From Courtesan to Saint: Embodied Female Space in Juan Correa’s The Conversion of Saint Mary Magdalene

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From Courtesan to Saint: Embodied Female Space in Juan Correa’s The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene JUAN LUIS BURKE

The painting by viceregal Mexican artist Juan Correa (1646–1716) titled The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene has an episodic composition. The painting, carried out in late seventeenth-century New Spain, portrays the saint’s transformation from repentant sinner to hermit in the wilderness, two of the most popular iconographical roles the feminine saint assumed during the mannerist and baroque eras on both sides of the Atlantic. I expand on previous scholarship on Correa’s work that suggested its employment in a casa de recogimiento, a shelter for women who sought to renounce prostitution.1 I argue that the garden’s representation in Correa’s painting, which Ana Laura Torres Herna´ndez interprets as a symbol of New Spain’s supposed Edenic qualities that aimed at highlighting criollo pride, should be read, instead, as an interpretation of a locus amoenus in the context of female monasticism; that is, a spatial metaphor of spiritual love sought by female worshippers through a regimen of prayer. In this context, the garden is a part of a mental and spiritual itinerary directed by the pictorial narrative in Correa’s painting. Additionally, I believe that the episodic nature of Correa’s composition borrowed certain principles developed by the Jesuit propaedeutic (preparatory instruction) of reformatio or spiritual conversion. This instructional system can be seen in the Adnotationes et meditationes in evangelia (Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels) from 1595, prepared by Jero´nimo Nadal at the request of Ignatius of Loyola. It utilized the notion of inventio, a personal sentimental and meditative itinerary prompted by vivid images and text, to construct tropes of contemplative prayer in order to reach reformatio or spiritual conversion. 1. Ana Laura Torres Herna´ndez, “Pecado, recogimiento y conversio´n. Un proyecto contra la prostitucio´n femenina en la ciudad de Me´xico del siglo XVII,” Boletı´n de monumentos histo´ricos – tercera ´epoca, no. 29 (December 2013): 52–71.

First I will discuss the painting’s context, the novohispanic seventeenth century, and the significant factors informing Correa’s work. Next comes a brief survey of the artist’s life and work, moving on to an analysis of the painting, touching upon each of its episodes, and concluding with a discussion on its operative episodic nature and how this characteristic reveals the most innovative aspect of Correa’s painting. THE LONG NOVOHISPANIC SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Within Mexico’s viceregal period, the seventeenth century is a pivotal moment in New Spain’s definition of its sociopolitical and cultural milieu. This era saw a range of interlocking and sometimes contradictory developments that reveal New Spain’s responses to regional, cultural, and political identities in the making. A wealthy criollo elite, the descendants of Spaniards born in New Spain, consolidated their place in novohispanic society, albeit under the restraint of the peninsulares (Spaniards), who barred them from occupying the most important civil and religious positions in the viceroyalty. Additionally, in the northern realms of New Spain, the missionary and colonizing efforts were ongoing, while the viceroyalty’s central regions saw wealthy cities like Mexico City or Puebla consolidate sophisticated urban cultures that were shaped after the models imported from the metropole, Madrid. This era saw the emergence of “republics of letters,” mostly made up of criollos and peninsulares, usually educated clerics and bureaucrats who occupied university lecturer and public service positions, who were diocese priests or owners of printing offices.2 This was the social class that, as Antonio Rubial Garcı´a has declared, “became the main diffusers of symbolic identity 2. For a wonderful study on the emergence of the republic of letters in viceregal Mexico City, see Stephanie Merrim, The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010).

Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture, Vol. 3, Number 2, pp. 29–45. Electronic ISSN: 2576-0947. © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/lavc.2021.3.2.29.

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networks.”3 The period represented, in short, the consolidation of a novohispano intellectual and cultural identity. Citing Rubial again, this was the era of “New Spain’s inclusion in hispanidad and Catholicity,”4 a condition corroborated, for instance, by the poetess-nun Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz’s literary popularity in Spain, or the Puebla priest Alejandro Fabia´n’s epistolary exchanges with Athanasius Kircher.5 However, despite these samples of cosmopolitanism, literary discourses surrounding urban and regional identities also flourished.6 Often, the authors of these literary products—chronicles, loas (theatrical plays), poetry, other literary pieces—were criollos, who, paradoxically and as Jose´ Joaquı´n Blanco has noted, often aspired to be “more Spanish than the Castilians or the Extremadurans, more medieval, more orthodox” than Spaniards themselves. They wanted to be “more punctilious in matters of honor, caste, fame, [and] family name,” something that became evident in the visual and artistic culture of the time, which, consequently and perhaps expectedly, was characterized by a rigid Catholic orthodoxy expressed in its iconographic language.7 THE LIFE AND WORK OF JUAN CORREA

Juan Correa was born in 1646 and lived his entire life in Mexico City.8 The son of a Spanish doctor and a freed Black woman, Correa was one of the most prolific artists of the Mexican viceregal period and ran an extremely prolific workshop.9 During Correa’s lifetime, Mexico City was a thriving and diverse urban center, inhabited by 3. Original: “ . . . se erigieron en los principales difusores de las redes simbo´licas identitarias.” Antonio Rubial Garcı´a, El paraı´so de los elegidos: una lectura de la historia cultural de Nueva Espan˜a (1521–1804), 1st ed. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica [FCE], Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico [UNAM], 2010), 212. All translations by the author. 4. “la pertenencia de Nueva Espan˜a a la hispanidad y a la catolicidad.” Rubial Garcı´a, El paraı´so de los elegidos, 213. 5. Elias Trabulse, “El tra´nsito del hermetismo a la ciencia moderna: Alejandro Fabia´n, sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz y Carlos de Sigu¨enza y Go´ngora (1667–1690),” Calı´ope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry 4, no. 1–2 (1998): 56–69. 6. Rubial Garcı´a, El paraı´so de los elegidos, 213. 7. ”ma´s puntillosos en asuntos de honra, casta, fama, nombre.” Jose´ Joaquı´n Blanco, Esplendores y miserias de los criollos. La literatura de la Nueva Espan˜a, vol. 2 (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 1989), 15. 8. Marı´a Elisa Vela´zquez Gutie´rrez, Juan Correa: “ mulato libre, maestro de pintor” (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 1998), 12. 9. Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, “Unique Expressions: Painting in New Spain,” in Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life. 1521–1821, ed. Donna Pierce, Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, and Clara Bargellini (Denver: Denver Art Museum; Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 66.

