Luis_de_Mena
Luis de Mena
Mexican artist
Luis de Mena was a Mexican artist who lived and worked predominantly in the middle of the eighteenth century. Mena painted religious works and has been described as "no more than a journeyman painter in 18th century Mexico."[1][2] He signed a work entitled "Most Holy Mother of Light", now on display in the Serra Museum in San Diego, California.[1]
His most famous painting is in the Museo de América in Madrid, which is much reproduced as an exemplar of the casta painting genre.[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] It is a single-canvas work from 1750 which portrays not only a variety of New Spain’s castas but uniquely features the Virgin of Guadalupe.[13][14] This painting also shares more common features with others of its kind, including fruits native to Mexico and idealized scenes of daily life in the top and bottom panels.
His paintings are, as a whole, more idealistic, suggesting he belonged to a school of art which emphasized the exotic and paradisiacal elements of New Spain.[citation needed] This approach to casta painting dominated the genre until the Bourbon Reforms of the 1760s.[15]