Virgin of Guadalupe
After 1730. Oil on canvas.Not on display
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 image of Our Lady of Guadalupe belongs to a family of late Gothic Madonnas (though already more Renaissance in their proportions) of Northern European origin that show her in a state of pregnancy, her hands joined in prayer, surrounded by a radial solar mandorla and positioned over the waning moon and an angelic plinth or footstool. The iconography also shares the signs of identity of the most popular Marian advocations of the first half of the 16th century, the Tota Pulchra and the Apocalyptic woman adorned with the sun, and it finally merged into the representations of the mystery of the Immaculate Conception.
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.