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people of differing backgrounds and ethnicities, from merchants and nuns to street vendors and rich hacendados (ranch owners). The city Correa knew was a veritable metropolis that enjoyed a vibrant cultural life. Incidentally, Correa might be the most researched viceregal New Spanish painter to date, as his figure was subject to scrutinous research during the 1990s by a group of scholars led by UNAM professor Elisa Vargaslugo. She and her team assembled a comprehensive catalog of his work and that of his workshop, presenting along the way a body of seminal documents about Correa’s life.10 One aspect Vargaslugo emphasized about Correa’s personal life was his ethnicity. Being the son of a Spaniard and a freed Black slave made Correa a mulato, a racial category employed in New Spain to designate mixed European and African descent. Correa’s mixed ethnicity is relevant, given that social hierarchy and mobility in New Spain were significantly determined by an individual’s “purity of blood.”11 This was the term employed to define a person’s ability to prove their family’s long generational Spanish and Christian condition and, therefore, lack of Jewish, Muslim, Indigenous, or African heritage. In that regard, Correa’s surprising success as a mulato painter and the effect his racial background may have had on his work requires further exploration.12 Artistically speaking, Correa’s work was influenced by the Escuela sevillana (Seville School), as with virtually all remarkable painters of the latter part of the seventeenth century in New Spain. Further, this era saw the arrival of artist Sebastia´n Lo´pez de Arteaga to the viceroyalty, a disciple of Francisco de Zurbara´n, the Spanish master known for his chiaroscuro and naturalism effects, traits that were soon adopted by New Spanish painters.13 In this context of artistic effervescence, Correa’s and other artists’ work, according to Ruiz Gomar, stood out for traits such as his “consistency in the composition of bodies and forms . . . vigor in the characterization of faces, by the effectual 10. Elisa Vargaslugo et al., Juan Correa. Su vida y su obra (Mexico City: UNAM, 1994). 11. On the subject of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), see, for instance, Marı´a Elena Martı´nez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). 12. Elisa Vargaslugo, Juan Correa. Su vida y su obra, vol. 1 (Mexico City: UNAM – Instituto de Investigaciones Este´ticas, 2017), 15–67. 13. Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, “La pintura en la Nueva Espan˜a durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVII,” in El arte en tiempos de Juan Correa, ed. Marı´a del Consuelo Maquı´var (Mexico City: CONACULTA-INAH, 1994), 93–94.

handling of light,” and “naturalistic representation of fabrics and draperies.”14 Ruiz Gomar’s generalizations regarding Correa’s work align with other currents coming from Madrid, such as the employment of vibrant colors, Rubens’s pictorial compositions, and visual dynamism, which complemented the chiaroscuro and naturalism trends introduced by the Escuela sevillana. Conversely, local Mexican artistic traits, which are more difficult to calibrate because they were slight modifications and variations from the European canons regarding iconography and stylistic choices vis-a`-vis their European counterparts, helped define the visual language of the period. In the end, all of these strands merged to define the pictorial output of artists such as Correa, Cristo´bal de Villalpando, or the brothers Nicola´s and Juan Rodrı´guez Jua´rez, some of the most notable artists from the late seventeenth-century novohispanic artistic sphere.15 In general, the output by Correa’s workshop was heterogeneous, with pieces of differing qualities that employed models from both New Spain and abroad, such as work by Rubens.16 Moreover, the work was of a marked iconographic orthodoxy, as the Council of Trent of 1545–63 and the Mexican Church Council of 1585 dictated iconographic practices in the viceroyalty. In effect, the iconographical language of the Counter Reformation took a firm hold in the artistic Hispanic world.17 This condition, coupled with a scarcity of patrons outside the Church, the lack of a viceregal court, and the view that painting was a craft more than an intellectual profession, meant that a great deal of visual artwork during this period was concerned with Catholic orthodoxy.18 Specific subjects and topics were reiterative in seventeenth´ vila, century Mexican viceregal art, such as St. Teresa of A St. Rosa of Lima, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Mary Magdalene, or Marian devotions like the Virgin of Guadalupe, the 14. Original phrases: “la consistencia en la construccio´n de los cuerpos y de las figuras [ . . . ] el brı´o en la caracterizacio´n de los rostros, por el manejo efectista de la luz,” “el acabado ma´s natural en la representacio´n de las telas y los drapeados.” Ruiz Gomar, “La pintura en la Nueva Espan˜a,” 93. 15. Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, “Nueva Espan˜a: en bu´squeda de una identidad picto´rica,” in Pintura de los reinos: identidades compartidas. Territorios del mundo hispa´nico, siglos XVI-XVIII, ed. Juana Gutie´rrez Haces (Mexico City: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 2008), 543–641. 16. Ruiz Gomar, “Nueva Espan˜a,” 621. 17. Jose´ Guadalupe Victoria, “La iconografı´a del arte del siglo XVII,” in El arte en tiempos de Juan Correa, ed. Marı´a del Consuelo Maquı´var (Mexico City: CONACULTA-INAH, 1994), 130–39. 18. Ruiz Gomar, “Unique Expressions,” 47–49.

Immaculate Conception, the Catholic sacraments, as well as a panoply of other subjects in the Catholic universe.19 MARY MAGDALENE, FROM COURTESAN TO SAINT

Little is known of Juan Correa’s The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene: not its exact date of production, nor the patron. Today, it forms part of the Museo Nacional de Arte’s collection in Mexico City, one painting among an ample output of religious art produced by Correa and his workshop. What is certain is that its existence is due to the female saint’s popularity throughout the Hispanic world at the time. Indeed, Mary Magdalene’s conversion had been a popular European and Hispanic artistic subject since the late medieval era, acquiring renewed vitality in the post-Tridentine (after the Council of Trent) world, due to the evangelizing possibilities surrounding Magdalene’s narrative, based on the phenomenological themes of repentance, conversion, and piousness. It is relevant, however, to remember her character’s obscure origin. In the Western tradition, Mary Magdalene as a literary figure is the resulting fusion of several biblical characters: Mary Magdalene, who witnessed Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection; Mary of Bethany, the sister of resuscitated Lazarus; and Mary Magdalene, the repentant sinner who anointed Christ’s feet, as told in Luke 7:47. Furthermore, thanks to the narrative propagated by Pope Gregory the Great, who pronounced in 591 CE that Mary of Bethany and the woman who anointed Christ’s feet were one and the same person, Magdalene came to be identified as a courtesan or prostitute.20 Given the varied characters that Magdalene could embody, she became a central female figure in the Catholic tradition, second only to the Virgin Mary.21 Not only was she intimately associated with Jesus’s life and his piety toward repentant sinners, but also, given Magdalene’s ability to represent an array of feminine sensibilities and affections, her figure became a vanitas, a model that conveyed the transience and futility of life, in contrast to the idealized—and therefore mundanely distant—figure of 19. Victoria, “La iconografı´a,” 131–32. 20. Jane Schaberg, The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament (New York: Continuum, 2002), 82. 21. Michelle Erhardt and Amy Morris, introduction to Mary Magdalene: Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 1.

