The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico: Crowned-Nun Portraits and Reform in the Convent 9780292753150, 2013016387, 0292753152

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T h e A rt of P rof e s si ng i n B ou r b on M e x ic o

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University of Texas Press

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Au s t i n

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Crowned-Nun Portrait< and Reform in the Convent

The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico by Ja m e s M . C ór d ova

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This book is a part of the Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture publication initiative, funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

Copyright © 2014 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2014 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper). Li br a ry of Congr e ss Cata logi ng -i n-Pu blicat ion Data Córdova, James M., 1974– The art of professing in Bourbon Mexico : crowned-nun portraits and reform in the convent / James M. Córdova. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-75315-0 (hardback) 1. Crowned nun portraits. 2. Portrait painting, Mexican— 18th century. 3. Art and society—Mexico—History—18th century. 4. National characteristics, Mexican, in art. I. Title. ND1312.M44C67 2013 757.0972′09033—dc23 2013016387 doi:10.7560/753150

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For my parents, Aniceto and Angélica Córdova, con amor, respeto y agradecimiento. And in memory of my grandparents, Aniseto and Patrocinia Córdova and Alfredo and Socorro Durán.

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C on t e n t s

List of Illustrations ix List of Abbreviations xiii Acknowledgments I n t roduct ion

xv

1

Ch a p t e r 1 Women’s Religious Pathways in New Spain

14

Ch a p t e r 2 New Spanish Portraiture and Portraits of Nuns

35

Ch a p t e r 3 Euro-Christian Precedents in the Crowned-Nun Image

69

Ch a p t e r 4 Indigenous Contributions to Convent Arts and Culture

93

Ch a p t e r 5 The Profession Portrait in a Time of Crisis Ch a p t e r 6 Colonial Identity Rhetorics E pi logu e

122

148

173 Notes

179

Glossary 215 Bibliography 219 Index

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I l lu s t r at ion s

0.1. Anonymous, Sor María Francisca Josefa de San Felipe Neri 0.2. Juan Correa, Saint Rose of Lima

3

5

1.1. Anonymous, Traje de las Religiosas de los Conventos de México, de los Colegios y Recogimientos 16 1.2. Anonymous, Sor Ana María de San Francisco y Neve 1.3. Anonymous, Sebastiana Inés Josepha de San Agustín

27 29

1.4. Miguel Cabrera, Sor María Narcisa / Doña Ana María Pérez Cano 29 2.1. Juan de Villalobos, Madre María de Guadalupe 2.2. Titian, Philip II in Armor

36

39

2.3. Anonymous, Portrait of Archbishop Fray Juan de Zumárraga 41 2.4. Anonymous, Madre María de Jesús Tomelín

43

2.5. Anonymous, Doña María Moreno y Buenaventura

45

2.6. Juan Patricio Morlete Ruíz, Sor María Francisca de San Pedro 2.7. José de Alcíbar, Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo 2.8. Anonymous, Sor Mariana de la Cruz y Austria

47

49

50

2.9. Attributed to Francisca de Ortiz Sotomayor, Madre Mariana de San José 52 2.10. Anonymous, Sor Margarita de la Cruz

53

2.11. Anonymous, Madre María de la Encarnación

54

2.12. Anonymous, Madre Matiana Francisca del Señor San José

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55

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2.13. Anonymous, Madre María de San José

57

2.14. José de Alcíbar, Madre María Ana Josefa de Señor San Ignacio 2.15. Anonymous, Sor María Engracia Josefa del Santísimo Rosario 2.16. Anonymous, Madre María Salvadora de San Antonio

59 62

62

2.17. Attributed to José de Alcíbar, Madre Rosa María del Espíritu Santo 63 2.18. José del Castillo, Madre María Clara Josefa

63

2.19. Anonymous, Madre María Antonia de Rivera

65

3.1. Anonymous, Virgin of the Immaculate Conception as Protector of the Capuchin Order of Nuns 71 3.2. Anonymous, Hortus conclusus 73 3.3. José de Ibarra, Christ in the Garden of Virtues

74

3.4. Anonymous, Symbolic Nuptials of Christ and a Religious Soul

77

3.5. Anonymous, Don Manuel Payno de Bustamante and His Wife

79

3.6. Anonymous, Tota Pulchra 81 3.7. Anonymous, Dormition of the Virgin 82 3.8. Cristóbal de Villalpando, Assumption of the Virgin

84

3.9. Anonymous, Coronation of the Virgin 85 3.10. Diego de Borgraf, Saint Catherine of Alexandria

87

3.11. Attributed to Angelino Medoro, Saint Rose of Lima 4.1. Anonymous, Sor Juana María de Señor San José

98

4.2. Anonymous, Sor María Joaquina de Señor San Rafael 4.3. Anonymous, Sor Manuela de Mesa

89 98

98

4.4. Attributed to Juan Rodríguez Juárez, Desposorio de Indios 4.5. Sebastián López de Arteaga, Marriage of the Virgin

102

104

4.6. Anonymous, flower artist, from the Florentine Codex

106

4.7. Anonymous, nobleman receiving flowers, from the Florentine Codex 106 4.8. Anonymous, Sor María Juana de Señor San Rafael y Martínez 4.9. Anonymous, Sor María Vincenta de San Juan Evangelista

108

108

4.10. Anonymous, Madre Ana María de la Preciosa Sangre de Cristo

108

4.11. Anonymous, married couple, from the Codex Borgia 110

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Illustrations

xi

4.12. Anonymous, Xochiquetzal, from the Codex Borgia 110 4.13. Anonymous, detail of a paradisiacal mountain scene, Teotihuacan 111 4.14. Anonymous, goddess and priests in a paradisiacal scene, Teotihuacan 112 4.15. Anonymous, Sor María Manuela de Señor San Ignacio 4.16. Anonymous, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios

114

117

5.1. Anonymous, Dominican nuns entering the Convent of Santa Catalina de Siena, Valladolid 127 5.2. Anonymous, Sor Jacinta María Nicolasa de Señor San José 5.3. Anonymous, Sor Ana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad

130

140

5.4. Anonymous, Sor María Manuela Josefa de Zamacona y Pedraza

140

5.5. Anonymous, profession portrait of a Conceptionist nun 144 5.6. Anonymous, Sor Ana Rita de Guadalupe

144

6.1. Anonymous, An Allegory of America Nursing Foreigners 6.2. Sebastián Salcedo, Virgin of Guadalupe

149

151

6.3. José Joaquín Magón, Del Español, y la Yndia nace el Mestizo, por lo común, humilde, quieto, y sensillo 154 6.4. Juan Manuel Yllanes del Huerto, The Preaching of Saint Thomas in Tlaxcala and the Introduction of the Veneration of the Holy Cross 160 6.5. Francisco Sylverio, Madre María de San José 6.6. Miguel Cabrera, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

163 166

6.7. Anonymous, Mapa de la Alameda, Paseo la Muy Noble Ciudad de México 168 6.8. Anonymous, Sor Juana de la Cruz

171

7.1. Anonymous, portrait of a crowned nun 175 7.2. Ray Martín Abeyta, Rosario de Besos 7.3. Joseph López, Monja Coronada

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176

176

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A bbr e v i at ion s

AGI

Archivo General de las Indias (Seville)

AGN

Archivo General de la Nación (Mexico City)

AHAM

Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México (Mexico City)

BNAH

Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Mexico City)

BNE

Biblioteca Nacional de España (Madrid)

CONACULTA Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes INAH

Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia

INBA

Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes

LALTU

Latin American Library, Tulane University (New Orleans)

UNAM

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

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Ac k now l e dgm e n t s

W

i t hou t a n um be r of f r i e n ds, m e n tors, colleagues, and institutions, I could not have accomplished this project. First, the William J. Fulbright Commission and COMEXUS funded the research portion by awarding me a fellowship to conduct dissertation research in primary sources in Mexico. Later, an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship gave me the time and resources that I needed to further develop my ideas and writing as a postdoctoral fellow in Latin American art at Pomona College. Further support from the Mellon Foundation, through the University of Texas Press’s Latin American and Caribbean Arts and Culture publication initiative, as well as the College Art Association’s Millard Meiss Publication Fund, helped with expenses incurred in publishing this book. In Mexico City, the staff and faculty of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) kindly gave me access to their rich visual and scholarly resources. In particular, I am indebted to Clara Bargellini, who encouraged my research ideas and objectives. Her questions and suggestions early in the process helped me to discern what paths of investigation would provide the greatest yields. I also extend my thanks to the staffs of the Instituto’s library (the Biblioteca Justino Fernández) and visual resources center (the Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint). Similarly, my thanks to the very capable staffs of the Biblioteca Samuel Ramos (UNAM), the Fondo Reservado of the Biblioteca Nacional de México, the Archivo General de la Nación (AGN; Mexico City), the Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México (AHAM; Mexico City), the Archivo del Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia (BNAH), and, in Spain, the Biblioteca

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The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico

Nacional de España (BNE; Madrid) and the Archivo General de las Indias (AGI; Seville). The resources and collection of the Museo Nacional del Virreinato in Tepotzotlán were especially integral to my research. During my tenure in Mexico I had the good fortune to attend a scholarly symposium at this museum that was put together in conjunction with a large exposition of crowned-nun portraits from Latin America and Spain. There I met, learned from, and exchanged ideas with an international group of leading scholars on female monasticism in colonial Latin America. In particular, I would like to thank Manuel Ramos Medina, the late Josefi na Muriel, María Concepción Amerlinck de Corsi, and Sor María de Cristo Morales for their enthusiasm for my project and individual suggestions and research leads. Among all these scholars, the astute insights, motivation, and generosity of Alma Montero were unparalleled. Her work on monjas coronadas and female monasticism in colonial Latin America provided a point of departure and a measuring rod for my own work. I also owe a substantial debt of gratitude to my graduate advisor, Elizabeth H. Boone, who deeply enriched my experience at Tulane University, where I began my studies in Latin American art history. Elizabeth always listened carefully to my ideas and encouraged me to articulate them with the greatest clarity and depth. Her research interests, many of which bridge the old pre-Columbian/colonial divide, have informed many of my own scholarly pursuits and continue to fuel my enthusiasm for this still-growing field of study. Similarly, I would like to thank Susan Schroeder, who supported my research at Tulane and deepened my exposure to interdisciplinary scholarship, the New Philology, and an ethnohistorical approach. Additional thanks to the Department of Art and Art History and the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University, whose consistent support benefited my education and research on this and other projects. After my time at Tulane, Frances Pohl’s mentorship at Pomona College helped me to develop some of my thoughts on early modern portraiture and images of women. Thereafter, the comments of Fred Luciani, Camilla Townsend, and Asunción Lavrin, all of whom read earlier versions of chapters or proposals for this book, helped me to hone my focus. During my fi nal push in completing this book, my colleagues in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Colorado at Boulder gave me unparalleled support. Among them, I would like to thank Claire Farago, with whom I have had many intellectually invig-

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Acknowledgments

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xvii

orating conversations that have informed my scholarly interests, and Lia Pileggi, whose technical expertise was instrumental in the preparation of my images. I also extend my sincere thanks to Nancy Mann, whose comments, suggestions, and edits considerably improved this book, and to Marc Eagle and Christoph Rosenmüller, who helped me refi ne my knowledge of viceregal bureaucratic terms and administrative history. Finally, the patience and encouragement that my parents, Aniceto and Angélica Córdova, have always shown me made my experience developing this book not only a scholarly exercise but one of personal growth and cultural reflection. Their long-standing interests in art, history, culture, and things Latin American have shaped my own interests and propelled my motivation to learn. Indispensably, they also helped me translate some difficult colonial Mexican documents; their native New Mexican Spanish often came to my rescue when my own Spanish failed me and dictionaries could not assist. I extend them my greatest thanks and dedicate this work to them.

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T h e A rt of P rof e s si ng i n B ou r b on M e x ic o

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I n t roduc t ion

Oh, most high-standing of the Lord’s Brides, rightfully compared to the Angels of Heaven! Oh, most high-standing, that not only measures up to the angels, but in a certain manner, exceeds them! Don J ua n de Pa la f ox y M e n doz a, “Pa r ec e r,” i n R EG L A D E L G L O R IO S O D O C T O R D E L A IG L E S I A N U E S T RO G L O R IO S O PA D R E S A N AG U S T Í N , Q U E H A N D E G UA R D A R L A S R E L IG IO S A S D E L O S C O N V E N T O S D E S A N TA C ATA R I N A D E S E N A Y S A N TA I N É S D E MO N T E P O L I C I A N O , D E L A O R D E N D E N U E S T RO PA D R E S A N T O D O M I N G O

(1773)1

I

n Bishop Pa la fox y M e n doza’s j ubi la n t stat e m e n t, he elevates nuns, whom he calls “the Lord’s Brides,” above the angels of heaven. His accolade, which appears in the Rules and Constitutions of Puebla’s convents of Santa Catarina and Santa Inés, would have delighted its readers. After all, at the moment a woman took the solemn vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure, she immediately elevated her spiritual and social rank by symbolically marrying Christ and thereby becoming a kind of queen. In New Spain, the “bride of Christ” designation endowed nuns with a degree of prestige and agency that laywomen generally lacked. In this male-dominated society, the convent gave women relative autonomy as well as opportunities to become administrators and models of spiritual excellence. Their direct relationship with Christ could conceivably bypass the priest’s mediation between God and his people. Yet, by virtue of their sex, nuns were also subject to a pervasive Euro-Christian con-

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The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico

struct that held women to be sinful, irrational, and in constant need of male supervision. Considered naturally corrupt, women were to model themselves after the Virgin Mary, who was intrinsically pious, humble, and obedient. Women in New Spain navigated between these gendered markers throughout their lives. Nuns in particular found their greatest agency as Christ’s brides, a title through which they could, and did, confront the Church’s authority when they found it intolerable. Although hyperbolic, Palafox y Mendoza’s declaration clearly shows the value of female monasticism in New Spain, a society in which social honor was often bound up in religious matters. As if to emphasize their singular distinction as Christ’s brides, New Spain’s nuns put on great floral crowns and held flowery staffs and other rich trappings in their profession and funeral ceremonies, thereby denoting the high regard with which their relationship to Christ invested them. By the eighteenth century, New Spaniards so revered their nuns that they developed a local tradition of painted portraits, today called monjas coronadas (“crowned-nuns”) portraits, whose sitters don the regal trappings of religious profession and mystic marriage. Today these portraits are recognized as a significant painting type in New Spanish visual culture. A brilliant example is Sor María Francisca Josefa de San Felipe Neri’s profession portrait, in which the sitter stands in a full-length, threequarter pose, exuberantly garbed in a flowing white robe and a bodylength crimson cape that streams elegantly over her shoulders (fig. 0.1). Just below her chin, a circular plaque—called an escudo de monja (nun’s badge)—features a painted rendition of the Virgin Mary. A neatly pleated rectangular scapular runs down the center of her robe, while a black veil and crown strewn with flowers, artificial butterfl ies, and angel figurines frame the solemn expression of a young woman who has just metaphorically renounced the world and married Christ. She stands in a dark, ambiguous setting that emphasizes her detachment, and balances an elegant statue of the Christ Child, which holds a sprig of flowers in one hand and, in the other, a cross with a flowery base and a small lamb figurine. Additionally, she carries a staff exploding with colorful flowers and miniature figurines of birds, butterfl ies, and the saints. The inscription along the bottom edge of the canvas identifies her by her religious name, convent, and age at profession: “Portrait of Sor María Francisca Josefa de San Felipe Neri, professed in the convent of [San Jerónimo] of this city of Puebla on 26 April of the year 1767 at the age of . . .”2 Many contemporaneous profession portraits also list their sitters’ parents, hometown, and, in some examples, date of death, a de-

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Introduction

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F igu r e 0.1. Anonymous, Sor María Francisca Josefa de San Felipe Neri, profession portrait ( Jeronymite). 1767. Oil on canvas, 181 × 121 cm. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

tail that would have been added posthumously. The kind of biographical information provided in these inscriptions anchors their sitters to the secular world and historical time, which are easily lost track of in the otherworldly image of the crowned nun. Sor María Josefa’s portrait is remarkable not only for its visual rich-

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ness, which captures the aesthetic complexities of the baroque in New Spain, but also for its blending of the mundane aspects of popular portraits with the divine qualities of religious painting in the image of a common nun. This convergence was no small matter in a society whose religious affairs were strictly regulated by the Inquisition, an office of the Church that, among other things, demarcated mundane subjects from divine ones and forbade the conflation of the two. Portraits like Sor María Josefa’s strike a delicate balance between these two realms through the theme of nuptial mysticism: the idea that upon professing, a woman marries Christ and therefore can rise above the “natural limits” of her sex. Nuptial mysticism and its associated crowns and floral accoutrements link portraits of newly professed nuns with images of the Virgin and popular female saints that stood as models of feminine piety and sanctity for Spanish America’s nuns. For example, a painting of Saint Rose of Lima by the New Spanish artist Juan Correa (active 1666–1739), executed nearly one hundred years before Sor María Josefa sat for her portrait, adheres to the saint’s standardized iconography and demonstrates the early demand for images of this Peruvian mystic, the Americas’ first saint (fig. 0.2). Framed by fourteen roundels that picture scenes from her life, Saint Rose appears in the center of the composition, underneath two rainbows. Dressed in a Dominican habit, she wears a wreath of roses and carries a rose bouquet that contains an image of the Christ Child, much as Sor María Josefa does in her profession portrait. She also grasps a lily branch and a bunch of roses while standing amid a sprinkling of flowers. In a continuous narrative that appears twice in the background, she is interacting with the Christ Child. To the right of her main figure they are pictured in a garden that symbolizes her virtue and spiritual fecundity. In a roundel just above the main image (second from the right), she is shown in her mystical marriage, the most important event of her life, through which she experienced her spiritual apotheosis. As in Correa’s painting, New Spain’s portraits of crowned nuns feature their subjects in a perfected spiritual state. These works constitute a distinctive brand of New Spanish portraiture, and those that picture recently professed nuns are entirely unique to New Spain. Despite this exclusivity, the tradition of depicting nuns with floral accoutrements originated not in the Americas but in Europe, where funerary portraits of convent founders and abbesses wearing floral wreaths were commissioned at the time of their death. This practice eventually made its way to Spanish America and developed along its own lines, especially in New

