So far, so close. Guadalupe of Mexico in Spain

How close to and how far from Spain was the Virgin of Guadalupe of Mexico between the mid-17th and late 18th centuries? This exhibition shows the wide circulation of a sacred image that also propagated through Italy, Portugal, the viceroyalties of South America, the Caribbean and Asia. 

Guadalupe of Mexico was the first globalised Marian image. The dispatch of her “true likenesses” from New Spain to the metropolis bears witness to the intense relations between families and personalities on both sides of the Atlantic who shared desires, aspirations and sentiments. Through them, dense interpersonal, cultural, political, social and economic webs were woven that have now been lost, and which this exhibition seeks to restore. 

The Virgin of Guadalupe had a devotional legend, but it was above all a revealed icon whose imprint made by roses on the unprecedented support of a cape of coarse cloth led theologians to compare the phenomenon with the Eucharist itself. For copies of the Holy Original to partake of its miraculous nature, they had to be extremely exact, obliging artists to apply all their skill. 

The exhibition, mostly made up of works from the Spanish heritage, examines the aim and function of the Guadalupan images, which are highly diverse despite their reiteration of a single prototype, and points out their similarities and contrasts with other European cults or with devotions served by Spanish painting. 

Guadalupan cartography in Spain (1654-1821-2025) - Room C

Since the arrival on these shores of the first Guadalupan images in 1654, nearly a thousand copies originating in Mexico have been counted in Spain. Most of them were sent before 1821, the year of Mexico’s independence, by landowners, viceroys, bishops, members of religious orders, functionaries and families with concerns in trans-oceanic trade and mining. From then until the present day, the presence of these representations, now reduced, has been linked to migration, exile and globalization.

The areas of greatest devotional tradition are concentrated on the Atlantic and Catabrian coastlines of Spain and the centre of the Iberian Peninsula. Among the destinations of the artworks are eighteen cathedrals, thirteen basilicas, seven collegiate churches and four Marian shrines, where they are worshipped in their own right. Besides parish churches and chapels in towns and villages, convents and museums, a large number of copies are preserved in private museums. This map tracing the estimated locations of the images was drawn up by Dr. Francisco Montes González (University of Seville).

By the mid-17th century, a model of representation had been established that brought together the four encounters between the Virgin of Guadalupe and an indigenous peasant named Juan Diego in the hills of Tepeyac, outside Mexico City. The first took place amidst birdsong in the early hours of 9 December 1531. Juan Diego acted as a visionary and intermediary in the miracle of the imprint of the image, not only by collecting the roses that appeared at Mary’s bidding but also by giving up his cape so that the portrait of the Virgin could be imprinted on it. The cloak was presented to Bishop Juan de Zumárraga as proof of the apparition.

Two painters from New Spain, José Juárez and Juan Correa, and an engraver from Seville, Matías de Arteaga, executed the first series of the four apparitions and established an iconographic canon that held sway for three centuries and was transferred to many other supports, including sculpture, architecture and a long list of decorative arts.

At the start of the 17th century, most of society in Spain and its American territories regarded painters as practitioners of a manual and mechanical craft. In reaction to this, artists vindicated their intellectual status by using mythological, theological and historical arguments in both treatises and paintings. Just as Zeus was considered a painter-creator in classical mythology, Christianity taught that God made the world with mental images which could be equated to paintings. By virtue of his omnipotence, he conceived Mary without sin and, according to some interpretations, painted the image of Guadalupe of Mexico by using the roses collected by Juan Diego as pigments. The divine faculty for painting was extended to Saint Luke, who was said to have painted the Madonna and Child in an image known as Salus Populi Romani (Protector of the Roman People) preserved at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. Its copies were “true likenesses” that retained their sacred character and demonstrated the nobility of art.

The proof of the sacred nature of the Virgin of Guadalupe lay not only in the miraculous reproduction of her image on Juan Diego’s rustic cape but also in the fact that the cloak was preserved intact despite adverse environmental conditions. The veil of Veronica was also considered a trace or relic of the divine because the face of Jesus had been left imprinted on it through contact with his sweat and blood. The image of La Guadalupana was meanwhile explained in different ways, either as an impression produced by the sun or as a painting mysteriously executed by God or his angels. On one of the first altarpieces dedicated to this Virgin in Mexico, a “true likeness” of the Holy Face was also included as a way of equating the miraculous nature of these imprinted images, which moreover served as protectors and as means of persuasion.

The growth of the Guadalupan cult reached the trans-Pacific route, with New Spain acting as a commercial and artistic hub between the Philippines and the Iberian Peninsula, as can be seen in these three sumptuous and original works. 

The technique of enconchado, or shell work, was developed in New Spain in the 17th and 18th centuries on the basis of Japanese namban (art for export) ornamental lacquer work. It involved incrusting flakes of mother-of-pearl in a wooden panel that was then painted with thin layers of pigment, lacquer and varnishes to enhance the gloss of the shells. In this example, the shell flakes cover the whole figure of La Guadalupana except for the flesh areas. The elaborate frame is adorned with grapes, flowers and butterflies. 

In the meantime, the two ivory pieces made in Asia for the market in New Spain or the Iberian Peninsula are different in their treatment of volume, more accentuated and fluid in the case of the piece in Seville, and flatter and more restrained in that of the work in Madrid.

The first two Guadalupan copies displayed for worship in Madrid were brought to the city in 1654 on the initiative of Pedro de Gálvez, inspector general of New Spain, who placed them respectively in the Convent of the Augustinian Recollects and the College of Doña María de Aragón, which belonged to the Calced Augustinians. The print by Pedro de Villafranca depicts one of these pictures, now lost, which served as a model for the work of Senén Vila. 

It was also in Madrid, in 1740, that the city’s most reputed engraver, Juan Bernabé Palomino, made an allegorical print that became enormously popular on both sides of the ocean, since it celebrated the patronage of La Guadalupana over Mexico City, proclaimed in 1737. The engraving was promoted by the colonists who had returned from the Indies and were now grouped in the Royal Congregation of Guadalupe in Madrid, whose Brother Superior was later to be King Ferdinand VI.

The mountainous terrain of Tepeyac was considered a holy place even before the arrival of the Spaniards. After the conquest, it became renowned as the site of the apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe and the location of a well of curative water. As a sacred territory, it attracted pilgrims who went to visit the sites that featured in the narrative and hold processions in honour of the Virgin. The pictures of the shrine clearly identified the main buildings and functioned as a visual memento, since faith was strengthened and activated by a reminder of the visit. They occasionally also included a representation of the varied populace brought together by this object of worship.

The copies of La Guadalupana were exact or scale portraits of the Holy Original, emphasising its supernatural origin and transmitting its sacred immanence. Included in the margins were four cartouches that related and disseminated the story of its apparition and legitimised its consideration as a non manufacta work, meaning it had not been made by human hands. These allegorical works had a celebratory function expressed in the floral garlands, the symbols of the litanies of Loreto, the angelic choirs and the traceries, all elements expressive of praise and honour, as well as in the inscriptions, which include the official motto of La Guadalupana, taken from Psalm 147: “He hath not dealt so with any nation.” At the foot, there was generally a view of the Virgin’s shrine, a place of pilgrimage, cleansing, cure and prayer, or else a fifth apparition, the healing of Juan Diego’s uncle, Juan Bernardino. Each of these elements had its correspondence in the canticles and music performed in the choir and during matins.