This impressive painting by Melchor Pérez Holguín was recently acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

Holguín was born in Cochabamba, in present day Bolivia, around 1660. Although nothing is known about his training, by 1678 he was living in the legendary mining city of Potosí, where he became a highly sought-after painter. 

At the height of his fame in the early eighteenth century, he boldly portrayed himself in the center of two of his most ambitious canvases—The Last Judgment, created for the Indigenous parish of San Lorenzo, and The Entry of Viceroy Morcillo into Potosí, where he appears holding a paintbrush to emphasize his elevated status and that of his profession. 

In 1545, soon after the Spaniards established the viceroyalty of Peru, they stumbled upon the fabled Cerro Rico, or Rich Hill, of Potosí—a mineral deposit that would produce over half the world's silver for some 250 years. The discovery of this mine and the founding of the Imperial Villa of Potosí changed the course of history and turned Spain into the envy of the globe. Travelers described the streets of Potosí as cobbled with silver bars, spreading the idea of the region's unparalleled wealth. The mine fueled a veritable silver bonanza, attracting people and commodities from every corner of the world. Driving the metropolis’s growth, thousands of Indigenous laborers along with enslaved Africans were forced to work under dismal conditions to extract the precious ore

 

Kris Lane, Author of Potosí: The Silver City that Changed the World 

There is a perception for the Spanish that this is not an insurmountable thing. They can build a city at almost 13,500 feet above sea level. It's an extraordinary altitude. The mountain itself—we use the word "iconic" far too often—but in this case, it really is. The mountain is iconic. The Cerro Rico and the city beneath it are reproduced in print over and over. And people can get that in their heads that is where silver comes from. That is the place where treasure comes from.

It's a really overwhelmingly cosmopolitan place in the most improbable site, in the deep interior of South America, high in the Andes, far from any place. And people are gasping for breath, but they're doing it anyway. There's nothing else that comes close, no single place that comes close to being as responsible for early globalization as Potosí. And that's because the silver that's coming from this place is lubricating economies very, very far afield.

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Potosí was also a profoundly devout city, dotted with many churches that still tower over its streets today. The population suffered several devastating epidemics, including two plagues in 1649 and 1719, and turned to Catholicism for solace. Holguín's distorted and highly expressive figures endowed his images with a sense of pathos that appealed to local forms of religiosity.

In LACMA's stirring Pietà, painted in the early eighteenth century, Christ lies gently on the Virgin's lap surrounded by weeping angels, as cherubs tenderly support his arm and foot. The angel on the left holds a candle, highlighting the intimacy of the evening scene. The artist's strategic application of complementary colors (green and red) creates a striking impression. 

Green and red bore ancient associations with Inca rulers and the sacred. This color combination appears in numerous paintings from Upper Peru and Cuzco often in figures of God the Father, the saints, and angels. Colors were endowed with power in precolonial Andean culture, and transposing them to Christian iconography might have triggered a type of energy that kept ancient ideas of the sacred alive.

The painting is also profusely ornamented with gold to heighten the sense of the divine. 

Gilding had a long history in European art, but in the Americas, it was widely associated with Cuzco-school paintings. These works circulated amply in the Andes and were in high demand in Potosí. Some of the gold patterns, especially those on the Virgin's cloak, closely follow the folds of the garments and present cracks and losses, suggesting that they were applied early in the life of the painting; others exhibit a different style and were likely added at a later time. 

 

Ilona Katzew, Curator and Department Head, Latin American Art, LACMA  

A really interesting thing about this painting is the inclusion of gold ornamentation or gilding, which is known as “brocateado.” And it's really fascinating because we can't exactly pin when it was added. Our conservators have noticed cracks in some of the elements, which suggests that the gold ornamentation was added early on in the life of the painting, possibly even by Holguín. The thing is that there are not too many paintings by Holguín that present gold ornamentation. There are few, but not too many.

So he may have very well added the gilding. But also, there are differences in style that suggests that they were added on by another hand as well. 

Now, the question, too, is why was there a need to add gold ornamentation to this very striking picture? And that possibly has to do with the great fashion for richly decorated surfaces that came about through the introduction of Cuzco paintings at the time, many of which flowed into the region of Potosí. So there was a fashion for this kind of works. 

And also another interesting thing that I always like to keep in mind is that paintings are not static. They're pretty much like documents. So even artists who painted those works could change and alter them. Or later artists or different people could change the pictures to convey different messages or to respond to specific aesthetic fashions

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Holguín painted several Pietàs based loosely on a 1634 composition by the Flemish artist Anthony van Dyck, which he must have known from a print or perhaps a painted copy. In this version, he demonstrated exceptional intelligence and sensitivity by compressing the scene and pushing it to the foreground, evoking images of the Nativity and effectively connecting, in the viewer's eye and imagination, Christ's birth, death, and resurrection. 

