Desert Saints

The painted pine tablets and sacred statuettes might easily have been mistaken for relics of ancient Crete. They had the same soft, staring eyes, tight smiles and ornate costumes. Actually they were made between 1680 and 1850, in a cutoff, primitive, fiercely Roman Catholic corner of western America. Last week 80 of them, on tour of the Pacific Coast, were on exhibition in Portland, Ore.'s art museum. Next stop: Seattle.

The men who made the sacred objects --and called them santos--never owed allegiance to the U.S. They were the hard handful of caballeros, Navaho slaves, and converted Pueblo Indians (including the fanatical sect of Indian flagellants known as Penitentes) who lived along the headwaters of the Rio Grande in New Mexico. For them, civilization and the cathedral which symbolized it lay in Mexico City, over 1,000 miles to the southeast. When their imported plaster statues crumbled and the oil paintings in their adobe chapels faded away, they created their own rowel-sharp art. It was one of history's best examples of the meeting of simplicity and sophistication.

Archbishop John B. Lamy (one of the Indians' best friends, whom Willa Cather portrayed in Death Comes for the Archbishop) brought death to the art of santos-making. The Archbishop decreed, when he arrived at Santa Fe in 1851, that the barbaric santos be destroyed, and replaced by conventional images and chromes imported from Lamy's native France. More than a thousand santos--today mostly to be found in southwestern museums--survived the Archbishop's ban.

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