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the Virgin Mary.22 Magdalene, the repentant sinner, enjoyed an unmatched popularity during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In effect, she embodied the possibilities of renewal in the face of hardships and the indulgence of carnal sin. But also her figure came to represent the resilience of women who endured a social condition that was mostly unforgiving of their faults and whose actions were under constant scrutiny. Magdalene represented the sublimation of the female condition in its fortitude and its self-reflective and affective roles, while conversely suggesting or pointing at traits and conditions scorned by the patriarchy, such as promiscuity, adultery, and prostitution. Therefore, Magdalene came to epitomize a dynamic and varied array of emblematic characters: the witness to Christ’s crucifixion, the woman who bears witness—before any of his male associates—to Jesus’s resurrection, the repentant prostitute who evolves into a loyal and devout Christian, or the mystic that chooses to retire into the desert to lead an ascetic life. In short, Magdalene is the guardian and proud representative of female affections, resilience, honorability, and piety, becoming a model for Christian women taking a path toward personal improvement, seeking a dignified existence in the face of hardship, and longing for spiritual sublimation and redemption. Given the various iconographic roles and rhetorical possibilities, Magdalene’s depictions became a widespread and pervasive topic in early modern religious art. The repentant and weeping Magdalene thus developed into a popular artistic trope for early modern artists, painters, sculptors, and writers alike.23 In the field of painting, during the sixteenth century, representations of Magdalene’s figure came to be characterized by her partial nudity, thereby sexualizing Magdalene’s body. Such is the case of Titian’s famous representation of the female saint from 1531, now part of the Uffizi Galleries collection. Magdalene’s bareness thus became part of the rhetorical repertoire available to exploit her figure: her nudity represented, all at once, her repudiation of vanity, her regained chasteness, but also her sinful past. Put differently, Magdalene’s symbolic nudity inevitably resulted in the confirmation of her feminine and sexualized nature.24 During the seventeenth century, however, depictions of 22. Mary Haskins, Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Riverhead Books, 1993), 224. 23. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 16. 24. Haskins, 227.

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Magdalene became more restrained, the product of a reaffirmed orthodoxy that revised the decorum of religious pictorial representations at the outset of the third session of the Council of Trent (1563), and the eventual appearance of influential texts such as Federico Borromeo’s De pictura sacra (1624), which corroborated and enforced propriety.25 The seventeenth century also marked a new chapter in Magdalene’s artistic representation: her repentance and eventual conversion into a pious Christian. Artemisia Gentileschi’s famed The Conversion of Mary Magdalene, (c. 1620, Uffizi Galleries collection), epitomizes both the caution in the handling of Magdalene’s prudent appearance—as she is painted fully clothed save for her naked shoulders, only a trace of her bosom showing—and a more dramatic, mannerist handling of the body and the emotions evoked by the subject, which had the objective of prompting the viewer into a reflection on the saint’s emotional inner turmoil. As a variant of the repentant sinner, Magdalene’s representation in the grotto, in her role as a mystic retreating to the desert, also acquired popularity in the seventeenth century. In the Hispanic world, specifically in Spanish art, representations of Magdalene demonstrate the saint’s spiritual drama and are often more cautious about the sexualization of Magdalene’s body. An example of this restrained manner of representing Magdalene is El Greco’s (1541–1614) personification of a blonde Magdalene in her grotto, impeccably and prudently dressed. Magdalene appears with a skull and an oil flask at hand (fig. 1). A few decades later, Jose´ de Ribera’s repentant Magdalene in the grotto, from 1641, still shows restraint and prudence in its depiction of Magdalene’s body, wherein the saint is represented as a young and beautiful woman, impeccably dressed and dignified, in an attitude of prayer and retreat at the entrance of a grotto. These visual conventions would, by extension, influence the representations of Mary Magdalene in New Spain. In effect, Baltasar Echave Ibı´a’s Penitent Magdalene (c. 1605, Museo Nacional de Arte), which portrays her with a sorrowful expression as she holds on to a crucifix, a flask of oil nearby, one breast visible while the other is obstructed from view by the saint’s robe, can be said to belong to that tradition (fig. 2).

25. Haskins, 252.

THE REPENTANT SINNER

Domenikos Theotokopoulos, called El Greco (1541–1614), The Penitent Magdalene, c. 1580–85, oil on canvas, 40 x 32¼ in. (101.6 x 81.9 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, purchase by William Rockhill Nelson Trust, 30-35 (photograph provided by John Lamberton; image reproduced with permission)

FIGURE 1.

Baltasar Echave Ibı´a (c. 1580–c. 1660), Penitent Magdalene, c. 1605, oil on canvas, 28 x 33 3=4 in. (71 x 85.5 cm). Museo Nacional de Arte (MUNAL) – Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (artwork in the public domain; photograph © MUNAL-INBA, reproduced with the kind permission of the Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico) FIGURE 2.

As previously argued, in seventeenth-century Mexico, artistic depictions of religious subjects were ruled by orthodoxy. In effect, the norms that dictated artistic representations derived, in turn, from social conventions that dictated women’s expected behavior in this colonial society. These norms stemmed from two sources: the stringent post-Tridentine Catholicism practiced in New Spain and the codes of conduct enforced by a patriarchal society.26 In this scenario, a woman’s life was, in the public mindset, ideally devoted either to a life of religious observance—meaning cloistered in a convent—or to matrimony and child-rearing. Higher education institutions, civil governmental institutions, and guilds all banned women from acquiring an education, occupying public positions, or practicing many professions. At the same time, their legal rights were effectively curtailed vis-a`-vis those of men. However, despite living in a society that insisted on restricting their access to educational, cultural, or political spaces, viceregal novohispanic women still managed to construct a definition of their femininity. This feminine condition was not defined by carving spaces for themselves in the spheres occupied and controlled by men. Instead, their mark and their voices were heard, and their presences felt, in all the spaces they directly or indirectly touched upon, whether in the streets of viceregal cities, the cloistered feminine convents, or the intimate spaces of domesticity. In this way, in seventeenth-century New Spain, the body was employed as a junction between the individual and society, and the vast numbers of female representations in viceregal art act as a visual testament to many of the normative ideals of womanhood.27 A great many of the female forms found in viceregal art promoted idealizations of feminine qualities, with chasteness and 26. Gonzalbo Aizpuru cites the catechism by Gero´nimo de Ripalda, for instance, as a source of Christian moral doctrine applied to everyday life that would have reinforced notions of women’s subservient role vis-a`-vis their male counterparts. See Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Educacio´n, familia y vida cotidiana en Me´xico virreinal, 1st electronic ed. (Mexico City: El Colegio de Me´xico, 2013). 27. On this subject, Donahue-Wallace has investigated the representations of women in viceregal Mexico as depictions of secular and sacred order and as representations of social paradigms. See Kelly DonahueWallace, “Abused and Battered: Printed Images and the Female Body in Viceregal New Spain,” in Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America, ed. Kellen Kee McIntyre and Richard E. Phillips (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 125–47.

