Transforming Saints: From Spain to New Spain

By Charlene Villaseñor Black

Transforming Saints explores the transformation and function of the images of holy women within wider religious, social, and political contexts of Old Spain and New Spain from the Spanish conquest to Mexican independence.

The chapters here examine the rise of the cults of the lactating Madonna, St. Anne, St. Librada, St. Mary Magdalene, and the Suffering Virgin. Concerned with holy figures presented as feminine archetypes—images that came under Inquisition scrutiny—as well as with cults suspected of concealing Indigenous influences, Charlene Villaseñor Black argues that these images would come to reflect the empowerment and agency of women in viceregal Mexico. Her close analysis of the imagery additionally demonstrates artists' innovative responses to Inquisition censorship and the new artistic demands occasioned by conversion.

The concerns that motivated the twenty-first century protests against Chicana artists Yolanda López in 2001 and Alma López in 2003 have a long history in the Hispanic world, in the form of anxieties about the humanization of sacred female bodies and fears of Indigenous influences infiltrating Catholicism. In this context Black also examines a number of important artists in depth, including El Greco, Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera, Pedro de Mena, Baltasar de Echave Ibía, Juan Correa, Cristóbal de Villalpando, and Miguel Cabrera.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780826504722

Book preview

TRANSFORMING SAINTS

Transforming Saints

From Spain to New Spain

CHARLENE VILLASEÑOR BLACK

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS

Nashville, Tennessee

Copyright 2022 Vanderbilt University Press

All rights reserved

First printing 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Villaseñor Black, Charlene, 1962– author.

Title: Transforming saints : from Spain to New Spain / Charlene Villaseñor Black.

Description: Nashville, Tennessee : Vanderbilt University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022002160 (print) | LCCN 2022002161 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826504708 (paperback) | ISBN 9780826504715 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780826504722 (epub) | ISBN 9780826504739 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Christian saints in art. | Women saints in art. | Christian art and symbolism—Spain. | Christian art and symbolism—Mexico. | Christian saints—Cult—Spain. | Christian saints—Cult—Mexico.

Classification: LCC N8079.5 .V55 2022 (print) | LCC N8079.5 (ebook) | DDC 704.9/48630917561—dc23/eng/20220414

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002160

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002161

A mis antepasadas

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. St. Anne, Art, and Conversion

2. The Madonna, between Mother and Queen

3. The Suffering Mother

4. Rebellious Daughters

5. Mary Magdalene and the Erotics of Devotion

Conclusion

Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

AT THE HEART OF SCHOLARSHIP lies dialogue, conversation, and connection across difference. For that reason, I am deeply grateful for the opportunities I enjoyed presenting the research and ideas that make up this book. People too numerous to mention provided thoughtful commentary, asked challenging questions, and entered into conversations with me that improved my thinking. I thank the following institutions for invitations to speak and for their support of my work: UCLA and its Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (now the CMRS Center for Early Global Studies), Department of Art History, César E. Chávez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and Center for 17th-and 18th-Century Studies, Fowler Museum, and Chicano Studies Research Center; Southern Methodist University, where I presented as part of the Comini Lecture Series at the invitation of Adam Herring; Yale University, where I was invited by Mary Miller; the University of Michigan, at the invitation of Louise Stein; the University of California, Riverside, at the request of friend and colleague Jennifer Scheper Hughes; the University of Southern California’s Department of Art History and the USC-Early Modern Studies Institute; the University of Oxford; and other venues. Audiences at various museums offered their insight into the ideas I was working through, including at the Getty Research Institute, Dumbarton Oaks, the Oakland Museum, the Frederick and Jan Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University, and the Huntington Library. Colleagues at conferences furthered the conversation, including at the College Art Association annual conference, Renaissance Society of America, the International Congress of Americanists, and the Attending to Early Modern Women gathering. Finally, I extend my heartfelt thanks to the anonymous peer reviewers of the manuscript. Their suggestions made enormous improvements to this book, and I am forever grateful for their insight and expertise.

Generous financial support provided time off to research, write, and acquire image permissions. I am thankful to the following organizations for their recognition of my work: the Career Enhancement Fellowship Award, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the American Council of Learned Societies Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship (at the Huntington Library); and the UCLA Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence, an annual award offered by an inspiring group of women alums. Later in the project, as I finished, I received support from two additional awards. My inspiring co-principal investigators and research partners on Critical Mission Studies at California’s Crossroads, funded by the University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives, provided invaluable insight into the experiences of Native Americans during colonization and forced conversion. During the final year (2021–22), as I awaited publication, I was fortunate to be the Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art at the University of Oxford, affiliated with History of Art and Worcester College. I enjoyed support from UCLA along the way, especially from the Deans of the Humanities and Social Sciences, David Schaberg and Darnell Hunt, as well as Interim Dean Laura Gómez.

