This article is aimed at evaluating the discourse in paintings of the Holy Family made in the seventeenth-century Santa Fe. From the analysis of this set of images it is demonstrated the use of painting by the Catholic Church as a tool to configure an articulated society from families ruled by principles such as piety, chastity and mortification. The analysis is directly related to the problem of building a colonial subject whose physicality is modeled after the images of Christ, the Virgin or the saints.
