“Santa Rosa de Lima” by Escuela Cuzqueña

This canvas may have been painted when the Bishop of Cuzco, Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo, sought to expand her cult to the Southern Andean region. The saint’s face takes on an idealized and conventional beauty, although she wears the Dominican third order dress she used in life. Her figure rises over a landscape that attempts to evoke the hermitage where she prayed, surrounded by a symbolic frame of roses, the same flower that crowns the saint. On the other hand, she holds the Infant Jesus, the source of her constant mystical experiences, whom she affectionately referred to as the “little doctor.”
Text: Luis Eduardo Wuffarden
Source: Wuffarden, Luis Eduardo, Kusunoki, Ricardo [eds .]. (2016). Colonial Art. Collection of the Lima Art Museum.