Several talented graduate students provided invaluable research assistance over the years, including Yve Chavez, Julia McHugh, JoAnna Reyes Walton, Carlos Rivas, and Miranda Saylor. Miranda valiantly helped with the image permissions at the height of the pandemic when institutions in Mexico were shut down. I am grateful to those individuals and organizations in Mexico, Spain, New York, New Mexico, and elsewhere that granted me permission to publish images.

Finally, I extend my thanks to family members, friends, and colleagues whose love and support sustained me. My son, Joe, now a young adult, grew up with this project. Thank you for everything that you are and for all our adventures, intellectual debates, and shared love of philosophy, politics, history, and music. Being your mother has been a journey of healing. My sister, Jessica Doğantemur, was always there, doing the heavy work of caring for our mother, and serving as the perfect travel companion and interlocutor. My students at UCLA over the years, as well as at Stanford and Oxford, provided inspiration, challenge, and sustenance. As Paulo Freire reminds us, to educate is an act of love. I am blessed by wonderful colleagues at UCLA. I learned a great deal from years of friendship with the visionary Chon Noriega. Colleagues in Chicana/o studies, Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma López, provided good food, good company, and lively exchanges in their beautiful home in LA, Casa Nepantla. I was grateful to have a supportive department chair in Leisy Ábrego. With our adjacent offices in a corner of Dodd Hall, the witches’ corner, Sharon Gerstel was a steadfast friend and inspiring fellow single mother, with whom I share not only academic interests but our common challenges as parents. I cherish my escapades with retired colleague Cecelia Klein, authority on Aztec art and gender, including trips to Mexico and Cuba, shopping expeditions, restaurant hopping, and intense conversations about our work. Maite Álvarez of the Getty Museum and I have been friends for decades and coauthors for some years; I strive to emulate her graciousness and creativity. I am delighted to have worked closely with Emily Engel for the last five years on the founding of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, the first peer-reviewed journal in our field. Ilona Katzew of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been both a brilliant and inspiring colleague and a caring friend. I’ve found our collaborative efforts on conferences and seminars to be supremely stimulating. Felipe Mirabal is an old friend (and former student) who knows more about colonial New Mexico than anyone in the world, and I treasure our exchanges and travels together. I finished this project as I began working closely with artist Judithe Hernández, whose own images of women provided visions of how our ancestors survived the past in Mexico—living and thriving as they confronted conquest, conversion, revolution, and migration.

My UCLA colleague Maite Zubiaurre recommended Vanderbilt University Press; I am thankful for her wise suggestion and to everyone who supported my manuscript through peer review and production: Zachary S. Gresham, Acquisitions Editor; Joell Smith-Borne, Managing Production Editor; Brittany Johnson, Grants Coordinator; and Jenna Phillips, Scholarly Marketing and E-Book Manager. I thank Kim Giambattisto, Senior Production Editor at Westchester Publishing Services, who oversaw copy edits and finalized the images, as well as copy editor Lisa Sinclair.

Colleagues and friends at the University of Oxford made the final stages of edits, proofs, and awaiting publication more enjoyable. I extend my gratitude to Chair of the Department of History of Art Geoffrey Batchen and to Giuseppe Marcocci, convener of the Iberian History Seminar. I was fortunate to find comadres in the UK, including the colonial historian Karoline (Kaja) Cook and dear friend Rocio Van Doren, the other Latina living in the village of Islip in Oxfordshire, birthplace of Edward the Confessor. My visionary friend Yannick Ndoinyo made tangible to me the importance of decolonizing our world through his inspiring political work and research.

I write these acknowledgments as we enter the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic. I’ve had a lot of time during lockdown to think about the subject of this book and its connections to my antepasadas. I dedicate this study to them, to the womxn in my family—past, present, and future–in honor of our powers to survive, thrive, adapt, and transcend as we nurture (and nurtured) loving bonds and connections, making families.

