The Cusqueña School of Art , named after the Peruvian city of Cusco, is generally regarded as the most prodigious in colonial South America. Its masters, especially active in the eighteenth century in and around the city, were gifted with an extraordinary ability to produce subtle oil paintings, mostly of religious, devotional subjects, that somehow combined sombre understatement with a startling vitality. Favourite subjects - as part of Counter-Reformation propaganda - were the Crucifixion, the Virgin Mary, San Francisco Solano and other founders of the religious orders that evangelized Spanish America, and the saints in general. Their highly valued work is partly derivative, with the main inspiration taken from fashionable Flemish, French and Italian engravings and woodcuts, though the influence of the great Spanish master Francisco Zurbarán (1598-1664) can be detected in the clear, austere use of colour, the solid forms and the frequent fusion of the mystical and the realistic. The bulk of their production has never left Peru, but several examples of this school's production can be found in churches and museums across Argentina, a reflection of the fledgling country's reliance on imported art in the early nineteenth century, to satisfy the demands of the landed aristocracy and emerging middle classes until local artists came to the fore.