When LACMA acquired the painting in 2019, it had suffered a number of damages and had undergone several restoration and cleaning interventions over the years. The painting was examined with various methods to determine how to safely remove the dirt and the layers of old discolored varnish without affecting the original paint. For example, the figure of Christ was covered with a toned varnish that was not original. Two pieces of thinly woven canvas were sewn together, and various repairs of holes and tears were visible on the back. Physical inspection of the painting showed that the edges had been trimmed and that the canvas had been rolled and folded, resulting in paint cracks and losses throughout. 

To stabilize the work, an adhesive was flowed under the flaking paint, which was set down with a warm tacking iron. Irregularities in the canvas were minimized with moisture, weights and suction plates. Losses were filled, and the painting was varnished before and after inpainting. 

While X-rays reveal that the figures, especially Jesus, were in relatively good condition, in the lower section, a tear stretching from Christ's back to the bottom of the painting had been coarsely restored. The cherub depicted from behind was heavily damaged, but traces of the original helped conservators interpret the figure's shape and color. More significant damages, however—caused by water—had affected the area of Christ's feet, the winding sheet and the instruments of the passion. 

Extensive paint loss had exposed the raw canvas, now covered only with bits of the remaining preparatory ground and flecks of paint. Some dark lines of a simple underdrawing were visible to the naked eye in the area of the feet, and infrared photography revealed additional outlines. 

Given the location and the extent of the damages, limited toning was preferable to attempting to recreate the missing areas, which would have defied honest restoration. In the end, the emotional intensity of the central scene and its chromatic vibrancy is what commands the viewer's attention. 

Technical analysis revealed much about Holguín's method of work. He primed the canvas with a double ground. The layer directly on the canvas is a gray color made from a mix of white calcium-carbonate chalk, black, yellow, and red ochres, and lead white. The upper layer, though similar in terms of pigment content, appears more transparent and yellow. Both layers work together to give the composition its overall warm tonality. 

Cross-sections helped detect the use of two layers of blue pigments for the Virgin’s cloak. The lower one, a gray blue, appears to be made mostly of azurite (a blue copper bearing mineral) and black and white pigments. The upper layer is more transparent and contains smalt, (a powdered blue glass colored with cobalt), as well as azurite which were also detected in the areas of the sky

 

Elma O’Donoghue, Conservator of Paintings, LACMA  

When we examined this blue layer with ultraviolet light, you can see that it's made up of actually two layers. And on the bottom is a very, very dark—it's opaque—pigments are ground a little finer than in other sections. And it's very dark. 

And then directly on top of that is this highly fluorescent layer and it has these large glassy chunks of blue pigment in it. This area was analyzed with XRF by our conservation scientist and she detected cobalt. So this is, of course, smalt blue pigment, which is a glassy pigment

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As with the blue paints, Holguín masterfully built up the greens in two layers. The lower one is lighter and combines malachite, lead white, and black pigments, providing the base for the more intense and transparent green glaze on top—likely a copper resinate.

 

Gabriela Siracusano, Author of Pigments and Power in the Andes

I see that the palette is quite extensive because there is azurite, smalt, vermillion, lacquers, orpiment, verdigris, ochres, whites, and carbon blacks. In other words, the color scheme is very rich, which is not surprising given that Holguín was a painter who employed a very varied palette. But the point is how he used it. 

There’s another fact that is worth emphasizing in relation to the research that we have conducted. In the palette applied to the painting, you identified a mixture composed of azurite and smalt. Many years ago, we identified the same mixture of these pigments (or a very similar one) in a painting attributed to Holguín of Saint Francis of Paola in the collection of the Museo Isaac Fernández Blanco. 

In the case of Saint Francis of Paola, the coarsely ground smalt is mixed with lead white on the palette, as in the Pietà. Why? This speaks to Pérez Holguín’s knowledge on how to treat the material.

This is to say, he knew perfectly well that he could employ that material, and he was familiar with period treatises and recipes, which recommended not grinding smalt excessively to impart a sheen

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Close examination of the painting reveals much about Holguín's technique, his masterful handling of color, and his talent for creating powerful compositions that invoked the viewers' piety and activated their imaginations—all while appealing to local forms of taste. This ability contributed to his almost mythical status, earning him, in the 19th century, the nickname "the Golden Brush."