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Introduction

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F igu r e 0.2. Juan Correa, Saint Rose of Lima. 1671. Oil on canvas. Convento dominico, Mixcoac, Mexico City. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

Spain, where it was often commingled with Mesoamerican customs and cultural knowledge that survived the Conquest and transformed in the colonial period to meet the specific needs of that new social, religious, and cultural context. The image of the New Spanish nun, in which the sitter dons the re-

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The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico

gal trappings of her marriage, carries notions of prestige, wealth, and authority that challenge the popular conception of the modest, obedient, and ascetic nun. This latter model, widely recognized today in popular figures like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, also had currency in early modern times and is based on the conventional image of the Virgin Mary, which personifies the traditional feminine qualities of passiveness, gentleness, and forgiveness, attributes, among others, that women were expected to spend their lives perfecting.3 Both models stood in opposition to the normative understanding of women in the early modern Hispanic world, which represented them as morally weak, intellectually frail, and dangerously vulnerable to sin, like the fi rst woman, Eve. It should come as no surprise, then, that members of the social elite strategically conflated their prestige with the moral esteem and spiritual rank of their daughters who entered the cloister, a topic that some scholars have addressed in their studies of crowned-nun portraits. Most extant publications on crowned-nun portraits focus on the paintings’ Euro-Christian iconography and stylistic influences, or treat the images as a springboard for better understanding the religious ceremonies surrounding profession and death that took place in every convent. The fi rst major publication, Retratos de monjas (1952), examines the portraits’ iconographical content, identifies the various religious orders represented in them, and enumerates the occasions for which the portraits were commissioned: profession and death. The authors, Josefina Muriel and Manuel Romero de Terreros, also respond to Manuel Toussaint’s characterization of eighteenth-century painting in New Spain as “decadent.”4 They argue that the visual richness of the portraits is neither frivolous nor vain, but an expression of the mentality of the period.5 This mostly descriptive analysis treats the portraits as uncomplicated tableaux vivants of the monastic life, rather than highly nuanced products of cultural influences and particular social interests that bridged the secular and religious realms of viceregal society. In a 1978 essay, Rogelio Ruiz Gomar noted that the uniqueness of crowned-nun portraits lies in their representation of the religious and worldly realms in which nuns operated daily. Again, the assumption is that art reflects life as its sitters experienced it.6 Yet Ruiz Gomar does not identify the particular worldly or religious forces that affected nuns, nor does he show how the portraits were influenced by them. Instead, he focuses on style and period. Calling attention to their characteristic visual complexity, he notes that the portraits’ “exaggerated decoration and artifice” are fundamental and “fitting expressions of Baroque art.”7

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Introduction

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Sensitive to the stylistic traits of viceregal painting, he distinguishes portraits painted in the “exaggerated” baroque style from those painted in the more modern neoclassical style, which are notable for their comparative visual restraint.8 This kind of stylistic analysis, however, fails to take into consideration the more pressing social forces that were directly responsible for the development and proliferation of the profession portrait, as well as for the “baroque” or “neoclassical” manner in which its sitters were pictured. Kirsten Hammer’s essay on crowned-nun portraits, part of a 2004 exhibition catalogue on portraiture in Latin America, is primarily a study of the portraits’ rich iconography, which she links to the theme of mystical marriage. Additionally, Hammer establishes the portraits as records or impressions of the rituals of profession and death inside New Spain’s convents and considers their biographical inscriptions as indicators of families’ desires to associate themselves with the sitters. The first scholar to consider how the portraits functioned on a social level, beyond their role as family mementos, she notes that the “regal” style of the portraits (what Toussaint would have identified as “decadent” and Ruiz Gomar as “Baroque”) was an important means by which patrons bolstered their own moral and social distinction in viceregal society.9 Problematically, however, she asserts that the profession portrait predates the death portrait, but offers no evidence to support this claim.10 In fact, while it is currently impossible to determine which portrait type came fi rst, the available evidence would seem to argue against Hammer. In her 2007 essay, Elizabeth Perry also touches on the social relevance of crowned-nun portraits, although in broader terms than those used by Hammer. She states that crowned-nun portraits, as well as nuns’ badges, were emblems of Creole (Euro-American) pride and expressions of a local sense of providential destiny.11 Her astute analysis of Conceptionist order portraits has the unintentional outcome of homogenizing all profession portraits, which represented various religious orders and interests, but her connection of the portraits to local religious identity formation is notable. This is a topic that I have also addressed, specifically in light of the colonial appropriation of the pre-Hispanic past in the literary production of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, a late seventeenthcentury priest, intellectual, and Creole patriot who strategically compared Aztec priestesses to New Spain’s nuns to establish New Spain’s parity with, or even supremacy over, Europe.12 Finally, in the most recent and comprehensive study on crowned-nun portraits, Alma Montero de Alarcón treats these works as ways to eluci-

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date nuns’ profession and death rituals. Echoing Muriel and Romero de Terreros, she deduces that the religious insignia that embellish the sitters were not intended as pure decorative elements added to improve the portraits’ aesthetic quality. Rather, they had clear iconographical meanings that directly alluded to the ritual occasions for which they were painted.13 Montero astutely recreates the ritual lives of nuns through an iconographical analysis of crowned-nun portraits, her reading of period documents that relate to convent life, and the incorporation of recent archaeological fi ndings that provide material evidence for nuns’ death rituals. As with the other studies discussed here, Montero does not directly account for the impact that ecclesiastical reforms of the late eighteenth century had on the proliferation of the profession portrait, as well as the manner in which its sitters are portrayed. None of these studies acknowledges local indigenous influences on the image of the crowned nun. Broadly speaking, the extant body of crowned-nun portrait studies largely fails to relate the portraits to the immediate social, economic, political, and multicultural contexts that informed their meaning and the reasons for their production.14 Using this important body of scholarship as a springboard, the present book asks why crowned-nun portraits, and especially the profession portrait, were in such demand in the mid to late eighteenth century in New Spain. Also, what distinguishes these works from their European and South American counterparts? That is, precisely what makes them uniquely New Spanish? In answering these questions, I situate crowned-nun portraits and related works within New Spain’s artistic, social, political, religious, economic, and cultural landscapes, which together provided the stage, players, and motivations for the production of these distinctive works. Because nuns’ professions and modes of religious life were intensely debated by colonial reformers, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico considers crowned-nun portraits not only as mementos of their sitters and the rituals they experienced, but also as rhetorical devices that promoted local religious and cultural values as well as client–patron relations, all of which were under scrutiny by the colonial Church. Significantly, the surge in crowned-nun portrait production took place at a time when the Spanish crown was consolidating itself and reorganizing its possessions through a set of broad political, economic, and ecclesiastical measures in the latter half of the eighteenth century, which are collectively known as the Bourbon reforms. I argue

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Introduction

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that the proliferation of the profession portrait in the latter half of the eighteenth century must be considered in the light of these reforms. In situating crowned-nun portraits within their local social, cultural, economic, and political context, this work takes them out of isolation and links them to the major issues of their era, while also relating them to contemporaneous New Spanish pictorial and literary works. Thus I consider crowned-nun portraits as one visual component of New Spain’s larger engagement with colonialism. These works are especially significant because they involve (1) culturally distinct religious and artistic traditions that fused in the colonial context to create a local and unique portrait type; (2) the perceived effects of ethnicity, lineage, and social rank on human nature in the colonial context; (3) local interpretations of hegemonic Western concepts of gender, specifically in relation to feminine piety; and (4) the negotiations that nuns and their benefactors conducted in an oppressive colonial environment. Thus, in positioning nuns’ portraits within their original sociopolitical and cultural context, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico emphasizes the intellectual and cultural web to which they belonged and links them to the discursive referents, coeval and historical, that bound them to a larger discourse of local identity formation.15 As the subjects of crowned-nun portraits are women, I am also interested in women’s actual and prescriptive roles in New Spanish society and how the portraits related to these factors. The placement of women in the colonial model was complex and largely depended on their lineage, socioeconomic status, and place of birth; it also varied by region. As other scholars have noted, European-born and Creole groups outranked mixed-blood or otherwise nonwhite groups. Indigenous women were subjected to an especially high degree of scrutiny for their collective non-Christian past and their perceived boorishness and proclivity for immoral behavior, which set them against a vocal segment of New Spanish society that denied their ability to live as nuns. As postcolonial scholarship has consistently noted, non-European cultures are not judged positively for their uniqueness, but are rather identified as inferior because of it. Indeed, Western imperial power has been predicated on maintaining the colonial difference that distinguishes colonizing groups from their colonized subjects.16 This difference reached into the cloister in Spanish America, despite the traditional view of nunneries as impenetrable fortresses that resisted the influences of secular society. The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico rejects this view

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The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico

and instead follows a vein of recent scholarship that identifies convents as porous institutions and microcosms of the world outside the cloister. Anne McClintock has argued that colonial women stood as the empire’s boundary markers; fetishized objects, they coded the colonies themselves as a feminine entity that the elite European man naturally desired and dominated.17 However, in New Spain the concept of woman also allowed for certain image types to embody indomitable local distinction. The best-known example is the Virgin of Guadalupe, who became the official patroness of the Americas in the eighteenth century. Saint Rose of Lima and the crowned-nun image fi lled similar roles. However, among all of these, the crowned-nun image was unique in visually combining Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican notions of the sacred and in creating a bridge between popular portraiture and religious painting to depict common nuns.18 In its examination of cultural heterogeneity and the development of local, positive images of women, this book contributes to the objectives of postcolonialism and postmodernism by critically examining Western discourse on these topics, which has historically overlooked or misconstrued local perspectives, traditions, and agencies, perhaps especially those of women and other colonized groups. In particular, it examines the agency of nuns and their patrons, and shows how those groups utilized pictorial traditions and normative gender signs that pertained specifically to nuns in order to negotiate monastic reforms. It also engages in colonial discourse in its analysis of the roles and meanings of cultural productions in terms indigenous to the groups that produced them, all the while relating them, their makers, and their patrons to the colonial enterprise. Current discussions of non-Western art and cultures largely vacillate between local and purportedly universal terms and concepts.19 In accounting for the Western and Mesoamerican cultural traditions that compose the crowned-nun image and related works,20 this book complicates the traditional understanding of New Spain’s convents as institutions that primarily reproduced Euro-Christian values and culture. Although the images of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Saint Rose, and crowned nuns were not originally intended to directly engage with aspects of Spanish colonialism, by the eighteenth century they had come to function partly as emblems of local self-fashioning, and contributed to the barroco de Indias: a critical expression of colonialism in local art and ideas, and a cornerstone of New Spanish identity formation.21 But they do not directly critique colonialism and long for its abolishment; rather,

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Introduction

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they react to particular policies that impinged on local group interests and values. The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico begins by tracing the religious pathways available to New Spain’s women in order to identify the sitters in crowned-nun portraits and delineate their relation to their society’s view and practice of female monasticism, as well as nuns’ multifaceted relation to the colonial enterprise. Chapter 1 frames the various institutions dedicated to women’s education, asylum, and spiritual formation that employed normative European gender archetypes to organize colonial society by regulating women’s sexuality and social identities. These institutions, which began as humanist initiatives to care for and educate the dispossessed and culturally distinct, ultimately reproduced the sexual and socioeconomic hierarchies of Spanish colonialism. In this system, Spaniards and Creoles occupied the top tier, an elevation intensified by the profession ceremony, which symbolically raised them above all other women, who were considered constrained by the “natural limits” of their sex. Chapter 2 links viceregal portraits of nuns to conventions of early modern portraiture in Europe and New Spain, and examines patronage issues in order to determine who demanded these works. It also outlines a method for identifying the subjects’ various monastic orders and determines how the portraits’ inscriptive and pictorial components place their sitters in a quasi-supernatural space where the sacred interweaves with the mundane. The chapter concludes with the assertion that the codified construction of crowned-nun portraits and their pictorial uniformity mitigate—without entirely obscuring—differences between the various religious orders, even emphasizing their commonalities. This effect established a sense of corporate identity among New Spain’s nuns and distinguishes their portraits as a distinctive local painting type. The next two chapters examine the Euro-Christian and Mesoamerican elements that constitute crowned-nun portraits’ rich iconographical content. Chapter 3 identifies Western pictorial and literary sources, picking out the themes of gardens, flowers, and mystical marriage as well as images of the Virgin Mary and crowned female saints. Chapter 4 looks at profession portraits of indigenous nuns in relation to a major debate on the nature and religious abilities of native women, and the desire of native nobles to achieve status parity with elite Creoles and Spaniards. Contributing to recent critical studies in “hybridity” in the visual arts as articulated by Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, this chapter

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demonstrates how indigenous practices and knowledge combined with their Euro-Christian counterparts in the construction of the crownednun image.22 I then examine how indigenous artistic practices may have influenced other convent arts in New Spain. I argue that the indigenous concepts of nobility, divinity, and spiritual transformation embodied in floral, avian, and butterfly motifs found an acceptable mode of transmission in the bridal trappings that nuns wore in their profession and death rituals. However, New Spaniards considered these attributes in crowned-nun portraits not necessarily as culturally heterogeneous, but rather as acceptable iterations of the sacred feminine, which appeared entirely Christian in form and concept to nonnatives, just as they have until recently to many modern scholars. Chapter 5 considers the profession portrait in the light of the monastic reforms of the late eighteenth century. Specifically, it proposes that the manner in which the portraits picture their subjects—as richly clad “brides of Christ” and members in good standing of their individual religious orders—speaks directly to the heart of the matter of reform as many nuns saw it. Both their very identity and the method of religious life that nurtured their spiritual development were in jeopardy. By developing and promoting the crowned-nun portrait type, nuns, artists, and patrons utilized normative symbols of femininity and the sacred to articulate local values, reaffirm convents’ client–patron relations, and promote nuns’ religious lifestyles, which colonial reformers scrutinized. This strategy did not overtly challenge colonial authority, but creatively negotiated between reformers’ demands and nuns’ responses to them. Chapter 6 situates images of nuns within a broader framework of identity rhetorics in New Spain, interpreting the portraits as a facet of the barroco de Indias. I argue that this image type, along with other local cultural productions, fulfi lled the objectives of outspoken New Spanish patriots and intellectuals to proclaim New Spain’s outstanding place in the world, in religious terms. Because representations of nuns make use of normative concepts of women from the early modern Hispanic milieu, The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico employs a theoretical framework that regards gender as a means of signifying difference and producing a power differential, in this case between nuns and the patriarchal Church, that is perceived as part of the natural order. It argues that the profession portrait depicts a gendered performance that was integral to nuns’ social and religious identity: marriage to Christ. Crowns, flowery trappings, religious vestments, and so forth, which render visible the nuns’ interior virtues, were

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Introduction

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integral to establishing an idealized representation of perfectas religiosas, or model nuns. As Judith Butler has argued, this localization of a gendered identity in the self obfuscates the external and institutional forces that actually produce that identity.23 Yet nuns—who depended on this perception of themselves for recognition within the Church and in broader society—could utilize it to maintain a critical relation to the patriarchal Church when the institution infringed upon the nuns’ understanding of that very identity.24 This explains why the institutional Church and nuns disagreed on the defi nition of a perfecta religiosa—a debate that the Church officially won. Nevertheless, the profession ceremony and portrait gave many nuns a means to negotiate their relation to the Church’s defi nition. The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico analyzes this image and contextualizes it within the larger spheres of identity formation, gender norms, cultural heterogeneity, and colonialism in New Spain.25 Because New Spain’s colonial enterprise was in the process of renewal and consolidation, especially at the time of the profession portrait’s ascendance, nuns’ identities were also made unstable as they responded to those changes. The portraits, however, do not readily indicate this instability (although the signs are subtly present). Instead, they seem to freeze their subjects in a moment of time, making them and the local values they represent appear unchanging and therefore truthful and iconic. Herein lies an important measure of their rhetorical value, for the seemingly unchanging, authoritative icon is a powerful means of establishing its depiction as the correct one. Portraits like Sor María Francisca’s, described above, created the conditions that nuns and their patrons required to artfully promote their endangered values in a colonial environment that often pitted local ideals and interests against imperial ones. In this context, the crowned-nun image astutely embodied the impressive spiritual clout of New Spain’s nuns that Bishop Palafox y Mendoza so vividly extolled in his “Parecer” long before the eighteenth century’s sweeping monastic reforms challenged local and time-honored interpretations of the religious life.

