Museo de Arte Religioso

This guide to the Museo de Arte Religioso in Cusco starts with a photograph spotted at a California museum in 2016 that matched a colonial canvas stolen from a church in Ollantaytambo back in 2002, sending the FBI and Peru chasing a painting that had vanished for fourteen years. From there it opens onto the museum's own galleries of Cuzco School art, made when Andean and European hands worked side by side after the conquest, hanging for centuries largely unguarded in remote mountain chapels. It asks what, in the end, kept a handful of these fragile pictures safe when so many others simply disappeared.