For the organizers of a showcase of New Spanish painting and sculpture at the New Mexico Museum of Art (NMMA), exhibition planning began with a problem: “We wanted to be able to include Mexican high baroque as well as santero culture in New Mexico,” says Mark White, the museum’s executive director. But how could the museum script a show in which those categories, along with maps, books, nun’s shields—in short, material culture from three centuries of artistic production—tell a coherent story? The solution they struck on was simple: look to the holy.
The more than sixty objects on view in Saints and Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain, guest-curated by Cristina Gonzalez, associate professor of art, graphic design, and art history at Oklahoma State University, demonstrate how the lives and likenesses of saints became the principal means by which the Old World melded with the New. One of the exhibition’s centerpieces, Cristobal Villalpando’s Mystical City of God, describes in dramatic detail the revelations received from the Virgin Mary by Spanish mystic Sor Maria Agreda, who served as an inspiration for missionaries to Latin America, where she was believed to bilocate. The rustic charm of nineteenth-century retablos, such as a strikingly graphic white, black, blue, and red example painted by José Aragon and dedicated to Saint Isidore, patron saint of farmers, provides a humble counterpoint to the flourishes of the baroque. Simple devotionals like this would have been great comfort to Spanish settlers scratching out an existence in what is now the American Southwest, a reminder of the rewards of suffering.
Doing right by the NMMA’s saintly subject matter required more artworks than could be supplied through the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, which also oversees Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art and the New Mexico History Museum. “Very early on it became apparent that we’d need a number of loans from Mexico,” says White, “so we started working with a consulting firm that helped us establish relationships with Mexican institutions.” The main foreign lender is the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (the “Mexican Smithsonian,” for all intents and purposes), which has drawn on collections stored in museums across the country to provide the finest examples of viceregal art in the exhibition.
If the most famous instance of iconographical syncretism is Our Lady of Guadalupe herself—whose fabled appearance to Juan Diego at a site sacred to worshippers of the Aztec goddess Tonantzin gave missionaries the pretext for introducing the Virgin Mary into Mesoamerica—the most striking here shows Saint Hippolytus of Rome, whose feast day on August 13, 1521, coincided with the capture of the final Aztec emperor. On this seventeenth-century canvas, with its clumsily rendered figures (note especially the putto at left, who appears to have had one of his feet amputated), the saint sits astride a golden eagle that alights on a prickly pear cactus, suggesting the vision that inspired the Mexica people to settle in the Valley of Mexico. Below, Indians and conquistadors unite in appreciation, and in the practice of a shared faith.
Saints and Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain • New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe • to January 12, 2025 • nmartmuseum.org