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Chapter 1 Wom e n ’s R e l igiou s Pat h way s i n N e w S pa i n

J

ust t wo y e a rs a f t e r t h e conqu e st of M e x ico T e nochtitlan, the Franciscan lay brother Fray Pedro de Gante (1490–1572) began to indoctrinate Mexico City’s native youths in Christianity and provide them with a humanist education. His undertaking was adopted by the fi rst wave of friars to arrive in New Spain the following year in their broader campaign to extirpate idolatry and establish New World Christian communities. One of the brothers, Fray Toribio de Benavente, whom the natives called Motolinía (ca. 1490–1569), initiated schools for girls (colegios de niñas) in Texcoco and Huejotzingo, two important native polities in pre-Hispanic and viceregal times. Caught up in this climate of evangelical zeal and educational expansion, Mexico City’s fi rst bishop, Fray Juan de Zumárraga (active 1528–1548), petitioned the Holy Roman emperor to send him Spanish beatas (lay pious women belonging to sisterhoods) to serve as girls’ teachers. A few years later, he asked for a contingent of Spanish nuns for the same purpose. Given the monumental designs and seemingly endless possibilities of this formative period, it must have come as a disappointment to him when his request was denied. However, the bishop, ever resourceful, did not abandon his vision; instead he altered his strategy. In 1540 he brought a group of Spanish nuns of the newly formed Conceptionist order to Mexico City. There, under his auspices, they founded the convent of Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción, the fi rst of many nunneries in New Spain and one of the largest and most prestigious. In a letter to Charles V, he explained that convents would fulfi ll his objective of educating native

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Women’s Religious Pathways in New Spain

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girls by acting collectively as “a seedbed of teachers,” a resource that, he added, was sorely needed in New Spain.1 For Zumárraga La Concepción was to provide spiritual and physical care as well as an education for native and mestizo girls, groups that because of their distinct ethnic and cultural background and circumstances were thought to be at risk of falling outside Hispanic social norms. By providing them with a Catholic education and establishing a structured daily routine, nuns were to perpetuate the faith and shape the character and values of New Spain’s non-European and ethnically mixed women. Perhaps Zumárraga could not foresee that his nuns and their successors, most of whom came from elite Spanish and Creole backgrounds, would reproduce the socioracial hierarchy of viceregal society by prohibiting women with backgrounds different from theirs from becoming nuns. In the eighteenth century, a small number of convents were founded to remedy this problem, but they limited their applicants to members of the indigenous elite; native plebeians were not allowed to profess. Still, many convents brought elite Spanish and Creole women into contact with female servants and students from diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. Furthermore, a number of other institutions dedicated to women’s asylum, education, and catechism provided New Spain’s diverse female population with additional avenues of spiritual development. Along with convents, they offered eligible local women an alternative to marriage and the single life. By the eighteenth century these institutions were an integral part of New Spain’s cultural fabric and religious character and became centers of the impressive spiritual and economic wealth of the viceroyalty’s greatest cities. A late viceregal painting entitled Vestments of the Religious Women of the Convents of Mexico, of the Colleges, and Retreats testifies to that wealth by picturing women from Mexico City’s various religious and educational establishments (fig. 1.1). The architectural framework of arches, columns, capitals, pilasters, and lintels neatly organizes the composition and deliberately enshrines its figures in a classical reference to the city. The spatial hierarchy favors Mexico City’s nuns, who occupy the composition’s center, while students and other laywomen appear along the right margin and in part of the lowermost register. Only nuns were considered to have transcended the “natural limits” of their sex when they ritually transformed into Christ’s brides at the moment of their profession. Through prayer, penance, and other religious practices, they spent the rest of their lives maintaining this fragile state of grace.

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F igu r e 1.1. Anonymous, Traje de las Religiosas de los Conventos de México, de los Colegios y Recogimientos (Vestments of the religious women of Mexico’s convents, colleges, and retreats). Late eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 134.5 × 104 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

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Women’s Religious Pathways in New Spain

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Avenues of Spiritual Formation The lives available to Spanish and Creole women in New Spain were conspicuously limited by modern standards, and most viable paths led to marriage or the religious life. Those choosing an alternate route compromised their reputations as well as their families’ honor and were subject to the harsh realities of navigating through a patriarchal world that condemned them for straying from the social model.2 In the early modern Hispanic world a woman’s virginity or fidelity to her husband preserved her honor and amplified her husband’s reputation as a strong paterfamilias. Conversely, infidelity damaged her husband’s and family’s reputation. Yet in New Spain many women formed conjugal relations with men outside marriage. Such unions, although in theory unacceptable by religious and mainstream standards, were at times accepted, especially if the man was of superior social rank. In such cases, women could elevate their own rank by advancing to a higher socioeconomic plane. Financially, most women were dependent on their husbands, especially because they had been prohibited from working in the public sphere until a 1799 royal decree abolished this restriction. Despite this advance, however, many Spanish and Creole women avoided employment even in dire fi nancial circumstances, since high social rank was incompatible with any kind of occupation. For example, in 1772, don José de Cárdenas’s three daughters, who identified themselves as maidens, petitioned the audiencia for assistance. According to them, they were reduced to working with their hands because their father had died and had not provided them with adequate resources to sustain the lifestyle befitting their station.3 In 1804, Viceroy Iturrigaray noted with some dismay that many families in New Spain preferred genteel poverty to the disgrace of learning a trade, although marketable skills could improve their fi nancial circumstances and generally contribute to society.4 Ultimately, there were few compelling reasons for upper-class women to forgo the traditional paths of marriage and the religious life. This mentality, so ingrained in mainstream consciousness, was conditioned by the written works of early modern Spanish moralists, which officially identified proper and improper social roles for women. In particular, Fray Martín de Córdoba’s Jardín de nobles doncellas (ca. 1460) set the tone for subsequent Hispanic moralists in Europe and the Americas. In sum, they examined women’s “inherent nature” and prescribed

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The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico

appropriate behavior models for upper-class women. Each one also extolled virginity over marriage, reflecting Saint Paul the Apostle’s own preference. For example, in a metaphor of harvest yields, Fray Martín wrote that if marriage produces a harvest of thirtyfold, virginity produces one of a hundredfold. He reiterates this point by comparing marriage, widowhood, and virginity to copper, silver, and gold, respectively.5 Echoing Fray Martín, Juan Luís Vives, in his Instrucción de la mujer cristiana of 1523, stated that chastity was the greatest virtue to which women could aspire.6 Because he perceived women as lacking the natural reason and exceptional morality of men, he recommended that men take women into their custody and guide them in life’s matters.7 Furthermore, he advised women to refrain from teaching because their intellectual frailty, which made them particularly vulnerable to the Devil’s deceit, ultimately rendered them undependable. By the eighteenth century, Spanish and New Spanish moralists who subscribed to the Enlightenment ideals of individual autonomy and productivity recognized women’s intellectual capacities and promoted their education for the general benefit of society.8 According to the New Spanish moralist Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi in La educación de las mujeres, a woman’s proper education consisted in the ability to use arithmetic, especially to manage the household budget, and to raise children properly.9 However, he advised that women rely on patriarchal counsel, which was still deemed intellectually and morally superior. Not every woman who received an education like the one promoted by Fernández de Lizardi married or entered the convent. According to an 1811 census, unmarried women in Mexico City constituted one-half of adult female residents and one-fourth of the whole population.10 For those who chose to enter religious institutions, however, several options were available. Beaterios, recogimientos, and colegios de niñas proliferated in many of Spanish America’s greatest cities and, like convents, offered women shelter and the opportunity to pursue a religiously intense lifestyle. Beaterios were voluntary organizations of pious laywomen (beatas) who pursued a religious calling by taking simple third-order vows.11 Dressed in plain habits and semicloistered, they depended on alms and relied on the guidance of priests who acted as their spiritual directors. Many beaterios housed the dispossessed of colonial society: widows, divorcees, orphans, and repentant women, among other groups. These women were required to prove their unbroken Spanish and Christian lineage (limpieza de sangre) before they could enter the beaterio. For ex-

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Women’s Religious Pathways in New Spain

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ample, the administrators of Santa Rosa de Lima in Querétaro required that their entrants be “of clean blood, of honorable and well-born families” and not “mulattas, moriscas, lobas, or any other mixed-blood combination.”12 Some beatas were esteemed publicly for their piety and impressive religious demeanor, including, for example, Francisca de San José, the daugher of a Spanish nobleman and a Creole woman. According to her hagiography, she was a third-order Dominican who lived piously and died a virgin at the age of seventy-eight. Her hagiography was published for public edification in 1729 by Domingo de Quiroga, a Jesuit priest and her spiritual director. In it Quiroga extols her “heroic virtues” and emphasizes her life of privation and self-mortification, in which she frequently disciplined her body by fasting, wearing hair shirts, and lashing herself.13 Quiroga also praises Francisca for faithfully observing the Dominican rules of the third order to which she dedicated herself and in which he personally instructed her. In becoming a beata, Francisca vowed chastity and poverty as well as obedience to Quiroga. She also dedicated herself to the infi rm, and focused her daily meditations on Christ’s suffering and her own death. Because of her highly developed spirituality, Quiroga writes, Saint Ignatius of Loyola appeared to her several times on her deathbed to comfort her and praise her for her suffering, which she offered to Christ.14 Yet despite the example of model beatas like Francisca, many people considered these women to be wayward, living immoral lives and perpetuating social ills, especially since they did not take a vow of enclosure as nuns did. In addition, they were not under the same kind of close religious and patriarchal supervision that regulated nuns. Recogimientos served as asylums for women who for a number of reasons lacked family resources or male protection. These were essentially retreats that provided shelter, spiritual development, and a basic education for pious and wayward women.15 Their residents (recogidas) sought shelter and religious guidance and strived to recover from marital strife, divorce, prostitution, crime, or poverty. Many recogimientos also provided recogidas with a basic education. The premise of recogimiento was that by withdrawing from the world one could establish a particularly strong relationship with God through prayerful meditation and with a priest’s guidance. Although some beaterios and recogimientos were regarded as asylums for the wayward and dispossessed, they sheltered the devout, the repentant, and the criminal alike. Their doors were open primarily to Spaniards and Creoles, although apparently mestizas and native women

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The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico

also entered.16 African and racially mixed women were permitted to enter only as servants or slaves. Colegios de niñas also admitted women, though they were meant primarily to educate New Spain’s girls and young women. The fi rst colegio in New Spain was founded in Texcoco in 1528 by the Franciscan friar Motolinía and his colleague Fray Luis de Fuensalida. Soon after its founding, another colegio de niñas was established in Huejotzingo and a third followed in Mexico City. All of these were dedicated to educating native girls in Catholic doctrine, the memorization of prayers in Spanish, grammar, and the so-called feminine arts, which included sewing, weaving, embroidery, basic mathematics, music, reading, writing, and kitchen skills, among others. Because colegios were funded by the Church, the state, and private individuals or groups, their services were free of charge. A major component of New Spain’s sixteenth-century humanist efforts, colegios de niñas were intended to Hispanicize native girls so that they might adapt better to viceregal society and teach their families what they had learned, thereby spreading the faith and mainstream cultural values. As Motolinía put it, many colegialas (colegio students) went “out to teach, both in the patios of the churches and in the houses of the upper classes. Here they converted many Indian women, who were then baptized, became devout Christians and benefactors, and have always been greatly helpful in matters of Christian doctrine.”17 Although the Franciscan initiative of exclusively educating and acculturating native girls had come to a close by the 1550s, colegios de niñas for Spanish, Creole, and mestizo girls proliferated thoughout the viceregal period. The fi rst of these was the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad, founded in Mexico City in 1548 by the Cofradía del Santísimo Sacramento, a prestigious sodality for laymen dedicated to the veneration of the Eucharist. The colegio’s initial purpose was to provide a shelter for poor, orphaned Spanish and mestizo girls and to foster their educational and religious development so that when they were of age to marry they would demonstrate the proper qualities expected of Spanish women and so sustain their households. In the seventeenth century, however, La Caridad catered only to Spanish and Creole girls and women, sheltering a mere thirty-two occupants at a time.18 As with beaterios and recogimientos, colegios de niñas tended to the religious and educational needs of a wide array of young women, but the vast majority of their students were of Spanish or Creole extraction. These same groups were favored by convents, which provided some of the same services. However, convents

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Women’s Religious Pathways in New Spain

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were also sacred spaces in which laywomen became nuns and could rise above the “natural state” of their sex.

Female Monasticism By the early nineteenth century there were about two thousand four hundred nuns in New Spain, the majority of them in Mexico City.19 In the capital alone, eight religious orders operated twenty-two convents. Puebla, New Spain’s second-largest city, boasted exactly half the number of Mexico City’s convents and was home to six religious orders. Oaxaca, Guadalajara, Mérida, Morelia, and a host of smaller cities could also proudly point to their own nunneries.20 Regardless of city or order, a convent’s primary function was to operate as a cloistered shelter for New Spain’s elite women, most of whom came from the lower aristocracy or merchant classes. When a nun professed, she renounced secular concerns and replaced them with religious ones in order to become a “bride of Christ.” In professing she experienced a kind of apotheosis whereby her social identity was amplified by a religious title. Nurturing this identity was a lifelong pursuit for any nun and one that put her on the “road to perfection,” all as a means to realize her full spiritual potential. New Spain’s convents were the most prestigious institutions catering to women and preserved or enhanced their and their families’ social status. They housed women from similar backgrounds who for varied reasons had chosen to enter the religious life. Beyond this function, as educational providers and propagators of societal values they profoundly influenced the social and religious welfare of New Spain. Recall that Zumárraga’s initial intent was for convents to provide an education to native women, who would impart what they had learned to others in their families and communities after they left the convent. It was in this way that female monasticism was to support the spiritual conquest.21 Although most of New Spain’s convents accommodated elite Spanish and Creole women, not all targeted the same group. In 1578, for example, Pedro Tomás Denia, a Spaniard and resident of Mexico City, established the convent of Jesús María exclusively for poor daughters of conquistadors, who could not afford to profess. Likewise, the founders of Santa Inés in Mexico City designated it for poor Spanish maidens and orphans who could not afford religious profession. This transfor-

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The Art of Professing in Bourbon Mexico

mative ceremony, central to the identity of any nun, required an aspirant’s family to provide music, food, and fabric (for the religious habit), as well as other items that could run to several hundred pesos, as they did for Agustina Ponce de León when she professed in the convent of San Lorenzo in 1667. In total, the cost of her profession was 630 pesos and 4  reales. This was in addition to her dowry, which probably amounted to about 2,500 pesos—a considerable sum, though not as sizable as a marriage dowry.22 Additionally, her family would have provided her with a yearly stipend, kept in her personal expense account (reserva) for food and other items. Although the high cost of profession and the limpieza de sangre requirement originally prevented non-European women from professing, there were a few exceptions to this rule. For example, in the sixteenth century the mestiza granddaughters of Moctezuma II, Isabel and Catalina Cano Moctezuma, professed in Mexico City’s convent of La Concepción, thanks to their high nobility. Then in 1607 Diego Tapia, an Otomí cacique (native leader), founded the Franciscan convent of Santa Clara in Querétaro for his daughter, Luisa; after she entered, however, only Spanish and Creoles professed there. It was not until Mexico City’s Corpus Christi convent was founded in 1724 that elite native women fi nally had the opportunity to profess (a topic discussed in chapter 4). Its success facilitated the establishment of three other convents for native women in New Spain: Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Cosamaloapan in Morelia (formerly Valladolid) (1734), Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in Oaxaca (1774), and Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe y Enseñaza de Indias in Mexico City (1811), which was a joint convent and colegio de niñas. Given what eighteenth-century monastic reformers would call a “relaxed” lifestyle in many of New Spain’s convents, some nuns in Mexico City desired a more religiously intense and ascetic life, which they felt their convents did not provide. To remedy this, Sor Inés de la Cruz and Sor Mariana de la Encarnación, Conceptionist nuns of Jesús María founded the convent of San José, later called Santa Teresa la Antigua, in 1616. They and other like-minded nuns occupied the new convent and eventually adopted the constitutions of the Carmelite order, recently reformed by Saint Teresa of Ávila. The Carmelites, like other austere orders, emphasized a life of privation that they observed through fasting and various acts of self-mortification. This lifestyle was intended to discipline the body and mind in order to strengthen the spirit. Even the number of nuns each convent would accept was limited in order to fa-

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cilitate this lifestyle. For example, a 1779 edition of the Carmelites’ rules and constitutions stated that convents were not to admit more applicants than they could comfortably sustain, so that the nuns could reliably subsist on rents and alms, and lead intense spiritual lives that required as little attention as possible to temporal matters.23 In the mid-seventeenth century, however, a number of New Spain’s convents were struggling to provide for their nuns’ basic needs, prompting Archbishop Payo y Ribera of Mexico City to relieve convents of their fi nancial obligation to do so. This measure allowed nuns to hold individual expense accounts (reservas), as in the case of Agustina Ponce de León of San Lorenzo convent. Not all convents took advantage of the archbishop’s directive; some continued to operate on the old system, which became known as the “communal life” (vida común). Austere religious orders like the Carmelites, Capuchins, and Augustinians subscribed to this lifestyle, while the Conceptionists, Jeronymites, Urbanist Franciscans, and some Dominicans subscribed to Payo y Ribera’s directive.24 This latter method of religious life, called the “private life” (vida particular), granted them more personal autonomy and private amenities than were permitted by communal-life orders. By the eighteenth century there was a distinct difference between these two methods of religious life in New Spain. In contrast to the more austere communal-life orders, private-life ones followed a regimented daily schedule that set aside time for socializing and relaxation.25 The day was divided into the canonical hours, for which nuns would gather in their church’s choir to sing and pray. Each day was also punctuated by nonreligious activities in which the nuns produced handicrafts such as clothes, candies, baked goods, artificial flowers, and other items. Private-life nuns often received guests and even held salons (tertulias) in the convent’s receiving room, called the locutorio. This parlor was designated as a space in which nuns came in contact with laypersons. A metal or wooden grating (the reja) separated the nuns from their visitors, as the vow of enclosure prohibited them from coming into close contact with outsiders. In this space, ideas, news, and gifts were frequently exchanged between nuns and their guests. The famous poet and intellectual Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651– 1695), of San Jerónimo convent in Mexico City (see fig. 6.6), often entertained important guests and held tertulias for local and foreign intellectuals and dignitaries. Her guests included viceroys and vicereines, university professors, and acccomplished scholars.26 According to the seventeenth-century Dominican traveler and chronicler Thomas Gage,

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Mexico City’s nuns and their students also provided entertainment for secular and clerical visitors in their parlors: It is ordinary for the friars to visit their devoted nuns, and to spend the whole day with them, hearing their music, feeding on their sweet meats, and for this purpose they have many chambers which they call locutorios, to talk in, with wooden bars between the nuns and them, and in these chambers are tables for the friars to dine at; and while they dine the nuns recreate them with their voices.27

Although Gage refers to convents’ students only in passing, teaching girls and young women was an important service that many of New Spain’s nuns provided. Members of the Company of Mary especially dedicated themselves to educating girls. Conceptionists, Jeronymites, Augustinians, Dominicans, and Urbanists also provided a formal education for girls. In fact, along with servants, students made up a substantial percentage of the total population of New Spain’s convents. The majority of students were upper-class Spaniards and Creoles who entered convents at a tender age. They remained there until they were about twenty-five or until their education was complete and they were ready to marry. However, in some cases they remained longer, especially if they suffered from poor health or were orphans. Once they were accepted into a convent, they were assigned to a particular nun, who was responsible for their tutelage and personal care. By modern standards their education was rudimentary and nonacademic. It consisted of learning Christian doctrine through memorizing the Catholic catechism, learning to read and write in Spanish and Latin, using basic arithmetic, and mastering the “feminine arts,” all of which were intended to be of use to their future families. Once they were of marrying age, many students returned to secular life and became wives and mothers. A smaller percentage became nuns. The most substantial portion of many private-life convents’ total population comprised personal servants and slaves. Many of these girls and women served the nuns for life. Some convents averaged two to three servants per nun—and some convents housed between one and three hundred nuns.28 In addition to tending to the personal needs of their mistresses, servants and slaves cleaned the buildings, cooked meals, cared for the cloister gardens, washed clothes, and served as errand-girls, connecting the nuns with the world outside convent walls. Although not all

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orders permitted personal servants, those that did (the private-life orders) opened their doors to the ethnically and socioeconomically diverse inhabitants of New Spain. If a convent’s nuns constituted a homogeneous group, their servants (mozas) composed a heterogeneous one made up of natives and the various racially mixed groups of viceregal Spanish America, collectively called castas. Until the ecclesiastical reforms of the late eighteenth century, nuns of certain orders could accommodate family members as well as servants and students in their cells. Such was the case for Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who accepted her niece Isabél María de San José as her protégée. They lived together in San Jerónimo until Isabél professed there, whereupon she occupied her own quarters.29 Sor Juana was also accompanied by her personal slave, a mulatto girl named Juana de San José, who was given to her by her mother when she professed. The size and amenities of many convent cells allowed nuns to maintain households composed of family members, students, and servants, who in turn supported a lifestyle that Church authorities of the eighteenth century would denounce as inappropriate for nuns, who were supposed to be detached from the secular world. The integration of so many women and girls from diverse backgrounds replicated the cultural fabric and socioracial order of viceregal society. Consequently, the tensions and conditions that informed New Spain’s ethnic and socioeconomic hierarchies also penetrated the cloister.

