Featured in this excerpted article are selections from the exhibition “Sants de Palo: The Household Saints of Puerto Rico, organized by guest curator, Yvonne Lange, and shown at the Museum of American Folk Art in N.Y. from Jan. 1992-April 1994. The objects in the exhibition were drawn from the collection of Alan Moss Reveron of New York City.
By just viewing the religious artistic expressions of many Puerto Rican santeros, one can see the intertwined past of two countries, by comparing the similarities and the contrasting differences with the santo carvings of the Philippines, which, like Puerto Rico, was Spain-owned, steeped in Catholicism, introduced by their colonizers.
Like Filipino carvers, santeros were untrained, and often worked from their imagination or by using old religious prints as guides for the saint’s iconography. Majority of the output were folksy in style, rather naïve, though a few were close to realistic—with better proportions, and superb painting,
The major difference is that, many of these Puerto Rican santeros were known and well-documented, while early Filipino artists remain anonymous. Most Puerto Rican samples average about 8” in height, while Filipinos examples show a wider range of sizes, from miniatures, tabletops, to processional and church size-images.
There are also expected differences in the representation of subjects, due to local devotions. A Filipino would be able to recognize, for example, a Puerto Rican-carved San Antonio de Padua or San Miguel., but perhapans, not Virgen de Monserrat or La Trinidad; the common Puerto Rican version shows 2 human forms (God, Son) and a dove representing the Holy Spirit. Filipino examples prefer showing a trio of look-alike persons.
Like the Philippines, the art of the Puerto Rican santero represents a rich and a varied legacy of imagery and artistic expression, often looked as a vocation, and not a trade.
SOURCES OF PHOTOS & INFO:
“Santos de Palo: The
Household Santos of Puerto Rico” Exhibit Catalog, © 1991, The Museum of 61 West
62nd St., N.Y., N.Y. 10023.
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