Saint John of God

The unidentified artist who painted this bucolic scene, dominated by the figure of the sixteenth-century Portuguese monk Saint John of God holding the infant Christ, was part of a European-influenced painting tradition that first developed in the sixteenth century in Spanish colonial Cuzco, Peru. Delicate flowers, birds, and trees spread across the composition, unifying the saint with vignettes of the Flight into Egypt at left and other saints at right.

Eighteenth-century estate inventories in New Spain described these types of paintings as “landscapes inhabited by saints.” Although similar religious subjects hung in churches in colonial Peru, the prominence of landscape made this kind of painting equally desirable for private collectors.