'Saints & Santos': Exhibit explores the spiritual and artistic heritage of the Spanish art form

The history of saints and santos rivers throughout the Southwest like a tributary of the Rio Grande.

The saints and their visual representations played a profound role in New Spain, a viceroyalty of the Spanish Empire from 1521-1821, encompassing modern-day Mexico, Central America and the American Southwest.

Open from Saturday, July 20, to Jan. 12, 2025, at the New Mexico Museum of Art, “Saints & Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain” explores this spiritual and artistic heritage.

'Saints & Santos': Exhibit explores the spiritual and artistic heritage of the Spanish art form

“The New Mexico Museum of Art traditionally has not done that many shows of a historical nature,” said Mark White, the museum’s executive director. “I thought it was very important to look back at painting and sculpture during the viceregal period. We still have a santero tradition that is thriving in New Mexico.”

This Spanish tradition was transplanted to the Southwest via the Camino Real from Mexico. Sometimes those artists came north to do commissions here, White said.

“It was very common for objects to travel the Camino Real,” he added. “Many of the iconographic traditions came from that.”

San Ysidro became the patron saint of agriculture.

“He became extremely important as the result of Don Diego de Vargas, whose family had a farm (in Spain) where San Ysidro appeared,” White said. De Vargas was the Spanish governor of the New Mexico territory. He was the title-holder in 1690–1695, and effective governor in 1692–1696 and 1703–1704.

Famed New Mexican santero Rafael Aragón painted a retablo of San Isidro Labrador, kneeling before a cross, circa 1800.

St. Rose of Lima mushroomed in popularity because she was geographically closer to the Southwest than Spain.

“It’s an issue where she is the hometown hero,” White said. “She’s a saint from Peru.”

Her real name was Isabel Flores de Oliva.

She became known for both her life of severe penance and her care of the poverty-stricken of the city.

“Supposedly, a servant claimed to see her face transition into a rose and that becomes her nickname,” White said.

Cristóbal de Villalpando painted her in “The Mystic Marriage of St. Rose of Lima,” ca. 1700.

The image shows St. Rose with John the Evangelist, the Virgin Mary and the Holy Trinity.

“Villalpando is considered one of the masters of Mexican painting,” White said.

The anonymous portrait of Sor María de Agreda, 18th century, shows the Franciscan abbess and mystical writer with pen in hand.

“She was supposed to have bilocated (between Spain and New Spain), which means she was magically teleported,” White said.

Sor María revealed that while in a trance in her convent in Ágreda, Spain, she was also mystically present in New Mexico and other places in the present day American Southwest and Mexico.

The anonymous painter of San Hipólito y las Armas Mexicanas, 1764, shows the patron saint of Mexico City in elaborate Baroque style.

“He’s showing the standard for the Spanish monarchy,” White said. “It shows him as a political/religious figure.”

Francisco Martínez’s, Santa Rosalia de Palermo, 18th century, captures the saint who rose to acclaim during the 1624 plague in Sicily.

“The Jesuits promoted her as confronting contagion and outbreaks,” White said. “She becomes a plague saint. In the plague, she supposedly appeared to a sick woman. The Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck was stuck in Peru during the plague and he paints her. Her legend kind of migrates.”

Rosalia heard the voice of God at a very young age, and followed that call. Two angels led her to a cave, where she would live in “honor of Jesus” for the rest of her life as a hermit.

The exhibition also examines the official canonization processes and celebrates the spiritual and civic significance of holy figures who, despite their importance, were never formally recognized by Rome.