The Ritual Life of Nuns Early modern Hispanic notions of femininity neatly divided women into two diametrically opposed groups: the sinful and the saintly. The line separating them was fine, because all women were deemed weak in physical, intellectual, and moral matters. The story of Eve, which tells of the first woman’s submission to sin, was a model applied to womankind. Spanish moralists and New Spanish hagiographers perpetuated the idea of women as morally weak, vulnerable to the Devil, and inclined to sin, especially in sexual matters. Terms like debilidad (weakness), flaqueza (emaciation), and fragilidad (frailty) appear repeatedly in nuns’ hagiographies to describe women’s natural qualities. However, nuns who rose above the “natural limits” of their sex were identified as “manly women” (mujeres varoniles) who were “heroic” in virtue, despite their flaqueza or debilidad. In his endorsement of Madre

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María de San José’s hagiography (1723), Luis de la Peña, a prelate in New Spain’s Church and an officer of the Inquisition, quotes Saint Basil: “The frailty, emaciation, and weakness of the female sex is in the body and the flesh, not in the soul, where heroic virtues reside and where heavenly wisdom takes its seat.”30 Many religious women, and nuns in particular, were renowned for excelling in virtue by disciplining their bodies, in return for which they received God’s wisdom and graces. Thus, a “manly woman” was one whose soul was strengthened by denying her earthly appetites and instead following Christ’s example of asceticism. In so doing, she rose above the “sinful woman” trope and joined the ranks of the saintly. In particular, three rituals elevated her above laypersons: becoming a novice, in which a woman was betrothed to Christ; professing as a nun, in which she married him; and death, through which a nun consummated her marriage. Before any woman could become a bride of Christ, a voting body of nuns had to grant her entry into the convent, whereupon she would commence a one- to two-year novitiate. Novices were differentiated by a white veil that covered their heads (nuns instead wore a black veil). An eighteenth-century portrait of Sor Ana María de San Francisco y Neve (fig. 1.2) depicts a young woman from the convent of La Concepción in Mexico City as a religiosa del velo blanco (novice). Hiding one hand behind her pleated scapular, she fingers a book with her visible hand—probably the rules and constitutions of the Conceptionist order, which as a novice she would have been expected to study. According to the Tridentine Church, aspiring nuns had to meet a number of criteria in addition to completing their novitiate. First, they had to be at least sixteen years old. Second, they had to publicly declare that their desire to profess was genuine and not forced upon them by others. Finally, they had to meet the specific obligations of the order to which they were professing. New Spain’s convents additionally stipulated that entrants must prove legitimacy of birth and unsullied EuroChristian lineage (limpieza de sangre) or, in the case of native nuns, noble status. Furthermore, they were required to present a dowry to their convent, to be of sound mind and body, to read basic Latin, to know arithmetic, and to possess domestic skills such as cooking and sewing. However, exceptions were occasionally made, especially if the professant possessed a certain talent. Given New Spain’s ethnically diverse population, several of these requirements considerably restricted the range of aspirants. For example, illegitimacy prevented many girls and women from becoming nuns. As

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F igu r e 1.2. Anonymous, Sor Ana María de San Francisco y Neve (Conceptionist novice). Ca. 1759. Oil on canvas, 180 × 120 cm. Iglesia de Santa Rosa de Viterbo, Querétaro, Mexico. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

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well, the requirement regarding limpieza de sangre posed problems for women whose lineage was diverse or unknown. This measure was intended to ensure that nuns were not slaves or descendants of slaves, Jews, Moors, or other heathen groups. Finally, many families of modest means could not provide their daughters with the dowry, in which case these women remained novices for life. The requirements of substantial dowries and limpieza de sangre were meant to ensure that New Spain’s nuns came from upper-class families of purely European or indigenous heritage.31 However, not all women who became nuns were necessarily “purebloods,” or elite. A degree of social and racial mobility allowed certain individuals to “pass” as Spaniards or natives.32 Furthermore, aspiring nuns and their families were able to maneuver around these criteria, especially when convents turned a blind eye to their liabilities or perceived an exceptionally talented girl. A notable example is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who despite her illegitimacy professed in the convent of San Jerónimo, in part because of her intellectual gifts and also because of her ties to the viceregal court, which opened otherwise closed doors. For those who could not afford the dowry, sodalities—especially those whose members were affluent—sometimes paid it.33 Regardless of how one became a novice, it was considered a great honor to enter the novitiate. Viceregal portraits of young women and girls on the eve of “taking the habit” (tomar el hábito), as the ceremony for novices was called, give a fi nal glimpse of these young laywomen, still wearing the opulent secular garments that identify them as members of the social elite (figs. 1.3–1.4). “Taking the habit” was an elaborate ceremony and involved the participation of the aspiring novice, her family, a priest, and the nuns of the convent she was entering. On the day of the ceremony the girl was dressed in sumptuous clothes and adorned with fi ne jewelry. In this manner she left home and rode in a carriage to the convent, where she was received by its nuns. As prescribed by the rules and constitutions of the Carmelite order, the novice was to kneel in the convent church while she performed a formulaic dialogue with the presiding priest, who inquired what she sought. She was to respond, “God’s mercy, the poverty of the order, and the company of nuns.” She then declared that it was her choice to enter the convent, and was instructed to live in poverty, chastity, and obedience.34 The nuns then obstructed the girl from the public’s view as they removed her fi ne garments and cut her hair before dressing her in a nov-

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Women’s Religious Pathways in New Spain

F igu r e 1.3. Anonymous, Sebastiana Inés Josepha de San Agustín (First-order Franciscan). 1757. Oil on canvas, 67 × 56 cm. Museo Franz Mayer, Mexico City. Photograph © Museo Franz Mayer.

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F igu r e 1.4. Miguel Cabrera, Sor María Narcisa / Doña Ana María Pérez Cano (Capuchin). 1758. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

ice’s habit. As they added each component of her habit, the priest solemnly blessed it. Finally, in what must have been a climactic moment, the girl reappeared, kneeling and holding a candle. At the end of the ceremony the Mistress of Novices presented her to the nuns, beginning with the abbess, whose hand the girl kissed as she knelt before her in an act of obedience. After embracing the other nuns, she entered the cloister, symbolically leaving her family, who returned home for the fi rst time without her.35 Novices were expected to learn the rules and constitutions of their order, and to pray, meditate, and observe the canonical hours daily. They also performed some physical labor. The novitiate generally lasted one to two years, depending on the rules of the order and the convent’s current circumstances. When the novitiate was coming to a close, the bishop sent a prelate to examine the novice and determine whether she was ready to become a nun. If she was deemed ready, she was given several days to leave the convent and reside with her family before professing. The reasons that impelled women to choose the religious life varied

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and were based as much on cultural and economic trends as on personal religious devotion and a genuine calling. In addition to offering women an honorable alternative to marriage and childbearing, or spinsterhood, the religious life provided a space where they were free from familial control and could exercise a degree of personal autonomy. Furthermore, it represented the only opportunity for women to take up positions of institutional authority. Many women became nuns out of a sense of piety and the desire to live a more intense religious life than they could as laywomen. Outside of marriage and motherhood, the religious life allowed them the best chance to realize their potential as successful individuals by dedicating their lives to Christ.36 Saint Teresa of Ávila called this process the “way of perfection” (camino de perfección or camino a la perfección), in her book of the same title; on this way, nuns strove to become “perfect religious” (religiosas perfectas) by fully complying with the rules of monasticism and rising above the stereotype of the frail and sinful woman. The three days a novice spent at home before her profession constituted a crossroads for both her and her family as well as a time of bittersweet celebration. In 1840 Frances Calderón de la Barca—wife of the Spanish ambassador to Mexico—briefly attended the celebration of a prominent Mexican family whose daughter was about to become a nun in the convent of La Encarnación. At the party Calderón admired the rich vestments of the young woman, who wore a floral crown and was sumptuously dressed.37 The party—attended by about one hundred people, in the author’s estimation—came to an end when the girl, accompanied by her mother, departed in a carriage that passed through the principal streets of the capital, parading the aspiring nun before the public in a custom called el paseo.38 Meanwhile, the girl’s family and friends made their way to the convent’s church, where they would witness her actual profession. The trappings of profession, already prepared by the convent’s nuns, were displayed in the church and visible for all to see. These included a statue of the Christ Child (or a crucifi x), a flowery crown, a flowery palm frond or staff, a black veil, and a nuptial ring.39 The novice’s arrival was announced with great fanfare as she was escorted to the grating near the church entry that separated the public from the nuns, who occupied the lower choir (coro bajo). A priest and the bishop presided over the ceremony and praised her lifelong commitment to Christ and the Church. After the sermon the novice disappeared temporarily behind the grat-

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ing’s curtain. When it was drawn again, she appeared prostrate on the floor, wearing her nun’s habit. The priest recited the scriptural passage in which the prudent virgins light their lamps upon the arrival of the bridegroom, and instructed the novice to ignite her own candle. Then priest and novice engaged in a scripted dialogue that expounded upon the obligations of the religious life. After this her white veil was exchanged for the black one, the nuptial ring was placed on her finger, and she was adorned with a flowery crown and given the statuette of the Christ Child (or crucifi x) and a flowery palm that denoted her virginity. The practice of crowning nuns in their profession ceremonies dates back to at least the fi fteenth century in Europe and signifies their honorable status as Christ’s brides.40 A late-eighteenth-century Spanish manual of the religious life for nuns of the Franciscan order by Fray Antonio Arbiol explains that all of these accoutrements were symbols of a nun’s mystical marriage to Christ: the black veil signified her betrothal, while her flowery crown was a symbol of her virtue, fragrant and sweet.41 Upon receiving these accoutrements, the aspiring nun made her profession by reciting an oath specific to her order. Conceptionist nuns of the convents of La Concepción and La Santísima Trinidad in Puebla publicly professed the following formula: I, Sister N., for the love and service of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the immaculate conception of his most holy mother, offer and promise to God, and the Blessed Virgin Mary, to Saint Francis, and to all the saints, and to you, mother abbess, to live my life in obedience and poverty, without private possessions, and in chastity and perpetual enclosure: under the Rule of this holy Order, sanctioned by Our Holy Father, Julius II.42

This profession statement varied slightly from other profession statements recited by nuns of different orders throughout Spanish America. For example, Capuchin nuns made an additional promise not to drink chocolate, as it was considered to be an extravagance.43 After professing their solemn vows, nuns became “brides of Christ,” a status that distinguished them from all other women and implied their transcendence over the supposed weaknesses of their sex. In 1696 the Jesuit Padre Antonio Núñez de Miranda explained in a tutorial for novices how a nun’s profession reconfigured her and distinguished her from laypersons:

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Question: What do the nuptial ceremonies in which we profess signify? Answer: The principal, lofty, and truly divine duties of your angelic state, especially the complete independence and holy detachment from all things and persons. A true bride of Christ is not to fall in love with, nor to wait on, nor even imagine [an earthly] thing or person. Oh, what an indignity to be detested! You should have no dealings but with angels, heavenly things, and your Spouse, as if nothing else existed in the world but God and you.44

This spiritual transformation was to be manifest in the nun’s appearance and comportment. A 1744 edition of the rules and constitutions of the Conceptionist convents of La Concepción and La Santísima Trinidad in Puebla instructs the nuns in this matter: “Nuns are to guard their composure and modesty, not only in the manner they wear the habit, but in their language, which should be distinct from the manner in which laypeople speak.”45 Although each of New Spain’s convents assumed a distinct identity and was known for particular qualities—the austerity of the First-Order Franciscans of Corpus Christi and the Carmelites of Santa Teresa la Antigua, for example, or the Company of Mary’s dedication to education in the convent of La Enseñanza—the primary purpose of each was to provide an environment for its nuns to pursue a deeply religious life in which prayer was paramount. For this reason, and because New Spain’s nuns were cloistered, they led more of a contemplative religious life (vita contemplativa), rather than the active life (vita activa) of priests, which emphasized extensive contact with the secular world. Hagiographies of New Spain’s nuns emphasize the extreme religious conviction of their subjects—for example, the horrific bouts of penitence through self-mortification, fasting, and other privations that sometimes compromised their health and, in some instances, may have hastened their death. Regardless of the reasons, a nun’s death caused the other convent nuns to reflect on their own mortality and measure the quality of their religious lives. As was the case with profession, when a nun died the entire convent carried out rituals that attracted the public as well as ecclesiastical and governmental officials. In fact, profession and death rituals were the two most significant events in a nun’s life and symbols of her spiritual apotheosis. When a nun professed, she married Christ. When she died, her marriage was fi nally consummated in

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heaven. Thus, death was regarded as a cause for celebration, for Christ’s brides would assume a venerable position in heaven along with the Virgin Mary and Christ’s other brides. Nuns’ death rituals were prescribed in their orders’ rules and constitutions, and elaborated upon by each convent. However, in New Spain, these rituals were relatively consistent across the gamut. Just before a nun expired, a priest blessed her with holy water and oils in the sacrament of extreme unction, while the nuns of her convent gathered around and prayed for a holy death. After the death, the nuns cleaned the corpse and dressed it in the order’s habit, preparing it for burial. It was then displayed in the lower choir, where professions were also performed, and adorned with a flowery crown and floral staff. Thus, when a nun returned to the lower choir in death, she completed the circle that began when she professed. In both rituals she was adorned with flowery trappings to signify her virtue and status as a bride of Christ. After the Requiem Mass was performed, the curtains of the lower choir were drawn back so that the public could view the body through a grating. It was probably at this moment or just before that artists were sometimes summoned by convent administrators to paint a funerary portrait of the deceased as a memento for the convent, especially if she was an abbess or other high adminstrator, or if she was regarded as exceptionally pious and a perfecta religiosa in life. Before burial, the public often requested relics, such as pieces of the deceased’s habit or parts of her body, like hair, which they believed were imbued with her holiness. After the public viewing, the body was then carried into the crypt, which usually lay beneath the lower choir. Recent excavations in some Mexico City convents have revealed that many nuns were buried with their floral crowns and staffs, perhaps as a reminder to the living that a nun did not cease to become a bride of Christ when she died.46 Just as her profession elevated her above other women, she experienced an even greater apotheosis when she died. A holy death was the crowning achievement for any nun. The tradition of placing floral wreaths and palm fronds on the deceased’s body came from Europe, and the tradition of commissioning funerary portraits of nuns was practiced throughout Spain, New Spain, Peru, Colombia, and the Philippines. But viceregal death portraits are visually distinct from their Spanish counterparts in the size and complexity of the floral trappings. And, though in New Spain the earliest crowned-nun portraits are funerary, in the eighteenth century local artists conspired with nuns and their families and benefactors to invent a

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new subgenre of portraiture that is exclusive to New Spain: crownednun portraits of living sitters, who are shown donning spectacular floral trappings at the moment of their profession. The next chapter examines these works and situates them in the broader tradition of New Spanish portraiture.

