Exploring Colonial Mexico©

Last September, three years after it was stolen, the U.S. ambassador formally returned a 400-year-old polychrome wooden relief sculpture to Mexico. Thieves had tried to sell it in the United States at a Santa Fe, N.M., art gallery for $255,000. The carved wooden relief, which originally formed the centerpiece of a large altarpiece, measures 92 inches high by 69 inches wide and depicts St. Francis receiving the Stigmata.

The relief is believed to have been carved between 1575 and the early 1600s, and was stolen from the Franciscan church in Tochimilco, Puebla, in 2001, the Mexican attorney general's office said. Mexican law prohibits the export of almost all such artworks from the 1521-1821 colonial period.

U.S. Customs officials remained tight-lipped about the investigation. The work of art had been on display in the Peyton Wright Gallery since July 2002. Gallery owner John Wright Schaefer said the piece had been on consignment at the gallery. Schaefer would not identify the owner. Customs investigators arrived unannounced at the gallery, federal search warrant in hand, to recover the piece after receiving a tip from Interpol that the carving was at the gallery.

Schaefer and gallery employees cooperated with investigators, and nobody associated with the gallery has been charged in connection with the stolen piece, according to David Fry, resident agent in charge of the Albuquerque division of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Schaefer said he went through all the proper channels in 2002 to ensure the piece was not reported lost or stolen before he displayed it at his gallery, including looking at the Art Loss Register, an in-depth list of stolen or lost art from around the world. The owner's name is currently being withheld by federal investigators.

The hill village of Tochimilco lies high on the slopes of the volcano Popocatepetl, southeast of Mexico City in the state of Puebla.

The church, part of the classic 16th century Franciscan monastery here, is notable for its lofty facade - a striking checkerboard of dark volcanic blocks set in white mortar. The Plateresque west doorway opens to an equally spectacular nave, covered with high Gothic rib vaults.

Beside the church is the open chapel, its great archway elevated above the arcaded entry to the convento below and its colonnaded stone cloister within.

A stone fountain, dated 1585 and carved with rabbits (Tochimilco signifies Field of Rabbits), stands in the plaza below the monastery.

Front

Open Chapel

Cloister

Fountain

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