Have you ever spent time in the Mission Church and wondered about the origin of some of the religious art and decorations in there?

One particular object has inspired many a prayer and a bit of curiosity: the Christ Crucified statue. Also known as the Catalá Crucifix, this statue came to Santa Clara from Mexico in 1803 and its location in the Mission was the site of long hours of devotion from Father Catalá, The Holy Man of Santa Clara. It was also paraded down the Alameda for Catholic celebrations and rituals during the Mission era, and was one of the few artifacts to survive the 1926 Mission fire. It hangs today behind an altar looking timeless and untouched in an alcove to the right of the nave as seen in the header image of this post.

Combined with the other decorations in the Mission Church—the altar furniture in the chancel, other statues that fill out the altar, and paintings—the Catalá Crucifix is one item in a collective of what are called retablos. We know this from the wonderful book Situating Mission Santa Clara de Asís, 1776-1851 by Russell Skowronek, a chronological dealing of Santa Clara and its milestones. Under the year 1802 it says:

… it was a year of highs and lows. On the positive side, after nearly twenty years in the Murgía complex, a payment of 1,400 pesos was made for the first retablo or alter piece from the workshop of Don Marcos Lopez (Mission Santa Clara Account Book, p. 52). It was consecrated on the Feast of St. Clare, August 12 (Bancroft 1885, vol. 19: 136). This decoration existed until 1926 when it was lost in the fire that destroyed the church” (182).

Under the year 1803, it says:

At Santa Clara, the decoration of the church that had begun in earnest the previous year continued with another 1,336 pesos paid for ‘two retablos in 32 boxes and three parts’ (Skowronek and Fanta 2004: 57) (Figure 27). Another entry exists for 160 pesos for three carved figures of St. Clare, St. Michael the archangel, and St. Joseph (55).

Skowronek goes onto say under 1803:

The procurador who checked the account books and made certain the missions were supplied was none other than Father Tomás de la Peña, one of Santa Clara’s founders. He would serve as procurador until 1806 (Bancroft 1885, vol. 19:165). The only part of these decorations to survive the 1926 fire is the so-called ‘Catalá crucifix’ that is still part of the furnishings of the church (Figure 28)” (p. 184)

Judging from the devotion this statue has engendered from the early 19th century Mission days to people of faith in the 21st century, it is a powerful example of Colonial Mexican art being used in California in service to Catholic worship for centuries—first by the Franciscans running a Mission and now by Jesuits running a college. As such, many praying people have closely examined the physical attributes of the statue and have had curiosity about this type of devotional art, the retablos.

The word retablo comes from the Latin retro tabulum, meaning “behind the (altar) table,” and in Spanish, retablo usually refers to painted or sculpted retables or alterpieces that first became popular in Europe in the fourteenth century (Chorpenning i). In Mexico and New Mexico, retablo has come to mean a specific type of devotional art not just used behind the altar in a church but for personal devotion. These are increasingly identified by scholars as images painted in oil on a tin-plated sheet of iron that was produced from the early nineteenth century through the early twentieth century (Chorpenning v). Yet, this is not what we see when we look at the Catala Crucifix. In fact we don’t see painted tin anywhere in the Mission Church the way it is understood to have existed from 19th century Mexico into the present day country and in New Mexico.

Reigning expert on Mexican retablos Gloria Fraser Giffords says, “The need for religious imagery in the earliest years [of Colonial Mexico] first was met by paintings, prints, and sculpture imported from Spain and then gradually replaced by works produced in Mexico” (35). As works began to be created in Mexico, the influence of the indigenous culture seeped into the art: architectural details of churches reveal that the “technique and even… motifs… of the ornament are Indian” despite the form itself being European, like in the case of the Renaissance cloister at Acolman (Toussaint 50). The other way in which indigenous influence in Catholic art was felt was with a specific method using the pith of the corn stalk, called caña de maíz, or maize stem sculptures in English, in the production of puppets and statues (Toussaint 52). This artistic method is similar to papier-mâché, resulting in a hallow structure that is then lacquered, often with linseed oil.

This describes our Catalá Crucifix!

Furthermore, the lightness of statues made in the caña de maíz technique lends itself to the forms being used in ritualistic parades as portable puppets, specifically in the palm procession before Easter Sunday, which is a tradition dating back to the Carolingian era in medieval European history and that gained popularity as evangelizing of the new world became a central focus for the Spanish in New Spain (Lara 212-3). This tradition, called the Palmesel, “appealed to the neophytes in New Spain when they dealt with the dramatized episodes of the life of Jesus Christ” to dissociate the divine qualities of Jesus from the human actor (doubtlessly beleaguered by human shortcomings) that would be portraying him (Lara 213). In fact, these puppets were also used in Lenten processions, but as life-sized crucifixes made from the corn pith. The Christ crucified statues are “vivid in color and extraordinarily lightweight, ideal for the long and exhausting Lenten processions” (Lara 215).

