The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent by James M. Córdova (review)

James M. Córdova’s clear and concise monograph examines an art form unique to late-colonial Mexico: portraits of nuns crowned with flowers at the time of their profession. The crowned-nun portraits of New Spain had Old-World precursors, particularly paintings of venerable deceased nuns with floral arrangements in Golden Age Spain. But the New-World portraits differed from their European antecedents in two important ways. First, they depicted nuns upon their profession rather than their death. Second, they represented a range of nuns, not just abbesses and nuns renowned for their sanctity.

The first half of the book investigates the iconography of the crowned-nun portraits. Córdova argues that paintings portrayed nuns as brides of Christ and exemplars of the monastic discipline prescribed by their religious orders. Intricate flower arrangements recalled the virtues of purity, virginity, and saintliness. Somber, nondescript backgrounds emphasized withdrawal from the world. The crowned-nun portraits, like most portraits of the age, highlighted social position rather than individual character. The author concedes that imagery contained in the portraits mostly derives from a traditional European-Christian artistic repertoire. He does argue, however, that inclusion of birds, butterflies, and some floral elements stemmed from pre-Hispanic traditions. Córdova concludes that this indigenous iconography carried no subversive content and that nuns, patrons, and artists must have viewed these elements as local expressions of orthodox Catholic symbols.

Córdova’s most significant contribution comes when he places the crowned-nun portraits into the context of the Bourbon Reforms of the late-eighteenth century. Beginning in the 1760s, reforming bishops in New Spain attempted to transform the viceroyalty’s convents. For much of the colonial period, women religious had lived in what was termed the private life. They controlled their own funds, lived in large individual cells with female family members and maids, and interacted frequently with the laity (although separated by a grille) in convert parlors. The bishops imposed the common life on convents—requiring the expulsion of family members, the end to individual funds and cells, and in general a more austere life within the cloister. Córdova notes a marked increase in the production of crowned-nun portraits during the reform period and afterward and argues that families commissioned these paintings to depict their daughters as ideal nuns and to proclaim the validity of local female monastic practices.

Last, Córdova inserts crowned-nun portraits into a larger colonial debate about the inferior nature of the Americas. Beginning in the sixteenth century Spanish authors claimed that the natural environment of the Americas debilitated its inhabitants, rendering them torpid and inferior to Europeans. Creoles (Spaniards born in the New World) countered this discourse on multiple fronts, for example, exalting the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a singular blessing for New Spain. Córdova insists that crowned-nun portraits, by proclaiming the remarkable virtues of New Spain’s nuns, also contested derogatory views of the New World and expressed Creole patriotism.

This is a clearly written and argued book. It would have been ideal, however, if the author had expanded on the implications of the portraits’ placement, which Córdova suggests was within the home of the depicted nun’s family, for their social function. Given their placement within the home, did the portraits speak more forcefully to family pride than to colonial identity? Despite this quibble, this fine monograph will appeal to art and religious historians of colonial Latin America.