The Prado Honors the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Pop Star That Unified America and Spain

The Virgin of Guadalupe embodies characteristics akin to a pop star: each December, over 10 million devotees pilgrimage to Tepeyac, just outside Mexico City, to venerate her; she also enjoys the Church’s approval, having been canonized by Rome. Furthermore, her image has been reproduced almost mechanically since the 17th century, not only in pieces deemed strictly artistic—there are over a thousand in Spain alone—but also on less noble materials like t-shirts, keychains, and notebooks…another conquest of turbo-capitalism.

The Prado Museum is dismantling all these narratives surrounding this virgin in So Far, So Close: Guadalupe of Mexico in Spain, an exhibition where Jaime Cuadriello, one of the Mexican curators of the show, positions the virgin as key in shaping “an Atlantic imaginary,” breaking down all borders, including those highlighted for years by the decolonial debate affecting museums worldwide.

“Artistic language creates an alternative reality. Art allows for the colonization of the collective imagination, as this Marian cult has done,” added the doctor from the National Autonomous University of Mexico in the exhibition presentation. Paula Mues Orts, a doctor at the National Institute of Anthropology of the Latin American country and curator, elaborated: “The debate on decolonization is political, and here we find ourselves in an artistic and historical one.”

It has been four years since the Prado held its first exhibition dedicated to art produced in the American viceroyalties. This pending subject began to be addressed with Tornaviaje (2021) and continues now with Guadalupe. “There is no better way for decolonization than to showcase history,” said Miguel Falomir, director of the Prado, “in this case, bringing visibility to the art created on the other side of the Atlantic.” As the director noted, since his arrival in 2018, he has tried, in his words, “to eliminate prejudices. Art is the result of a series of decisions that have excluded some artistic expressions from the established canon, such as geography, sex, materials… We are committed to aligning with history.”

In the task of depoliticizing the Virgin of Guadalupe, the exhibition is organized thematically to explain how the cult of a Marian figure revealed to an indigenous peasant has reached many countries, mostly former colonies under what was then the Spanish Empire. “One of the successes was its capability to be reproduced. It was said that one of its miracles was that it could not be copied. Artists could create many images in different sizes and formats. That reproducibility enabled the cult and expansion,” explains Mues Orts.

About Guadalupe, Mues Orts states, it was said she was “Creole and an Aztec princess,” “the empress of the Americas,” and was connected to other European Marian icons like the Immaculate or Tota Pulchra. Being a stamped revelation granted her the status of “painting not made by human hand” and thus linked her to the concept of Deus pictor, meaning “the living image of what God the Father imagined,” another narrative Cuadriello translates around the virgin.

“The stamping of her figure from flowers on the cloak of the peasant Juan Diego led theologians to compare the phenomenon to a living relic and an object of veneration,” the curators have explained. One of the images of the virgin is positioned next to the painting The Holy Face, by Francisco de Zurbarán, to equate the veil of Veronica with a piece of rough fabric on which the first Guadalupe was also said to have been miraculously preserved.

All the copies made of her are gathered in the exhibition section called vera efigies, showcasing reproduced pieces with specialized artistic techniques, among others, a Guadalupe painting made of mother-of-pearl, but there are also others of exotic materials like ivory and brass brought through the Manila Galleon. “All of this demonstrates that it was the first globalized Marian image,” emphasize the curators, who have included works from New Spanish and peninsular artists like José Juárez, Juan Correa, Manuel de Arellano, Miguel Cabrera, Velázquez, Zurbarán, or Francisco Antonio Vallejo. This way, it competes for prominence with some ancient masters.

The Prado has gathered almost 70 works, most coming from Spanish heritage (only eight are from Mexico), because a large part of the Guadalupe legacy is on this territory as indicated by the map of the Iberian Peninsula welcoming visitors. There are Guadalupes since 1654 in the Atlantic area, in the center, and in the Cantabrian coast, and it has been present in 18 cathedrals, 13 basilicas, seven collegiate churches, and four Marian shrines with its own cult belonging to a virgin of which one of its first chapters (Nican Mopohua) was written in Nahuatl, the language of one of Mexico’s indigenous peoples. They were sent before 1821, the year of Mexican independence, by immigrants, viceroys, bishops, religious order members, officials, and families linked to transoceanic trade and mining. All of it legal, according to the rules of the viceroyalties.