Hall of Ex-votos

      The visitor is greeted by this space lined with rows of paintings offered to the Virgin in gratitude for a favor bestowed. One genre of the artistic offering is the retablo pintado, or painted ex-voto. A representative sampling of these paintings is displayed here. Usually done on tinplate, and occasionally quite naïve in style, these ex-votos use text and image to express humanity’s relationship with divinity, the offerer’s faith, fears, worries, needs, social and political problems, and the daily life of Mexicans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.