Lot Essay
In New Spain devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe was firmly entrenched among most layers of society by the eighteenth century. Although each group interpreted her meaning differently, novohispanos considered her their Patroness generations before it was made official in 1754. As in all advocations of the Virgin Mary, the basic iconography is fixed. In this case, the image left on Juan Diego's cloak furnished the iconography. Enriquez, like Miguel Cabrera and many artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, based their paintings of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the image at the shrine. Patrons demanded as faithful copies as possible. Certain embellishments were acceptable. The essentials, plus one additional feature, are here in a late work by Enriquez.(1)
Hands clasped in prayer, head bowed, eyes lowered, the Virgin, dressed in a gold-edged star studded blue cloak and a gold enbroidered rose garment, stands on a crescent-shaped moon. Since Antiquity, the crescent moon was a symbol of chastity. For Spaniards it had a double meaning. Mary, standing on the crescent (symbol of the Moors), signified her aid in defeating the Moors during the reconquista. An angel with outspread arms keeps her aloft. Her face, turned to the right, is an ashen color: the "Dark Virgin." The Virgin of Guadalupe is a variation of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, an advocation very popular with the Spanish and the Spanish colonials throughout the period. Bright light emits from a mandorla made of rays of light behind her. Light shines on her proper left leg, bent forward above the knee. The bright light washes out the color of her rose garment. The color of her whole left side is lightened as it catches light from an unidentified source. Below her left knee, the folds of her garment, and the whole of her right side are in medium shadow. Her lower left leg is slightly too short in proportion to the upper leg. Her hands are disproportionately small. The folds of her cloak are stiff. Thus a generally mannered look, slightly contradicting some of the "accepted rules" of art, mixes a sophisticated technique with one that also could be interpreted today, loosely, as folk art.
Of all the flora of "The Columbian Exchange," the European rose was the most benign. It neither crowded out native species nor became a pest. It had its thorns, but it was and still is appreciated for its color and scent. One of the Virgin Mary's attributes is the rose, usually white. She is the "rose without thorns," i.e., sinless. Roses are important to the Guadalupe story. In the Enriquez painting, red roses on a cream background (perhaps Juan Diego's tilma, a type of ayate cloth cloak worn by the Indians) surround the mandorla around Mary. This most probably is the artist's (or his patron's) desire for a reference to the miraculous filling of Juan Diego's tilma with red roses in December, poured out before the Bishop's feet, simultaneously revealing the image on his tilma of the Virgin as Our Lady of Guadalupe. This is one of the familiar events of the story. Or, it could be a reference (nearly forgotten today) to testimony in 1666 by Marcos Pacheco, a mestizo witness in one of the many historical investigations of the apparition. (2) Pacheco answered interrogatories concerning his aunt, who, having heard the story of the Virgin's appearances to him by Juan Diego himself, said that she saw the roses stamped on the tilma. (3)
Carol O'Brien English, Ph.D
Denver,
15 March 1996
1. Since the appearance of paintings dated after 1768, it seems reasonable to extend this artist's date to 1778. Manuel Toussaint is correct in identifying his most active period between 1730-1768, but Toussaint himself believed that it would not have been impossible for Enriquez to have been painting in 1787, since he was still alive.
2. The Capitular Inquiry of 1665-1666 made by the cathedral chapter of Mexico City.
3. Documentations of the interrogatories summarized by Stafford Poole, C.M. Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531-1797 (Tucson & London: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 128-143.