INTRODUCTION

IN 2001 IN Santa Fe, New Mexico, outraged protesters attempted to shut down the exhibition Cyberarte at the Museum of International Folk Art. At issue was a photograph by queer Chicana artist Alma López of a woman posing as the Virgin of Guadalupe, clad in what protesters described as a rose bikini¹ (figure I.1). Similar anger was unleashed at the 2001 opening of the exhibition The Road to Aztlán at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. There, Catholic demonstrators condemned a painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe cast as the pre-Columbian goddess Coatlicue, a work by pioneering Chicana artist Yolanda López created between 1981 and 1988 (figure I.2). While both protests seem symptomatic of the so-called culture wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, disputes over the depiction of the Virgin Mary and other holy women have a long history in the Spanish empire. These demonstrations, in fact, highlight two major issues that have traditionally provoked attempts at censorship in the Hispanic world: the humanization of sacred female bodies and fears of Indigenous influences infiltrating Catholic cults.

Transforming Saints investigates these issues in the Hispanic world from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, looking closely at the transformation of images of female holy persons as their cults moved from Old World to New. Five case studies, taken from Spain and Mexico, are explored: St. Anne, the Holy Grandmother; the Madonna and Child; images of Mary’s suffering during the Passion; crucifixion victim Santa Librada; and the penitent Mary Magdalene. All were critical figures in Catholic devotion, all figures whose imagery came under Inquisition scrutiny in the Hispanic empire, and all figures whose cults (and vitae) were conflated, to varying degrees, with Indigenous religious practices and cults of Native deities in Mexico. My focus in Mexico is on the Nahua (Aztec) Central Mexican and Pueblan areas from 1521 to 1821, with additional comparative material from Northern Mexico, Michoacán, Guatemala, and Panama. I examine artworks by the leading artists of Spain and New Spain, with particular attention to works created in Madrid and Seville, as well as Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca, major colonial centers. Artists include El Greco, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera, and Pedro de Mena in Spain and Naples, and Baltasar de Echave Ibía, Juan Correa, Cristóbal de Villalpando, and Miguel Cabrera in New Spain, among others. In certain instances, works by artists whose names have been lost to history become important to consider.

FIGURE I.1. Alma López, Our Lady, 1999. Inkjet print on canvas, 17⅜ × 13⅞ in. (44 × 35 cm). Collection of the artist, Los Angeles. Courtesy of the artist

FIGURE I.2. Yolanda López, Nuestra Madre, from the Guadalupe series, 1981–88. Acrylic and oil on Masonite, 6 × 4 ft. (183 × 122 cm). Collection of the artist, San Francisco. © 1981–88 by Yolanda López; image courtesy of the UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, Los Angeles

The cults of these holy women did not simply foster religious conversion, but also played a role in establishing European gender norms in the wake of the conquest of the Americas. Images of the ideal mother, grandmother, and daughter established European archetypes of feminine behavior, contrasting with the repentant figure of the fallen Magdalene. The need for such European models was pressing in the minds of friars, who, as other scholars have demonstrated, were particularly suspicious of the standing of Native women, who seemed to possess more power than their European counterparts.² The representation of female saints’ bodies was of particular concern, as is attested to by attempts to suppress nudity in depictions of the nursing Virgin and the penitent Magdalene, concerns over the proper rendering of Santa Librada’s gender identity, and strict circumscription of the suffering Madonna’s grief. The depiction of these saints’ lives also inspired other debates—over Mary’s paradoxical virginity and maternity, the intersection of the sacred and the erotic, sacred suffering as feminine devotion, and incest subtexts in saints’ cults. The church was appropriately suspicious of these sacred images, for, as this study argues, female saints’ cults changed in significant, subversive ways in Mexico, transformations that reflect the empowerment and agency of women in the process of Christianization.

The potential power of sacred imagery to influence the viewer took on particular urgency in cases where Indigenous influences were suspected. Friars in Mexico sounded the alarm about converts feigning piety for St. Anne as they continued to worship the goddess Toci. Devotion to St. Mary Magdalene, patron of reformed prostitutes in Spain, seems to have been influenced by beliefs about the goddess Tlazolteotl, Aztec protector of sex workers and adulterers. The cult of the Virgin Mary was also significantly transformed in Mexico in the hands of Indigenous neophytes, reflecting their agency. Native preference for visual representations of Mary as a queenly, heavenly figure shifted European attention on her as a humble, maternal paradigm. Colonial Mexican reception of Santa Librada, an early Iberian convert to Christianity, cannot be fully comprehended without understanding the context of child conversion in New Spain.

