Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 95; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-3088716

1527-1900

Jaime Lara,

Early Modern Women Writers

Books concerning the Virgin of Guadalupe generally tend to fall into several categories. There are pious literature for Catholic devotees written in an apologetic vein, polemical gibes by evangelicals and Pentecostals for proselytizing purposes, simplistic expositions of a supposed syncretism between the Virgin Mary and some Aztec goddess, scrutiny of the foundational texts to prove or disprove the historicity of apparitions and personages for nationalistic purposes, metahistorical admiration of Guadalupe as a feminist symbol of racial and gender liberation, and scholarly works that seek to contextualize and understand the Guadalupe phenomenon through the use of a variety of academic disciplines. Jeanette Peterson's handsome and hefty book falls squarely into the last category. The author's overarching question is what a rigorous application of the discipline of art history can reveal about the Guadalupe images and their multiple meanings for multiple audiences. Her magisterial work spans the Middle Ages and the colonial period.Like other serious scholars, Peterson begins with the originating twelfth-century Guadalupe sculpture in the Hieronymite monastery of Extremadura, Spain, and its place among medieval dark-skinned Madonnas. But instead of proceeding immediately to the hill of Tepeyac in New Spain, Peterson discusses the sacrality of blackness and traces the Extremadura Virgin's highly orchestrated travels in South America via Hieronymite friar Diego de Ocaña. The reception and quasi-theatrical uses of the dark image among Andean converts offers a frame for understanding European icons in non-European contexts, and it prepares the reader for a “subjectivity of seeing” the renowned Mexican image.Peterson then turns her focus to what she calls the “Tepeyac Sphere,” both the hill where the apparition to Juan Diego supposedly occurred and its surrounding topography and meanings for indigenes and colonizers (pp. 71–79). Here she debunks the myth of the existence of an Aztec goddess named Tonantzin whom the Virgin Mary supposedly replaced, while at the same time emphasizing the “power of the place” and other memories associated with Tepeyac overlooked by historians. There follows a close reading of the tilma and its iconographic precedents in Assumption and Immaculate Conception imagery. Peterson accepts as a given that the image was painted by human hands (most likely those of the native artist Marcos Cipac de Aquino) using a combination of materials, and on this matter she refers the reader both to the colonial chronicles and to the scientific examination of the artifact permitted by the Catholic Church in 1982.When analyzing the Guadalupe foundational narratives, Peterson sees them as evolving texts. In their earliest manifestation, the emphasis is on the miracles that occurred in the presence of the icon and on the propagation of those miracles via prints. Given that the nascent cult to Guadalupe was being promulgated by the Dominican archbishop of Mexico against the wishes of the Franciscans, one might have preferred more examination here of inter-Mendicant rivalries in propelling the devotion forward. This leads to the next phase of the Guadalupe story, that of an image not made by human hands (known as acheiropoieton) and of the gaze of the religious devotee. Peterson rightly places Guadalupe within the long medieval tradition of miraculously made icons such as the Veil of Veronica. But her most novel contribution is the inclusion of a discussion of early modern optics and colonial attempts to explain the impression of the image on the tilma by the science of shadows and refracted light. The role of eighteenth-century artist-experts like Miguel Cabrera, with their pseudoscientific analysis of the artifact, shows that Guadalupe must also be considered within the economics of late colonial art production and the polemics of church and state.A shift occurs with chapter 8 to what might be called the aftermath and implications of the Guadalupe phenomenon. Peterson asks how native peoples, “the civilized and the savage,” were being portrayed in the story and in its earliest artistic representations (pp. 203–26). Her brilliant insight highlights that the indigenous theatrical performances surrounding Guadalupe, recorded in auxiliary paintings at the shrine, included scenes of ritualized warfare that may have acted subversively to challenge colonial authority — a portent of things to come. The book concludes on the eve of the Mexican independence movement with new material about Guadalupe's political importance for the viceroys and then with an intriguing discussion of how the popular Mexican icon returned to the land of the Extremadura Guadalupe and “reconquered” the mother country (pp. 259–74).Visualizing Guadalupe is the most scholarly and comprehensive study of the topic to date, and one against which all future research will be judged. Its “thick description” (to use the term of anthropologist Clifford Geertz) will make it a classic text for scholars and students on colonial religious, social, and visual history. My one criticism is that the density of historical data sometimes overwhelms the narrative; I would also fault the University of Texas Press editors for reducing several key images to a size that renders them practically unreadable. That being said, the book is a great achievement by a major scholar who has digested the primary and secondary material and who has looked with a microscopic eye on the most important source material of all: the artistic images of the Virgin(s) of Guadalupe.