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Explore how sacred art evolved in early Mexico, adapting to local cultures and artistic traditions.
This beautifully illustrated book reveals the importance of saints in New Spain, a viceroyalty that was part of the Spanish Empire from 1521-1821, covering modern-day Mexico, Central America, and the US Southwest. In the late sixteenth century, Rome's attempts to manage sanctity as an official process had a profound impact throughout Spain and the Spanish viceroyalties. Saintly devotions traveled to Mexico, and circulated within the vast territory as images or print, then to be transformed by New Spain's own communities. Drawing on collections from Mexico and the United States, this book examines the role of images in the construction of the holy: these paintings, sculptures, and engravings routinely used to propagate, celebrate, and venerate saintly figures, and used in official beatification and canonization proceedings. The relationship between sanctity and the pictorial is a long, revered tradition that continues in the work of New Mexico's santero artists today.
List of contents
Foreword
Diego Prieto Hernández, General Director, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México
Director's Preface and Acknowledgments
Mark A. White
Curator's Acknowledgments
Cristina Cruz González
Introduction: Picturing the Holy in New Spain
Cristina Cruz González
San Hipólito and the Sacred Origins of Mexico City in an Eighteenth-Century Viceregal Painting
James M. Córdova
Catholic Religious Orders and the Promotion of Saints in New Spain
Gauvin Alexander Bailey
On the Matter of Saints: Relics and Reliquaries
Gabriela Sánchez Reyes
Friar Sebastián de Aparicio, A Saint for Puebla de los Ángeles
Montserrat A. Báez Hernández
Sanctity on the Border: Sor María de Ágreda in New Spain
Anna M. Nogar
El origen del arte entre nosotros: Colonial Religious Painting and the Formation of a (New) Mexican Art Historical Canon
Ray Hernández-Durán
Epilogue: The Cathedral Discovery of 2022
Arturo Balandrano Campos
CATALOGUE
Notes to the Catalogue
Lenders to the Exhibition
Contributors
Works Cited
About the author
Cristina Cruz González is an art historian, curator, and educator. She received her PhD in art history from the University of Chicago and is a specialist in the visual culture of Latin America. She is an Associate Professor of Art History at Oklahoma State University.
