The Virgin of Guadalupe concentrates on her image qualities of a pop star: that pilgrims to the outskirts of Mexico City, to Tepeyac, to venerate it; And, at the same time, it has the approval of the Church. In addition, its picture is reproduced almost mechanically since the seventeenth century not only in pieces considered strictly artistic – in Spain, for example, there are more than a thousand – but also on less noble materials such as t -shirts, keychains, notebooks … another conquest, this, that of turbocapitalism.
The Prado Museum is picking up all these stories that have been configured around this Virgin in So far, so close. Guadalupe from Mexico in Spainan exhibition in which Jaime Cuadriello, one of the Mexican commissioners of the sample, places the Virgin as a key in the configuration of “an Atlantic imaginary”, making all the borders jump through the air, including those that he points out for years.
“The artistic language composes an alternative reality. Art allows to colonize the collective imaginary, as this Marian cult did,” added the doctor from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the presentation of the exhibition. Paula Sampo Orts, a doctor at the National Institute of Anthropology of the Latin American and curator, has abounded: “And here we are in an artistic and historical one.”
Four years have passed since the Prado dedicated his first exposure to art produced in the American viceroyalty. This pending subject began to amend with (2021) and continues now with Guadalupe. “There is nothing better for decolonization than to show history,” said Miguel Falomir, director of Prado, “in this case, give visibility to the art made to the other side of the Atlantic.” As the manager recalled, since 2018, when he arrived at the direction, he has tried, in his words, “to end prejudices. Art is the result of a series of decisions that have excluded some artistic manifestations from the established canon, such as geography,, we have the will to adjust to history.”
In that task of depolitizing the Virgin of Guadalupe, the exhibition is articulated by themes to explain how the cult of a Marian figure that was revealed to an indigenous peasant, Juan Diego, has reached so many countries, mostly old colonies under the command of what was then the Spanish empire. “One of the successes was the ability to reproduce it. It was said that one of its miracles was that it could not be copied. Artists could send many images, in different sizes and formats. That reproducibility enabled cult and expansion,” explains Sigo Orts.
From Guadalupe, says Sampo Orts, it was also said that it was “Creole and an Aztec princess”, “the Empress of the Americas”, connected with other Marian icons such as the Immaculate or the Tota Pulchra. Being a printed revelation, he achieved a category of “painting not made by human hand” and thus related to the concept of God painterthat is, “the living image of what God the Father imagined,” translates a quadriello more narrative around the Virgin.
“The stamping of his figure from flowers on the layer of the peasant Juan Diego caused the theologians to compare the phenomenon with a living relic and object of veneration,” the commissioners explained. In the sample is one of the images of the Virgin next to the painting La Santa Fazby Francisco de Zurbarán, to equip the veil of the Veronica with a piece of gross cloth on which the first Guadalupe was fixed whose conservation has also been considered miraculous.
All copies that were made of it meet in the section of the exposure called Vera effigies, Where the played pieces are shown with specialized artistic techniques, among others, a Guadalupe painting made with a peak, but there are also other exotic materials such as ivory and brass arrived through Manila’s galleon. “All this shows that it was the first globalized Marian image,” emphasize the commissioners who have included in the exhibition pieces of novohispanos and peninsular artists such as José Juárez, Juan Correa, Manuel de Arellano, Miguel Cabrera, Velázquez, Zurbarán or Francisco Antonio Vallejo. In this way, compete in prominence with some old teachers.
The Prado has gathered almost 70 works, most from Spanish heritage (there are only eight from Mexico), because a large part of the Guadalupano legacy is in this territory as recalled the map of the Iberian Peninsula that receives the visitor. There is guadalupes Since 1654 in the Atlantic area, in the center and in the Cantabrian cornice and has been present in 18 cathedrals, 13 basilicas, seven collegiate collegiate and four Marian sanctuaries with a cult of a virgin of which one of its first chapters (Nican Mopohua) in the Nahuatl language, that of one of the original peoples of Mexico was written. They were sent before 1821, year of Mexican independence, by Indians, viceroys, bishops, members of religious orders, officials and families related to transoceanic trade and mining. All legal, according to the rules of the viceroyalty.