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Chapter 2 N e w S pa n i s h P or t r a i t u r e a n d P ort r a i t s of N u n s

B

ecause of t h e e xt r e m e ascet icism a n d m yst ica l raptures that brought her into contact with Christ and the Devil, many residents of Puebla considered Sor Isabel de la Encarnación a local saint. When she died in 1633 the nuns of San José (later renamed Santa Teresa) convent summoned a local artist to record her image as she lay on her funeral bier in the convent’s lower choir. In an indisputable sign of her sanctity, her disfigured face miraculously recovered its former youthful beauty when the nuns adorned her corpse with a flowery crown and palm frond.1 The portrait, intended as a memento, perhaps even a relic, for her convent, pictured the effects of this transformation and reaffirmed Sor Isabel as an exceptionally gifted member of San José and a model nun of the Carmelite order.2 It is also one of the earliest pieces of evidence of a crowning ceremony and the crownednun portrait tradition in New Spain. New Spain’s earliest portraits of crowned nuns, such as this one, seem to have been funerary images, modeled on Golden Age Spanish portraits of deceased nuns, which were also intended for the convents in which their subjects once resided.However, in New Spain this practice was transformed, producing a new portrait type not seen elsewhere: images of common, living nuns dressed in the rich trappings of their profession.3 Nearly a century after Sor Isabel died, Juan de Villalobos (ca. 1687–1727) painted one of the first known profession portraits of a Mexican nun, that of Madre María de Guadalupe (fig. 2.1). In it the conspicuous young woman, still an adolescent, appears kneeling beside Saint Barbara, her patron saint, and is richly garbed in profession trappings and the red and white habit that the Jeronymite nuns of Puebla wore. Villalobos

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F igu r e 2.1. Juan de Villalobos, Madre María de Guadalupe, shown with Saint Barbara, profession portrait ( Jeronymite). 1727. Oil on canvas, 192 × 125 cm. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

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New Spanish Portraiture and Portraits of Nuns

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was probably commissioned by Sor María or her family to commemorate the momentous event that transformed this ordinary woman into a bride of Christ. The presence of Saint Barbara, a virgin martyr, emphasizes the extraordinary nature of a nun’s religious profession and likens Sor María to the saint, who also renounced the world in order to dedicate her life to Christ. Furthermore, Sor María’s crown and staff suggest that the Mexican viceregal tradition of adorning professing nuns in elaborate floral accoutrements was fully developed by the time Villa lobos painted this remarkable work. Other occasions during which nuns were crowned include celebrations of their twenty-fi fth and fi ftieth anniversaries as religious, and the installation of an abbess.4 Regardless of the occasion for which crownednun portraits were produced, the works invariably picture their subjects with floral trappings that deliberately identify them as Christ’s brides. Additionally, most portraits feature an inscription that provides the sitter’s personal data. In effect, each portrait’s pictorial components radiate a sense of spiritual majesty that is predicated on the sitter’s rich trappings and solemn demeanor, while the accompanying biographical inscription highlights the work’s documentary value and links her to worldly agents such as family and benefactors as well as particular convents. This chapter situates crowned-nun portraits within the traditions of Spanish and viceregal portraiture and argues that the codified manner in which crowned-nun portraits are constructed deliberately elevates the sitters’ institutional identity over their individuation. On one level, the rich trappings of profession mitigate major differences among the various religious orders without entirely effacing them, and instead emphasize their commonalities, forming an unchanging, iconic image of the New Spanish nun. Yet on another level, individual portraits demonstrate the sitter’s conformity to the rules of her religious order and the institutional values of her particular convent, which varied along the gamut. The line between uniformity and distinction was nuanced and artfully drawn, and allowed nuns to express their unique monastic and institutional affi liations while simultaneously conforming to the broader implications of being a bride of Christ.

Portraiture in Early Modern Europe and New Spain Although portraiture did not garner the esteem of other pictorial genres, such as historical or allegorical painting, its tradition of royal patronage in Europe lent it some distinction. In his Tesoro de la

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lengua castellana o española (1611), Sebastián de Covarrubias defi nes retrato (portrait) as the figural representation of a great lord that is made to record his semblance for posterity.5 In early modern Spain and other countries, portraits of monarchs and noblemen conveyed the attributes of a good ruler: unbroken lineage, military might, and high moral standing. These qualities are deliberately conjured in order to create an impression of undisputed authority. Yet portraiture’s relatively low artistic status prevented its specialists from achieving the highest level of professional fame. Artists like Titian, Velázquez, and Goya, who excelled at portraiture, achieved renown for their accomplishments in more esteemed genres that were thought to be especially demanding and rewarding, if done well. The hierarchy of painting types was based on the values that artists, intellectuals, and critics assigned to simple imitative copying (ritrarre) and insightful representation intended to convey some greater meaning (imitare). Ritrarre faithfully reproduces what the artist observes in nature—a strategy traditionally associated with portraiture. Imitare, considered more intellectually demanding and therefore nobler, conveys a profound truth—usually a moral quality—about the subject depicted, something that cannot be captured by simple reproduction of appearance, but rather is captured by perfection of that appearance.6 These concepts and the debates that codified them go back to classical antiquity and were revived in Renaissance Italy by influential artists and authors like Alberti, Leonardo, and Vasari, among others. In Spain, the influential art theorists and painters Francisco Pacheco (1564–1644), Vincente Carducho (1576–1638), and Antonio Palomino (1653–1726) took up this matter, also favoring invention over simple imitation. However, as Pacheco points out in his treatise on painting (1638), the portrait painter has his place among some of the world’s greatest artists, including Apelles, Raphael, and Titian, who were excellent portraitists.7 Of course, imitation and invention could be combined in varying degrees, as Titian demonstrated in his Augsburg portrait of King Philip II of Spain (fig. 2.2). Here the Spanish monarch appears in the composition’s center, full-length and in a three-quarter pose. Dressed in extravagant armor, he is positioned elegantly in contrapposto, and gazes directly at the viewer while resting one hand on his sword’s hilt and the other on a feathered helmet that is set on a waist-level table behind him. Titian executed this work when he met Philip in Augsburg in 1550. However, there is compelling evidence that he did not rely solely on direct observation to paint it. An earlier Titian portrait of Charles V (Philip’s father and the Holy Roman emperor), known today through a copy by Juan

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F igu r e 2.2. Titian, Philip II in Armor. Ca. 1550. Oil on canvas, 193 × 125 cm. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Photograph © Art Resource.

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Pantoja de la Cruz (1553–1608; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid), pictures the sovereign in a strikingly similar manner and with many of the same attributes that would appear later in Philip’s portrait. These portraits of the Habsburg kings epitomize the codified image of royal majesty in early modern Europe, which emphasizes an idealized balance between the sitter’s composure (a reference to self-restraint and morality) and his impressive military prowess, qualities that could be implied not through simple imitation but only through the artist’s inventive skills. Works like these provided viceregal artists with models upon which to base their portraits of powerful men such as Hernán Cortés and New Spain’s viceroys. Throughout the viceregal period, the Habsburg model informed the manner in which artists painted portraits. The sitter poses in a threequarter view, and directs his expressionless gaze at the viewer. Family crests and inscriptions augment the subject’s social status and provide details about his or her life and career. Swags of colorful cloth often fi ll one corner of the composition, adding a sense of decorum, while the subject rests his hand on a table, upon which objects implying political, ecclesiastical, or professional rank are prominently displayed.8 Portraits of the viceroys were exhibited in the viceregal palace and other government offices to create a sense of institutional history and to commemorate its leaders and dignitaries. The Church, likewise, commissioned bishops’ and other prelates’ portraits and displayed them in ecclesiastical palaces for the same purpose. The portrait of Mexico City’s fi rst archbishop, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, adheres to the conventions of viceregal portraits of illustrious ecclesiastical men (Fig. 2.3). In it Zumárraga is pictured in a full-length, three-quarter pose, and is garbed in the gray habit of the Franciscan order. He holds a pectoral cross elegantly in his right hand and gestures with his left hand to an open book that exhibits in Latin Christ’s command to the apostles that they “go out to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16: 15–16). The fi rst friars to arrive in New Spain considered this passage a directive to eradicate Amer indian idolatry and replace it with Christianity, an objective Zumárraga would have also valued, as his efforts to bring beatas and nuns to New Spain in order to indoctrinate native girls and women (discussed in the previous chapter) corroborate. Conventional signs of the archbishop’s high office include his cathedra, or bishop’s throne behind him, a jewel-encrusted miter, a golden crozier, and a silver and gold

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F igu r e 2.3. Anonymous, Portrait of Archbishop Fray Juan de Zumárraga. Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTA.-INAH.-MEX, reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

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processional crucifi x (crux archiepiscopalis) placed on, or resting against, a table to the right of him. The table itself—a traditional symbol of high status also featured in Titian’s Habsburg portraits—emphasizes the archbishop’s impressive ranking.9 Additionally, the archbishop’s crest appears emblazoned on a rich crimson and gold cloth that is stylishly drawn back, just behind Zumárraga’s head and above his cathedra. An ovular plaque appears against the picture plane in the composition’s lower right portion and identifies Zumárraga by name and office: “The most illustrious and reverend Señor Don Fray Juan de Zumárraga, first Bishop and Archbishop of Mexico and founder of the Amor de Dios hospital.”10 Factual inscriptions like this one establish a sense of authenticity; indeed, some portraits even functioned as verifiable documents providing proof in legal cases. For example, in his Concilios provinciales primero, y segundo celebrados en la muy noble, y muy leal ciudad de Mexico (1769), Archbishop Francisco de Lorenzana includes a notorial document in which two men testify to atrocities committed against the natives of Cachulac by the conquistador Pedro de Villanueva. In support of their testimony, they cite a painting that features Villanueva alongside a depiction of the atrocities he committed. Cases like this one, which depended upon visual “evidence,” often involved native litigants who might not possess more conventional documents to support their claims.11 Portraits of the king, in particular, served a special function. The concept of the king’s two bodies, articulated by Fadrique Furió in 1559, states that the king possesses a human body and a political body: the fi rst is produced by Nature and the second is a product of God’s favor and is intended solely for governing justly.12 The king’s official portrait was much more than a representation of his physical likeness—it also referenced his political body and the dynastic legacy that legitimated his authority. In the king’s physical absence, his representation (an official portrait) or representative (the viceroy) demanded the respect and obedience of his subjects as if he were actually present, giving rise to the expression “Regis imago rex est” (the royal image is the king). Thus, the king’s portrait did not merely symbolize but could embody royalty, extending his authority to the faraway reaches of the empire.13 Portraits—and especially the king’s portrait—were often treated as if they contained something of the essence of their sitters.14 In viceregal portraits, identifying inscriptions often use the term “true portrait” (verdadero retrato), in an effort to consolidate an aura of authenticity.15 For example, the inscription appearing along the upper edge of the portrait of Madre María de Jesús Tomelín (fig. 2.4) reads, “True portrait of the Ven-

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F igu r e 2.4. Anonymous, Madre María de Jesús Tomelín (Conceptionist). Early eighteenth century. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

erable Mother María de Jesús, professed nun of the Convent of La Purísima Concepción of this City of Puebla de los Angeles.”16 Although not likely painted from direct observation, it is probably based on an earlier image of the nun, making it a work derived from literary, pictorial, or oral sources.17 The term “true portrait” would have imbued the image with a moralizing quality—associated with individuals of high social

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status—that is meant to impart a lesson on proper comportment to the viewer, as well as a sense of visual authenticity.18 Until the eighteenth century, women in Spain and New Spain sat only infrequently for individual portraits.19 When the tide turned, the production of women’s portraits developed coevally with the growing number of portraits in Europe and the Americas that pictured non noble individuals of high social rank and means. Apparently in Spanish America such works were sometimes exported to Spain so that families could “see” their American relatives.20 Although Madre María de Jesús’s Spanish relatives probably did not commission her portrait, her image seems to have been in demand among individuals of considerable means and status. Women’s portraits characteristically emphasize qualities that were specifically gendered “female” in their milieu. For example, in the portrait of doña María Moreno y Buenaventura (fig. 2.5), the sitter is clearly a lady of high social rank. Appearing in a half-length, three-quarter pose, she sports a stylish coiffure, a chiceador (an artificial beauty mark) on her temple, and clothing reminiscent of French high fashion, popular among New Spain’s gentry of the eighteenth century. The elegant scarlet drapery and family crest in the background affirm the subject’s elite social status. In demonstration of her sexual purity and constancy, she holds a single red carnation in her left hand, symbolizing her betrothal, and a constricted fan in her right, representing her virtue and propriety.21 Miniature portraits of a man—probably her fiancé—appear on her fan and bracelet, accentuating her constancy and feminine honor, qualities integral to a family’s reputation in the Hispanic world. Additionally, she wears a small floral tiara that recalls the massive crowns nuns wore for their profession and in death, and boasts flower-studded collars and an elegant dress as well. Many of the flowers that embellish her figure appear to be roses—a traditional symbol of conjugal love. Despite their visual richness and biographical inscriptions, viceregal portraits do not reveal the sitters’ idiosyncrasies or temperaments; they lack psychological fi nesse. Instead, they emphasize social rank, lineage, titles, career accomplishments, and moral attributes. In this regard, they perpetuate early modern European standards of portraiture, which favor a stoic demeanor, free of idiosyncrasies. However, their static qualities do not imply that the original audience could not “read” the sitters’ attributes. Well into the eighteenth century, physiognomy allowed one to glean a subject’s character from the face’s permanent features. It was not until critics like William Hogarth (1697–1764) and Georg Christoph

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F igu r e 2.5. Anonymous, Doña María Moreno y Buenaventura. Ca. 1760. Oil on canvas, 104 × 79 cm. Phoenix Art Museum. Photograph © Phoenix Art Museum.

Lichtenberg (1742–1799) revised popular understanding of physiognomy that emotional expressions, not permanent facial features, became the markers of a person’s character.22 Originally, a restrained and dignified manner was intended for royal portraits and images of elite nobles; however, by the early seventeenth century European and Spanish American artists also were applying this attribute to portraits of wealthy and upper-class commoners. In Spain, Carducho complained that the gravitas that was so intrinsic to portraits of monarchs and nobles inappropriately appeared in images of “very or-

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dinary,” although wealthy, men and women.23 In the case of New Spanish crowned-nun portraits, this detached quality was meant to demonstrate the sitters’ successful abandonment of natural proclivities and idiosyncrasies in favor of a selfless imitation of Christ and the saints. That is, the portraits’ pictorial components focus entirely on their sitters’ religious and institutional identities as well as their conformity to the bride of Christ model.

Crowned-Nun Portraits Not every nun in New Spain sat for a portrait, and not every painter was commissioned to execute one. In fact, only a few artists signed their names to (or have been credited with) some twenty crowned-nun portraits; the vast majority of portraits are unsigned.24 Among these signatures, that of José de Alcíbar (ca. 1735–1803; see figs. 2.7, 2.14, 2.17) is most prestigious. A founding member of Mexico City’s Academia de San Carlos, Alcíbar was also once a student of Miguel Cabrera (1695?–1768; see figs. 1.4, 6.6), the preeminent painter of eighteenth-century New Spain and also a member of an earlier informal art academy founded in 1753 by his colleague, José de Ibarra (1688–1756; see fig. 3.3). Cabrera painted several nuns’ portraits, including that of Sor María Josefa Agustina Dolores, a Capuchin. Additionally, Juan de Villalobos (active ca. 1687–1727; see fig. 2.1) of Puebla, Andrés López (active 1777–1812), Juan Patricio Morlete Ruíz (1713–1772?; see fig. 2.6), Francisco Javier Salazar, Mariano Guerrero, Mariano Peña y Herrera, Victorino García, and José Mariano Huerto signed their names to crownednun portraits. Of these artists, Cabrera, Alcíbar, and Ruíz were the most prominent; all three were members of prestigious art academies. There is no evidence that nuns painted crown-nun portraits although this possibility should not be ruled out.25 Regardless of artist, style, or date of production, crowned-nun portraits are formulaic in their compositional makeup and iconographical content. They deliberately emphasize their subjects’ exceptional virtue, choice lineage, and high social status. Commissioned for a variety of reasons, they can be categorized into five thematic groups: profession portraits, funeral portraits, posthumous portraits of exemplary nuns, anniversary portraits, and portraits of nuns who held high office.26 Profession portraits constitute the largest category of crowned-nun images. Exclusive to New Spain, they feature mostly young, elite women

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F igu r e 2.6. Juan Patricio Morlete Ruíz, Sor María Francisca de San Pedro, profession portrait (Carmelite). 1760. Oil on canvas, 180 × 120 cm. Private collection. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

recently professed or on the verge of taking their religious vows as novices or nuns. Nuns’ families—who were their primary benefactors— seem to have commissioned them as mementos of their soon-to-be cloistered daughters.27 However, the portraits must also have functioned as markers of their patrons’ high social rank, ecclesiastical affi liation, and fi nancial standing, since nuns were required to prove their limpieza de sangre and legitimacy of birth, and to provide a considerable dowry. A case in point is José de Alcíbar’s portrait of Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo, an Urbanist Franciscan of the convent of Santa Clara in

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Mexico City and a member of two prestigious families in New Spain that boasted judges, knights, counts, and adelantados (frontier governors) in their ranks (fig. 2.7). The inscription identifies her parents28 and associates them with this prestigious convent, with which they may have had a fi nancial affi liation: Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo, legitimate daughter of Señor don Manuel de Uribe y Sandoval and Señora doña María Josefa Valcarcel y Velasco. She professed on 1 May 1777 in the most religious convent of Santa Clara of Mexico City at the age of 22 years and 3 months.29

Profession portraits like Sor María Ignacia’s would have been displayed in residential parlors where family members and guests gathered.30 On some occasions, portrait copies may have been made for nuns’ godparents or other family members and benefactors. They depict their sitters in half-length or full-length compositions, in three-quarter view, and in obscure settings that imply the somber privation of monastic life. Although some profession portraits—especially those of Capuchins and Brigitites—lack the rich trappings seen in the majority of crowned-nun portraits, most nuns are pictured with a rich array of bridal accessories: a crown, usually embellished with flowers; a flowery palm or staff; a statue of the Christ Child or a crucifi x; an ornamented candle; occasionally, a bridal ring; and, for some, an escudo de monja featuring a painted religious scene.31 Many of these trappings recall images of virgin saints and martyrs, who frequently appear wearing floral trappings. (The allusions in religious painting are examined in detail in chapter 3.) A number of seventeenth-century portraits of noble Spanish nuns feature similar accoutrements, although they are not technically profession images nor were they commissioned and displayed by their sitters’ families and benefactors, but rather by their convents. The portrait of Sor Mariana de la Cruz y Austria, for instance, pictures a Franciscan nun in a dark setting illuminated by a circular window that hints at the Eucharistic wafer and is divided into square panels by lines that call to mind the symbol of the Cross (fig. 2.8). Sor Mariana, a member of the royal house of Austria, appears in a half-length, three-quarter pose, and holds up a sprig of small flowers and a cross in her left hand, while pressing her right hand over her heart in a dignified gesture. Behind her an elaborate golden crown prominently rests on a red-cloaked table just below the window, alluding to her royal lineage, which she has symbolically

