De Oficio Pintor: Arte Colonial Venezolano: Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros

Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic: Centro Leon, 2007. Softcover. VG-. One copy has some soiling on title page.. Color illustrated wraps, red spine with white lettering; French flaps. 124 pp. Numerous color figures, 33 color plates. Text mostly in Spanish. Essay provided also in English in the back section of the book. Accompanied a 2007 exhibition. Thirty-three works illustrated with annotations, including works by Juan Pedro Lopez, Jose Lorenzo Zurita, Antonio Jose Landaeta, and other colonial Venezuelan artists. In this publication Jorge F. Rivas P., curator of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, examines the evolution of art in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries and traces the development of Venezuelan colonial art. It also includes an essay by the art historian María Ugarte about Dominican Colonial painting. The collection includes works by colonial artists like Francisco de Lerma y Villegas, Antonio José Landaeta, Fernando Álvarez Carneiro, José Antonio Peñaloza, José Landaeta and Joaquín de Sosa who were part of a guild of craft painters, and whose education was limited to the workshop of some other master painter. In contrast with Mexico, and with a few exceptions, these Venezuelan criollos had no academic formation in painting or the possibility of studying aboard. Their only relationship with the outside world was the imported artwork bought in to Venezuela by some painters upon their return to the country. The exhibition represents the opportunity to rediscover the "craftsmen" of Venezuelan Colonial sacred art.