These images of holy women also attracted Inquisition and other censorship. Thus, they expose the intricate mechanisms of artistic oversight in the Spanish empire. Simultaneously, close visual readings also reveal artists’ and patrons’ resistance to Inquisition demands. Judith Butler’s theorization of censorship as not only restrictive, but potentially productive, and Michel Foucault’s conception of the dual nature of power—that is, not only its ability to control, but also its creative potential—shed light on the transformation of religious imagery as it moved from Spain to New Spain. In certain instances of censorship, Jacques Derrida’s notion of writing under erasure helps to elucidate how sacred painting in the Hispanic world produced meaning.³

I begin my research into these female saints’ cults in late medieval Spain, then trace their migration to the New World in the 1500s. While highly interdisciplinary, my study is rooted in visual evidence. In compiling and comparing images from Spain and the Americas I have studied paintings, frescoes, manuscripts, and prints, as well as sculptures. The analytical tools of art history, tools that deeply interrogate visual images as primary sources, expand our knowledge of the past in ways that textual sources cannot, and the work of art historians is essential as we excavate the historical archive. I then carefully document the initial stages of these cults in Mexico, and attempt, when possible, to establish concrete links with Spain. To supplement understanding of the images, I have consulted hundreds of primary sources, including documents from archives in Mexico and Spain, printed sources of the time, and artworks. These include a variety of printed texts such as art treatises, devotional books, hagiographies, sermons, prayers, novenas, comedias de santos, sacred music, and even medical treatises. Early accounts of the Conquest and conversion of Mexico have been indispensable, such as those by friars Bernardino de Sahagún, Motolinía, Diego Durán, and others. Through archival work in both countries, I have at times been able to pinpoint images and devotions to specific locales. Surveys of the Spanish empire, ordered by Spanish kings in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, which inventoried religious establishments, have been invaluable. Commissions for artworks, inventories of churches, and records of devotional confraternities help to fill in the picture.

While heavily based in primary source research, this study also acknowledges silences in the archives, particularly the missing voices of women and Indigenous peoples. In the face of these gaps, works of art serve as primary, material documents of the past. I also posit innovative ways to consider existing evidence and its inconsistencies by reading surviving sources obliquely, interpreting archival silences, and analyzing later ethnographic data. I am guided by new decolonial approaches that challenge Eurocentrism and attempt to center Indigenous voices.⁴ Finally, I take seriously the critique of social history and challenge to include women’s lives and gender issues articulated by Chicana scholar Emma Pérez in The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History.⁵ Her call inspires my own revision of social art history. How can I transform the inherited tools of the discipline in order to bring to visibility women’s relationships to renderings of female saints in the early modern Iberian world?

My methodology has thus been influenced by social art history, informed by gender and ethnic studies, and affected by postmodern movements such as semiotics, post-structuralism, and postcolonialism. Simultaneously, I am deeply committed to historical work, to attempting to excavate the past. My scholarship also seeks to transcend nationalist models of art history, situating the movement of Catholic imagery within the wider networks of the early modern Iberian empire. Indeed, most researchers in the humanities today now recognize that the early modern world was intensely interconnected, and they are developing new methodologies and practices for recognizing and theorizing these global links and associations. Their work suggests our growing cognizance of the complexities of the early modern world, a world that was global before the era of globalization.⁶ As I examine the translation and transformation of holy images from Spain to New Spain, I also address the complex network of sources that inspired the creation of these early modern and viceregal artworks—in most cases European, Indigenous, and Latin American. To describe them as hybrid seems insufficient, and, in fact, no art historical language seems to exist to explain adequately their genesis.⁷ Gilles Deleuze’s meditation on the great mathematician Gottfried Leibniz’s theories of the fold, the pleat, curves, twisting surfaces, curvature, and movement comes to mind as a possible model for thinking about the complex interconnections between artists and artworks in a global economy.⁸ Deleuze and Leibniz’s model is the monad—two floors separated by a fold; the inside and the outside interpenetrate, time and space are compressed; the whole world is contained within. I find it a useful model for thinking about the types of images discussed in this study, for thinking about how the early modern world was folded; all was folds; the whole world was connected. Do studies such as this, which refuse to observe nationalist or temporal boundaries, have the potential to deterritorialize art history and history? Are the recent controversies over Alma López’s Our Lady and Yolanda López’s Nuestra Madre, then, just the latest folds, unfoldings, refolds, in a long history of the censorship, resistance, and migration of sacred art in the Hispanic world?

