Carne asada

This room-sized painting, once commanding an even larger altar, knocked me off my feet. CDMX native José Juárez (1617-c. 1662)'s "El martirio de san Lorenzo" (1650) isn't just crowded with figures, but the depths opening up behind the scene of St. Lawrence's grilling are crowded too - with multiple rows of angels against an angry sky, crowds standing around the martyred saint, and, at the painting's center, a gyre of little angels from a light-filled world beyond. 

The Museo Nacional de Arte helped me fill in the four centuries between the destruction of Tenochtitlan and the muralists of the early 20th century, Catholic piety persisting longer but anti-conquistador nationalism starting earlier than this common modernist narrative allows. Witness the Guadalupe-named locomotive at the shrine to the Virgen in Luis Coto (1830-99)'s "La colegiate de Guadelupe" (1859) and Leandro Izaguirre (1867-1941)'s "El suplicio de Cuauhtémoc" (1893).

Unrelated, but also a little crowded, pics of an arcade of religious figures behind the cathedral, a scene from a street selling dome-shaped gowns for quinceañeras and weddings, and a subway interchange.