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Correa (1646–1716), The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene, late seventeenth century, oil on canvas, 42 3=8 x x 166 cm). MUNAL – Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City (artwork in the public domain; photograph © MUNAL-INBA, reproduced with the kind permission of the Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico)

FIGURE 3. Juan 65 3=8 in. (107.5

piousness being among the principal ones. Juan Correa’s The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene undoubtedly epitomizes some of those normative notions—and it does so by visually conveying a series of spaces that embody feminine sensibilities, affections, and spiritual aspirations. Correa created an allegorical and codified world that visually transports the viewer into spaces that embodied religious and spiritual states of mind, namely repentance, self-reflection, and references to asceticism, mysticism, and female monasticism. These spiritual categories were required in the painting’s visual program, as the painting most likely hung in a female convent or in a casa de recogimiento.28 In Correa’s episodic narrative, the first episode or register, which occupies the left half of the painting (fig. 3), presents us with Mary Magdalene as a repentant figure. Her repentance, as we know, will eventually result in her conversion. Mary Magdalene’s most common 28. Torres Herna´ndez, “Pecado, recogimiento y conversio´n.”

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iconographic attributes are present in the painting, such as the long hair and the various objects that suggest her repentance of a life lived in sin and vanity, such as the opulent clothing, the scattered jewelry on the table and floor, and the mirror. The mirror is an artifact that possesses the capacity to both cultivate vanity and incite selfreflection, ultimately leading to realization. Correa’s Magdalene appears as a young and beautiful woman, and her attire suggests her qualities as a courtesan. Her brocaded skirt is reminiscent of the lavish and curvaceous outfits worn by the saints sculpted in the estofado polychrome technique—prevalent and propagated in New Spain—while her vest and vaporous sleeves subtly suggest her body figure in a cautious but still sensual manner. Alfonso Alfaro wrote the following about viceregal Mexican bodily representation: “Catholic art of the devout body is sensual but restrained, visual but insufficiently tactile, and has no use for a purely descriptive

realism or an explicit eroticism.”29 Indeed, Mexican viceregal art and its representations of the body in the context of a stringent Catholicism revolved around two ideas: a discretionary attitude toward revealing the flesh and an overwhelming opulence in attire. In this manner, the dress in an estofado sculpture or a painted depiction of the body was like a second skin; it demanded intricacy, as it was a substitute for the flesh. Furthermore, viceregal Mexican bodily representations relied on the viewer’s acceptance of a mystical metaphor. In effect, this was an artistic tradition that relied heavily on the body’s representation to spiritually and emotionally move the spectator. It operated between the suggestion of renouncing the lust of the flesh and the veneration of holy images, with both ends solidifying notions of how the celestial and the earthly were intertwined.30 The scene in Correa’s painting represents a woman who—previous to her repentance—was potentially in control of her emotional and sexual expressions. The jewels, the clothing, a mirror, the flask of perfume, and the portrait of a male friend or lover are evidence of this. The scene is set in a chamber that, while architecturally somber, displays characteristics that would have been considered opulent, such as the pillars with ornamental Renaissance motifs, the hanging velvet curtain, the elegant chair on which Magdalene sits, and the tiled floor. Correa depicts a rare scene in seventeenth-century viceregal Mexican art, a period characterized by its stringent religious orthodoxy: that of a woman explicitly displaying traits of her sensuality and sexuality. Nevertheless, the notion of a woman in control of her sexual agency gets shattered the minute the viewer realizes the protagonist’s emotional distress, resonant with the room’s disarray, and embodied in her tears, both the real and the symbolic ones—the ripped pearl necklace loosely hanging from her neck and the scattered pearls on the floor. The scene establishes an emotional tension in the viewer, who wonders about the reasons that would distress this young, beautiful, and seemingly affluent woman. The message reveals itself: a woman’s attempts at a life of vanity and autonomous sexual agency should not be rewarded at all. 29. ”El arte cato´lico del cuerpo devoto es sensual pero contenido, visual pero poco ta´ctil, no tiene lugar para el realismo puramente descriptivo o ´ yeme con los ojos. Elogio del para el erotismo explı´cito.” Alfonso Alfaro, “O cuerpo entrevisto,” in Corpus aureum. Escultura religiosa, uso y estilo (Mexico City: Museo Franz Mayer – Artes de Me´xico, 1995), 24. ´ yeme con los ojos. Elogio del cuerpo entrevisto,” 30. Alfonso Alfaro, “O 8–25.

Charles Le Brun (1619–90), Sainte Madeleine repentante renonce a` toutes les vanite´s de la vie, c. 1650, oil on canvas, 99¼ x 67 3=8 in. (252 x 171 cm). Louvre Museum, Paris (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Muse´e du Louvre, reproduced with permission)

FIGURE 4.

Correa’s inspiration for the composition of the repentant Magdalene derived from European prints. Torres Herna´ndez has suggested Charles Le Brun’s famous painting of the Penitent Magdalene, now in the Louvre (fig. 4), as a source of inspiration. Le Brun’s painting inspired, in turn, numerous engravings, such as the one by Gerard Edelinck (c. 1 6 50 , National Gallery of Victoria), the likes of which might have made their way to New Spain (fig. 5).31 The Le Brun model shows a young Magdalene in contrapposto, almost standing or sitting on a stool, fully clothed and in an interior setting, by a window. As she gazes upward with a contrived look on her face, a cloud hovers above her, the ominous presence of heavenly intercession. Simultaneously, her fanciful, fluid garments lead 31. Torres Herna´ndez, “Pecado, recogimiento y conversio´n,” 52–71.

