During the colonial era in Peru, two main schools of painting achieved a very high technical and artistic quality: the Cuzco and the Lima schools.  Previous studies of paintings belonging to these two schools have revealed some differences in the materials used by their artists. Our research was focused on a selection of paintings from three collections located in Lima:  the Religious Art Museum of the Cathedral, Celso Pastor’s private collection and the Monastery of Discalced Trinitarians. The first two collections are composed mainly of well conserved paintings that belong to the Cuzco school.  The third one is in a very poor conservation state and is believed to consist mainly of Lima school pieces. The paintings were initially examined by handheld XRF and, whenever possible, microsamples were taken for further analysis by optical microscopy, FTIR and Raman spectroscopy, gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and scanning electron microscopy.

This work constitutes just a small contribution to our knowledge of the materials used in the two most important schools of colonial painting in Peru.  We were able to identify materials, previously reported in the literature, that are characteristic of the aforementioned schools, such as lead white, linseed oil, minium, vermilion, smalt, Prussian blue, indigo, copper-based blue and green pigments, orpiment and gold and bronze leaf (orpiment and metallic brocades are considered diagnostic for Cuzco school).  It was not possible to fully identify some of the copper-based pigments present in the samples.  This is an issue that should be further explored, given the variety of copper minerals found in Peru that were accessible to artists during colonial times.

Participante(s):
GONZALES GIL, Patricia Elena; ORTEGA SAN MARTÍN, Luis, FIGARI GOLD, Jenny
Institución responsable:
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
Instituto Superior de Conservación y Restauración Yachaywasi
Año: 2014
Ponencia presentada en Nombre del evento: Gordon Research Conferences: Scientific Methods in Cultural Heritage Research
Ciudad: Newry, EE.UU.
Url: http://www.grc.org/programs.aspx?year=2014&program=scimethods