Images beyond the veil: Funeral portraits and sacred materialities in New Spain’s nunneries
2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 67-68; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/692452
ISSN2327-9621
Autores Tópico(s)Archaeology and Natural History
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeImages beyond the veil: Funeral portraits and sacred materialities in New Spain’s nunneriesJames M. CórdovaJames M. Córdova Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhen Madre María Antonia de Santo Domingo of Mexico City’s prestigious convent of Jesús María died in 1682, a local artist painting her death portrait witnessed a miracle. As she lay motionless on her funeral bier, one side of her face began to transform into a misshapen mass, while the other side remained unchanged. Then, as the misshapen side returned to its normal appearance, the unaffected side began to distort. The nuns of Jesús María had to calm the artist, who, understandably, became upset by this ghastly sight. After veiling her face, the nuns returned later in the day to behold her once more. When they removed the veil they were astonished to find that her visage had been restored to its former beauty, as if she were still living, and they regarded this as a sign of her holiness.1 While the current whereabouts of this portrait are unknown, we can speculate based on existing New Spanish funeral portraits of nuns that it would have shown her in a state of dignified repose. For the nuns of Jesús María, it likely would have served as a mnemonic device, conjuring this extraordinary anecdote long after their beloved sister had been laid to rest.2 In New Spain, nuns maintained a vital relationship with their deceased sisters by collecting and caring for their funeral portraits and select personal belongings, which together constituted an integral component of a convent’s institutional identity and collective memory.Along with hagiographies, funeral sermons, and the rules and constitutions of various religious orders, nuns’ funeral portraits contribute to the body of primary sources that scholars have used to reconstruct the intricate death rituals of convents.3 Still to be recognized, however, are the various meanings that the funeral portrait held for convent communities, particularly in the late eighteenth century, when a set of controversial monastic reforms severely altered the religious landscape of nunneries in New Spain. In a recent examination of nuns’ profession portraits (paintings of recently professed nuns in rich floral trappings), I argued that these images helped nuns and their benefactors creatively negotiate the reforms and consolidate important client-patron relations that the reforms put in jeopardy.4 However, nuns’ funeral portraits warrant further inquiry. Although both portrait types were made contemporaneously and are clearly related in their iconographic content and subject matter, funeral portraits would have held an exceptional place in a convent’s institutional identity because they pictured some of its most renowned members, who were also role models: founders, abbesses, and women regarded as saintly. In addition, unlike profession portraits, which were produced for the sitters’ families and displayed in their homes, funeral portraits were made specifically for, and exhibited in, the convent.These portraits belonged to a body of conventual material culture that also included objects believed to contain the holy essence of departed nuns who were regarded as especially saintly. Together with brandia (objects that had been in close contact with the living or deceased bodies of holy persons) and relics (actual bodies or body parts, such as hair, fingernails, bones, etc.), funeral portraits linked living nuns to their deceased predecessors and made the sacred visible and concrete.5 The rich material qualities emphasized in nuns’ funeral portraits make conspicuous this sacred palpability: habits cut from cloths of various textures, hues, and patterns; densely vegetative and multicolored floral wreaths, staffs, and crowns sometimes teeming with artificial butterflies, birds, and miniature figures of angels and saints; circular pectoral plaques (escudos de monja) painted with exquisite religious scenes and bordered with precious tortoiseshell frames; sculpted crucifixes; and rosaries streaming down the length of the habit, which is sometimes beautifully strewn with flowers. During and after the reforms, these portraits would have also expressed the efficacy of two distinct methods of monastic life: the communal life (vida común) and the private life (vida particular). Significantly, the reforms divided many convents because they required all nuns to adhere to the communal life and prohibited the private life, despite strong opposition from many private-life convents. I argue that in this tense environment, funeral portraits acquired new political connotations because their subject matter—holy death—and their close relation to sacred materials