This is part of a collection of stories spotlighting deeply rooted – yet sometimes less exposed – craft hubs around the world and how to experience them. Read more here.
Picture the proportions of a shadow box: It could be the size of your hand, your head, or, in some cases, larger than your entire body. The exterior of this wooden box, often painted with vibrant floral flourishes, is deceptively simple. Pull open the two front doors and you’ll find an entire world within.
It might be a snapshot of daily life in the Andes – maybe a mercado, in which tiny figurines clamber over fruit and meat, or a celebration in which thousands of revellers dance in costume, their faces moulded in exuberant joy, bitsy cans of Pilsen beer littering the ground. Some offer religious interpretations of the afterlife; others preserve moments in the country’s history. Traditionally, the figures that make up the interior of a retablo are made piece-by-piece, from a compound of ground stone, like alabaster or lime, mixed with binding agents like potato starch and cactus gum; and then even the finest details are painstakingly painted on by hand, traditionally with aniline dyes, for a process that can take many months or years to realise. Hour by hour, day by day, retableros – that is, retablos makers – breathe life into the scenes they want to share.
Andean cultures have long found ways of telling stories through craft – by weaving tales into thick textiles, painting sagas onto ceramics, or chiselling 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 colonisation, political turmoil, internal displacement, and diaspora, in a craft moulded 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.
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).
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.
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