Cuzco’s Virgen de la Descensión through a Carmelite Optic

Abstract

The author analyses an 18th-century painting known as La Virgen de la Descención, the centrepiece of a series of monumental  canvasses financed by members of Cuzco’s Inca nobility that decorate the Sagrario or parish church of the Cathedral of Cuzco. The  building and the series of paintings discussed were authorized by Fray Bernardo Serrada, Castilian Carmelite bishop of Cuzco. It is  argued that Bernardo Serrada himself was the intellectual author of La Virgen de la Descención and that the composition represents a  unique and hitherto-fore unrecognized variant of the providential interpretation of the Spanish Conquest of Peru, based on an  extrapolation of the medieval Carmelite exegesis of Elijah’s vision of the little cloud rising from the sea as expounded in Felip Ribot’s  “The Ten Books of the Way of Life and Great Deeds of the Carmelites”.