Quito: masters of splendor and tradition.

• Author: Tarrago, Rafael E.
• Position: Painting tradition in Quito, Ecuador

A unique school of painting established in the golden era of this colonial city has been passed on for generations

Within two decades of Spain's defeat of the northern armies of the Inca, the Americas' first school of the arts was founded in Quito. Prompted by the Council of Trent's sweeping reforms, New World missionaries employed art as a didactic tool; in Quito, however, the amalgam of Christianity and native religion and culture would forge a new form of artistic expression that has remained distinct to this day.

The first master of Quito painting was Fray Pedro Bedon, who had studied painting in the European style with the Italian Jesuit Bernardo Bitti in Lima. When he returned to Quito in 1586, he selected nine young Indians as his students. Through his stalwart patronage of indigenous popular religious art, Bedon established the Quito School of Art. His pupils began by imitating Andalusian artists like Alonso Cano and Pedro de Mena, combining Catholic and indigenous imagery and producing a mixture of the European baroque and Plateresque with the more rigid indigenous style. The school developed along the lines of its Flemish, French, or Spanish counterparts in Europe, and Quito workshops produced hundreds of paintings each year, many of which were exported to other kingdoms of the Indies and some as far as Rome.

European architects and Spanish sculptors also arrived in the New World and traveled from city to city; by the middle of the seventeenth century they too were serving to inspire native craftsmen. With the golden age of the baroque came the emphasis on curves and spirals and on intrinsic design that appears to have touched a creative nerve in Ecuadorans such as the Jesuit Nicolas Duran Mastrillo, who designed La Compania de Jesus, the main church of the Jesuits in Quito. Other masterpieces of baroque architecture are the cathedral at Cuenca and Quito's church-monasteries of Santo Domingo and La Merced.

The best of Bedon's pupils was Andres Sanchez Gallque, who produced many pictures of saints as well as a portrait of three Afro-Ecuadorans descended from runaway slaves who lived in enclaves in the region of Esmeraldas and swore allegiance to the king of Castile only after he had recognized their autonomy. This triple portrait was commissioned by Juan Barrio de Sepulveda in 1598 as a gift for King Philip III. Considered Sanchez Gallque's best-known work, it hangs today in Madrid's Museo de America.

Miguel de Santiago is the most famous of the Quito School's baroque painters. Little is known about his mestizo origins or his artistic apprenticeship. His first important paintings date from 1656, a series of canvases on the life of Saint Augustine in the cloister of Quito's Saint Augustine monastery and the monumental La Regla painting in the monastery's...