The painting was done by hand in Cuzco, Peru, where artists have been making sacred art this way for almost five hundred years. The Cuzco school began in the 1500s when Spanish missionaries trained Quechua and mestizo painters to make devotional works for the new churches of the Andes. What came out of that integration was its own thing entirely. The brushwork here is refined and realistic, closer to European devotional painting than the folk style of the other Cuzco pieces, but the gold stars and the warmth of the skin still mark it as Andean.
