional genre that required archaism and repetition to maintain its cultural relevance. Their finished portraits visually demonstrate an emerging dissonance between artistic innovation and pictorial tradition. Through an examination of their late eighteenth-century corpus of work, this article demonstrates how artists adjusted the representation of elite bodies in portraiture to reflect the subtle disintegration of a unified colonized social body.