Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas by Jeanette Favrot Peterson (review)

The devotion to Our Lady of Tepeyac and the history of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexican lands are certainly among the most argued, debated, and controversial issues in Mexican historiography and religious history. Debates on the origins of the image have been common since the 1550s, and controversies on the historical legitimacy of this foundational narrative have captured the attention of writers of all walks of life since the publication of Imagen de la Virgen María by Father Miguel Sánchez in 1648.

Aparicionistas and anti-aparicionistas have presented their positions over the centuries since then, even after the publication of the late Edmundo O’Gorman’s Destierro de sombras (1986), a seminal evaluation of sources and traditions. Since no other subject in Mexican historiography has received more attention over time than the history of the guadalupana, it is always tempting to perceive new publications on the subject as coffee-table artifacts, decorative books with nice photographic work and light writing to entertain wide audiences. Despite its high-quality illustrations and production quality, Visualizing Guadalupe is definitely not one of these corporate-sponsored art books.

This engaging work presents a long overdue art history analysis of the iconographic representations of María de Guadalupe between 1550 and 1756, the year in which the Virgin was proclaimed Queen of the Americas. The first chapter examines some of the most representative Black Madonnas of the late medieval and early modern Iberian peninsula and the emergence of the Virgin Mary devotion in the monastery of Guadalupe in Extremadura province. Chapter 2 analyzes the arrival of the Virgin of Guadalupe in her Iberian advocation to South American lands in the colonial period, focusing on the participation of the Jeronymite Diego de Ocaña in the Andes region.

The author continues with the history of the Tonantzin devotion in the Tepeyacac hill in Central Mexico, providing an overview of the frequently cited sources for colonial times, from Fray Bernardino de Sahagún to Lorenzo Boturini. Chapters 4 and 5 provide a history of the Guadalupana veneration in New Spain, focusing on material representations in public devotional art. The following chapters deal with the analysis of textiles, clothing, embodiment, and authorship in sacred art and public representations of the Virgin of Guadalupe in colonial Mexico. Chapters 8 and 9 provide an analytical perspective on devotional artworks as representations of thanksgiving by private individuals and public authorities in the viceroyalty, along with some examples in history of thanksgiving as a public ritual in central Mexico in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Chapter 9 provides additional information about the proliferation of Guadalupe images in the transatlantic network of Spanish economic and political elites, particularly in Andalucía in Southern Spain.

Visualizing Guadalupe is an ambitious project that challenges the reader to see the transformations in the devoción guadalupana through a critical lens by incorporating the analytical tools of art history and current scholarship on sacred art. While the book may not be as comprehensive or exhaustive in its study of the devotion beyond sacred art and devotional objects, the examples selected certainly offer a fresh and absorbing light for envisioning el arte guadalupano in its own specificity and uniqueness. The ideological analysis of the images produced in connection with the veneration leads the reader not only to recognize a line of investigation distinct from the traditional one provided in orthodox texts, but also to appreciate the nuances and transformations in the Guadalupe phenomenon in colonial times.

The book expands the understanding of the connections between sacred representations and the ways they were envisioned by different communities of the faithful. Moreover, it represents a positive contribution to the history of seeing religious material culture as it explores the devotional artifacts and sacred representations of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Future researchers on Latin American sacred art and Mexican culture...