PhD Program in Historical studies
Mannerism and the Italian influence in the Viceroyalty of Peru: Bernardo Bitti
Bernardo Bitti, who was born in Camerino in 1548, entered a workshop at age fourteen in Rome and in 1568 he entered the Society of Jesus as a layperson. After a stay in Seville from 1573, he arrived in Peru in 1575. Upon his arrival in Lima he began working in the Church of San Pedro, the main church of the Jesuits, where you still see some of his paintings. In 1584 he lived in the Juli mission, near Lake Titicaca, where he painted several paintings and altarpieces in the various churches of the Company. In 1585 he moved to Cuzco, where he painted a series of paintings with passages from the life of Christ and various paintings in the chapels of the Church of the Jesuits. Most of these works have been lost. From Cuzco, Bitti passed into the territory of the Audiencia of Charcas, present day Bolivia, living in La Paz, Potosí and Chuquisaca, now Sucre, leaving his best of painting. Some of the paintings in this locality are preserved today in the museum of the cathedral. In 1597 he returned to Cuzco, where he worked on the painting of eight large paintings on the walls of the chapel of the church of the Society. Around 1600 he returned to Lima, where he painted several works for the Churches of San Pedro and del Cercado, including two paintings of Saints Ignatius and Francis Xavier. Shortly after, he moved to Arequipa, where even today there are a Resurrection, and two paintings of the Virgin of Candlemas. In 1605 he worked in Huamanga, present day Ayacucho, where he painted two paintings in the Church of the Society which had just been built. Bitti died in Lima in 1610. Bitti’s art received the influence of the masters of the Roman school of the years 1560-1580, as well as by Matteo Pérez de Alessio, the other Italian painter whose work was influential in Peruvian colonial painting and came after Bitti. The two met in Lima around 1592. Bitti’s work had a considerable influence on the paint of the Viceroyalty of Peru, leaving many followers, including several indigenous disciples. Some of these painters became later known rather, as in the case of Tito Cusi Guamán (image: Bernardo Bitti, La Coronación de la Virgen).