like brandia and relics would have situated them either as uniquely authoritative justifications of the reforms, or as indisputable antitheses to them, depending on the political inclinations of the convents in which they were exhibited. During and after the period of reform, nuns would have regarded portraits of their deceased sisters as evidence of the virtues of the particular monastic lifestyle the deceased had professed. Because funeral portraits functioned as models for the living, they were potentially potent vehicles through which nuns could negotiate the reforms.6 This argument expands our current understanding of nuns’ funeral portraits in New Spain as simple mementos of the deceased and uncomplicated models of the religious life, and posits that they also functioned as politically motivated agents for articulating institutional identities, which became greatly contested during the age of reform.Framing death and life in the cloistersHeartrending as it was, death in the convent was also celebrated because it was believed that another of Christ’s brides had finally encountered her divine bridegroom in heaven and could potentially act as an advocate for those she left behind in life. A pious life and good death were the ultimate goals of every nun in the early modern world, as both led to eternal union with God. But nuns’ lives and deaths were not fully private matters. For example, when a nun was on her deathbed, word spread throughout her convent and to other convents as well, so that the prayers of a city’s entire monastic community could assist her in dying. Her family, friends, students, and benefactors would also participate in this prayerful undertaking, and the public, who awaited news of her death, would be made aware of it by the sounding of the convent’s bell.Every nun’s death was given meaning through a series of rituals in the convent that commenced while she lay on her deathbed.7 Once a physician or the convent nurses gave a terminal prognosis, the abbess ordered the nuns to pray that she might die a good death, that is, one which properly guided her to salvation by helping her overcome the Devil’s final temptations and alleviated her own fear of mortality.8 Then, the convent bells were rung to inform the nuns of their sister’s impending passing and to summon them together for prayer.9 The nuns would meet in the chapel’s lower choir, where they lit candles and processed to the infirmary while chanting hymns prescribed for such occasions. A crucifix was placed in the hands of the moribund, and she was sprinkled with holy water while the priest performed last rites and heard her final confession if she was able to give it. When she died, the nuns began another set of prayers and chants, after which the body was prepared for burial and moved to the chapel’s lower choir. Nuns dressed the deceased in her habit and placed a floral wreath or crown on her head and a palm branch or floral staff on her body, and sometimes scattered flowers over the corpse—signs of her sanctity, chastity, and marriage to Christ. The abbess would then inform other convents about the passing of the nun, activating prayers for the deceased throughout the city. In the deceased’s own convent, the nuns gathered in the refectory to reminisce and converse about her.10 It was at this point, I would argue, that a convent began to consolidate its official memory of the deceased and added this memory to its oral history, which was integral to its institutional identity.If the nun was regarded as especially pious or holy, government officials, religious authorities, and ordinary laypersons came to the convent’s lower choir to view her body and pay their respects.11 The element of pageantry, so central to nuns’ death rituals in the convents of colonial Latin America, allowed religious and laypersons alike to perform their piety and demonstrate their dedication to, and support of, the convent.12 For example, on June 12, 1637, the day after the death of Sor María de Jesús Tomelín of the convent of La Concepción in Puebla, many priests and ministers accompanied the treasurer of the diocese and the vicar general of Puebla’s convents to pay respects to the saintly nun.13 It was usually at this point—when the body was prepared for burial, dressed in floral regalia, and placed in the chapel’s lower choir, which could be viewed by the public through a wood and/or metal grille (reja)—that an artist was called in to paint a portrait of the deceased. Not all deceased nuns had their portraits painted—the majority of funeral portraits picture nuns who were considered models of the religious life: founders, abbesses, and the exceptionally pious. If the deceased was considered saintly, the public often requested her relics, brandia, or portraits, and even established commissions dedicated to promoting her canonization.14 Such was the case with Saint Rose of Lima, Peru, who died in 1617 and was canonized in 1671.15 Similarly, shortly after Sor María de Jesús Tomelín of Puebla died in 1637, a local