My approach is further informed by two additional theoretical models. Twentieth-and twenty-first-century consideration of the baroque and neobaroque as New World phenomena impacts my approach to the historical images under consideration, which range from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, for example. Writing in the wake of World War II, Cuban authors José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier reconceived of the colonial baroque as a form of contraconquista or counterconquest, a rebellious or contestatory baroque that diverged from Spaniard José Antonio Maravall’s characterization of the baroque as a conservative style aligned with state control.⁹ Literature specialist Monika Kaup takes their theorizing into the realm of visual culture, identifying examples of this decolonizing baroque in the hands of artists in viceregal New Spain and the contemporary Americas, as in her discussion of the poblano ultrabaroque church of Santa María Tonantzintla in Mexico or Chicana/o lowriders in the United States. She likens this understanding of New World baroque to the concept of becoming-minor articulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in which colonized subjects transform the dominant culture, an idea reminiscent of Homi Bhabha’s mimicry.¹⁰ Inspired by these theorists, I approach the historical objects under study here as having the potential to encode such contestatory, rebellious, and even insubordinate meanings.

The challenge is discovering and disentangling these meanings from the Catholic Church’s official stance on these female saints and their imagery. Recent discussion of entanglement is useful for thinking through these challenges. How are Indigenous epistemologies entangled or enmeshed with official interpretations of Catholic saints? Despite a desire to clearly separate out and neatly categorize the varied influences on artistic representations of female saints, the model of entanglement insists on the mingling, intertwisting, complication, and confusing nature of cultural interaction. At the same time, it pays attention to agency.¹¹ Agency is particularly important to bear in mind, particularly when attempting to write histories that capture the experiences of people often excluded from standard records, including women and Indigenous peoples, among others.

Situating Transforming Saints within Existing Scholarship

Transforming Saints is the first study to probe in detail the translation and transformation of the imagery of female holy persons from Spain to the Americas and how these images functioned within wider religious, social, and political contexts. While scholars have investigated the iconography of Christ and the cross in colonial Mexico, depictions of holy women—with the exception of Mary in her guise as the Virgin of Guadalupe—have not been examined in detail.¹² The wide-ranging nature of the research, spanning both the New World and the Old, demonstrates the critical role of art in colonialism, both as an agent of identity formation and as witness to cultural transformation.

Transforming Saints builds on existing literature on saints in the viceregal Americas. A groundbreaking anthology of essays edited by historians Allan Greer and Jodi Bilinkoff, Colonial Saints: Discovering the Holy in the Americas, considered a range of important and neglected topics, including gender, and how Indigenous and African traditions infused Catholicism, employing a hemispheric approach.¹³ More recently, the anthology Sainthood and Race: Marked Flesh, Holy Flesh, edited by Molly H. Bassett and Vincent W. Lloyd, addressed the intersections of race and theology in cults of saints from around the world, the first such collection of its kind.¹⁴ While developing certain strands of thought in these two anthologies, Transforming Saints focuses on the exchange of female saints’ cults and images between Spain and New Spain and women’s experience of them, as it additionally considers issues related to indigeneity and race. This monograph also builds on historian Erin Rowe’s Saint and Nation: Santiago, Teresa of Avila, and Plural Identities in Early Modern Spain, a concentrated study of two saintly figures and their role in nationalism in Iberia, and her recent book, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism.¹⁵ Finally, Transforming Saints centralizes women, art, and gender as it investigates censorship controversies over sacred art, an important window onto the agency of artists, patrons, and devotees at the time. In its deep engagement with sacred images and gender, varied array of primary sources, and commitment to contextualization, it also develops from my previous book, Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire, as well as published articles.¹⁶

As noted, the one exception to the general observation that the imagery of female holy figures has been little studied in Spain and the Americas is, of course, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Mexico’s special patron and protector. In light of her status as the most visible holy personage associated with Mexico, and the object of notable devotion continuing even today, the bibliography on her cult is large. The most recent study, by art historian Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas, synthesizes previous scholarship as it considers the various manifestations of the image from Spain to South America and Mexico.¹⁷ Most importantly perhaps, Peterson convincingly argues for the link between the Virgin of Guadalupe and an Indigenous goddess cult located in Tepeyac by re-evaluating colonial-era evidence previously dismissed as fake.

