Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed nowBy subscribing, you are agreeing to the privacy policy. Unsubscribe anytime.
Barnebys HQ
Brahegatan 10
BOX 5038
114 37 Stockholm
All auctions / Asian Art / 19th C. Mexican Tin Retablo of Santo Nino de Atocha - Spanish Colonial Folk Art
Spanish Colonial, Mexico. A seated Holy Child gazes out from a sheet of hand-painted tin, enthroned between parted blue drapery and twin urns of blooming roses. The Santo Nino de Atocha wears his full pilgrim's regalia: a broad plumed hat, a wide lace collar, a caramel-brown cape fastened with a red rosette and stitched with the scallop shell of Santiago, and a long white gown with a gold hem over buckled sandals. He holds a flower-filled basket in the right hand and a gourd-hung pilgrim's staff in the left. Painted in oils on a rectangular tin sheet with a pale blue ground and a rosy tiled floor, the panel is set in a worn painted wood frame. Such retablos hung on domestic altars across northern Mexico and the Southwest, objects of daily petition rather than church furnishing. The devotion originates in Atocha, a district of Madrid, where a statue of the Virgin held a Christ Child said to leave his mother's arms at night to carry bread and water to Christians imprisoned by the Moors. Transplanted to Plateros, Zacatecas, in the 18th century, the Nino acquired a distinctly Mexican character as the patron of miners, travelers, prisoners, and the unjustly accused, and his shrine remains one of the busiest pilgrimage sites in the country. His attributes are read as a checklist by the faithful: the basket that never empties, the gourd of inexhaustible water, the staff of the wayfarer, and the cockle shell that marks him as a pilgrim on the road to Santiago.\n\nRetablo santos were painted on rolled sheet tin, cheap and widely available in Mexico after the 1820s, by workshops that reproduced favored images by the hundreds. The anonymous hands behind them worked from prints and from one another, which is why their compositions repeat while their brushwork does not. Item # 204996
Estimate:$350
To the auctionView all items fromArtemis Fine ArtsorAsian Art
Estimate:
$350
Bring your auction to collectors worldwide!
Get listed now
