as way to display the family's wealth. Josep Antonio de Ayala was a prominent artist, who is known for painting "The family of the Valley at the foot of Our Lady of Loreto" (c. 1769). This devotional painting was commissioned for the children of the del Valle family in memory of his parents and is characteristic of the painting of this century. The Virgin of Loreto is central to the composition, with the stiff figures of the family members are finely dressed. The men are in fashionable clothing of the era, with the matriarch of the family wearing an embroidered and lace dress, along with pearls. The daughters are shown in the habit of Conceptionist nuns, with escudos de monjas, religious paintings worn on their chests. The painting is inscribed with in information about its commission and the parents, and the fact that it hung in chapel of the family's hacienda. The painting is a display of piety and wealth. There are such group paintings with different central religious figures. Two notable portrait painters are brothers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century are Juan Rodríguez Juárez and Nicolás. Some other prominent painters of this period are: Cristóbal de Villalpando, Juan Correa, José de Ibarra, Joseph Mora, Francisco Martinez, Miguel Cabrera, Andrés López, and Nicolás Enríquez. In the 18th century, artists increasingly included the Latin phrase pinxit Mexici (painted in Mexico) on works bound for the European market as a sign of pride in their artistic tradition. Gallery History paintings and other secular art Starting in the seventeenth century, painters began to produce canvases and biombos with historical themes, including the conquest of Mexico and imagined scenes of events involving Mexico's Nahua population. Also important was a history painting of the destruction of the Franciscan mission of San Sabá by Comanches, by José de Páez. Paintings of Mexico City sites appeared beginning in the seventeenth century, most famously a painting by Cristóbal de Villalpando of the Plaza Mayor in Mexico City, ca. 1696, showing the damage to the viceregal palace from the 1692 corn riot. It also shows the Parián market, where luxury goods were sold. The Parián market was also the subject of at least one other painting. Gallery Casta painting Another type of secular colonial genre is called casta paintings referring to the depiction of racial hierarchy racially in eighteenth-century New Spain. Some were likely commissioned by