Argentine painting

Argentine painting refers to all the pictorial production done in the territory of Argentina throughout the centuries.

The Cueva de las Manos, one of the masterpieces of paleolithic painting, is located in the Santa Cruz Province of Argentina. It has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Other important prehistoric artwork is located in the north of Córdoba. A collection of more than 35,000 pictographs (one of the densest collections of such images in the world) is found in the hills of Colorado, Veladero, Intihuasi and Unmount.

More recently, the pre-Hispanic cultures that inhabited the present territory of Argentina left a number of pictoral records. In the Andean northeast, the Ceramic Period cultures, from the Condorhuasi culture (400 BCE-700 CE) to the La Aguada (650-950 CE) and Santa María (1200-1470 CE), show a comprehensive development in the painting of ceramics and stone.

During the Spanish colonial era, painting developed primarily as a religious art in churches, designed to Christianize indigenous peoples. Colonial-era religious painting was often done by forced indigenous artists and African slaves under the power of the religious orders.

Colonial painting is also seen in the books and manuscripts made by colonists, priests, scientists, and visitors. Notable among these are the drawings and watercolors of the German Jesuit Florian Paucke (1719–1789).

In what is now northwest Argentina, especially in Jujuy, the Cuzco School developed in the churches, with its images of ángeles arcabuceros (angels armed with Spanish colonial muskets) and triangular virgins (a syncretism of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the Pachamama).

In the first years of the 19th century, many foreign artists visited and resided in Argentina, leaving their works. Among them were English mariner Emeric Essex Vidal (1791–1861), a watercolorist who left important graphic evidence of Argentine history; French engineer Carlos E. Pellegrini (1800–1875), who was devoted to painting out of necessity and who would be the father of president Carlos Pellegrini; the mariner Adolfo D'Hastrel (1805–1875), who published his drawings and watercolors in the book Colección de vistas y costumbres del Río de la Plata (1875); and lithographer César Hipólito Bacle (1790–1838).

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Wikipedia