commission organized itself to lobby for her promotion to sainthood—an endeavor still underway today.In cases like these, the Church required evidence of the subject’s sanctity.16 To spread support for her path to sainthood, priests and other religious officials often published hagiographies of the deceased, which narrated her life and recorded signs of her sanctity, giving special attention to certain miracles attributed to her after she died—another requirement for sainthood.17 In his 1683 hagiography of Sor María de Jesús Tomelín, Fray Diego de Lemus notes that a powerful sign of the nun’s sanctity occurred shortly after she died, when her face, disfigured by death, miraculously transformed itself to its youthful beauty, an indicator that her soul was in heaven.18 Her salvation was confirmed shortly thereafter by Madre Agustina de Teresa, who had a vision in the convent’s choir, wherein a dove flew out of the chapel’s tabernacle, hovered around the choir, and returned to the tabernacle. Madre Agustina interpreted this as the soul of her departed friend, who, she believed, wished to demonstrate to her “that because on earth she offered the full candor of her ways to the Most Sacred Virgin, so [in death] she was owed the crown as a corresponding reward.”19 Lemus narrates other miracles attributed to Sor María de Jesús, who was affectionately known as “the Lily of Puebla,” a reference to her holy fragrance, or olor de santidad, and a sign of her holiness. In one instance, a portion of the nun’s finger, upon which an image of Christ had once appeared, cured Madre Mariana de Jesús, who was suffering from a fatal heart condition.20 In other documented examples, pieces of her habit and dirt from her grave cured the ailments of those who sought her intercession. Finally, so as to authenticate his account of Sor María de Jesús and promote her beatification, the last chapter of Lemus’s work includes the approbation of various ecclesiastic officials, religious orders, schools, and Puebla’s city council.21In some cases a portrait of the individual who was being considered for beatification or canonization was included among the materials submitted to Rome. Nuns’ hagiographies were sometimes illustrated with printed portraits that showed their subjects in a prayerful pose, alone in their quarters, or next to a crucifix or other religious object.22 In the case of Saint Rose of Lima, a lay member of the Dominican Order, it was said that Angelino Medoro (an Italian artist living in Peru at the time) was commissioned to paint her portrait shortly after she died, when a floral wreath was placed on her head to indicate her virginal state.23 This portrait, or a copy of it, was sent to Rome as part of her beatification and canonization case and would have been examined by church officials there. As Alma Montero has noted, the recurring image of Saint Rose of Lima wearing a floral wreath (as in the Medoro portrait) became one of the models for portraits of Dominican crowned nuns in Spanish America.24 Saint Rose’s image, in turn, was a Spanish-American iteration of an established iconographic type that pictured virgin saints and martyrs with floral wreaths or crowns and palm fronds as a way to indicate their virtuousness and love of Christ.25Crowned-nun portraits were also partially based on Spanish funeral portraits of nuns, which depict their subjects wearing floral wreaths, palm fronds, and other floral appurtenances in the same manner as early modern portrayals of the Virgin Mary on her deathbed.26 In New Spain the earliest recorded funerary portraits of nuns date from the early seventeenth century; unfortunately, none of these have survived to the present day, but they probably looked much like their contemporaneous Spanish counterparts. The funeral portrait of Madre Mariana de San José, painted in 1638 by an unnamed artist, is typical of this portrait type in Spain (fig. 1). This oil-on-canvas painting pictures a deceased Augustinian nun of the convent of La Encarnación in Madrid, where it is still displayed. Above her image a golden inscription in capital letters identifies the subject as “Our Venerable Mother Mariana de San José, prioress of this Royal House, founder of the collective. She died on 15 April 1638, departing to enjoy the fruits of her labors at the age of 71 years.”27 Below, Madre Mariana’s funeral bier is decorated with colorful flowers attached to its sidewalls and surrounded by rhythmically arranged lit candles in golden candlesticks. The nun’s body reposes with a scattering of flowers arranged along the length of her habit. Her hands are tightly clasped in a gesture of prayer, and she is crowned with a wreath of flowers. A golden palm frond protrudes out of the bier, alongside her head.Figure 1. Anonymous, funeral portrait of Madre Mariana de San José, 1638. Oil on canvas, 109 × 184 cm. Madrid, Real Monasterio de la Encarnación. Photo: courtesy of the Patrimonio Nacional, Spain.In the Roman Catholic tradition the combination of floral wreath and palm