Virgin of Guadalupe

1550-1600

Name(s) currently unknown

Basílica de Guadalupe, Tepeyac, Mexico City, MEX

The most important devotional image in the Americas, the Virgin of Guadalupe is the focal point of worship at the Basilica dedicated to her in Mexico City.

In the modern basilica, the image is hung high up and behind glass, with visitors passing below on a moving walkway. The Virgin is surrounded by an almond-shaped mandorla, as rays of light emanate from her body, a sign of her sacredness. She shares her name with a Spanish Virgin of Guadalupe, whose cult image, a cedar wood statue, was kept at her shrine in Guadalupe, Extremadura. Standing on the crescent moon, this Virgin is a variant form of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. The angel also accompanies the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception to support the moon. In the Guadalupe image, he hangs from the edges of the Virgin’s cloak.

According to a history published in the 17th century, the Virgin appeared to Juan Diego, a Nahua man, asking him to erect a shrine to her at this site. As a token of her wish, she miraculously imprinted her image onto his cloak. Many faithful Catholics believe this image is of divine origin. Some contemporary sources attribute its authorship to the native artist Marcos Cipac de Aquino, who was active in the mid-16th century.

The image is painted on two pieces of finely woven cloth (known as cáñamo), sewn up the center with cotton thread. The image measures 172 x 109 cm (ca. 70 x 43 inches), and is therefore close to life-sized. Recent studies of the image indicate traces of sizing and sketch lines underneath the pigment of the main image and its gilding. Signs of over-painting by later hands also appear.

A shrine to the Virgin was established at Tepeyac sometime before the mid-16th century. When a larger shrine was built in 1555-1556, it contained both a cloth painting (likely this one) and a small statue. The site was of special significance to the Nahua since a shrine to a female earth deity existed there before the conquest. Today, the modern Basilica, which dates from the 1970s, is an active house of worship, and in December (on the Virgin’s feast day, about the time of year when she is said to have appeared to Juan Diego), it hosts thousands of pilgrims who come to honor the Virgin.

Devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe had Spanish roots. But once appropriated by people in New Spain, she provided both a locus of communal identification as well as evidence of local intercessions by divine figures in human affairs. The image has, over its life, touched millions of people. At various points in the colonial period, it was displayed so that people could press holy objects to it to absorb some of the Virgin’s miraculous powers. And in 2002, Juan Diego was canonized, further securing the importance not only of this American Virgin of Guadalupe to the history of Catholicism but also of the devotion she has, and continues to inspire.

Banco Mexicano de Imágenes

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

O'Gorman, Edmundo. 1986. Destierro de sombras: luz en el origen de la imagen y culto de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe del Tepeyac. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. 2005. "Creating the Virgin of Guadalupe: The Cloth, The Artist, and Sources in Sixteenth-Century New Spain." The Americas 61 (4): 571-610.

Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. 2014. Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas. Austin: University of Texas Press.