The Andean retablo, with its wooden doors and miniature scenes, has for centuries been one of the most moving forms of Peruvian popular art. Born as a portable altar for religious devotion, it has long transcended that origin to become an open structure — a container of collective memory, popular belief, and stories that resist being forgotten.

This retablo, depicting the Huanta Massacre of 1969, is proof of that transformation: it no longer tells of saintly miracles, but of open wounds from Peru’s recent history. In its small, hand-painted figures — frozen mid-gesture — lives a popular chronicle that refuses to disappear.

From missionary altar to mestizo expression

The retablo, as we know it today, has its roots in the colonial period. During the Catholic evangelization campaigns in the Andes, Spanish priests carried small portable altars with them to perform mass and teach doctrine in rural communities. These “boxes of saints,” as they were called, displayed images of Christ, the Virgin, or patron saints, and were designed like miniature theaters that opened to reveal a devotional scene.

However, like many colonial forms imposed on the Andes, what arrived as a tool of domination was soon reappropriated. The Indigenous and mestizo hands that began to craft retablos transformed their iconography, their techniques, and their functions. Saints remained, yes, but now alongside them appeared protective animals, rural trades, farming scenes, local characters, and syncretic elements blending Christian liturgy with ancestral Andean beliefs.

From then on, the retablo also became a symbolic refuge: a microcosm preserving a world under threat of erasure.

Retablo as oral and political archive

Over time, the retablo was secularized. In the 19th century, religious themes and costumbrista scenes (fairs, dances, carnivals) still dominated. But in the 20th century, a new dimension emerged: the retablo as narrative and testimony.

Artists like Joaquín López Antay, Heraclio Gómez, Nicario Jiménez, and Claudio Jiménez Quispe began to depict contemporary historical scenes, social conflicts, forced migration, and memories of Peru’s internal armed conflict. These works — built with humble materials like wood, maguey, plaster, or dough — became critical and poetic devices through which popular art took up the voice to tell its version of history.

The retablo you see here tells of the 1969 Huanta Massacre. That tragedy, long silenced, occurred when the military government violently repressed a protest by students and campesinos in Ayacucho. What is represented here is not only a historical episode, but a collective wound. Every molded figure, every frozen gesture, contributes to a scene that is simultaneously mourning, denunciation, and memory.

A box never truly empty

In its basic form, the retablo is a two-tiered box: the upper level devoted to heaven or the divine, the lower to earth and the human realm. But this dual structure is often reconfigured depending on the story being told. The retablo is also a narrative tool: it can hold celebrations or funerals, landscapes or migrations, tales of love or horror. It may speak of saints, but also of miners, mothers, the disappeared, Andean deities, journeys, and resistance.

For that reason, beyond its aesthetic value, the retablo is a vehicle. Not just an object, but a way of storytelling. In a sense, it is a blank page — a frozen stage — where the questions and stories of a community, a moment, or a people can be inscribed.

Today, retablos are not only found behind museum glass. Many popular artists continue to use them to document, protest, remember. In a world ever more fragmented and fast-paced, these small wooden boxes remind us that memory is also built with hands, with time, with detail. And that popular art is not merely decorative craft — it is a living form of thought, of resistance, and of hope