Diego Quispe Tito (Cuzco, Peru, 1611 - 1681) The Holy Family in the workshop of Nazareth'. Oil on canvas. 169 x 224 cm. Provenance: From the same collection of lot 80. A palace-house of an Andalusian marquisate, a Spanish noble family whose lineage dates back to the 12th century. As we read in the Real Academia de la Historia Quispe Tito 'Member of a family of the Inca aristocracy, he is considered among the main initiators of the Cuzco school of painting. He apparently came from the indigenous village of San Sebastián, which houses a significant part of his production. It is centred on the decorative works for the parish church in that town, for which he worked intensively between 1634 and 1669. During those years he produced four large pictorial cycles: Life of Saint John the Baptist, The Passion, Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and The Doctors of the Church. These groups of canvases summarise Quispe Tito's original maturity, characterised by an ingenious reinterpretation of European prints and by a precise, agile brushstroke with lively colours. His fame soon spread beyond the confines of Cuzco, and by 1667 he was painting Jesús entre los doctores del templo and Los desposorios de la Virgen, both of which are now in the Museo de la Casa de Moneda in Potosí, commissioned by the churches of Potosí. In the Inca capital itself, Quispe Tito's most ambitious work is the canvas The Last Days or the Last Judgement, painted for the porter's lodge of the Convent of San Francisco in 1675. Here the Andean painter abandoned the dynamic formulas for depicting the Last Judgement, in use until the High Renaissance and early Baroque periods in Europe, to return to the ordered scheme, in the form of successive horizontal strata, common among medieval painters. The Holy Family Returning from Egypt (National Museum of History), dated 1680, displays the virtuosity characteristic of his later works. Here the painter based his work on a widespread composition by Rubens, but Quispe Tito considerably reduced the proportion of the figures in relation to the background in order to place the scene of the sacred story within a vast idealised and fantastic landscape, thus heralding the emergence of one of the favourite genres of Cuzco painting in the following century. At the same time he executed the well-known series of the zodiac, hung on the walls of the side naves of the Cathedral of Cuzco. Today only nine of the twelve signs exist, either because three of them were destroyed or because the artist died before completing the commission. This is a Christianised cycle, in which each of the zodiacal emblems is identified with a parable of Christ or a Gospel story. In this case Quispe literally follows his Flemish graphic sources, while at the same time displaying a European-inspired pictorial craft, the high technical level of which is unsurpassed in the Cuzco context. In this way the artist, in the last stage of his life, seemed to adapt his work to the aesthetic preferences of a cultured, urban clientele, which may have attracted the attention of Bishop Mollinedo and his cathedral chapter.