San Martín, Huaquechula, Mural of Hooded Flagellants

1540-1556

Name(s) currently unknown

Huaquechula, MEX

This mural fragment was painted in the upper cloister of a 16th-century Franciscan monastery in the indigenous town of Huaquechula, Mexico. The scene shows hooded figures carrying whips, scourging themselves as penance.

The lead figure carries a cross, connecting the procession to Jesus’ march to Golgotha on Good Friday. In Huaquechula, as in other parts of Spanish America, flagellants were often devout members of the community who would commonly participate in processions on Good Friday. As if supporting the illusionistic space of the upper painting, a foliate border is set beneath, almost certainly inspired by the decorative margin of a printed book.

The Franciscan friars who lived at Huaquechula would have chosen the images for their cloister, but we know that many of these works were actually carried out by well-trained indigenous painters.

Painted in earth tones and black on a white ground, the murals, although not true fresco, have endured, perhaps protected by later coats of whitewash. The sky above was once blue, but this pigment has proved fugitive. Many convents and monasteries were covered with mural painting, paint being a relatively inexpensive and rapid medium.

Placed in a cloister, these figures would have reminded friars of the value, from a Catholic viewpoint, of abnegation and suffering, like that of the crucified Christ, who was scourged before being crucified. Such images attempted to frame the mundane—the suffering of the human body—in Christian terms. Recent scholarship suggests that the painted flagellants may have been headed towards a painted scene (now lost) of Jesus’ descent from the cross—a key event prior to his resurrection on Easter. If this is correct, then mural and performance mirror and document each other: the ritual performance of flagellation, which was public yet ephemeral, lent meaning to the painting. The painting, which was permanently affixed to the cloister wall, sustained memories of Holy Week events from years gone by and projected those yet to come.

The sources of monastic paintings like these were often the printed images found in books imported from Europe—such influence is clear in the decorative lower border. However, this mural may have recorded or commemorated a scene frequently carried out in Huaquechula, because across Spanish America, flagellants were common participants in Holy Week processions. Sponsors were often local cofradías, many of which were comprised of indigenous men and women. As cofradía members marched through neighborhoods, dressed in black or white hooded garments that masked individual and worldly identities, bonds among them were established and strengthened. As such, this painting was descriptive of a local ritual, an immediate, rather than a distant model for religious practice.

Elizabeth Hill Boone.

Dana Leibsohn and Barbara E. Mundy.
Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820. http://www.fordham.edu/vistas, 2015.

Burkhart, Louise. 1998. “Christian Pageantry and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico.” In Native Traditions in the Postconquest World. E.H. Boone and T. Cummins, eds. Pp. 361-381. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

Lara, Jaime. 2008. Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press.

Webster. Susan Verdi. 1997. “Art, Ritual and Confraternities in Sixteenth Century New Spain.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 19 (70): 5-44.

Webster, Susan Verdi. 1998. Art and Ritual in Golden-Age Spain: Sevillian Confraternities and the Processional Sculpture of Holy Week. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.