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well as her blouse’s see-through sleeves. Unlike Le Brun’s model, who appears either standing or on a nonvisible high chair or stool, Correa’s Magdalene is sitting on a luxurious, padded chair with armrests, part of a sparse but stately architectural interior. However, Correa’s most crucial innovation stems from depicting the garden and wilderness observed right outside the room where Magdalene sits. THE GARDEN

F I G U R E 5 . Ge´ rard Edelinck (1 6 1 9 –8 4 ), The Penitent Magdalen, c. 1650, engraving after Charles Le Brun, 21 3=8 x 1 6 in. (54 .2 x 4 0 .3 cm). National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1926. This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of the Joe White Bequest (artwork in the public domain; photograph © National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, reproduced with permission)

the gaze downward, where a small trunk lies open, jewelry scattered on the floor. On a desk or table, a mirror stands next to an oil flask. Indeed, the similarities of composition between the Le Brun model and Correa’s repentant Magdalene are evident. However, Correa’s depiction of Magdalene’s attire, namely, the brocaded skirt with vegetative and floral motifs, as in an estofado sculpture; her vest, which emphasizes Magdalene’s waist; as well as the vaporous sleeves, stand in contrast to the flat patterns, colors, and the flowing and amorphous attire of Le Brun’s model, which neutralize the saint’s female figure, therefore hindering it from sexual objectification. Correa’s variation from Le Brun’s model concentrates on depicting a woman expressing inner turmoil but whose sexual appeal emerges via the brocaded, stamped attire, as 36

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The second register occupies roughly the right half of the painting. While it could be perceived as one single scene, as both are outdoors as opposed to the interior scene with the penitent Magdalene, there is a reason to divide that register into two parts. Correa has reproduced an ordered, carefully designed garden in the lower half, with parterres, paths, and a thin water spring emerging from the middle of each parterre. Meanwhile, the upper part represents an altogether different environment: an untamed wilderness. For one, the designed garden resembles the pictorial representation of an hortus conclusus, an allegory that possessed various readings in New Spain. As is well known, in the Western tradition, the notion of an ideal garden lies on the hortus conclusus, the idea of enclosure originating in Song of Songs 4:12, “my sister, my spouse is a garden enclosed, a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up.” However, the enclosed garden also came to be identified with the Marian quality of virginity and purity, along with the traditional European metaphors that identified a garden or Edenic setting with a place of fertility, birth, and rebirth.32 In Correa’s painting, the enclosed garden’s first association is to that of embodied femininity; the designed garden should be read as an extension of Magdalene’s body as she regains her chasteness. Note that in the early modern period, Magdalene’s beauty was both sensual, as in the depictions of Magdalene as a courtesan, but at the same time, as Haskins has argued, her beauty was also sacred. By raising her eyes to heaven, Magdalene was allegorically alluding to the principles of truth and celestial love.33 In effect, the garden as a symbol of purity also stands in as a spatial symbol of Magdalene’s regained 32. Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 1995), 122–25; Bryan C. Keene, Gardens of the Renaissance (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013), 34; Bryan C. Keene and Alexandra Kaczenski, Sacred Landscapes: Nature in Renaissance Manuscripts (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017), 67–70. 33. Haskins, Mary Magdalen, 238–39.

seventeenth and eighteenth-century New Spain, a good number of laywomen who inhabited convents but had not vowed complete seclusion, exiting and re-entering at will, posed a significant problem for prelates, as it tested the original virtues of complete seclusion: lack of contact with males and thorough devotional observance. This insistence upon the qualities of female monasticism often resorted to invoking the figure of the garden. Moreover, the garden was a synecdoche for the monastic institution, and it was a convent’s most evocative spatial symbol. In effect, the cloister, as the central, most carefully designed, and centralized architectural space in a female convent, can be said to be the spatial heart of female monasticism.34 In his Parayso occidental (1684), a work devoted to praising and recounting the biographies of the nuns at the Royal Convent of Jesu´s Marı´a in Mexico City, the writer Carlos de Sigu¨enza y Go´ngora evoked the virtues of the cloistered garden, referring to it as a human-made paradise and provocatively suggesting its superiority over the Garden of Eden itself. Philippe de Champaigne (1 6 0 2 –7 4 ), The Repentant Magdalen, 1648, oil on canvas, 45 5=8 x 35 in. (1 1 5 .9 x 8 8 .9 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH), museum purchase funded by the Agnes Cullen Arnold Endowment Fund, 70.26 (image reproduced with the kind permission of MFAH)

FIGURE 6.

chasteness and purity. The second association of the garden in the context of Correa’s narrative, however, should be the idea of female monasticism. Indeed, while Torres Herna´ndez has argued that Correa’s painting could have hung at a casa de recogimiento, his Magdalene was a model that appealed not only to repentant prostitutes but to any woman dedicated to a life of religious observance, which is to say, to cloistered women in general. In effect, it was not uncommon for a female convent to possess images of Magdalene as a repentant sinner. Such is the case of The Repentant Magdalen by Philippe de Champaigne (1648, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), originally produced for the Saint Sacrement du Marais convent in Paris (fig. 6). As Asuncio´n Lavrin has documented in viceregal Mexico, the first and foremost expression of fidelity and commitment to a life of female religious observance was the notion of becoming enclosed in a convent. In fact, in

If in that one [referring to the Garden of Eden], over original purity triumphed original sin, in this one [referring to the cloister of the Augustinian Real de Jesu´s Marı´a Convent in Mexico City], divine grace inhabits peacefully; . . . if in that one, a cherub expelled the lone woman inhabiting it due to delinquency; in this one, as seraphim holding on to their love for their spouses, innumerable virgins inhabit it.35

The allusions of female cloister-gardens as a spatial metaphor for female monastics’ state of purity and chasteness can be considered an analogy to Magdalene’s capacity to regain her purity after her conversion and repentance. Furthermore, her conversion and repentance were, in turn, connected to Magdalene’s appeal to eremitic life. In effect, representations of monasticism as a symbol of a garden are recurrent in viceregal novohispanic art. One of the best examples of visual treatments of the cloister as a spatial and symbolic garden of female monasticism and 34. Rubial Garcı´a, El paraı´so de los elegidos, 219. 35. “Si en aquel triunfo´ de la original pureza la primera culpa; en este tiene pacı´fica habitacio´n la divina gracia [ . . . ] y si de aquel desterro´ un querubı´n a una so´la mujer que lo habitaba, por delincuente, en este viven como serafines abrazadas en el amor de su Esposo innumerables Vı´rgenes.” Carlos de Sigu¨enza y Go´ngora, Paraı´so occidental (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2003), 33.