While the practicality of the material is noteworthy, the corn is deeply symbolic and connects to Indigenous notions of the sanctity of corn. According to Lara, “the Nahuatl word for maize dough is in fact ‘our sweet sustenance’ (toneuhcayotl)” and “corn was the staple food and had itself been a god in the Aztec pantheon” (215). Combining holy material—holy sustenance—with Christian imagery is a concrete way in which cultural worlds collided in the so-called new world and aided in the conversation of the local people to Christianity.

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Jaime Lara, in Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico, says:

To make one of these statues, the corn husk was first opened and its ‘heart’ (pith) removed, much like the pre-Christian sacrifices or the preparations of food. Then an armature was constructed of dried maize leaves fastened together with fibers of the agave cactus; for rigidity in the finger and toes turkey feathers were used. In some cases the fabricators of the armature made use of old sheves of paper, and in several sculptures the armature is a Nahuatl-language codex of prayers and catechism texts, used no doubt because of its being sacred writing, and hence ‘sacred stuffing’ (215).

Lara goes onto say:

The framework was roughly covered with a mixture of corn pith paste and a sticky mass obtained from orchid bulbs. After the figure was dry, a fine coating of the paste was spread over it, like stucco, and modeled to bring out the rib system and facial features; then this was painted. The profuse blood was simulated by a compound of cochineal, a red liquid produced by insects that feed on the precious eagle cactus fruit, the sacred nopal. All of the ingredients were not only technically successful but also carried religious associations with pre-Hispanic divinities. Either the friars were unaware of the connotations, which seems unlikely, or they may have thought of it as a good thing… Many of the images now extant were probably manufactured in Michoacán around the mid-sixteenth century (215).

Further complicating the cross-cultural exchange that goes into the Cristos de Maíz, the art form was in turn exported from New Spain back to Europe, and we see these corn pith Crucifixes in Florence, Croatia, and of course in Spain. This fascinating information quenches our curiosity about the attributes of our own Catala Crucifix but it also opens a host of more questions.

We know that by the first few years of the 1800s, an individual named Don Marcos Lopez had a workshop where he was creating these sculptures in Mexico City according to the Mission Santa Clara account book, and he was most likely a Spaniard or descended from Spaniards due to guild ordinances forbidding “admission to the ranks of maestro to blacks, mulattoes, or anyone of ‘color quebrado‘ ” (Giffords 59). This contracticts with what we know of Cristos de Maíz. Not only was our artisan Don Marcos Lopez most likely of European origin or descent, he was most likely trained in European artistic sensibilities at the Academy of San Carlos. “When the Academy of San Carlos was established in Mexico City in 1785, Neo-Classicism formally was ushered in as the dictum of good taste… The academic canons that would be imported from Europe over the next one hundred and twenty years… were taught rigidly at the academy and were insensitive and woefully out of touch with the Mexican spirit” (Giffords, 43). This is at odds with the timeline we know for Cristos de Maíz being made in the 15th and 16th centuries, and is at odds with what we know about them coming from the Michoacán region, not to mention their very essence being influenced by indigenous religious symbols and food culture. Could Don Marcos Lopez have obtained our own Catalá Crucifix from another church where it had been made using indigenous techniques in whose culture prized the life-sustaining nature of corn, potentially in the region of Michoacán where Cristos de maíz were commonly created? Could this crucifix have been actually created two or three hundred years before, in the 16th century, at the height of the trend? It is possible, but we will actually never know for sure, even if a study was completed using high tech scanning tools.

What we do know is that Don Marcos Lopez must have employed many artisans for his shop to be prolific enough to furnish so many decorations to Mission Santa Clara between 1802 and 1803. We also know that eventually he is the person attributed with providing the Catalá Crucifix—whether it was his name as a metonymy for the collective labor of the shop or whether it was him as an artisan possessing talent to make such an object. But knowing the power afforded to him by his race, and the indigenous roots of the Cristos de Maíz, we know there was a crossover of culture in the least, and a mass appropriation of culture for profit at worst.

Works Cited

Chorpenning, O.S.F.S., Joseph F. “Preface.” Mexican Devotional Retablos from the Peters Collection, edited by Joseph F. Chorpenning, O.S.F.S., Saint Joseph’s University Press, 1994, pp. v-ix.

Giffords, Gloria Fraser. The Art of Private Devotion: Retablo Painting of Mexico. InterCultura; Meadows Museum; Southern Methodist University, 1991.

Lara, Jaime. Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico. University of Notre Dame Press, 2008

The Mission Santa Clara Manuscript Collection, Record Group 1, Santa Clara University Library Archives & Special Collections.

Skowronek, Russell K. Situating Mission Santa Clara de Asís, 1776-1851 : documentary and material evidence of life on the alta California frontier : a timeline. Academy of American Franciscan History, 2006.

Toussaint, Manuel. Colonial Art in Mexico. University of Texas Press, 1967.