Exploring Colonial Mexico©
Exploring Colonial Mexico©
January 2010
El Altar de Los Reyes Mexico City's Metropolitan Cathedral is perhaps the nation's foremost repository of late colonial art treasures in situ. Among the finest and most imposing of these art works is the stupendous main altarpiece, or retablo mayor.
In 1737, the unveiling of this grand, ground breaking retablo dedicated to the Three Kings, or Los Santos Reyes, caused a sensation. Designed by the flamboyant Sevillian architect and designer Gerónimo de Balbás and constructed over almost 20 years with the help of an experienced team of Mexican artists, sculptors and joiners, this enormous, soaring structure transforms the apse of the cathedral into a gilded grotto.
Based on his earlier design for the Cathedral in Seville, Spain, and infused with the florid, sensuous Andalusian manner of the time as well as Balbás' penchant for the dramatic - a result of his training as a theatrical designer - the Balbás altarpiece was the first, one of the most elaborate, and certainly the most influential work in the new estípite style, so-called because of the complex, eclectic forms of its supporting columns and pilasters.
This seminal retablo ushered an innovative and exuberant style into the New World, consequently commonly called the Churrigueresque after José de Churriguera, another prominent Spanish baroque designer. Its importance for the subsequent development of architecture and altarpiece design in Mexico cannot be overestimated.
The Adoration of the Magi
The principal panel of the Retablo de Los Reyes is, as might be expected, a sumptuous portrayal in Mexican baroque style of the Nativity scene featuring the Three Kings, or Adoration of the Magi.
This focal painting is the work of Juan Rodríguez Juárez, one of the leading lights of an eminent dynasty of Mexican colonial artists*.
A late work of the painter, it interprets the familiar biblical scene in a dynamic composition of light and drama, that reflects the warm colors and popular style of the influential Sevillian painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo.
Juan's older brother Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez painted several panels in a related, less dramatic style for the altarpiece of the Santos Reyes priory in Metztitlan, Hidalgo.
Felipe de Ureña in the cathedral
As aficionados of this web site know, we have a special interest in the work of Felipe de Ureña,* a leading 18th century designer and architect, who with his family members was a prime mover in the spread and development of the estípite baroque style, as it is more properly described, across Mexico, in the 1700s.
Although undocumented, it is believed that Felipe de Ureña and his established family workshop were involved in the fabrication and possibly even design aspects of the Altar de Los Reyes, as well as playing a larger role in the creation and completion of the 1737 Altar del Perdón (right), also attributed to Balbás.
This innovative and important companion piece to Los Reyes, recently restored following a fire, is located in front of the central choir of the cathedral facing the west entry, traditionally known as the Portal of Pardon.
Ureña's continuing association with Balbás seems to have been an important one, for he participated in and completed several of Balbás' commissions, including the main and side retablos for the Third Order chapel of San Francisco in the city of Mexico. (1739-40)
* An Artistic Dynasty
Juan Rodríguez Juárez (1675 - 1732) and his older brother Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez (1667 - 1734) were among the last prominent members of one of the longest lasting and successful artistic dynasties in colonial Mexico: a vast, extended family that intermarried and worked cooperatively over several generations, starting in the late 1500s with the Basque immigrant painter Balthazar de Echave Orio (1548 - 1612?)