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F igu r e 2.7. José de Alcíbar, Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo, profession portrait (Urbanist Franciscan). 1777. Oil on canvas, 180 × 109 cm. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

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F igu r e 2.8. Anonymous, Sor Mariana de la Cruz y Austria. Late seventeenth century. Oil on canvas, 120 × 92. Monasterio de Descalzas Reales, Madrid. Photograph © Patrimonio Nacional, Spain.

given up and offered to Christ. While she is dressed as a simple nun, it is clear that her nobility is still a significant aspect of her identity. A fancy vignette with a biographical inscription appears in the bottom part of the composition.32 This portrait and others like it from the Descalzas Reales convent in Madrid juxtapose their sitters with crowns, tables, and other conventional symbols of elite social status or administrative office. Significantly, living, nonnoble nuns were rarely portrayed with regal accoutrements in the Spanish empire, except in New Spain. This nonconformity may be

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partially explained by the fact that New Spanish artists were simultaneously basing their works on Spanish portraits of noble nuns like Sor Mariana as well as funerary portraits that used crownlike headdresses, while also utilizing the symbolic conventions of religious paintings. Also, New Spain’s crowned-nun portraits were mostly produced in the eighteenth century, a period that saw a surge in the production of portraits of “rich but ordinary” people (to use Carducho’s expression) that depicted them in the manner of noblewomen. At the convent of La Encarnación in Madrid, Madre Mariana de San José is the subject of an unusual portrait that shows her in life and crowned with a floral wreath (fig. 2.9). The quill and book that she is holding identify her as the founder of the convent, as does the inscription, while the wreath refers to her exemplary virtue. Remarkably, the wreath was added at a later date, apparently in emulation of the New Spanish tradition of picturing nuns with floral crowns.33 Until this tradition was adopted in Spain, Spanish portraits of living nuns featured their subjects without any of the floral attributes present in the crownednun genre of New Spain. And the Spanish portraits primarily served as records of the convents’ founders, administrators, and distinguished residents. In New Spain, a portrait might also be commissioned when an especially pious nun died. Death portraits constitute the earliest documented examples of viceregal crowned-nun portraits. Although there are no records naming who commissioned them, a number of nuns’ hagiographies suggest that convents were the primary clients. Sor Isabel de la Encarnación’s hagiography—mentioned in the opening paragraph of this chapter—is among the earliest New Spanish sources to document the commissioning of such a portrait. As Salmerón describes it, once the painter arrived at the convent of San José, the disfigured face of Sor Isabel miraculously returned to its original, youthful appearance—a phenomenon that incited the residents of Puebla to proclaim her a saint.34 Such a metamorphosis was considered to be a sign of the deceased person’s sanctity. Laypeople and religious considered nuns whose bodies experienced this phenomenon to be saintly and actively sought out their relics and their effigies—which constituted a kind of relic, since, as we have seen, some portraits were believed to carry something of the essence of the subjects they portrayed.35 Among other things, death portraits were intended as inspirational models of piety for living nuns. For example, Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700) states in Paraíso occidental—a publication about the Mexico

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F igu r e 2.9. Attributed to Francisca de Ortiz Sotomayor, Madre Mariana de San José. Early seventeenth century. Oil on canvas, 103 × 83 cm. Monasterio de la Encarnación, Madrid. Photograph © Patrimonio Nacional, Spain.

City convent of Jesús María and some of its more notable residents—that when Madre María Antonia de Santo Domingo died in 1682, a portrait was commissioned for the convent. Like Sor Isabel’s, her body underwent a miraculous transformation that returned her disfigured face to its former youth and beauty, thereby demonstrating her favor with God. According to Sigüenza y Góngora, the portrait was not simply intended to commemorate Madre María Antonia; it was to stand as a model of virtue for all of the nuns of Jesús María.36 The Spanish American death portrait tradition is based on seventeenth-century Spanish portraits of deceased nuns, which some Span-

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ish convents collected to memorialize their founders and most prestigious members. The convents of La Encarnación, Santa Isabel, Corpus Christi, and Descalzas Reales in Madrid still exhibit these moving images today.37 One of the most notable of these portraits features Sor Margarita de la Cruz (fig. 2.10), archduchess of Austria and the daughter of the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian II and empress doña María de Austria, one of Descalzas Reales’s most prestigious and famous members, in her funeral casket. Clad in the brown Franciscan habit that Clarists wore, Sor Margarita loosely grasps the crucifi x that rests on her chest, and a golden palm frond is tucked into the crook of her arm. Crowned with a colorful floral wreath and covered in a spectacular floral arrangement, the emperor’s daughter is pictured as she appeared just before her interment in 1633 at the age of sixty-six. This mode of funeral display was common in early modern Spanish convents and provided the immediate visual precedent for funerary crowned-nun portraits in colonial Spanish America. Unlike Spanish portraits, viceregal death portraits of monastic women do not limit their subjects to convent founders, administrators, or noblewomen; they also picture common women who were highly regarded

F igu r e 2.10. Anonymous, Sor Margarita de la Cruz, funeral portrait. 1633. Oil on canvas, 81 × 100 cm. Monasterio de Descalzas Reales, Madrid. Photograph © Patrimonio Nacional, Spain.

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F igu r e 2.11. Anonymous, Madre María de la Encarnación, funeral portrait (Augustinian). 1756. Oil on canvas, 50 × 67 cm. Museo Ex-Convento de Santa Mónica, Puebla, Mexico. CONACULTAINAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

for their piety. For example, the half-length portrait of Madre María de la Encarnación (fig. 2.11) depicts an Augustinian of Santa Mónica convent in Puebla, wearing a colorful floral wreath and wielding a massive floral palm frond. Her eyes are closed, indicating that she is deceased, and her sleeves completely conceal her enfolded arms. A transparent white veil identifies her as a novice, while a biographical inscription running along the bottom edge of the composition gives her age and

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date of death.38 Although the portrait’s exhibition history is unknown, it was probably displayed in Santa Mónica convent as a memorial and an inspiration for its residents. Sor María is pictured upright; however, most Spanish American death portraits present their sitters reclining on their funeral biers. For example, in her portrait, Madre Matiana Francisca del Señor San José (fig. 2.12) reclines on a large white pillow, her eyes closed. Like Madre María in the previous example, Madre Matiana bears a colorful floral staff in the crook of her arm. A sprig of lilies shooting up from her tightly clasped hands and a sumptuous floral crown complete the portrait’s floral array, which also serves as a pictorial frame for Madre Matiana’s face and head. Her hands partially obscure the painted pectoral badge (escudo de monja) that was an integral part of the Conceptionist habit.39 The biographical inscription at the bottom of the portrait identifies the nun as a vicar-elect of her convent.40 The distinctively New Spanish elements in these (and other) viceregal death portraits are Madre María’s upright pose, Madre

F igu r e 2.12. Anonymous, Madre Matiana Francisca del Señor San José, funeral portrait (Conceptionist). Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 61 × 82 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

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Matiana’s floral crown, and the floral staffs, which are completely composed of real and artificial flowers. In contrast, the Spanish death portraits invariably feature their sitters reclining, with floral wreaths (as opposed to crowns) and unembellished palm fronds. The third category of crowned-nun portraits consists of posthumous portraits of nuns that picture their subjects as living, and were based on literary, visual, or oral sources rather than an artist’s direct observation. Like death portraits, they were painted to commemorate exceptionally pious nuns, some of whom were locally regarded as saints. The portrait of Madre María de Jesús Tomelín, for example (see fig. 2.4), pictures a devout Conceptionist nun who was widely celebrated by the residents of Puebla for her piety, mystical raptures, and miracles. Popularly known as the “Lily of Puebla,” Madre María de Jesús became a symbol of civic pride for the residents of this city. She is the subject of two hagiographies, published in 1683 and 1756, both of which were intended to facilitate her beatification and promote her elevation to sainthood. In her half-length portrait, Madre María de Jesús is shown with her bridal trappings (flowery crown, candle, and wedding band). Her skyblue cape, pleated white scapular, and escudo de monja bearing an image of the Immaculate Conception identify her as a Conceptionist nun, while the inscription along the upper edge of the composition emphasizes her hometown and the image’s authenticity. Madre María de Jesús’s idealized physiognomy suggests that the portrait is based on oral descriptions or literature rather than direct observation. Because no portraits of this nun seem to have been painted from life, this and other images of her were probably based on oral traditions and hagiographies. The last category of crowned-nun portraits comprises images of convent founders and administrators, mostly commissioned by convents to record their institutional histories. The portrait in figure 2.13, for example—of Madre María de San José—depicts an important Augustinian nun who authored a devotional text entitled The Stations (1710) and founded the Oaxacan convent of La Soledad in 1697. As well, she is the subject of a hagiography published in 1723 by Fray Sebastián de Santander y Torres and a 1773 and 1782 tract by Angel Maldonado, which was written and published to promote her beatification. In her half-length portrait, Madre María wears the black-and-white habit of the Augustinians and is crowned with a simple but colorful floral wreath. In her crossed hands she holds a flowery staff, which represents her virtue and symbolic martyrdom, or detachment from the world. Along the bottom

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F igu r e 2.13. Anonymous, Madre María de San José (Augustinian). Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 66 × 82.5 cm. Museo Ex-Convento de Santa Mónica, Puebla, Mexico. CONACULTAINAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

edge of the composition an inscription identifies her by her religious and family names and specifies the convents where she professed and died: Venerable Madre María de San José, the name she gave herself the day she professed in the most religious convent of Recoletas de San Agustín and Santa Mónica in Puebla, known as Ygnacio y Solorsano in the world, she died in the Augustinian convent of La Soledad in Oaxaca of which she was the

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founder . . . [she died on] 8 December 1719 . . . at the age of 63 years, she appeared as she is represented [here].41

Madre María, like Madre María de Jesús Tomelín before her, was a renowned mystic who entered the convent because of numinous events that she experienced in her youth. In her portrait, the roundels on either side of her head narrate one of these events, in which a bolt of lightning struck near the young girl, increasing her faith and inspiring her to become a nun. This portrait, then, not only commemorates Madre María de San José as a founder of La Soledad convent, but identifies her as a virtuous and spiritually eminent nun after whom the nuns of Santa Mónica—the site of her profession and the location where the portrait would have been displayed—should model themselves. Regardless of the occasions for which portraits of nuns were made, most of them contain particular iconographic elements that unify them as a group. With few exceptions the portraits’ settings are austere and obscure interiors, probably intended to denote the sitters’ detachment from the world. Because many portraits were likely painted in New Spain’s convents, or based on studies made there, their stark settings document the kind of interiors artists would have worked in: namely, the coro bajo of the convent’s church (especially in the case of death portraits) or the convent’s locutorio.

Monastic Orders By the mid-seventeenth century, Conceptionist, Jeronymite, Urbanist, and some Dominican nuns professed the private life. The convents founded by them, especially the Conceptionists, considerably outnumbered those founded by communal-life orders like the Capuchins and Carmelites. Perhaps because Conceptionist convents outnumbered all others in New Spain and maintained strong relationships with the secular world, a higher percentage of crowned-nun portraits feature women of this order. Arguably, Conceptionist portraits are the most visually opulent of New Spain’s crowned-nun paintings. For example, the 1795 profession portrait of Madre María Ana Josefa de Señor San Ignacio (see fig. 2.14), signed by the artist José de Alcíbar, pictures a Conceptionist nun in a simple half-length, three-quarter pose. However, the sumptuous trappings of her habit and bridal symbols provide a visual richness that is fre-

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F igu r e 2.14. José de Alcíbar, Madre María Ana Josefa de Señor San Ignacio, profession portrait (Conceptionist). 1795. Oil on canvas, 104 × 84 cm. Szépmüvészeti Múzeum/Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Photograph © Szépmüvészeti Múzeum.

quently lacking in portraits of reformed-order, or communal-life, nuns. As with other portraits of Conceptionists, Madre María Ana Josefa appears in a blue cape and white robe, a deliberate reference to the Virgin’s garb when she revealed herself to the order’s founder, Beatríz da Silva (d. 1492). However, her habit is considerably embellished with lavish border decorations that almost entirely hide the brilliant blue fabric of her cape. Her black veil is highlighted by a rich gold-and-white fringe design and embroidered floral motifs that surround the entwined “MA” emblem of the Virgin Mary. A similarly designed yoke runs down the front of her habit in two panels alongside the wooden beads of a rosary. These

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trappings contrast with the elegantly pleated scapular, which is most visible near her midriff. Just below her chin a great escudo de monja features an image of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (patroness of the Conceptionist order) flanked by two saints. Portraits of Conceptionists and Jeronymites frequently depict their subjects with escudos de monja, which normally portray a host of saints gathered around the Virgin Mary. This element of the Conceptionist and Jeronymite habit originated with the Conceptionist order of nuns in Spain, but as a much smaller plaque called a venera.42 Supplementing these trappings, a floral crown, stylized palm frond, statuette of the Christ Child, and bridal ring complete the nuptial theme. The profession portrait of Sor María Francisca Josefa de San Felipe Neri, a Jeronymite nun (see fig. 0.1), exhibits the visually rich quality of non-reformed-order—private-life— portraits while simultaneously distinguishing her particular religious order and convent. Only the nuns of San Jerónimo convent in Puebla wore the rich crimson-and-white attire, which evokes Saint Jerome’s cardinal robes. An escudo de monja just below her chin, featuring an image of Mary Immaculate surrounded by saints, also identifies her as a Jeronymite nun. Her spectacular floral crown and great flowery palm frond—both of which are embellished with saint, bird, and butterfly figures—establish the bridal theme of this portrait. As well, Sor María Francisca holds a book (probably the rules and constitutions of her order) and an elegantly dressed statue of the Christ Child in her right hand—references to her fidelity to the order and to her divine spouse. Unlike Conceptionists and Jeronymites, the Franciscans were divided into communal-life and private-life branches. The full-length profession portrait of Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo by José de Alcíbar (see fig. 2.7) pictures a private-life Franciscan nun of the Urbanist branch. In it, Sor María Ignacia wears an elaborately embroidered veil and cape and a great flowery crown, and wields a richly decorated floral staff and lit candle. The band on her wedding fi nger symbolizes her marriage to Christ. A cincture (monastic belt), barely visible just below her cape, also identifies her as a Franciscan. Sor María Ignacia’s Urbanist habit (comprising a blue-gray robe, matching scapular, and black yoke) is somewhat obscured in her portrait, but can be seen more clearly in other viceregal portraits of Urbanist nuns. An inscription in white lettering to the left of the sitter identifies her by name; lists her parents, date of profession, convent, and age at profession; and includes Alcíbar’s signature, a rarity in crowned-nun

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portraits. The obscure background sets Sor María Ignacia’s full-length figure in high relief and calls attention to the inscription that appears next to her. The near-life-size dimensions of this portrait, along with the distinguished artist’s signature and the nun’s regal appearance, would have made this work a source of pride and honor for her family, who would have prominently displayed it in their home. While Conceptionist and Jeronymite habits deliberately evoke the patron saints of their orders, Dominican habits specifically call to mind Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Rose of Lima, the order’s most famous female members. In her profession portrait, Sor María Engracia Josefa del Santísimo Rosario (fig. 2.15) wears the same black-and-white habit that saints Catherine of Siena and Rose of Lima wear in their portraits. She also exhibits a massive floral crown that features a Dominican novice figurine receiving a black veil from two angels—a reference to her own profession. Her small statue of the Christ Child encircled with flowers deliberately evokes images of Saint Rose of Lima, who frequently appears with this same element in viceregal art (see fig. 0.2), while her embellished candle denotes her vigilance as a bride of Christ. The portrait of Madre María de San José (see fig. 2.13), an Augustinian, exhibits a visual austerity that is generally lacking in portraits of private-life nuns. Rather than a towering floral crown and elaborate floral staff, her bridal trappings are a simple floral wreath and a small staff. In other Augustinian portraits, like that of Madre María Salvadora de San Antonio (fig. 2.16), the most striking attributes are the flowery bridal trappings—with bird and butterfly figurines—which prominently stand out against the simple black habit. Madre María Salvadora’s plain habit, downcast or closed eyes, and crucifi x imbue her figure with an overwhelming sense of sobriety and humility—qualities that are emphasized in many portraits of communal-life nuns. The biographical inscription in the upper left corner of the composition contributes to the documentary aspect that is present in most crowned-nun portraits.43 Nuns of the Augustinian order are identified by their plain black habits, white wimples, and a small black teardrop-shaped bit that sometimes protrudes from the veil along the nun’s hairline. Gestures of humility are also found in portraits of Carmelites, such as that of Madre Rosa María del Espíritu Santo (fig. 2.17). In her elegant full-length profession portrait, Madre Rosa María is pictured in the brown-and-white habit of her order, and wielding the bridal trappings of her profession: a long-stemmed candle lavishly adorned with floral arrangements and a double-headed eagle plaque, and a prominent flo-

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F igu r e 2.15. Anonymous, Sor María Engracia Josefa del Santísimo Rosario, profession portrait (Dominican). 1803. Oil on canvas, 135 × 95 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas.

F igu r e 2.16. Anonymous, Madre María Salvadora de San Antonio, profession portrait (Augustinian). 1792. Oil on canvas, 84 × 63 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Photo by author.

ral crown. These extravagantly decorated trappings contrast with Madre Rosa María’s downcast eyes, which convey her modesty and piety to the viewer—qualities especially emphasized in portraits of communal-life nuns, showing the sitters’ conformity to the rules of their orders. An inscription along the upper left portion of the composition identifies her by name, convent, and date of profession.44 Carmelites wore the characteristic brown-and-white habit that the order’s most famous saint, Teresa de Jesús (also Teresa of Ávila, 1515–1582), wore. In images of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (see fig. 3.4), the Virgin Mary is clad in the same habit, linking the order to this particular Marian devotion in the same manner that the Conceptionists are linked to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. Only a few Capuchin nuns appear with floral trappings in their por-

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traits; most are uncrowned and unadorned. A typical example is José del Castillo’s portrait of Madre María Clara Josefa (fig. 2.18), which emphasizes its sitter’s piety and asceticism. Her habit—of coarse gray-brown material, like sackcloth, highlighted by lighter-colored patches of fabric on her sleeves—identifies her as a Capuchin nun. Madre María Clara leans forward slightly and casts her gaze downward as she brings together her patched sleeves, shrouding her hands in a gesture of self-containment and meditation that is diagnostic of Capuchin portraits. Below her arms the knotted cincture of the Franciscans bisects her simple habit. To her side, two books and an hourglass are arranged on a high wooden ta-

F igu r e 2.17. Attributed to José de Alcíbar, Madre Rosa María del Espíritu Santo, profession portrait (Carmelite). 1775. Oil on canvas, 182 × 100 cm. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

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F igu r e 2.18. José del Castillo, Madre María Clara Josefa, profession portrait (Capuchin). 1769. Oil on canvas, 198 × 113 cm. © D.R. Museo Nacional de Arte/Instituto de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City.

