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June 10, 2008
Claire Farago and Donna Pierce Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos in-between Worlds University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006. 376 pp.; 91 color ills.; 114 b/w ills. Cloth $75.00 (0271026901)
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CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2008.57

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Some of the most recognizable regional art forms in the United States today are New Mexican santos. These religious devotional objects include retablos (painted wood panels) and bultos (polychromed three-dimensional sculpture), and they originated in the Hispanic colonial period of New Mexico (late sixteenth–early nineteenth century). Their fabrication has continued into the twenty-first century, coinciding with a renewed interest in these objects. Numerous publications and exhibitions appearing since the early twentieth century attest to the popularity of santos, yet an understanding of them has plateaued in recent decades. Scholars have primarily focused on the santeros, or creators of santos, attempting to identify the styles developed by individual santeros and to attribute certain objects to their respective oeuvres. Frequently ignored, however, are the possible indigenous contributions to the creation of santos, as well as the social function, reception, and possible meanings that these images elicited in their historical contexts. In Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos in-between Worlds, editors Claire Farago and Donna Pierce offer a welcome and long-overdue study of New Mexican santos that concentrates on issues typically neglected. Similar to Farago’s previous edited volume, Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press,...