From Devotional Craft to Folk Art Revival

Alongside the larger carved bultos and painted panel retablos, Mexican tradition developed a distinct smaller scale genre, the tin retablo, small devotional paintings, typically on tin sheet, produced from the eighteenth century onward and depicting either a saint for ordinary devotion or, in the closely related ex voto tradition, a specific answered prayer or miraculous intervention, commissioned by an individual devotee giving thanks and often inscribed with a short written account of the event the image commemorates. Santos and retablo making declined as a widespread devotional folk craft through parts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under pressure from mass produced religious imagery imported from Europe and, later, industrially printed devotional pictures, both considerably cheaper than hand carved or hand painted work, but the tradition has seen sustained scholarly, museum and folk art revival interest since the twentieth century, particularly in New Mexico, where the santero tradition is actively taught, practised and celebrated today as both a living devotional practice within Hispanic Catholic communities and a recognised and valued regional folk art form, sustained by contemporary santeros working in direct continuity with historical technique and iconography.