Museo de Arte Virreinal

The Museo de Arte Virreinal occupies a 17th-century building that was originally the Colegio de San Bernardino, a Jesuit college closed during the expulsion of the order from New Spain in 1767. The conversion to museum was done carefully; the colonial architecture — stone arches, inner courtyard, tiled corridors — is itself part of the collection. The building has the particular quality of colonial institutional architecture: intended to impress, built to last, stripped of ornament by history.

The collection focuses on the religious art and material culture of colonial Guerrero: paintings, carved wooden saints, processional crosses, vestments, and devotional objects from the churches and monasteries of the region. The quality of individual pieces varies, but the cumulative effect of the collection gives a clear sense of what colonial religious life looked like in a prosperous silver town. The tumulus — the extraordinary funeral decoration described above — is the standout object, but the painted retablos (votive panels) and the carved polychrome sculptures throughout the building are also worth attention. It is one of the better small colonial museums in southern Mexico.

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The museum's most unusual object is a tumulus — an elaborate wooden and paper structure erected over a coffin during elaborate colonial funerals, then dismantled and burned or discarded after the ceremony. Almost none survived. Taxco's 18th-century tumulus is one of a handful of examples anywhere in Mexico, preserved because it was stored rather than destroyed. It is large enough to fill a room.