Allow me to map out several pertinent issues in the scholarship.¹⁸ According to devotees, the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared several times to a recent Native convert, Juan Diego, on the hill of Tepeyac, between December 9 and 12 in 1531. She spoke to him in his native language, Nahuatl, and instructed him to tell the Bishop of Mexico City, Juan de Zumárraga, to build a church in her honor. She gave Juan Diego a special sign to convince the bishop of the veracity of his story: she filled his cloak, or tilma, with Castilian roses. When the humble Indigenous convert was granted an audience before the bishop, he unfurled his tilma to reveal the roses, and the miraculous painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe worshipped today in Mexico City was revealed on his cloak. Zumárraga fell to his knees before it.

Many devotees believe that the tilma image, enshrined in the Basilica to the Virgin of Guadalupe built in the 1970s on the hill of Tepeyac, is the miraculous image revealed in 1531 (figure I.3). Art historians, though, have dated the image to the 1550s, and associated it with a Native artist called Marcos in various sources. It was, apparently, one of several images in the original chapel dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe on the site.¹⁹ Although not a direct copy of the titular image in the Spanish monastery dedicated to the Extremaduran Virgin of Guadalupe, it was certainly inspired by European iconography of the time. Setting aside the story of the miraculous creation of the Mexican image, reproductions of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the New World represent an instance of the transference of a sacred type from the Old World. Hernán Cortés, in fact, visited the Monastery of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Extremadura in 1528, on his return trip to Spain.

This cult presents the clearest case of Indigenous spiritual practices transforming Catholic devotion in the Americas. Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún complained in The Florentine Codex, the text of which was finished by 1569, that the Native people were worshipping a figure called Tonantzin, or Our Mother, at the site dedicated to the Virgin of Guadalupe on Tepeyac. Archaeologists and art historians have convincingly demonstrated that a previous pre-Columbian ritual site dedicated to a complex of goddesses was located in the Tepeyac area. Indeed, a colonial manuscript by an unknown artist, the Codex Teotenantzin, created in the first half of the eighteenth century, recorded petroglyphs of a goddess carved in the area, remains of which were still visible into the late colonial period.²⁰

In contrast to Peterson’s wide-ranging study, a recent 2019 monograph focuses in on a local Yucatec manifestation of the Madonna, the Virgin of Itzmal, and its efficacy in an epidemic of 1648.²¹ Author Amara Solari deftly employs Native language sources to arrive at a complex picture of how Maya religious practices and worldviews were adapted to Catholicism. Significantly, this research preserves knowledge of badly damaged wall paintings in Yucatan. These two particular manifestations of the Virgin Mary notwithstanding, other important saints and other advocations of Mary have long awaited study.

FIGURE I.3. Virgin of Guadalupe, 1531? Oil and tempera on cloth, 69 × 43 in. (175 × 109 cm). Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico City. Public domain: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1531_Nuestra_Se%C3%B1ora_de_Guadalupe_anagoria.jpg

Transforming Saints adopts a broad view, crossing chronological and temporal borders, as it employs a wide scope of sources. The recent 2019 monograph, Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism, situates saints within global circuits, providing a more expansive (and accurate) picture of Catholicism’s range and influence. A carefully documented volume by Mexican historian Antonio Rubial García, El paraíso de los elegidos: una lectura de la historia cultural de Nueva España (1521–1804), examines in some detail the development of creole nationalism and its relation to Mexican culture, including Catholic religious art, over the three-hundred-year colonial period.²² Similarly, Cécile Fromont’s monograph, The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo, looks at the use of imagery in the conversion to Catholicism from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries in Kongo.²³ Amy G. Remensnyder’s study of La Conquistadora, the Virgin Mary as patron of war, crosses the divide between medieval and early modern studies, tracing the evolution of this martial Marian cult from premodern Iberia to the Americas.²⁴ The benefits of histories such as these that cross geographic and temporal boundaries, often employing a longue durée, include the ability to identify broader cultural trends as well the opportunity to synthesize a richer body of evidence. Transforming Saints, which ranges from 1521 into the 1800s, is similarly expansive in chronological range and wealth of visual, material, archival, textual, ethnographic, and other evidence. It also draws inspiration from the work of Mexican art historian Jaime Cuadriello, whose richly documented and deeply contextual research demonstrates the deep entanglement between Catholicism and the arts, politics and daily life.²⁵

