Retablo and Santos

Retablo and santos making is the folk Catholic image craft of the Spanish colonial Americas, producing santos, images of saints made in two related forms: bultos, three dimensional carved and painted wooden figures typically standing or seated, and retablos in their older architectural sense, flat painted panels depicting a saint or holy scene, both intended primarily for devotional use in home altars, small chapels and parish churches across colonial and postcolonial Latin America and the American Southwest rather than as fine art produced for elite patronage or public display alone. The tradition developed distinctively regional character, with New Mexican santero, saint maker, tradition in particular sustaining a recognisable, comparatively austere carving and painting style across the Spanish colonial and Mexican periods and into the present, distinguishable from equivalent traditions further south in Mexico proper, reflecting the santos tradition's consistent pattern of adaptation to local materials, artistic training and community taste even while sharing the same underlying devotional purpose and Iberian Catholic origin across the wider region.

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.