Saints and Santos: Picturing the Holy in New Spain: Picturing the Holy in New Spain

An exploration of how sacred art evolved in early Mexico, adapting to local cultures and featuring over sixty breathtaking paintings, sculptures, and engravings.

This beautifully illustrated book reveals the importance of saints in New Spain, a viceroyalty that was part of the Spanish Empire from 1521 to 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. Published in collaboration with the New Mexico Museum of Art and drawing on collections from Mexico and the United States, this book examines the role of images in the construction of the holy. The relationship between sanctity and the pictorial is a long, revered tradition that continues in the work of New Mexico’s santero artists today.

Cristina Cruz González is an Associate Professor of Art History at Oklahoma State University.