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Unidentified artist, Los desposorios mı´sticos en el Monte Carmelo (The Mystical Marriage at Mount Carmel), c. 1790, oil on canvas. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, CONACULTA-INAH (artwork in the public domain; Arte colonial americano, http://52.183.37.55/, image reproduced with the kind permission of the Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia (INAH), Mexico)

FIGURE 7.

piety, in other words as locus amoenus, is found in the anonymous Mystical Marriage painting, an eighteenthcentury work that today is part of the National Museum of the Viceroyalty’s collection, in Tepotzotla´n, Mexico (fig. 7). The painting depicts a Carmelite nun in the act of engaging in matrimony with Christ, represented as a child; the Virgin Mary holds him as he pierces the nun-bride’s heart with a nail. Behind them, a cadre of saints, such as St. Teresa, St. John of the Cross, and St. Joseph, stand as witnesses to the ceremony. A garden whose center is marked by a fountain represents a Carmelite religious community, seen on the painting’s right-side register. In the scene, a series of Carmelite nuns tend to the garden, watering the flowers, while around them a curtain of trees envelops the whole architectural space. The garden’s 38

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design, as in Correa’s enclosed garden, is marked by parterres; in the case of the Carmelite painting, these are round and delimited by stone ashlars. Nonetheless, the garden as an Edenic setting, a space for introspection, seclusion, and communion with Jesus, is similar in nature to Correa’s garden depiction. There are other instances of the cloistered garden associated with Mary Magdalene’s figure. Such is the case with the representation of an episode of Noli me tangere, attributed to the novohispanic viceregal artist Juan Tinoco, housed in the San Jero´nimo convent in Puebla (fig. 8). This painting shows Christ standing and a kneeling Magdalene beside him in the forefront, while a baroque, enclosed garden with perfectly delineated parterres serves as a backdrop for the scene. Despite the artistic tradition of representing the scene when Magdalene and Jesus meet

´ nimo convent, Puebla, Mexico FIGURE 8. Juan Tinoco (1617–99), Noli me tangere, c. 1660, oil on canvas. Church of San Jero (artwork in the public domain; Arte colonial americano, http://52.183.37.55/, image reproduced with the kind permission of INAH)

after his resurrection in a garden, Tinoco’s piece, in highlighting the representation of a carefully designed garden, serves like Correa’s to visually remind and underscore the importance of cloistered and contemplative life to the convent’s worshippers—the site of encountering Jesus. However, a broader message is implicit in Correa’s and other similar depictions of the garden: that of conveying the importance of female monasticism in novohispanic society. Indeed, female convents in viceregal Mexico not only conformed to the normative ideals of feminine spirituality but were also a relevant aspect of the seventeenth and eighteenth-century viceregal Mexican cities’ cultural lives. As Rosalva Loreto has argued, female convents were crucial to the social lives of cities, and their presence spoke highly of a city’s cultural and economic standing.36 The Mexican viceregal Church, both its mendicant and secular branches, promoted the creation and patronage of such 36. Rosalva Loreto Lo´pez, “La funcio´n social y urbana del monacato femenino novohispano,” in La iglesia en Nueva Espan˜a. Problemas y perspectivas de investigacio´n (Mexico City: UNAM – Instituto de Investigaciones Histo´ricas, 2010), 237–65.

institutions, and their existence regulated and promoted a particular series of social and cultural norms and values. In addition, their importance impacted secular dimensions of everyday life. To a considerable extent, convents gave shape to entire districts’ or barrios’ urban-cultural life through their economic influence: they possessed, in many instances, veritable fortunes in real estate property. In other words, they owned large quantities of residential and commercial real estate and were active participants in urban religious celebrations.37 In this manner, female monastic institutions regulated and framed the communal lives of barrios by reinforcing their sense of belonging to the broader idea of a city’s commonwealth. In essence, the cloister garden in Correa’s painting served as a reminder and visual locus for reflecting on female monasticism as a communal institution, and at an individual level, as a locus for the viewer to situate herself in that locus amoenus, the site of inner recogimiento or spiritual retirement, where engagement in mystical love with Jesus occurred. 37. Loreto Lo´pez, “La funcio´n social,” 237–41.

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THE HERMIT

The message of nature as an embodied symbol is carried over to the upper portion of the right-hand register, which presents us with another famous passage in Mary Magdalene’s life: her retirement into the wilderness to become an ascetic. The grotto setting became the most famous representation of this saint during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Correa’s episodic narrative of Magdalene’s transformation would not have been complete without depicting her retiring into her grotto, located, according to the French tradition, in Provence, in the locality of La Sainte-Baume, close to Marseille. In effect, Magdalene’s isolation in a cave was the final iteration of her penance cycle: renouncing the world’s vanitas. The image of a woman living as a hermit in the wilderness in the early modern period in viceregal Mexico would have been relatively rare. However, the phenomenon of hermits—for the most part, males, retiring into the wilderness to live, frequently in caves similar to the one Mary Magdalene is inhabiting in Correa’s painting, to lead a life of confinement, would not have been foreign to a New Spanish viewer, as there are many documented instances of ascetics throughout seventeenth-century Mexico.38 However, this pictorial tradition in novohispanic art was based on European prints brought to New Spain. Magdalene is typically represented in rags, sometimes shown on a sleeping mat, by the grotto at La Baume, accompanied by the same arrangement of objects: a skull, a crucifix, a book, and the oil flask. Correa could have known engravings such as those by Gerard Seghers and Lucas Vorsterman, one of which depicts Magdalene outside her grotto, reclining on her elbow, closely resembling Correa’s depiction (fig. 9). Alternatively, the engraving by Claude Mellan of a reclining Magdalene on the floor in her grotto, with a series of objects to prompt spiritual reflection such as the skull, a book, and a crucifix, with the ubiquitous oil flask nearby, belong to the same tradition that inspired Correa to produce his representation of the eremitic Magdalene (fig. 10). A novohispanic painting of unknown artist and date, but probably of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth 38. While some of these ascetics managed to construct an aura of sainthood around them, many, instead, acquired an air of suspect heresy. On the subject of religious hermits during the Mexican viceregal period, see Antonio Rubial Garcı´a, Profetisas y solitarios. Espacios y mensajes de una religio´n dirigida por ermitan˜os y beatas laicos en las ciudades de Nueva Espan˜a (Mexico City: FCE, 2006).

