Tres álbumes de grabados antiguos en la Biblioteca Nacional del Perú

Abstract

The Peruvian National Library holds today in its vaults three valuable albums of Old Master prints which still await proper catalogation. The prints of these albums come from the Low Countries, Paris, Rome, Cologne, and Augsburg, and were produced in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Taken together, these albums offer an encompassing view of the prints that circulated in Colonial Peru, thus contributing to the formation of the visual culture of the country. The purpose of this essay is to reveal the wealth of the Old Master print collection in the Peruvian National Library. One of the noteworthy fruits of our labors will be the discovery of the only known impressions of a couple of prints of Thomas de Leu (ca. 1555-ca. 1612), a prominent Parisian printer of great significance for Colonial Art.