At the many official and unofficial religious sites in Mexico believers have left engaging painted, drawn and written descriptions of what they consider to be miracles, or at least divine assistance. These informative, culturally revealing, often rustic versions of occurrence and belief have a rich religious and esthetic history in Mexico.
At the beginning of the 19th century the art of painting religious icons on sheets of tin (popularly called retablos) flourished throughout the central provinces of Mexico. One of the centers of this art included the villages and towns around Guadalajara.
One worship, new gods
Modern interest in culturally distinct art today has elevated the retablo to one of the most important forms of authentic Mexican folk art.
Worship of a household deity is as old as civilization. With the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Roman Catholicism utilized the long-accepted practice of image-worship here by replacing indigenous deities with a new hierarchy of religious personalities, many of them surprisingly similar to the old “pagan” gods of Mexico.
This similarity, plus the primordial impulse to possess the proper supernatural image insuring health and abundance, led to the swift transfer of commitment from the old gods to the Catholic saints, and at once created a demand for paintings, statues and prints depicting the important personages of the new religion. This demand at first was gradually fulfilled by small, relatively inexpensive paintings on wood, bark, cotton cloth and canvas, few of which have survived. In the 1800s with the production and ready availability of tin-plated iron sheets, this burgeoning art form, especially in its later manifestation of ex-votos, took an innovative new direction that would guarantee its products endurance for centuries, providing modern society with a detailed and provocative view of the modes of village religious beliefs in 19th-century Mexico.
Fervent beliefs
Retablos and ex-votos, unsigned and of unknown origins and dates, were painted for and primarily by the common people of Mexico. The paintings mirror the fervent belief of these people, emanating a unique and unsophisticated charm. Retablos were the first widely disseminated, popular folk art that could truly call itself “Mexican” — a grass-roots art form that was an authentic amalgamation of Indian and Spanish.
The word retablo comes from the Latin retro-tabu-lum and was used in Colonial Mexico to indicated the great gilded screens in the apses behind the altars of the Catholic churches. But by the early 1800s the word was applied to small paintings of religious figures. The paintings were baroque in style, executed in oil usually by provincial artists with little training. In such population centers as Mexico City and Puebla, retablos were not popular, for in these large cities, engravings, sculptures and lithographs were abundant. The major centers of retablo production were around Guadalajara, Zacatecas and Guanajuato. While the work of many of these untrained provincial artists often seems crude, the freshness of their vision, the spontaneity of their execution, and their resourcefulness in achieving compositional effects are almost always surprising and admirable. These artists were more concerned with the identity of religious figures in their paintings and the work’s decorative effects than they were with illusionistic attempts at three dimensions and the modeling of life-like figures. The subjects were often copied from approved models of what Catholic tradition and the Spanish Inquisition had determined “holy persons” should be. These models came from religious woodcuts, etchings and engravings — usually imported from Europe — paintings hung in the churches of the larger cities, and religious statues commissioned by the Church.
Changes
While native Mexican artists often went to the local church for models, their imagination, talent and sense of expediency changed such images, often making them simpler, more abstract, more Indian, more decorative, frequently even more allegorical.
Then, with the rise of the mechanization of printing toward the end of the 19th century and later of photography, tin retablos slowly ceased being made, though production at a much reduced scale continued into the 20th century. The abundance of inexpensive lithographs and steel engravings created a desirefor more realism, colors and, possibly, just for something new and manufactured, thus dooming the retablo form.
These less expensive, quickly produced reproductions filled the age-old need of a household god more effectively than the retablos and a charming and singular folk art gradually began to disappear. Today, they may be found on the walls of well-to-do collectors and big-city shops selling antiquities, but not on the walls of common people who had once been solely responsible for their existence.
Ex Votos
A more culturally revealing – and longer lasting – offshoot of the retablo in Mexico were ex-votos, pictorial stories describing divine aid and serving as public offerings to the “holy persons” invoked. (The term ex-voto is Latin, meaning in pursuance or a vow.) An ex-voto is placed in a church or near a particular holy image or location to commemorate, or fulfill a vow concerning the recovery of the donor from some grave danger. Normally it consists of a painting illustrating an accompanying written account of the circumstance of rescue or cure. Ex-votos were not copies of European-inspired religious images. Because they told unique stories, they had to spring from the often uneducated, but strikingly sincere, imaginations of unsophisticated artists. Many are so dense with regional dialect and phonetic spellings as to be nearly untranslatable.
In ex-votos, the solutions to perspective, color and modeling were handled in a fresh, imaginative manner, divorced for the most part form copying. The many problems involved with not merely providing a representation of a single iconographic personality, but of depicting a narrative called forth an inventive and striking originality.
Ex-votos were usually produced by a specific individual in a town or pueblo, not by the person relating the experience. Only after the local artist or artisan had satisfactorily interpreted his clients experience in paint and words, could the ex-voto be taken to the church or other holy site to be presented in commemoration of a divine occurrence. Because of their rustic origins and their deep sincerity, such paintings are, in the words of Mexican artist Roberto Montenegro, of singular value because each is “a document indispensable to the understanding of Mexican painting ...” Anita Brenner, whose broad experience and instructive perceptiveness are masterfully documented in the book, “Idols, behind Altars,” called ex-votos “... a moving record of a nation, a stethoscopic measure of its heart.”
In Tijuana (Baja California) a Jalisco-born soldier, who was executed in 1938 for the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl, is today revered as an unofficial miracle worker. His grave site is decorated by, among other testimonials, numerous ex-votos. Says the writing on one plaque, “You saved me from the prison that was awaiting me. May God allow you to enter His sainted kingdom for making this miracle for me.”