CUSCO CULTURE
The Escuela Cusqueña
During two centuries the called Escuela Cusqueña was developed in the colonial Cusco, it established the painting as the deepest of all the arts, with characteristics of an unquestionable originality which was carried also to Quito, Lima and Oruro. The brought religious stamps from Europe, along with the establishment in Cusco of a school of Beautiful Arts or “Escuela de Bellas Artes”, where the dominant currents in Spain, Flandes and Italy were studied, took place to this true pictorial explosion that upholstered the churches of Cusco with something more than a million paintings.
In the expensive paintings of the Escuela Cuzqueña prevail the cherubs (fat and blond children), the gunsmith angels, the evangelical scenes, the tormented virgins and the hieratic saints like fruits of the religious syncretism of Christianity with the Andean rituality.
Although most of artists who could enter to this school remained anonymous, the names of its most outstanding representans is known, like the mannerists Gregorio Gamarra and Lazaro Pardo de Lagos, the baroque like: Santa Cruz Pumacallao and Diego Quispe Tito, and the called “popular painters” like Marcos Zapata, Tadeo Escalante, Antonio Willca and Basilio Pacheco.
The machiguengas
About eight thousands Machiguengas live today in the forests of La Convencion. Machiguengas conforms the only ethnic group of jungle origin that lives in Cusco, disperse in the border zones with Ucayali and Madre de Dios.
One of the characteristics of its people is to tell to funny histories of its very rich culture. Between these there are a variety of subjects, including one of black ancestors that run away from the farm slavery in the days of the Colony. As they lack of fighting spirit, Machiguengas has been on disadvantage in front of other more warrior ethnic groups or against the subversive followers at the last time of the terrorism.
The Q'eros
In the highlands of Paucartambo, at the union of the rivers Quero and Chuwa, at more than 4.200 meters above sea level, is the town of Q'ero Totorani, inhabited by 300 people that live following the ancestral customs of their Inca direct ancestors. The community, on the foot of the snow-covered mountain Sacsayhuaman, maintains its houses of stone and mud mortar and its ceilings of ichu (highland grass), that is able to resist strong snow falling. The settlers lived under the colonial slavery system or mita on the Q'ero farm or ranch, despoil of their land until 1955, year in which, thanks to the management of the anthropologist Oscar Núñez del Prado, they recovered their lands.
They remember their Inca origins, fortified by the confrontation with the Spaniards, who were defeated by them, with the help of the Apus, in Wiracochapampa. In the present, they live of the agriculture and the pasturing in the quechua and amazonian yunga zones. The men and women of the town are dress very colorful by their textiles and braids elaborated in looms. They maintain its Andean religious spirit, they live according to the agricultural Inca calendar and maintain its connection of adoration to the Pachamama (Mother Earth) and the nature. Its only contact with the modern world takes place in the celebration of the El Carmen Virgin in Paucartambo.
At certain moments of the year, Cusco seems an interminable round of festivals, parades and celebrations. The outbreaks of fire crackers break the calm of the dawn almost everyday; small groups of devotees cross the city carrying icons of some church or local chapel and the streets are overwhelmed with roisterers during all night long in the big occasions.