Devoted to saints on tin: with enduring passion, Gloria Fraser Giffords has opened a window on popular Mexican retablos, revealing their important contribution to the world of fine art.

• Author: Bach, Caleb
• Position: Cover Story

To many colleagues, she is the retablo lady. And it's a label Gloria Fraser Giffords (Jinx to her family and friends) wears with pride, yet with some misgiving: The fact is, not much eludes the interest or grasp of this tireless art historian. In spending time with Giffords, one quickly comes to appreciate her high-energy style, her machine-gun, staccato way of expressing herself, even the little drum roll she creates with her feet when particularly enthused by something--all the while assuming that others see with the same knowing eyes that she has developed over the years from examining thousands of retablos.

A retablo is a small, devotional painting of a holy personage: Christ, the Virgin Mary, saints, archangels. In the parlance of church architecture, retablo also refers to the painted or carved screen behind the altar (in Latin, retrotablum), but in Mexico and Latin America the term is used to describe small images often incorporated into folk altars within the home or just hung on the wall for domestic devotion. Most were executed formulaically by unschooled artists who conformed to a rigid code inherited from Spain. Still, many painters managed to develop personal styles. With few exceptions, the artists in Mexico applied their colors in oil to thin sheets of tin plate--a bit unusual in that their counterparts elsewhere painted on canvas or wood. The vast majority of surviving retablos mexicanos date from the nineteenth century, after which the tradition gradually died out, probably because color lithographs became widely available at a fraction of the cost. As recently as the 1960s, retablos as a form of folk art largely were ignored and forgotten but for a few treasure seekers who made modest profits selling them to local antiquaries or peddling them in northern Mexico border towns.

Giffords and her husband, Spencer, a tire dealer in Tucson, remember in the 1960s purchasing finely rendered retablos for about four dollars each. "We would go to curio shops in Nogales or Juarez, sort through a hundred or more retablos, and maybe buy one or two. We were so particular then. Not one scratch!" she recalls. "We didn't know what we were doing. We were just learning as we went along. At the time I was studying art history at the University of Arizona. One day I suggest to my professor that I research retablos as my master's thesis topic. He was cool to the idea because he relegated retablos to a form of folk art, to the lowly level of croft.... But when I proposed analyzing the tin paintings from an iconographic standpoint, he gave me the green light, so off I went. Not being Catholic, from scratch I had to learn all about the saints, how to identify them by their attributes, and understand how their cults evolved."

With genuine fascination and excitement Giffords explains numerous minute, subtle distinctions between two likenesses seemingly identical to the unschooled observer, thus one has to slow her down to get some basic information--why did artists in Mexico paint on tin? Why do most retablos tend to be the same size?

"Well, earlier retablos were done on canvas or copper, usually refined images executed by academically trained artists," Giffords begins. "But in the early nineteenth century, their provincial brethren began painting on thin iron leaves coated with tin to which the paint adhered well. I've check shipping records. Almost all of it came from England where, at Pontypool, they had been producing machine-rolled tin plate since 1730. They shipped it in barrels, which would suggest the material came in rolls. In Mexico they cut the stock into standard sizes, the largest laminas being fourteen by twenty inches or half that, fourteen by ten inches, but the vast majority are half of that again: seven by ten inches. Spots of solder on the back suggest that usually the artists mounted the finished panels in frames, also of tin, cut or perforated...