Among the most dazzling paintings invented in New Spain were those inlaid with mother-of-pearl, known as enconchados. Conceived in the traditional manner of Western painting, the works include shell fragments that reference a range of Asian decorative arts, which flowed in through various trade networks. Pearls had also been associated with the legendary riches of the Americas since the conquest. Their materiality connoted imperial power, ostentation, and wealth. The genre reached its apogee from roughly 1680 to 1700, and Nicolás Correa was among its most salient practitioners. Aside from individual devotional pictures, many enconchados were created as multipanel series portraying the lives of the Virgin, Christ, and various saints—the iridescent nacre helping to suffuse the works with a sense of the divine. With their mixed technique, the opalescent enconchados stood at the juncture of imperial vision, global trade, religious fervor, and colonial invention.
Nicolás Correa, the nephew of the famed mulatto painter Juan Correa (c. 1645–1716), produced a number of fine enconchados. The Imposition of the Chasuble on Saint Ildephonsus depicts a well-known episode of the life of the seventh-century bishop of Toledo, when the Virgin appeared to him and presented him with a priestly vestment from her son’s treasury to reward him for his devotion.
From exhibition Archive of the World, 2022 (for more information see the catalogue entry by Ilona Katzew in the accompanying publication, cat. no. 66, pp. 264–74)
