Using the painings of Gregorio Vásquez, this article integrates art and cultural history as sources of social history during the colonial period. In the first section, the author demosntrates how colonial Latin American's conception of the world differed from the European perspective. The religious institutions in America utilized pictorial art as a means of communicating and circulating ideas through images and codes. The second section analyzes the background of Vásquez and his work. His style developed through formation in the "colonial school"  but some traces of the "European school" are evident in his work.  Characterized but a certain mysticism, religious themes dominate his paintings. The final section of the article classifies the entire body of Velálzquezs work utilizing a criteria that corresponds to three critical stages of the artist's life.