cuzco iv

"Our family has been on the receiving end of America’s largesse [vrijgevigheid]... 

and I thought that it would be good to repay, in very small part, our debt... 

to your great nation, in the form of a donation of works of art... 

which have enchanted me for many years past,” 

Li wrote in an email to The Art Newspaper. 

Explaining that his father had attended a Chinese university partially funded by the US, and later the University of Wisconsin, where he earned several degrees, on full scholarship. 

Li and his brother also attended US schools and colleges on scholarship, culminating in a degree from Harvard Medical School for his brother, and one year at Harvard Business School for himself. Then, seduced by Brazil, Li decided not to finish his master’s degree, but build his business interests there instead.

Ronda Kasl, the Met curator who specialises in the art of Spanish America... 

said that “Li allowed us to choose what we wanted” from his trove [schat]. 

She first flew to São Paulo to study the collection in April 2017, along with Charlotte Hale, a paintings conservator at the museum.

Like most Spanish Colonial paintings, those in the gift are unsigned, so the museum staff had to do hard-core research on them, Kasl said. Of the ten paintings, only one artist was identified—Melchor Pérez Holguin (around 1660 to after 1732), a Bolivian painter who is believed to have done the nocturnal portrayal of Saint Christopher (around 1710-20).

Also in the gift is Li’s favorite painting, Our Lady of Valvanera (around 1770-80) from Cuzco, which depicts the miraculous discovery of her image in the hollow of an oak tree by a thief-turned-hermit. 

Another beauty, Kasl said, is Our Lady of Mercy, called The Pilgrim of Quito (around 1720-30), which is a statue painting (a painting of a sculpture) depicting the Virgin and Child being transported on a mule led by a white-robed friar.

In a departure from usual practice, the museum is putting all the works in the gift on view before they undergo planned conservation. Each painting needs some treatment, ranging from minor fixes, which are being made before the exhibition, to major work on five or six of them that will take perhaps three years. They will be removed from the gallery one at a time, and the museum will share the findings of its conservation work with the public.

In addition to these paintings, the gallery installation—which will remain on view indefinitely—will include the crown, a newly acquired silver-bound missal published in Antwerp in 1709 and bound in Cuzco about a year later, and a silver-gilt monstrance acquired as a Spanish work in 1931 but recently conserved and reattributed to an artist from Quito.

[bron]