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century, depicting a reclined Magdalene in the wild, shows a barer Magdalene that appears in a wilderness, striking some similarities to Correa’s depiction (fig. 11). The Magdalene in the wild episode in Correa’s narrative represented the ideals of introspection and renouncement of earthly goods required of women that were either cloistered or in a casa de recogimiento, undergoing continuous prayer and confessional regimens. As Lavrin affirms, prayer was the central axis of a cloistered woman’s spiritual practices, and the observance of a strict daily individual or communal prayer discipline was of utmost importance to fulfill monastic expectations.39 THE EPISODIC NARRATIVE

In general terms, Juan Correa’s depiction of Mary Magdalene’s conversion narrative is an artifact that visually manages to convey a cycle of embodied female devotional practices. The cycle starts with repentance and selfreflection, embodied in the figure of a grieving Magdalene. It continues with a spatial embodiment of female purity and chasteness in the form of an hortus conclusus, which, in turn, evokes the virtues of female monasticism. Moreover, the cycle ends with an appeal and commitment to a life of seclusion and mysticism, away from the vanitas of life outside the convent, embodied by Magdalene’s representation as a mystic or hermit in the wilderness. In this sense, the episodic nature of the Correa painting constitutes an original and effective pictorial recourse that speaks of the artist’s ability to convey a visual program that was probably proposed or presented to him by the painting’s patron(s). This hypothesis stems from the fact that conventual devotional practices were greatly influenced and promoted by the writings of the likes of ´ vila, St. John of the Cross, or Friar Luis de St. Teresa of A Granada, and particularly, by the theological practices and devotional programs championed by the Jesuit order.40 In this regard, Correa’s episodic composition can be compared with the manner in which the 1595 collection of engravings promoted by the Jesuit theologian Jero´nimo Nadal’s Adnotationes et meditationes in evangelia (Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels) operated. Indeed, the Adnotationes was an ambitious work planned and promoted by Nadal, a close colleague of Ignatius of Loyola, and ratified by the Collegium Romanum, which 39. Asuncio´n Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 96–97. 40. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 96.

FIGURE 9. Lucas Vorsterman (1595–1675), engraving after Gerard Seghers (1591–1651), Penitent Mary Magdalene in a cave, c. 1615–75, print, 10 7/16 x 14 3=8 in. (26.5 x 36.5 cm). Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, accession number RP-P-1883-A-7378 (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.192268)

resulted in a volume that collected 153 outstanding engravings composed by several Flemish artists, among them Hieronymus Wiericx and Marten de Vos, from 1568 to 1577.41 The volume should be regarded as a companion to Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises (1524), which provided Jesuit novitiates with a method to learn to employ, in the words of Walter Melion, “Gospel liturgy into the matter of contemplative devotion,” in other words “the rhetoric of prayer.”42 In effect, each engraving was accompanied by a text that instructed worshippers as they progressed in their spiritual itinerary and consisted of several metaphorical and rhetorical “journeys” that explored pivotal scenes or moments in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. These scenes were depicted through richly detailed landscapes and interior and exterior panoramas, populated by each event’s protagonists. As an example, the engraving 41. Walter S. Melion, “Artifice, Memory, and ‘Reformatio’ in Hieronymus Natalis’s ‘Adnotationes et Meditationes in Evangelia,’” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Re´forme, New Series/Nouvelle Se´rie 22, no. 3 (1998): 5–34. 42. Melion, “Artifice, Memory,” 5–6.

corresponding to the second Sunday of Advent, illustrating how Jesus preaches to John the Baptist’s followers (Matthew 11; Luke 7:18), shows Jesus in the foreground surrounded by the men, while a landscape dotted with sparse constructions and topographical features appears as a natural backdrop to the scene. In actuality, those landmarks in the landscape, built or natural, play a crucial role in the narrative. Each one, identified by a capital letter, matches a letter in the key at the bottom of the image. Thus, we learn that A represents the jail where John was imprisoned by order of Herod Antipas, B represents the Jordan River, and C identifies two men as disciples of John on their way to meet Jesus, and so on (fig. 12). Each engraving in the Adnotationes represents a journey in time and space, where several events and people come together to define critical scenes of Christ’s life, asking the worshipper to engage in an embodied and spiritual manner in each scene. In this context, the topographical and architectural landmarks convert spaces into temporal markers, as the worshipper develops an interiorized oratio or rhetorical narrative. From Courtesan to Saint

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FIGURE 10. Claude Mellan (1598–1688), St. Mary Magdalene Reclining in Her Grotto, c. 1650, engraving, 7 5/16 x 8 13/16 in. (18.6 x 22.4 cm). Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953, accession number 53.601.215 (artwork in the public domain; photograph © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Unidentified artist, Penitent St. Mary Magdalene, c. 1670, oil on canvas. Museo de Arte Religioso del Ex Convento de Santa Rosa, Puebla (artwork in the public domain; Arte colonial americano, http://52.183.37.55/, image reproduced with the kind permission of INAH)

FIGURE 11.

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Hieronymus Wiericx (1553–1619), “Dominica II. Adventvs. Mittit Ioannes duos discipulos ad Iesum,” 1595, engraving, folio height 1 4 9 /1 6 in. (3 7 cm), from Adnotationes et meditationes in evangelia qvae in sacrosancto missae sacrificio toto anno legvntur, by Jero´nimo Nadal, S.J., Antwerp, 1595, page 4V (image kindly provided by John J. Burns Library, Boston College) FIGURE 12.

itinerary, the painting guiding them in their meditatio, which is the transformation of places and events into objects of contemplation that serve as models for different types of meditative prayer. In convents and casas de recogimiento, the backbone of women’s devotional practices was a strict prayer regimen, and the worshippers’ engagement with the Magdalene painting, whether self-guided or as a collective prayer exercise, could have been directed by a practiced priest trained in the Jesuit propaedeutic, such as the Spiritual Exercises or a similar regimen. Melion reports how Jesuit rhetors’ techniques derived from definitio logica, a concise and rigorous means of logical categories, such as causes and effects, which they employed to persuade the worshipper via written rhetoric. Then there was definitio per descriptionem, defined by the Jesuit Melchor de la Cerda, from his propaedeutic Usus et exercitatio demonstrationis (The Use and Practice of Demonstration) of 1598, as “depicting the subject in its colors, so that it stands before the eyes, as if those who hear were not spoken to, but rather seemed to perceive the subject with their eyes,” a notion that applies to visual resources such as the Correa painting.43 Since the central objective of cloistered female religiosity was to attain the love of God and pursue perfection in religious life, which demanded extensive devotional practices such as prayer and spiritual exercises, an artifact such as this painting, crafted in an episodic manner, allowed the worshipper to engage with it as a spiritual itinerary, through prayer.44 Such an artifact would have been favored and useful for the female worshippers employing it in their oratio-meditatio regimens. CONCLUDING REMARKS

The evident difference between the engravings contained in the Adnotationes and the Correa painting is the lack of an accompanying text and the markers identifying each element in the visual and rhetorical itinerary. However, the way the engravings in the Adnotationes and the painting operate pictorially are remarkably similar. To start, both types of artwork rely on the notion of a journey. In Correa’s painting, the journey is the reformatio or spiritual conversion of Mary Magdalene from a courtesan to a hermit in the wilderness. Worshippers, likely cloistered women either in a convent or temporarily interned at a women’s shelter or casa de recogimiento, utilized Correa’s painting to follow Magdalene’s spiritual

Juan Correa’s The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene, of uncertain provenance, could have hung at a casa de recogimiento or a female convent. As noted previously, casas de recogimiento were institutions dedicated to sheltering women who were attempting to abandon prostitution, and the work by scholar Ana Torres Herna´ndez has argued in favor of this thesis.45 However, in Torres Herna´ndez’s analysis, the garden in Correa’s painting is interpreted as a symbol for New Spain’s Edenic qualities, a popular rhetorical trope employed by many 43. Melion, 10–11. 44. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 97. 45. Torres Herna´ndez, “Pecado, recogimiento y conversio´n,” 58–64.

