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Condé Nast Traveler

In Peru's Andes, the Centuries-Old Art of the Retablo Captures a Changing Country

Andean cultures have long found ways of telling stories through craft—by weaving tales into thick textiles, painting sagas onto ceramics, or chiseling mythology into gourds. But retablos have reached a level of ubiquity in Peru, and you'll spot them in homes throughout the country; they also burst out of tourist shops everywhere from Lima to Cusco, and sit in museum collections well beyond the country's borders. 'Each [retablo] reflects a piece of Peruvian identity—whether it's a festival, a protest, or a quiet moment in a mountain village, they hold our stories,' says Nicario Jimenez Quispe, a third-generation retablo maker from Alcamenca, a village in the region of Ayacucho from which retablos originated. 'They show who we are, where we come from, and what we believe.' As visually impressive (or simply delightful) as they may be, retablos also chart the evolution of a land through colonization, political turmoil, internal displacement, and diaspora, in a craft molded by those at the forefront of each. This is no art form preserved in amber, and yet the ways in which retablos have continually evolved over the past 500 years have ensured their existence. 'The retablo is the most beautiful example of cultural survival,' says John Alfredo Davies Benavides. The hand-shaped figures in a retablo are traditionally made from a paste of potato starch and minerals like gypsum or lime. Brian Tietz Aniline dyes have been historically used to decorate retablos, though materials today vary. Brian Tietz Benavides is a traditional arts collector based in Lima, who was raised in the presence of retablo maestro Joaquin Lopez Antay (1897-1981), the 1975 Peruvian National Culture Prize winner who is credited with founding today's form of the retablo, and Antay's pupil, Jesus Urbano Rojas (1924-2014). Benavides can trace the roots of retablos back to pre-Catholic Huamanga, now known as the region of Ayacucho, where sculptores would travel between the high and low lands of the area, making items on commission for a rural clientele—common requests included stone figurines of pagan deities, and wooden boxes to hold them, to be used in rituals for the fertility and protection of livestock, including offerings to Pachamama (mother earth). The retablo is the most beautiful example of cultural survival. John Alfredo Davies Benavides In the post-contact 1620s, when the Spanish attempted to eradicate these pagan customs and talismans in the push for Catholicism, craftspeople simply created 'a language' in which they substituted various saints in for their deities. For example, Saint Mark and Saint Luke became a stand-in for the duality of Quechua god Illapa (known for both protecting and punishing, depending on how you treated the land) effectively preserving the belief system under a façade that aligned with the Spaniards' religious art. 'It's an artistic form of mestizaje, in which rural Andean beliefs and Catholicism mix,' says Diego Lopez, who wrote a 2024 paper on the work of Antay for the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú.