Magic Screens. Biombos, Namban Art, the Art of Globalization and Education between China, Japan, India, Spanish America and Europe in the 17th and 18th Centuries

Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, for several centuries doubtlessly the most discussed and most eminent writer of Andean America in the 16th and 17th centuries, throughout his life set the utmost value on the fact that he descended matrilineally from Atahualpa Yupanqui and from the last Inca emperor, Huayna Cápac. Thus, both in his person and in his creative work he combined different cultural worlds in a polylogical way.1 Two painters boasted that very same Inca descent – they were the last two great masters of the Cuzco school of painting, which over several generations of artists had been an institution of excellent renown and prestige, and whose economic downfall and artistic marginalization was vividly described by the French traveller Paul Mancoy in 1837.2 While, during the 18th century, Cuzco school paintings were still much cherished and sought after, by the beginning of the following century the elite of Lima regarded them as behind the times and provincial, committed to an ‘indigenous’ painting style. The artists from up-country – such was the reproach – could not keep up with the modern forms of seeing and creating, as exemplified by European paragons. Yet, just how ‘provincial’, truly, was this art?