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seventeenth-century writers and chroniclers, such as Agustı´n de Vetancurt, Carlos de Sigu¨enza y Go´ngora, and Father Agustı´n de la Madre de Dios. These chroniclers sought to utilize the figure of New Spain as an Edenic garden as a means of exalting its natural resources and beauty, thereby promoting criollo pride.46 However, if Correa’s painting were the protagonist of devotional practices by women at a casa de recogimiento or other female conventual institutions, Torres Herna´ndez’s interpretation of the garden as a symbol of New Spain’s Edenic qualities would need recalibration. As an alternative, this essay proposes to interpret the garden as an hortus conclusus and a locus amoenus, in other words, as space where, under the principle of composition of place, central to the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and visually exemplified in the engravings in Nadal’s Adnotationes, the worshipper would visualize and place herself in the garden, evoking several concepts related to virginity, chasteness, and a commitment to cloistered life and its institutions. According to this alternative conception, worshippers would follow the painting’s itinerary in three steps. The program begins with Magdalene as repentant sinner, in which the worshipper substitutes herself and engages in self-repentance and self-reflection. Next, the worshipper identifies herself with the garden by evoking the qualities of regained heavenly chasteness and purity, where the garden also acts as locus amoenus, the site where the bride of Christ meets her spiritual spouse. The cycle would end with Magdalene in the wilderness, an image that promoted a commitment to the contemplative life and the renouncement of earthly delights and goods, thereby reaffirming the worshipper’s dedication to her devotional practices. Another important conclusion is that the painting serves to initiate a discussion of how viceregal Mexican art has traditionally adopted a subservient role vis-a`-vis its European counterparts in modern scholarship.47 In other words, novohispanic art continues to be examined in direct comparison to European models, chronologies, and other notions such as invention. As Jonathan Brown wrote, To those who know the history of Spanish art, painting in the Viceroyalty of New Spain looks both 46. Rubial Garcı´a, El paraı´so de los elegidos, 215. 47. Clara Bargellini, “Originality and Invention in the Painting of New Spain,” in Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521–1821 (Denver: Denver Art Museum; Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 79.

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familiar and different. The similarities are easy to see, for New Spanish painting often followed Spanish, particularly Sevillian, models. The differences have proved more difficult to calibrate, in part because they have rarely been closely analyzed.48

In this sense, the Correa painting draws from an extensive European tradition of Mary Magdalene representations. However, the episodic pictorial narrative constitutes an instance of innovation, one of those differences cited by Brown. During the latter part of the seventeenth century, painters such as Juan Correa and Cristo´bal de Villalpando succeeded in establishing a painting tradition that was uniquely novohispanic. Nevertheless, scholars have had to reconcile the apparent contradiction of how viceregal artists continued to rely on copying models brought from Europe, mostly in the form of prints, while at the same time departing from those models to configure a New Spanish artistic tradition. The pinnacle of both Villalpando’s and Correa’s work was the series of paintings they carried out for the Mexico City cathedral sacristy. Aaron Hyman has used these paintings to explicate the notion of invention. His analysis argues that the term inventor, which both Villalpando and Correa once employed alongside their names to sign their works, revealed their desire, and presumably that of other viceregal artists, to stake a claim for originality. However, in seventeenth-century New Spain, where copying models from European prints undergirded various aspects of its artistic tradition, the practice of utilizing European models to implement varied forms of inventiveness should be measured and analyzed on its specific terms, departing from traditional analytical frames, Hyman argues.49 The Conversion of Saint Mary Magdalene can be employed to further explore these issues of artistic invention and originality. While it is evident that Correa drew inspiration from European sources such as Charles Le Brun and Flemish prints, his pictorial arrangement of Magdalene as a sinner in an interior space that connects with an exterior garden setting, and the connection between that register and Magdalene’s eremitic episode, 48. Jonathan Brown, introduction to Painting a New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521–1821, ed. Donna Pierce, Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, and Clara Bargellini (Denver: Denver Art Museum, 2004), 17. 49. Aaron M. Hyman, “Inventing Painting: Cristo´bal de Villalpando, Juan Correa, and New Spain’s Transatlantic Canon,” The Art Bulletin 99, no. 2 (April 3, 2017): 102–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2016. 1249251.

together constitute an unconventional composition in the tradition of representing the saint. It would seem as if Correa’s episodic narrative of Magdalene’s spiritual itinerary was made up of a collage-like series of vignettes drawn from Europeanate models, placed together by Correa to tell a story for a particular purpose: for the painting to serve as a vehicle for ritual prayer, selfreflection, and meditation in female religious settings. In a way, this is what Hyman alludes to in his study when he argues that novohispanic artists “engineered” their own “terms of invention,” thereby departing from the Eurocentric art historical convention of the original and the slavish copy binary. Instead, The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene puts forward the notion that copying, and going even further, “assembling,” pictorial narratives served its particular terms of artistic creation.50 These appear to have been dictated by an artist’s ability to copy, reinterpret, improvise, and even liberate their idioms from the European models they had access to, establishing, along the way, a set of rules of engagement understood and followed by other New Spanish artists.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the Early Modern Conversions Project (earlymodernconversions.com), funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and based at McGill University, and the University of Maryland, College Park, for sponsoring the travel and research that made this essay possible. I would also like to express my gratitude to the reviewers who provided critical feedback that significantly shaped this paper, as well as Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture Editor-in-Chief Dr. Charlene Villasen˜or Black and LALVC Associate Editor Dr. Emily Engel for their support, and Beth Chapple for her invaluable help in editing this essay. ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Juan Luis Burke is assistant professor in the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park. He researches the history and theory of architecture and urbanism since the early modern period in Mexico and Latin America, as well as their connections to Spain and Italy.

50. I am borrowing the terms employed by Hyman in his study, namely engineered and assemblage, to describe Villalpando and Correa’s devices to define how their art would be received. See Hyman, “Inventing Painting,” 114–29.

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