The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent

5. The Profession Portrait in a Time of Crisis

Chapter 5 The Profession Portrait in a Time of Crisis In 1723 don Luís de la Peña, a Mexico City rector and Inquisition official, stated matter-of-factly that many more women than men experienced God’s mysteries through visions and revelations.1 This was a direct result of their rich interior, or contemplative , lives, especially as religious. In the monastic realm, nuns and priests were to partake in the active life (vita activa), which stressed human relations and physical mortification, as well as the contemplative life (vita contemplativa), which stressed an interior spirituality that, especially for women, opened one up to mystical experiences and communication with the spirit world.2 As priests, men experienced a broader array of public ministries (preaching and administering the various sacraments, for example) that specifically pertained to the vita activa. This gendered distinction was consolidated during the Counter-Reformation; however , it had been established in Spain earlier by the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, who sought to distinguish between men’s and women’s religious roles in an effort to shore up the Crown’s power within the Church. Consequently, the early modern Hispanic world considered nuns to be indispensable advocates in spiritual matters, but ultimately subordinate to male ecclesiastical authority. For these reasons, New Spain’s portraits of male religious (see, for example , fig. 2.3) emphasize their sitters’ office and administrative or scholarly accomplishments (conventional signs of rational masculinity and public ministry), while in their profession and funerary portraits nuns are portrayed as Christ’s cloistered brides (employing the language of mystical femininity) and exemplary members of their religious orders.3 As paragons of religious excellence, nuns were considered to be on the The Profession Portrait in a Time of Crisis ~ 123 “road to perfection” (camino a la perfección), that is, to the realization of their full spiritual potential. As Torres stated in his Directorio, written for the novices of San Felipé de Jesús convent in Mexico City, “The contemplative life is more perfect [than the active life] and was the better part that the Magdalene chose for herself.”4 A nun who successfully followed this road/method was called “perfect” (perfecta religiosa), meaning that she excelled in fulfilling her monastic vows and conformed wholly to the rules and constitutions of her order. However, she rarely accomplished this ideal immediately. Despite the traditional image of the sequestered nun in colonial Latin America, nuns and convents were an integral component of the larger society and contributed to it on multiple levels. In New Spain’s early years, benefactors founded and sustained convents, establishing longlasting relationships that benefited them, their families, and the nuns they sponsored. Lay society and convents became dependent on each other in financial and religious matters, so that what happened in the secular world reverberated in religious communities, and vice versa. Thus, when widespread colonial reforms altered New Spain’s political, ecclesiastical, and economic landscape in the second half of the eighteenth century, their effects quickly penetrated the cloisters. This altered convents’ relations with the larger society and initiated a kind of identity crisis for many of New Spain’s nuns, who argued that the reforms prevented them from fully achieving their religious obligations and spiritual potential. Significantly, the years of monastic reforms (1760s–1770s) and the following decades in which they were policed mark the precise moment in which crowned-nun portraits, and the profession portrait especially , proliferated in New Spain. The reformers demanded that all nuns adopt the more austere existence that was characteristic of the Capuchins and Carmelites. In response , many protesting nuns and their benefactors used the profession portrait to articulate the conditions they deemed necessary to fulfill their social and spiritual obligations, and realize their full potential as brides of Christ and perfectas religiosas. The genre utilized normative gender values associated with the vita contemplativa that historically applied to nuns, but in a manner that maintained a critical relation to the Church’s current interpretation of them, especially for those orders that were most affected by the reforms. One may consider a group of these works, in part, as a form of agency in which nuns and their patrons strategically accessed the feminine models of mystical marriage and interior spirituality in order to reify a method of religious life that was predicated on a 124 ~ The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico system of mutually beneficial relations that colonial...