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ble just below a printed illustration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (a Jesuit devotion and a reference to Christ’s love). A darkened field along the bottom edge of the composition contains her biographical information, which includes her birth name: María Rosa Chamorro.45 Although her image lacks the usual bridal trappings of profession, the inscription indicates that this is a profession portrait. Cleverly referring to her birth name, a second inscription in the upper right corner of the composition poetically explains why she, as a Capuchin nun, lacks floral accoutrements: “For God this bride even abandoned her name; although she was still María, she was no longer María Rosa. Rejecting Rosa [the rose] made her exceptionally virtuous because this flower does not resonate among Capuchin nuns, only by thorns is her crown pinned.”46 Thus, her bridal crown is associated with Christ’s thorny crown—a symbol of penitence and suffering—not the customary floral crown worn by nuns of other religious orders, which Capuchins may have regarded as insufficiently austere.47 A peculiar juxtaposition of austerity and opulence characterizes the profession portraits of nuns belonging to the Company of Mary. This order was the last one to arrive in New Spain and operated only two convents in Mexico City at the end of the viceregal period. Perhaps for that reason there are few known profession portraits of nuns of this order. One of them is the half-length portrait of Madre María Antonia de Rivera (fig. 2.19), in which a young woman in an indistinct setting directs her arresting gaze at the viewer. Her habit comprises a plain black robe and a great white wimple that extends from her chin to her midchest. Posing in a three-quarters view, she holds open a booklet as if to save her place on the page while temporarily diverting her attention to the viewer. A wedding band, which appears on her left hand, and a towering floral crown—inside of which hangs a small sculpted dove (symbol of the Holy Spirit)—make up her bridal trappings and identify the work as a profession portrait. Along the bottom edge of the composition a biographical inscription imparts Madre María Antonia’s name, order, convent, and date of profession; the year in which she was elected abbess; and the date of her death.48 The juxtaposition of the young nun’s plain black habit with the grandiose floral crown is in line with communal-life order portraits; however, the feature that distinguishes nuns of the Company of Mary is the booklet, which appears in each portrait and signifies the order’s dedication to educating New Spain’s girls and young women.

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F igu r e 2.19. Anonymous, Madre María Antonia de Rivera, profession portrait (Company of Mary). 1757. Oil on canvas, 125 × 80 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph © Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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Image and Inscription Crowned-nun portraits specifically record their sitters’ name, lineage, convent, and date of profession. In some examples, hometown, date of entering the novitiate, and date of death are recorded. Inscriptions appear in multiple manners: on pseudo-parchment backings, in architectural roundels that give the appearance of an engraved commemorative stone plaque, and directly on the pictorial field. The fi rst two methods deliberately amplify the documentary quality of the inscriptions, and are probably based on profession registries (libros de profesión) that convents required their nuns to sign. In them, newly professed nuns recorded their secular and religious names; the convent in which they professed; their age, date, and place of profession; the priest who presided over the ceremony; and the names of their parents. Significantly, much of the same information was recorded in viceregal marriage registries—linking religious profession to the sacrament of marriage—and in baptismal registries. Indeed, because of their mystical nuptial theme, profession portraits can be considered marriage portraits of religious women. Regardless of their sitters’ religious orders, crowned-nun portraits visually integrate the sacrosanct and mundane qualities of their subjects, primarily through the combination of a pseudo-legal and documentarystyle inscription and a figure resembling a saint or martyr (the subject of the following chapter). Specifically, the sitter’s solemn demeanor combined with the visual exuberance of her rich bridal trappings establishes a mystical quality absent in other viceregal portraits. To a modern viewer a viceregal nun’s rich trappings may seem contrary to the asceticism and piety of the religious life; however, a period viewer would have understood that visual sumptuousness as a sign of her high moral and social standing. Furthermore, because profession and death portraits emphasize their sitters’ mystical union with Christ, their opulent floral trappings make visible the sitters’ incorporeal qualities (chastity, obedience, charity, etc.). In other words, the visual richness of these portraits symbolizes the sitters’ spiritual richness. The sacrosanct quality of these crowned-nun portraits is abated by biographical inscriptions (leyendas) that solidly bind their subjects to the earthly realm. These inscriptions highlight particular attributes of the sitters in pseudo-legal terms that call attention to their lineage, social class, and legitimacy of birth. Unlike painted images of the saints, which generally lack written biographical data and depict their subjects in heav-

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enly glory, crowned-nun portraits represent their subjects in sacred and earthly terms by expressing these qualities respectively in image and inscription. Pictorially, crowned nuns appear as the preeminent brides of Christ—mystic queens cloaked in the trappings of sanctity. Textually, they are portrayed as socially elite individuals with important personal ties to the secular world. Thus crowned-nun portraits invest their sitters with both spiritual and earthly capital (a matter taken up in chapter 5). Significantly, this blending of sacrosanct and worldly does not generally occur in contemporaneous portraits of male clerics or laymen and laywomen because, unlike crowned nuns, they are not pictured in the trappings of mystical union with God.49 Without the inscriptions, portraits of crowned nuns might be confused with religious images of Christian martyrs, queens, or crowned saints. The sitters’ particular physiognomy and the inscriptions that identify each are the primary indicators that the portraits are not religious icons of the saints but rather representations of actual individuals. For example, the portrait of Madre María de Guadalupe (see fig. 2.1), although executed in the tradition of donor portraits in which the patron/sitter appears as an observer (rather than a participant) in a religious scene, clearly combines the supernatural and natural realms by juxtaposing a nun, with clearly individualized facial features, and a saint exhibiting idealized features. Unlike most donor portraits, however, this one shows the sitter participating in the scene, as she holds Saint Barbara’s hand. The suggestion here is that Sor María enjoyed a privileged and personal relationship with this saint, who undoubtedly exemplified the bride of Christ model for the young nun. However, the painting’s leyenda identifies Sor María as a young nun in the convent of San Jerónimo in Puebla, clearly situating her in the earthly realm. This strategy fulfi lled the Church’s requirement of distinguishing sacred subjects from earthly ones.

Corporate Identity and Cultural Cohesion Portraits of crowned nuns adhere to the general conventions of viceregal portraiture in featuring their sitters’ feminine qualities. They are also based on Golden Age Spanish portraits of noble and deceased nuns. However, unlike the Spanish portraits, viceregal ones do not limit their subjects to distinguished founders, convent administrators, or noblewomen; rather, they mostly depict ordinary women—

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living and deceased—in the magnificent trappings of their marriage to Christ. Each crowned-nun portrait type is characterized by a rich iconographical program that strongly relates it to religious painting, in some cases blurring the lines between portraiture and religious icon. Idealized physiognomy, pious demeanor, and obscure setting amplify the sacred and timeless qualities of these women, while biographical inscriptions bind them to the earthly realm. This tension between sacrosanct and mundane establishes multiple layers of meaning in the portraits that touch upon mysticism, lineage, sanctity, female honor/sexuality, pride of place/hometown, and social status. In satisfying the various needs of their patrons, crowned-nun portraits functioned on multiple levels: as commemorative works, didactic models for living nuns, relics for the pious, and signs of a family’s social status, honor, religiosity, and institutional ties. Crowned-nun portraits conform to the early modern standard that highlights institutional identity, high social rank, and morality. Accordingly, they are largely devoid of meaningful personal idiosyncrasies. Instead, identity is partially dependent on the visual tension between the sacred and the mundane. Despite the multiplicity of individual sitters and the minor iconographical differences among the numerous religious orders, the consistency of pictorial format and bridal iconography effectively lessens differences and emphasizes commonalities, thereby establishing a kind of corporate religious identity among New Spain’s nuns. The story of Sor Isabel de la Encarnación’s miraculous transformation on her funeral bier demonstrates the privileges that some nuns experienced, even in death. Such events, though always noteworthy, were not unexpected by New Spain’s faithful, because, as a group, nuns enjoyed a heightened spiritual life that put them in contact with the supernatural realm. Their own sanctity and singularity among New Spain’s inhabitants are encoded in the iconography of virginity, martyrdom, and holiness that is present in every crowned-nun portrait, a topic the following chapter examines in depth.

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Chapter 3 E u ro - C h r i s t i a n P r e c e de n t s i n t h e C row n e d - N u n I m age

N

ew Spa i n’s h agiogr a ph e rs w rot e t h at e xce ptionally virtuous nuns who underwent a holy death had an “odor of sanctity” (olor de santidad) about them.1 These writers sometimes claimed that nuns’ dead bodies actually gave off a pleasing scent, a phenomenon that they considered to be an indisputable sign of holiness. For example, in 1683 Fray Diego de Lemus stated that before Sor María de Jesús Tomelín was interred, her corpse broke out in a fragrant sweat. The effect of the dead human body is decomposition; and it is ill fortune that a foul odor accompanies it: but [the body of ] God’s servant experienced exemption from that misfortune, such that the nuns who watched over her perceived an extraordinary fragrance emitted from her, pleasing them so, issuing aromas and the most delicate of perfumes. At midnight, keeping a vigil over her body, many nuns noted that her face began to sweat a fragrant liqueur of the most delicate, aromatic kind, delighting the senses. It took the form of genuine, clear pearls, like drops of pure oil.2

Even when a holy death involved no physical change or sweet fragrance, it could still be described metaphorically by this evocative expression. Floral imagery in crowned-nun portraits recalls the odor of sanctity in its conjuring of pleasant, floral fragrances. In late Christian antiquity, such fragrances, likened to those of a field, were indicative of the divine favor God granted some male and female religious as well as those who

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demonstrated exceptional piety and ethical distinction.3 In death portraits this imagery becomes a metaphor for Christ’s flowery nuptial bed, which awaits each of his brides at the moment of their death.4 The “garden of virtues” theme, like the expression “odor of sanctity,” imparted important religious notions for nuns, who saw themselves, and were seen, as flowers in the garden of their divine spouse. For example, in his written endorsement of Sor María de San José’s hagiography, don Tomás Montaño, canon of the cathedral of Mexico City, writes that the convents in which Sor María resided at different times in her life were like luxuriant gardens or flowers of the Church, where many sacred virgins are freed in their delicate odors, and a lively confection of aromas are given off in precious incense; here this Bride is among God’s other beloved, a Lily, it seems to me, that predominates in the crowd of flowers, because her head is bowed and crowned.5

In this emotive passage nuns reside in a paradisiacal setting with Sor María, who takes the form of a lily, the symbol of spiritual and sexual purity, as we will see below. The rich imagery of this passage is made visible in an anonymous eighteenth-century painting from New Spain that pictures the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception as the protector of the Capuchin order of nuns (fig. 3.1). In it the Virgin looks tenderly at a multitude of nuns who supplicate her in gestures of prayer, awe, and humility within an enclosed garden. Three nuns in the foreground, sprouting from colossal roses, are surrounded by other nuns who also emerge from giant flowers. The Virgin—Christ’s perfect bride—enjoys pride of place and watches over them prayerfully just below the three partially visible figures of the Trinity. Crowned-nun portraits use flowers to amplify the status of the sitters above that of ordinary women and to symbolize their virtues as brides of Christ. This floral imagery is based on an extensive body of literature: biblical passages regarding the ideal bride, Marian litanies, legends of the death and assumption of the Virgin, and Saint Teresa of Ávila’s notion of the soul as a garden. Additionally, the portraits are iconographically informed by images of the Virgin crowned and of female virgin saints and martyrs. The Virgin of Guadalupe (the patroness of the Americas) and Saint Rose of Lima (the first American saint) held a special place for American religious and for Creole intellectuals, many of whom were

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F igu r e 3.1. Anonymous, Virgin of the Immaculate Conception as Protector of the Capuchin Order of Nuns. Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 227 × 147 cm. Academia de Bellas Artes, Puebla, Mexico.

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consolidating a Spanish American religious identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in part by developing and popularizing visual emblems of Christian exemplarity.

Flowers, Gardens, and Virtues In the Christian tradition the “enclosed garden” (hortus conclusus) symbolizes virtue and holiness, as in the Garden of Eden before the Fall of Man. In New Spain it became a symbol of the convent or monastery.6 The notion originates in a passage from the Old Testament’s Song of Songs 4:10–15, which expresses a groom’s love for his betrothed. How fragrant your perfumes, more fragrant than all spices! Your lips, my promised bride, distill wild honey. Honey and milk are under your tongue; and the scent of your garment is like the scent of Lebanon. She is a garden enclosed, my sister, my promised bride; a garden enclosed, a sealed fountain. Your shoots form an orchard of pomegranate trees, bearing most exquisite fruit: nard and saff ron, calamus and cinnamon, with all the incense-bearing trees; myrrh and aloes, with the subtlest odors. Fountain of the garden, well of living water, streams flowing down from Lebanon!

By the thirteenth century these verses had come to be seen as references to the Virgin Mary, the mother and perfect bride of Christ.7 Because medieval nuns modeled their lives after the Virgin and became Christ’s brides at the time of their religious profession, this passage equally refers to their own virtue and bridal status. Significantly, virtues are allegorized in this passage in the form of aromatic trees and fruits, all of which grow within an enclosed garden at whose center stands a “well of living water”—a symbol of the Virgin herself. An anonymous eighteenth-century painting in the sacristy of the church of Santa Rosa de Viterbo in Querétaro pictures many of these elements in an allegory of the religious life for women, set in the enclosed garden (fig. 3.2). Sitting in the pillared entrance to a garden, the Virgin Mary is pictured caressing a pair of sheep that flank her. Two infant angels fluttering above the Virgin descend with a crown destined for her head. The inscription on the lintel just above the angels reads hortvs

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F igu r e 3.2. Anonymous, Hortus conclusus. Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas. Iglesia de Santa Rosa de Viterbo, Querétaro, Mexico. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

conclvsvs, referring not only to the setting of this scene but also to the Virgin herself. Inside the garden walls, women in both religious habits and secular garb are occupied in a myriad of activities. In the center of the garden Christ appears crucified on a tree and surrounded by a multitude of attentive lambs. Blood spurts in a thin stream from his side wound into a chalice held by an angel. Echoing this, to the right of Christ, streams of water shoot out of a fountain—a symbol of the Virgin as a well of living water. The church of Santa Rosa de Viterbo was part of a prestigious colegio de niñas intended for Spaniards and Creoles. In colonial times, colegialas were instructed in religious and domestic matters and resided within the institution’s walls. Accordingly, all of the human figures pictured in this mural are women. Each one is shown tending to some aspect of the garden, which itself is symbolic of the virtuous life that each of these women was expected to live, just as their model, the Virgin Mary, had done in her lifetime.

