Attributed to Basilio Santa Cruz Pumacallao (Cuzco,... Lot n° 68

Attributed to Basilio Santa Cruz Pumacallao (Cuzco, Peru, 1635 - 1710) "Death of St. Joseph before Mary, Jesus and St. John the Evangelist" Oil on canvas. 128 x 175.5 cm. Basilio de Santa Cruz Pumacallao, along with Diego Quispe Tito, dominated the artistic panorama during the last quarter of the 17th century of the Cuzco school. Its most relevant patron was Bishop Manuel de Mollinedo y Angulo (1673-1699), a Spanish cleric who arrived in Cuzco in 1673. As indicated by the Royal Academy of History, Pumacallao was an: “Active painter in Cuzco in the second half of the 17th century.  He was an indigenous painter considered to be among the founders of the Cuzco school. Like Quispe Tito and other painters of his time, Santa Cruz was a member of the Inca aristocracy. His career began around 1661, when the Franciscans of Cuzco commissioned him to paint twelve angels and an equal number of Madonnas for their church, paintings that are now lost. This painting is comparable to that preserved in the Church and Convent of St. Francis in Santiago de Chile, which represents the appearance of a musical angel to ailing St. Francis. The scene narrates, in an everyday and natural environment - the room of a Jewish home with a beautiful still life of flowers and fruit on a table - the definitive departure to Heaven of the Putative Father of Jesus. According to the Apocryphal Gospels, the Carpenter is said to have lived 111 years in perfect health, spending about 20 with Jesus. "His body was not haggard, he had not delicate eyesight, nor even a single tooth spoiled in his mouth. He never lacked sanity and prudence, and always preserved his sound judgment, even being a venerable old man of 111." On a certain day - he explains in apocryphal text - St. Joseph received the visit of an angel who informed him that that same year he was going to die.  He then travelled to Jerusalem, "entered the temple of the Lord, knelt before the altar, and prayed asking that when the moment came, he would not be abandoned by his guardian angel or St. Michael the Archangel." Pumacallao captured that moment, with St. Michael at the foot of his bed, wearing a crown of glory, waiting to help him make the passage into eternity. In the background, but without being unimportant, are the friends and apostles of Jesus, among whom the artist highlights St. Peter, "waiting for the moment when the gates of Paradise will be opened to him." An apparently normal scene, charged with the mysticism of the characters and the gentleness and humility with which he dies.