frond signifies spiritual and sexual purity, as well as actual or metaphorical martyrdom, and can be found in early modern European and Spanish American images of virgin saints and martyrs.28 Portraits of nuns bearing palm fronds and floral wreaths from this same period linked their subjects to these saints while identifying them as “brides of Christ,” a title they took when they made their religious vows. As the inscription in Madre Mariana’s funeral portrait indicates, she went off in death to “enjoy the fruit of her labors”—an expression that refers to her spiritual and marital union with Christ.In his 1662 hagiography of Madre Gerónima de la Asunción, Fray Bartolomé de Letona of Puebla notes that this celebrated Spanish nun, who founded the convent of La Purísima Concepción in Manila, spent her entire religious life preparing for a good death.29 He writes that when she died on October 22, 1630, at the age of 75, she was already considered saintly by her fellow nuns and by the public at large.30 Before her interment the nuns of La Concepción placed a crown and palm frond on her body, which Letona identifies as the proper signs of a virgin. In addition, they decorated her bier with many flowers, a detail also seen in the funeral portrait of Madre Mariana de San José (fig. 1).31 Letona notes that as she lay on her funeral bier, many portraits of her were made and distributed in Manila and New Spain, one of which hung in the church of Santa Clara convent in Puebla at the time of his writing.32 Although the current whereabouts of these works are unknown, printed portraits of this famous nun could be found in her hagiographies that circulated in the Spanish empire. Today her most famous portrait is that painted by Diego Velázquez (Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado), who completed it near the time she embarked on her journey to New Spain and the Philippines. Madre Gerónima exemplifies the fame that a nun could achieve in the early modern world by way of her piety.In New Spain, the mystic Sor Isabel de la Encarnación was well known throughout the city of Puebla for her profound visions, which marked her as a saintly woman. Her fame reached new heights after she died with the publication of a hagiography by Pedro Salmerón in 1675. Salmerón notes that when she died, the nuns of her convent placed on her body a flowery crown and a palm frond strewn with many flowers before carrying her into the convent’s lower choir, where an unnamed artist painted her portrait as she appeared in her bridal regalia: this is the first mention I have found in the written record regarding a “crowned-nun” portrait in New Spain.33 The current location of this portrait is unknown, but it likely adhered to the same conventions seen in the funeral portrait of Madre Mariana de San José.34 According to the New Spanish savant, priest, and author Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, funeral portraits served two related purposes: they were commissioned by convents to memorialize their beloved departed, and they also gave the convent’s living members visual models of the religious life.35 When he relates the awe-inspiring tale about the metamorphosing visage of Madre María Antonia de Santo Domingo as a startled painter was working on her funeral portrait, he closes by stating that “God would carry out such a miracle—which many can attest to today—so that in their doings each and every nun of the Royal Convent of Jesús María might be the portrait [retrato] of the virtues that Madre María Antonia de Santo Domingo exercised while she lived, and this is, without a doubt, what God desires to be perpetuated among the nuns, for the eternal memory of his faithful servant and his praise.”36 Accordingly, the deceased’s sanctity would have been denoted through the funereal regalia (floral staff / palm branch, floral crown, and habit) that embellished her body.37 Her funereal appearance would have inspired living nuns of the same convent to carry out their own religious lives as Madre María Antonia had. In addition to convent lore, hagiographies, and the rules and constitutions of religious orders, paintings like this one guided nuns in their religious lives and in their maintenance of institutional traditions. Together, these repositories of knowledge constituted the foundation of a convent’s unique history and institutional identity, which its nuns would promote to new members in order to reinforce their principles.Significantly, newly professed nuns wore the same kind of floral accoutrements that their deceased sisters wore on their funeral biers. In fact, nuns’ profession ceremonies, in addition to being “weddings” in which the professant married Christ, also commemorated their symbolic death to the world—a virtual martyrdom indicated by Sor Barbara Josefa de San Francisco in her autobiographical account of her own profession: “And I understood that I will always reverently wear my habit, in accordance with death; it is the shroud that the body wears, and in religion