Chapter Summaries

Chapter 1 of Transforming Saints, entitled St. Anne, Art, and Conversion, investigates the melding of St. Anne and the pre-Columbian goddess Toci in colonial Mexico. The cult dedicated to the model grandmother of Jesus flourished in Mexico at the same time that it declined in Spain. This decline was the direct result of Inquisition concerns with the cult’s historicity, which I bring to light by examining expurgated hagiographies and Inquisition pronouncements. In Mexico, Indigenous enthusiasm for the cult of the Holy Grandmother resonated with existing pre-Columbian religious practices and stimulated fervent Native devotion. Such conflation was facilitated by the alignment of ritual calendars: observance of the Nativity of the Virgin overlapped with the celebration of Toci’s feast day in the month of September. In fact, as Mexican colonial images demonstrate, St. Anne assumed many of Toci’s guises—model grandmother, patron of midwives, and intercessor during childbirth. Artists examined include Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina, Juan de Borgoña, Pedro de Campaña, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo in Spain, as well as Andrés de la Concha, Simón Pereyns, Juan Correa, and Miguel Cabrera in Mexico.

Chapter 2, The Madonna, between Mother and Queen, examines imagery of the Madonna and Child, another important devotion that played a major role in articulating Spanish ideals of motherhood in the colonial Americas. The first Mexican depiction appeared in the Codex Huejotzingo, created in the 1520s. While such images played a part in campaigns to encourage women to breastfeed their offspring, Inquisition censors were troubled by the exposure of Mary’s breasts, an anxiety related to the church’s condemnation of nudity following the Council of Trent. Censorship of the Virgo lactans, however, inspired artists to circumvent restrictions with innovative visual strategies, demonstrating the productive side effects of censorship. In New Spain, Indigenous devotions were inflected by Native traditions regarding motherhood and childrearing, documented in colonial manuscripts. In addition, various primary sources, including imagery, demonstrate Native Catholic converts’ desire to imagine Mary as celestial queen, rejecting more humble, humanized portrayals. This led to renewed valorization of Mary as heavenly feminine archetype in the Americas. This chapter also examines relationships between images of the lactating Virgin and other Marian devotions. For example, it is impossible to consider Mary as the perfect mother without considering her role as the Immaculate Conception, the embodiment of purity. Images of Maria lactans recall other uncensored lactation scenes, such as the visions of St. Bernard and St. Augustine, or Roman Charity, wherein Mary appeared to nurse adult male figures with her breast milk. Close examination of how Maria lactans imagery produces meaning in relation to these other depictions demonstrates the intricate mechanisms of Inquisition censorship. Artists considered include El Greco, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo in Spain, and Andrés de la Concha, Sebastián López de Arteaga, Cristóbal de Villalpando, and Miguel Cabrera in Mexico.

Chapter 3, The Suffering Mother, meditates upon Mary’s other important manifestation, as the suffering Virgin, La Dolorosa (the Virgin of Sorrows) and La Virgen de la Soledad (the Virgin of Solitude), considered a quintessentially Hispanic devotion. This chapter traces the unique development of Mary as suffering mother in Spain and Mexico. It elucidates both the Inquisition’s attempts to strictly control representations of Mary’s emotionality as well as Native influence on such scenes. The importance of women’s patronage of artworks representing the suffering Madonna, in particular the efforts of two Spanish queens, is considered as evidence of this devotion’s significance in the lives of women, in New World and Old. Artists’ inventive tactics in the face of Inquisition regulation, as well as their strategies for rendering the invisible, psychic suffering of the Virgin Mary during the Passion of Christ, are major areas of concentration. Artists discussed include Spanish sculptors Gaspar Becerra, Pedro de Mena, and Pedro Roldán, Spanish-Greek painter El Greco, plus Mexican painters Cristóbal de Villalpando, Juan Correa, and Nicólas Rodríguez Juárez, among others.

