Home > Artistic Content

The nineteenth-century retablo tradition, sacred and votive paintings on tin, reflects Mexico’s search for its cultural identity bringing forward the people’s necessity to invoke spiritual forces for peaceful solutions. Almost 500 years later, the endurance of sacred images introduced by the first missionaries on the newly-conquered lands of the Americas were copied by successive generations of untrained artists who learned their trade from artists following the European traditions.

Pilgrims who traveled along roadways such as El Camino Real between Mexico City and Santa Fé, stopped at shrines leaving behind devotional images they brought with them, which caused the Mexican art to move northward. The main devotional art that had arrived into Mexico from other parts of the world can be traced to prints and paintings on wood, cooper and canvas done by European and Mexican artists. Printed on paper, few of these prints survive, in spite of the fact that there were thousands in circulation among the populace. There was a separation between artist and subject matter involved in these prints, because the religious subject could be executed on any press, whether in Europe or, later, in Mexico. A typical print might be designed by an Italian painter, transferred into print by a Flemish engraver, printed on a Dutch press, and distributed by a Spanish merchant. The most desirable prints displayed the saint most realistically, and consumers made them more personal with the addition of tin work frames.

In Mexican retablo art, a strong European influence is recognizable through iconography. In Spain and viceregal Mexico, during the reform period of the Catholic Church, religious iconography reflected the propaganda tactics necessarily imposed upon artists to assist in the Church’s dogma against the Protestant Reform movement. Viceregal Mexico was inundated with art from Spain and Flanders, designed to coerce and convert. These devotional images graced the churches as well as the private homes.

However, viceregal Mexico slowly began to break from European influence and to deviate from traditional images in small ways. Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Spanish devotion, is an example of an image that has been so deeply endorsed by the Mexican people that this original cult image has been completely absorbed by Mexicans. Another, Our Lady of Immaculate Conception, dressed in blue and white with a crown of twelve stars and a crescent moon below, evolved into the Mexican Our Lady of the Apocalypse, recognizable by the wings placed on the Virgin. In other instances, however, the art seems to have survived virtually intact with few deviations. San Isidore Labrador, for instance, is very popular today in agricultural regions. This Spanish saint from Castile is often represented wearing the typical Castilian laborer cloth consisting of a jacketed with knee-high pants.