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

6. Colonial Identity Rhetorics

Chapter 6 Colonial Identity Rhetorics From shortly after the time of European contact, the discourse on America’s ontological makeup emboldened and legitimated Europe’s colonial enterprise. By the eighteenth century, Spanish American intellectuals and artists had entered the debate , complicating the monolithic image of America and its inhabitants that had crystallized in the European mindset over two centuries. An illuminating Peruvian painting dated to the turn of the nineteenth century (fig. 6.1) projects an American perspective regarding the nature of America and its relation to its diverse inhabitants. In the compositional center, an allegorical image of America appears as an enthroned queen, suckling smartly dressed Spanish boys while one African child joins a group of European-looking children that presses around her. An inscription along the composition’s bottom edge reads in part: “Where has it been seen in the world / That which we look at here / Her own sons lie groaning / And she suckles the foreigners.”1 Meanwhile, indigenous children wearing breechclouts and feathered headdresses writhe and weep in anguish and hunger while native royalty observe the scene dismally.2 The gathering takes place in a lush garden that highlights the abundance of America’s natural resources, amid which its native children go wanting, an apparent criticism of Amerindians’ lowly status and dismal conditions in their homeland. This painting is only one facet of a local, American perspective. Sebasti án Salcedo’s 1779 painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe pictures Mary surrounded by various images and an inscription that celebrates the prestige of America and its inhabitants (fig. 6.2). At the top of the composition a host of fluttering putti support a banner that reads, NON FECIT Figure 6.1. Anonymous, An Allegory of America Nursing Foreigners. Ca. 1800. Oil on canvas, 81.3 × 59.7 cm. Private collection (in the public domain). 150 ~ The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico TALITER OMNI NATIONI, or “Nothing like it has been done with another nation,” a passage from the Book of Psalms that was apparently uttered by Pope Benedict XIV (1740–1758) when he first heard the story of Guadalupe and saw a copy of her image.3 By the late viceregal period this quotation had become a powerful expression of New Spain’s prominence in Christendom as the only country in which the Virgin had appeared and left a physical testament (the miraculous tilma image that is enshrined today in the Basilica of Guadalupe). It appears that Salcedo wished to allude to New Spain’s singularity in Christendom by including the landscape scene along the bottom edge of the composition, a feature that is absent in the printed image upon which Salcedo modeled his.4 Here the basilica of Guadalupe and other buildings at the foot of Tepeyac hill—the site of her apparitions to Juan Diego—are easily identifiable and visually associate the Virgin of Guadalupe with Mexico City and, more broadly, New Spain. This association is further evident in the allegorical figure of New Spain, who kneels before the Virgin in the bottom right corner of the composition (across from the figure of the papacy) while holding up an Aztec war club (macahuitl ) and fingering an escutcheon bearing the Aztec topographic symbol for Tenochtitlan, an eagle perched on a prickly pear cactus. Salcedo’s painting and the Peruvian painting show two facets of the highly complex local perspectives on Spanish America’s colonial condition and identity: one criticizes the injustices of Spanish hegemony, especially against indigenes, through the genre of allegory painting, while the other celebrates New Spain’s divine transcendence by elaborating upon a popular religious icon. Both demonstrate that local artists and patrons actively represented various American interests and points of view regarding the nature of their homeland and, by extension, the qualities of their countrymen and countrywomen. In this chapter, I argue that the image of the exceptional woman, as seen in the allegorical figure of America, Salcedo’s Virgin of Guadalupe, and New Spain’s crowned nuns, was among the local emblems through which Spanish America’s artists, male ecclesiastics, and authors articulated important aspects of the ontological identity of the Americas and their inhabitants.5 In particular, the hagiographic genre, a major source of local patriotic discourse, influenced the various manners in which nuns were pictorially rendered. These image types provided their patrons with effigies that embodied local ideals and became objects of patriotic affection. Through these...