I will be as a dead person to all the things of this world.”38 Sor Barbara Josefa’s quasi-ekphrastic passage accords with nearly every New Spanish portrait of a newly professed or recently deceased nun. These works picture their sitters in their habits, wearing floral crowns and holding floral staffs (a New Spanish elaboration of the simple palm fronds that appear in Spanish funeral portraits of nuns). Illustrative of this is the 1754 portrait of Sor Ana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad, who, like Sor Barbara Josefa, professed in the convent of La Santísima Trinidad in Puebla (fig. 2). Sor Ana appears in the blue and white habit of the Conceptionist order, a black veil, and an embroidered and jewel-encrusted stole. She wears escudos de monja on her chest and right shoulder, as well as a floral crown capped with angel figurines, and she holds an immense floral staff in one hand and a statue of the Christ child in the other. This visual formulation marked the beginning of a nun’s nuptial bond to Christ, which she would fulfill in death, the final occasion on which she would wear bridal trappings and the moment when her ritual life as a nun would come full circle. Unlike funeral portraits, which were primarily commissioned by and displayed in convents, profession portraits were commissioned by lay members of society—usually a nun’s family, who would display her portrait in their residence as a demonstration of prestige, religious orthodoxy, and their ties to a particular convent.39Figure 2. Anonymous, profession portrait of Sor Ana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad, 1754. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo: courtesy of the Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.Each convent had a specific approach to fashioning the habits and floral regalia of its nuns. The published rules and constitutions of religious orders that circulated in New Spain’s nunneries frequently indicate the materials that could be used to fabricate habits, as well as what materials and fashion trends should be avoided.40 Likewise, certain local styles for floral crowns and staffs can be observed in nuns’ portraits. Profession portraits of nuns from the Puebla convents of La Purísima Concepción, Santa Inés, San Jerónimo, La Santísima Trinidad, and Santa Mónica frequently picture tri-crested crowns, while Mexico City nuns are regularly shown wearing towering floral crowns that are rounded on top. Although the portraits do not show a perfect consistency in crown and staff styles for each convent, these general patterns seem to indicate regional and institutional traditions.41Institutional identities are also apparent in portraits of founding convent members and subsequent abbesses, some of which have survived to the present day while others are mentioned in colonial texts.42 For example, the portrait of Sor María Josefa Lina de la Santísima Trinidad of the convent of La Concepción in San Miguel el Grande (today San Miguel de Allende) pictures the young, wealthy founder of this convent, who also professed in it and was one of its original members (fig. 3). The portrait’s inscription (not pictured in the accompanying illustration) acknowledges not only her establishing of La Concepción, but also the date of her profession: “The Very Reverend Mother María Josepha Lina de la Santísima Trinidad. Founder of the Royal Convent of the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady in the town of San Miguel el Grande. She professed on 2 February 1757 at the age of 19 years and 5 months.”43 As with nuns’ funeral portraits, profession portraits like this one picture their sitters with some combination of floral crowns, palm fronds, floral staffs, religious figurines, and candles. In both portrait types, the iconography presents the subject as a bride of Christ and therefore clad in regal attire. In addition to her solemn but exquisite portrait, Sor María Josefa was also the subject of a published hagiography by Father Juan Benito de Gamarra y Dávalos, which highlights her rejection of considerable wealth for a life of piety and austerity and identifies her convent as a sign of her character.44Figure 3. Anonymous, profession portrait of Sor María Josefa Lina de la Santísima Trinidad, 1757. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photo: courtesy of Alma Montero.Similarly, Madre Elvira de San José, who was twice the abbess of the Dominican convent of Santa Inés in Puebla, and whose written history was kept in the same convent, is the subject of a 1711 portrait by an anonymous artist (fig. 4).45 In it, the nun, clearly advanced in age, sits in a half-length composition and in a three-quarter pose, with her hands hidden inside the loose sleeves of her habit. She wears a magnificent floral crown and an escudo de monja (added later) and is depicted with closed eyes and a grimacing expression.46 The inscription in the upper-right portion of the composition reads, “Mother Elvira de San José, nun of Santa Inés, twice its abbess, died on 6 May 1711 at the age of 74 years, 4 months, and 4 days, with 56 years, 5 months, and 18 days as a nun.”47 The portrait, along with her biography, ensured that Sor Elvira would not be forgotten in her convent and that she would continue to be a model for its nuns and abbesses as well as an emblem of institutional history and identity. Similarly, the biographical inscription along the bottom edge of a profession portrait of Madre Lugarda María de la Luz Alvares de Palacios (Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico) reads that a written account of her life (probably either a handwritten autobiographical account or a biography penned by her confessor) was kept in the convent’s archive and that the abbess prohibited it from leaving the convent.48 As these examples demonstrate, hagiographies of nuns and convent chronicles like that written by Sigüenza y Góngora provided models of behavior and contributed to a convent’s unique institutional identity along with funeral portraits and oral histories—all of which were common to monastic institutions in the early modern period, both in Europe and in the Americas. Oral histories and hagiographies could also circulate beyond convent walls. In the case of Madre Lugarda, it appears that her vita was in such demand that the abbess had to take measures to keep it in the cloister.49Figure 4. Anonymous, funeral portrait of Madre Elvira de San José, 1711. Oil on canvas, 78 × 55 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. Photo: courtesy of the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and Museo Nacional del Virreinato.Death and changeIn the late eighteenth century the institutional identities of many convents were directly affected by a set of monastic reforms intended to standardize the then-diverse religious lives of nuns in New Spain.50 Until the late seventeenth century, all nuns in New Spain had followed a method of religious life called the vida común, or “communal life.” They were to reject the luxuries of the secular world, share dormitories, eat their meals in a communal hall, live without the aid of servants or the company of students, and maintain minimal relations with secular society. Certain foods considered to be decadent and unnecessary for basic nourishment (such as chocolate) were banned from their diets. They wore unembellished habits of coarse materials and, finally, practiced various forms of corporeal penance, including self-mortification and fasting. This monastic lifestyle, which Saint Teresa of Ávila promulgated in sixteenth-century Spain with her reform of the Carmelite order, was a means to align monastic orthodoxy with the Counter-Reformation; it provided a disciplined method for nuns to enrich their spiritual lives, in large part by subduing their bodily and earthly appetites.In the mid-seventeenth century, Bishop Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (1639–49) issued a rule and daily ritual schedule for the Conceptionist nuns in the diocese of Puebla. Accordingly, his focus on prayer allowed each convent to develop its own activities and institutional habits outside of the canonical hours.51 Following Palafox y Mendoza’s example, Archbishop Payo de Ribera (1668–81) of Mexico City effectively dissolved the communal life for financially burdened convents by suspending their responsibility to feed their nuns and pay other basic living expenses. Archbishop Juan Ortega y Montañés (1701–8) endorsed Payo de Ribera’s directive. In these convents, nuns now had to pay their own expenses out of accounts provided by their families. They lived in multichambered private quarters within the cloister, often with family members, servants, and students. This allowed for an alternative monastic lifestyle known as the vida particular, or “private life.” Not all convents chose to follow this path: of the ten religious orders of nuns in late eighteenth-century New Spain, fewer than half practiced the private life (the Conceptionists, Jeronymites, Urbanist Franciscans, and some Dominicans), while the others maintained the communal life (the Carmelites, Capuchins, Augustinians, First-Order Franciscans, some Dominicans, the Company of Mary, and the Company of the Savior); however, private-life convents outnumbered communal-life ones. Among the cities of New Spain, Mexico City boasted the largest number of private-life convents at thirteen (versus nine communal-life convents), and Puebla had the second-largest number at six (versus five communal-life convents).52 Other cities, such as Antequera de Oaxaca, Guadalajara, Querétaro, and Mérida, had far fewer convents.By the mid-eighteenth century, many influential church officials in New Spain were arguing that the private life was not aligned with the true spirit of monasticism as it was originally intended and continued to be practiced in communal-life convents. Their primary critiques focused on the nuns’ lavish dress (their habits were made of finer fabrics and of
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