Knowing how a picture is, involves not only looking at and analyzing what is represented but being able to touch and manipulate an object, access its sides and reverse. To answer why and for what a picture is how it is, is only possible if relations between the theory of pictorial representation and the development of the techniques necessary to comply, or not to comply, with those theoretical principles are established. In this book, based on the analysis of 251 Cuzco paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries, a set of singular material features are visualized, which, although they have important similarities with the European referent, establish a profound conceptual and cultural break with this model . The author, questioning the categories of analysis traditionally applied to these paintings, concludes that the Cuzco colonial painting is not exactly a painting but rather constitutes another mode of production and presentation of the sacred in the colonial Andean space. A material entity that means a liberation, from the retentions that establish the consistency of its transformation.