While images of the anguished Madonna modeled for women a path to identification with Christ’s suffering, other women in Spain and New Spain envisioned a more daring means to identify with the savior—they worshipped a crucified woman, Santa Librada, the topic of Chapter 4, Rebellious Daughters. Librada’s cult first rose to prominence during the Spanish Reconquista, when she was elevated as the ideal convert. The Franciscans imported her cult into the Americas in the seventeenth century. Devotion to the crucified Librada can be documented in various areas of Mexico, Guatemala, and Panama—always in places where Christianization met with Indigenous resistance. A rebellious daughter of Roman Counsel Catellius in Galicia, Librada became an early convert to Christianity in pagan Iberia. The central role of incest in the story of Librada’s life speaks not only to proper father-daughter relations, but also to anxieties about conversion. In the context of conversion, family members can become figuratively and literally unrecognizable to one another. This was certainly the case in Mexico, where friars concentrated their proselytizing on children. Thus, in this chapter, I demonstrate how images of Santa Librada functioned to facilitate women’s devotions to Christ, visualized the saint as a valiant ideal convert, and offered her as a model daughter in the context of conversion. The images examined in this chapter are prints, engravings, sculpture, anonymous retablos, and santero images. Because this chapter moves later chronologically, into the nineteenth century, and moves beyond Central Mexico to the northern reaches of New Spain, present-day New Mexico, investigation into Santa Librada highlights the widespread nature of concerns about the depiction of female saints throughout the empire, as well as their persistence over time. Furthermore, it focuses on a saint now considered obscure, in contrast to the other case studies, thus shedding light on the regulation of sacred cults in local contexts.

If the Virgin Mary, St. Anne, and Santa Librada offered women models of feminine behavior to emulate, the fallen Mary Magdalene offered a model of female repentance, the topic of Chapter 5, entitled Mary Magdalene and the Erotics of Devotion. A figure of considerable importance in early modern Spain and viceregal New Spain, the Magdalene became associated with reform houses for fallen women. Despite her later repentance, Catholic images of Mary Magdalene frequently alluded to her early life as a prostitute. While the Inquisition in Spain was quite successful at censoring explicitly erotic content in Spanish art, in Mexico, the Magdalene appears quite frequently with her breasts exposed, or with her body languorously posed. This chapter documents Mary Magdalene’s importance in Mexico and suggests reasons for the tolerance of eroticized images. Indigenous attitudes toward sexuality, as documented by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and others, as well as practices associated with pre-Columbian deity Tlazolteotl, patroness of prostitutes in the Aztec world, help to explain the unique development of the imagery of Mary Magdalene in viceregal New Spain. The chapter closely analyzes the works of Spanish artists El Greco, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera, and sculptor Pedro de Mena, as well as Mexican artists Juan Correa, Baltasar de Echave Ibía, Juan Tinoco, and Miguel Cabrera.

The Conclusion returns to the topic raised in the Introduction, namely, how current controversies over contemporary art—whether anxiety over viewpoint or the representation of female bodies—resonate with and are determined by past histories. It also appraises the transformation of female saints’ images in their translation from Old World to New, addressing the ways in which these artworks mutated to valorize women’s roles. Various factors explain this phenomenon, including the effects of Indigenous influence, the unique metamorphosis of sacred art in the context of conversion, and the particular circumstances of individual artists and actors in the global early modern Catholic world. Constituting a comprehensive study of the imagery of female saints in the Americas, the five chapters of this book uncover the diverse strategies of artists, patrons, and devotees responding to the imposition of sacred imagery, ritual, and belief in the colonial Americas. This book concludes where it began, linking past and present, an assertion of the importance of history as a means to envision a more just future.

1

ST. ANNE, ART, AND CONVERSION

WRITING BETWEEN 1577 and 1580, Friar Bernardino de Sahagún voiced concern that Native Mexican converts in Santa Ana Chiautempan, Tlaxcala, were feigning devotion to St. Anne as they continued to worship Toci, the matriarch of the Mesoamerican pantheon of deities: And the natives call her Toci, and people from over forty leagues away attend the feast of Toci. And they name Santa Ana in this manner . . . And all the people who come, as in times past, to the feast of Toci, come on the pretext of Saint Anne.¹ The allegation was repeated in 1611 by Dominican friar Martín de León: Even today they say that they celebrate the fiesta of Toci, or that they’re going to Toci’s temple, he observed in a Nahua catechism entitled Camino del Cielo en Lengua Mexicana. Furthermore, he protested, some Native people were even converting the names of Catholic holy persons into their own languages, citing the famous example of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the city of Mexico: [T]hey were adoring an idol of a goddess that they called Tonantzin, which means Our Mother, and they give the same name to Our Lady.² Another author, Franciscan friar Juan de Torquemada, repeated a similar accusation in his 1615 Monarquía Indiana.³

As these and other related claims demonstrate, the mass religious conversion that emerged from the fall of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City), in 1521 inspired a variety of responses. Several friars suspected Native converts of continuing pre-Columbian spiritual traditions, as recorded in various textual sources noted above. At the same time, some Indigenous people attempted to