The painting was done by hand in Cuzco, Peru, where artists have been painting the Virgin this way for almost five hundred years. The Cuzco school began in the 1500s when Spanish missionaries trained Quechua and mestizo painters to make sacred art for the new churches of the Andes. What came out of that integration was its own thing entirely. The colors here are brighter and bolder than anything you'd see in a European devotional painting. The sky is soft and almost translucent. And the gold is everywhere, the way Andean artists believed it should be when you're painting the Mother of God.