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F igu r e 3.3. José de Ibarra, Christ in the Garden of Virtues. Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 112 × 168 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

An allegorical garden of virtues worthy of accommodating Christ is the theme of a contemporaneous painting by the Mexican artist José de Ibarra (fig. 3.3). In this bucolic work, a youthful Christ reclines in a flower garden while a host of angels appears fluttering above him and a lamb tends to his wounded foot. As with the Querétaro mural, this image would have resonated deeply for novices and nuns, and is an important source for understanding the symbolism of flora and fauna in viceregal religious paintings and portraits.8 Many of the garden’s occupants are labeled with the names of specific virtues: “love” (amor), “suffering” (padecer), “chastity” (castidad), “grace” (gracia), “prayer” (oración), “contemplation” (contemplación), and “mortification” (mortifi cación). Meanwhile, the three theological virtues—“faith,” “hope,” and “charity”—are shown in the upper edges of the composition as, respectively, butterfl ies, the green leaves of a tree, and scarlet-colored birds—emblems that often appear on the crowns and staffs depicted in crownednun portraits. In the center, Christ holds up a floral stem bearing three lilies, a reference to Mary’s virginity as well as the Holy Trinity when it appears as a group of three. Other lilies in this composition, such as those

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sprouting at his feet, are identified as “chastity”—a vow made by priests and nuns—but the three that Christ holds are individually glossed as “will,” “memory,” and “understanding,” the Three Powers of the soul, which appear more commonly as rays emanating from Christ’s head. Meanwhile, two angels above bear a crown of hearts—labeled “love”— and a scepter constructed likewise. The lily is also the traditional symbol of the Virgin Mary—the model of chastity—and features prominently in scenes of the Annunciation, in which the Archangel Gabriel, holding a lily, appears to the Virgin. Other flowers embodied a wide range of meanings to which nuns were sensitive and that they learned about even before they took their vows.9 In his unpublished and undated Directorio para las novicias de este convento de San Phelipe de Jesús y Pobres Capuchinas de México, for example, Cayetano Antonio de Torres identifies particular flowers that symbolized virtues to which nuns should aspire.10 According to him, the jasmine, tuberose, and carnation respectively signify “simplicity,” “prayer,” and “obedience/penitence.” The amaranth symbolizes “union” and “fraternal charity,” while the broom represents “humility.” In the Euro-Christian tradition, carnations represent the Virgin’s love as well as betrothal, while violets and daisies stand for “humility” and “innocence,” respectively. Roses embody a range of meanings depending on their color and the context in which they appear. The white rose, like the lily, refers to purity; the yellow rose, perfection; the red rose, martyrdom. In his Directorio, Torres identifies the rose as a symbol of mortification, purity, and love of God.11 As Ana Paulina Gámez has noted, all of these flowers typically embellished a wide range of ecclesiastical objects in viceregal Mexico, imbuing them with moral significations.12 Many of them also appear in nuns’ floral trappings, as seen in a number of their profession and funerary portraits. Additionally, many hagiographies identify nuns as particular flowers to signal their exemplary virtues by means of a familiar visual reference. Since classical antiquity the rose had been imbued with symbolic value, much of which was adopted early on in Christianity. In the classical world, newlyweds slept on beds of roses and wore nuptial wreaths.13 For early Christians the rose represented not only conjugal love but virginity and spiritual love; it was the flower with which brides and grooms were crowned to indicate their conquest of sexual desire before marriage.14 The Christian concept of wedding divinity itself seems to have originated in the third century, when Tertullian used the expression “married to Christ” to refer to virgins who led exceptionally religious

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lives. In the twelfth century an interpretation of the Song of Songs specifically identified nuns as the mothers of Christ and brides of the Holy Spirit.15 Likewise, in thirteenth-century Italy, Saint Clare of Assisi advised a woman entering the religious life to regard herself equally as Christ’s mother, sister, and bride. Nuptial mysticism—the mystical marriage of Christ and a woman, usually a nun or, in special cases, a lay member of a religious order, like saints Rose of Lima and Catherine of Siena—fi rst became a popular theme in the thirteenth century.16 Saint Catherine’s hagiographer and confessor, Raymond of Capua, highlights her mystical marriage with Christ while she was still an adolescent. Even before that, Catherine’s fi rst mystical vision (at the tender age of six) centered on a bridal chamber in which Christ, the divine bridegroom, sat.17 Knowing that he intended her to be his bride, Catherine took a personal vow of celibacy after the vision, which she kept throughout her life. In a later vision, Christ promised her his hand in marriage, an event for which she ardently prayed. Saint Catherine’s marriage to Christ, which occurs entirely in one of her mystical raptures, and is described by her hagiographer, was rife with religious symbolism and became the model for nearly all subsequent depictions of mystical nuptials between Christ and his brides. As Raymond of Capua tells it, the Virgin appeared to the young Catherine, accompanied by various saints and biblical figures who stood as witnesses. She took Catherine’s hand and offered it to her son in matrimony. Christ then, showing his favor for Catherine, placed a wedding band on her fi nger, making her his bride for eternity. Thereafter he commanded her to remain faithful until their final union in death as husband and wife.18 In narrating a vision experienced by one of Saint Catherine’s followers, Raymond of Capua affirms that her fulfi llment of Christ’s command was ultimately rewarded in death. In this vision, the saint appeared with three crowns (rewards for her fulfi llment of Christ’s command to remain chaste in life) and ascended to her groom’s matrimonial bed, where she joined his other brides, among whom was counted the Virgin Mary.19 Mystical marriage was a theme of profound importance for New Spain’s nuns, whose religious experience was steeped in the sixteenthcentury tradition of mysticism set into motion by saints Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. For Spanish American nuns, the model of Saint Catherine’s mystical marriage was localized by the mystical marriage of Saint Rose of Lima. According to her hagiographies, Rose attended a Palm Sunday service at which, by an oversight, she was not given a palm

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F igu r e 3.4. Anonymous, Symbolic Nuptials of Christ and a Religious Soul. Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 98 × 119 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Photo by author.

frond, although everyone else around had one. In humiliation and outrage she prayed later that day before a statue of the Virgin and Child that the palm she desired not come from any man but from Christ himself. At this moment the Virgin turned toward her son, who then proposed marriage to Rose and gave to her a lily, symbolizing sexual and spiritual purity. In New Spain, the nuptials of saints Catherine and Rose became the supreme models upon which images of nuptial mysticism were based. A case in point is an eighteenth-century painting by an anonymous New Spanish painter that pictures the mystical nuptials of a model Carmelite novice with the child Christ (fig. 3.4). The novice, generically identified as a “religious soul” in the painting’s inscription, kneels at the feet of the Virgin, who simultaneously embraces her and holds her son. Saint Joseph and two Carmelite saints—probably John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila, the great mystics and reformers of the Carmelite order— surround the central group composed of the Virgin, Christ Child, and novice. Christ, meanwhile, pierces the novice’s exposed heart with a nail

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(symbolic of his divine love) and slides a ring on her fi nger in marriage. An inscription flowing from Saint Joseph’s mouth indicates that she will be crowned, just as the Virgin, Christ’s most perfect bride, is crowned.20 The scene takes place in a verdant, enclosed garden, much like the one in the Querétaro mural. In the background nuns draw water from a fountain, collect and water flowers, and generally care for the grounds. Collectively they demonstrate the nurturing of virtues necessary for the religious life and marriage to Christ. Saint Teresa holds up a lily branch in a declaration of her own purity as well as the purity required of Christ’s new bride.21 Mystical marriage between a woman and the Christ child, incongruous as it seems to the modern viewer, became a conventional image in Christian art. The portrayal of an infant groom seems to have been intended to de-eroticize the conjugal union of Christ and bride, imbuing it with an innocent, nonsexual character. Images of the Virgin and Child were originally based on the mother– child unions prominent in classical antiquity. In particular, the image-type in which Cupid caresses Psyche’s chin would reemerge in portrayals of the Virgin and Child and saints.22 The rose held symbolic value in the secular realm as well, as an indicator of a woman’s sexual honor and marital status. In the marriage portrait of don Manuel Antonio Payno de Bustamante and his wife by an anonymous eighteenth-century New Spanish painter, the couple’s marital status is denoted primarily by the rose that don Manuel’s wife holds up in a gesture that echoes that of Rose of Lima in her mystical nuptials (fig. 3.5). In her other hand, don Manuel’s wife (whose name has faded completely from the inscription) holds a richly decorated fan, a popular symbol of erotic love and material luxury among women of high social standing.23 Don Manuel, meanwhile, clasps his tricornered hat under his arm, and in his right hand holds what appears to be the metallic handle of a stylish walking cane or perhaps a symbol of his political office. He also wields a glove, a traditional emblem of love and marriage.24 The couple’s richly tailored clothing indicates their high social status, while a faded inscription that runs the length of the painted border enclosing the pair indicates that don Manuel was the regidor capitular of Mexico City, a governing position available only to those of high social rank. In the early modern Hispanic world, sexual honor was of critical importance for women of all social classes. A family’s honor depended largely on the sexual virtue of its women. Thus the image of a highsociety woman holding a single rose, or a group of roses, probably alludes to her sexual honor and by extension her family’s good name. In

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F igu r e 3.5. Anonymous, Don Manuel Payno de Bustamante and His Wife, marriage portrait. Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 63 × 84 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

New Spain, women’s honor was not restricted to women of European heritage but spanned ethnic lines, as numerous portraits demonstrate. For example, in the portraits of doña María Moreno y Buenaventura (see fig. 2.5) and of Sebastiana Inés Josepha de San Agustín (see fig. 1.3), both women are dressed richly: the fi rst in high French fashion and the second in a huipil (a traditional blouse worn by indigenous women, described more fully in chapter 4). Each woman wears glittering jewelry and is surrounded by conventional signs of her elite status. Both are pictured in a half-length, three-quarter pose, wielding a carnation and a constricted fan. Doña María is bedecked with a small, colorful crown of miniature flowers and fabric collars studded with small flowers. These elements denote her sexual virtue and feminine honor, which in turn speak to her marital fidelity (additionally, her husband’s portrait can be seen on her fan and wristband). For Sebastiana the flower and fan identify her as a virtuous maiden. She would later profess in the convent of Corpus Christi in Mexico City, designated for native girls and women of noble lineage.25 And like her Spanish and Creole contemporaries in the

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other convents of New Spain, Sebastiana would participate in crowning ceremonies that marked her marriage and final union with Christ, as the carnation (a symbol of betrothal) that she wields implies.

The Virgin Crowned Both nuns and married women were bound to their spouses. Consequently, sexual purity, honor, and conjugal love were expected of nuns and laywomen alike, and both groups modeled themselves after the Virgin Mary, the archetypal mother, wife (to Saint Joseph), and bride (to Christ). Images of the Virgin’s immaculate conception, dormition (death), assumption, and coronation especially resonated with nuns, whose own ritual lives roughly mimicked these events in the Virgin’s life. By the seventeenth century many portrayals of the Virgin had come to include a crown or flowers, or sometimes both, and these images directly influenced the depiction of crowned nuns.26 In Spain, the seventeenth-century painter and theorist Francisco Pacheco stated that depictions of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception should feature the mother of God as a crowned young girl in a white tunic and blue mantle, standing before the sun and stepping on the moon.27 This Marian devotion was especially strong in Spain. Although the idea that she was conceived without sin was not officially endorsed by the Church until the nineteenth century, it was actively promoted by Spain’s monarchs from the seventeenth century onward. The major issue surrounding the Virgin’s conception centered on her susceptibility to original sin: was Christ not the only person conceived free of original sin, which had tainted humankind since the original sin of Adam and Eve?28 The image of the Virgin Tota Pulchra (all beautiful), a variation of the immaculate conception, is based on biblical passages, most notably Song of Songs 4:7, which proclaims, “You are wholly beautiful, my beloved, and without a blemish,” and Saint John’s vision of the apocalyptic woman in Revelation 12:1: “Now a great sign appeared in heaven: a woman, robed with the sun, standing on the moon, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.” A myriad of Marian symbols derived from the Old Testament, and the Marian litanies often appear in Tota Pulchra images, among them the thornless rose and lily (symbols of Mary’s purity) and the enclosed garden. By the sixteenth century these images were being widely circulated in Spain and its American dominions.29 The Franciscans—among the most ardent advocates of the immacu-

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F igu r e 3.6. Anonymous, Tota Pulchra. Sixteenth century. Pigments on plaster. Convento de San Miguel, Huejotzingo, Mexico. Photograph © Art Resource.

late conception—were the fi rst of the monastic orders to arrive in New Spain, and images of the Tota Pulchra were executed under their direction and patronage early in their missionary efforts. A sixteenth-century mural in the Franciscan monastery in Huejotzingo is among the earliest depictions of the immaculate conception in the Americas (fig. 3.6). As the Tota Pulchra, Mary, although not crowned, appears much as Francisco Pacheco would prescribe years later: a beautiful young woman standing on a crescent moon, her hands clasped in prayer and her head framed by a halo of stars. Above her the Song of Songs passage appears in Latin: tota pulchra est amica mea et macula nono est. Above the inscription a half-length image of God the Father among cloud puffs bestows a benediction, while a host of Marian symbols—including an image of the enclosed garden— appears in the lower right corner. Directly opposite is the Civitas Dei, or City of God, at which the Virgin gazes and, above it, a fountain. The City of God emblem was especially relevant in early viceregal times, when many friars believed that a new Christian age would begin once the Gospel was proclaimed to all peoples—that is, once America’s native peoples were Christianized.30 Some even thought that the New Jerusalem (the City of God) would be established not in Europe but in the Americas, because they were untainted by Protestantism. New Spain’s providential destiny was further amplified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, in which

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F igu r e 3.7. Anonymous, Dormition of the Virgin. 1793. Oil on canvas. Convento de San Bernardino de Siena, Xochimilco, Mexico. Photo by author.

Mary appeared to a native man, Juan Diego, showing her predilection for the Americas.31 Other images that show the Virgin crowned and embellished with flowers include her death, assumption, and coronation. The most influential of the earliest, nonbiblical accounts of these events appears in Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend, a thirteenth-century compendium of saints’ lives and religious lore. In its account of the Virgin’s assumption into heaven, an angel gives Mary a palm frond from the garden of heaven and instructs her that it is to be carried in her funeral procession. Later Christ promises his mother that she will be crowned in death.32 This same expression was uttered at a nun’s profession, likening her to the Virgin and encouraging her not to fear death, but to long for it. When the Virgin fi nally died, The Golden Legend states, she was suddenly surrounded by red roses—representing martyrs—and white lilies—representing angels, confessors, and virgins. Various permutations of palm frond, crown, and flowers pervade the iconography of the dormition and assumption of the Virgin in viceregal art. For example, an image of the dormition dated 1793 and located on a lateral reredos in the church of San Bernardino de Siena in Xochimilco features the apostles surrounding Mary, who is pictured at the moment of her death, wearing a crown embellished with flowers (fig.  3.7). A

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flowering staff issues from her clasped hands, recalling Voragine’s account of the celestial palm frond given to the Virgin. Additionally, a scattering of flowers is strewn upon her brilliant white tunic. Pacheco states that Mary’s body was anointed with fragrant ointments, as prescribed by Jewish tradition, and that the flowers that covered her body emitted a notably strong and sweet aroma.33 This arrangement of floral elements, which recalls the expression “odor of sanctity,” is the same one that appears in many Spanish, New Spanish, and South American funerary portraits of crowned nuns. The next episode in the story of the Virgin’s death is her assumption into heaven. Like those of the immaculate conception, images of the assumption were based on the apocalyptic woman described in Revelation 12. The assumption was not depicted frequently, however, until the late fi fteenth century, when artists began to illustrate it separately from the dormition. In the early years of the sixteenth century, this theme assumed a distinctive iconography in Spain: the Virgin is surrounded by angels and standing on a crescent moon. Pacheco states that images of Mary’s assumption should incorporate a host of angels who accompany her in her heavenly ascent.34 Various seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury paintings of this theme from Spanish America comply with Pacheco’s prescription and include a range of crown–flower–palm frond combinations and sometimes picture the Virgin with wings. At the cathedral of Aguascalientes, Mexico, for example, a painting by Cristóbal de Villalpando (?–1714) pictures the Virgin kneeling as she rises into heaven, supported by a host of angels (fig. 3.8). In the upper left portion two angels rush to crown her with a floral wreath and present her with a palm frond. Below her, the apostles gather around her open tomb, which is cloaked with a shroud and strewn with flowers. By 1400 in Europe, the most common image of the Virgin’s glorification and regality was her coronation by the Trinity: God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit.35 Like many others, this theme derived from Voragine’s account of her assumption, specifically Christ’s announcement to his mother of her impending death and his declaration that in death she would be crowned. Such portrayals became integral to the Counter-Reformation’s objective of promoting the cult of Mary and emphasizing her regality—a point of contention with Protestants, who argued that only Christ was worthy of such high standing. To emphasize the Catholic point of view, crowns were painted on extant paintings of the Virgin during the papacy of Urban VIII (1623–1644).36 Viceregal images of the Virgin’s coronation picture Mary wearing a blue cape and

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F igu r e 3.8. Cristóbal de Villalpando, Assumption of the Virgin. Seventeenth century. Oil on canvas, 232 × 215 cm. Cathedral of Aguascalientes, Mexico. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

white tunic and standing or kneeling on the moon or a host of angels. In an eighteenth-century escudo de monja (fig. 3.9), the Virgin takes her place in the compositional center, below the three figures of the Trinity. She awaits her coronation, while a company of angels and saints witnesses the event. The Virgin’s dormition and coronation stood as models for the ritual occasions in which nuns wore crowns, namely, religious profession and funerary rites. Images of the Virgin were especially prominent in churches and convents throughout Spanish America, and it is not difficult to conjecture that these canonical works influenced the manner in which nuns appeared in their ceremonies. For example, the Conception-

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F igu r e 3.9. Anonymous, Coronation of the Virgin. Eighteenth century. Oil on metal, tortoiseshell. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTAINAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

ist habit, a blue cape and white tunic, mimics the garments worn by the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, a Marian theme that frequently appears in the escudos de monja that Conceptionist nuns attached to their habits.

Crowned Saints In Christian art and lore, crowns, palms, and flowers also identify virgin and martyr saints. Although these elements vary in their meaning, they always can be understood to convey God’s approbation

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for those who experienced actual or symbolic martyrdom. The palm, for example, was originally a Roman symbol of military triumph, but in early Christianity it came to signify Christ’s triumph: his martyrdom, resurrection, immortality, and ascension into paradise.37 Accordingly, its most frequent appearance in Christian art is in scenes of martyrdom and individual portraits of martyrs. In the former, the palm frond is shown as a reward given to the martyr at the moment of her death. In crownednun portraits, the palm frond, which often resembles a floral staff, references the sitter’s virginity and spiritual purity, as well as her metaphorical martyrdom, which symbolized her detachment from the world. Indeed, virginity and chastity were considered symbolic forms of martyrdom, when they were practiced for religious reasons. Emphasizing the palm’s reference to purity, Voragine states that Saint Peter the Apostle declared to Saint John the Evangelist, “Thou wert chosen a virgin by the Lord; and it is fitting that the Virgin’s palm be carried by a virgin!”38 Like the palm, the red rose could signify martyrdom, its color denoting the spilt blood of martyrs. The immediate precedent for this reading was the Roman tradition of awarding a rose to those who performed noble feats. White roses, on the other hand, often referred to purity, innocence, and nonsexual love.39 In some instances, virgin martyrs are pictured holding a lily branch, symbol of sexual and spiritual purity. Crowns, too, often refer to martyrdom. Specifically, the idea of being awarded a crown by God at the end of one’s life derives from a biblical passage from Wisdom 5:16, describing the glory that awaits the upright in death: “So they will receive the glorious crown and the diadem of beauty from the Lord’s hand.” While the crown in Christian art sometimes denotes the royal lineage of the saint portrayed (especially in the case of kings and queens), more frequently it came to symbolize the heavenly glory promised to martyrs and virgins at the moment of their death. Such is the case with Saint Catherine of Alexandria, a late thirdcentury virgin and martyr of noble birth. Renowned for her acumen and beauty, Catherine was sentenced to death by the Roman emperor Maxentius for not sacrificing to the gods or accepting his offer of marriage. Her initial capital punishment, which involved a series of spiked wheels intended to shred her body to pieces, was miraculously prevented by divine intervention. The fi nal instrument of her martyrdom was to be a sword, with which she was to be decapitated. Again divine intervention foiled the executioner’s intentions of an immediate killing, and instead she died days later from the wounds infl icted on her neck. Thus her pictorial representations include the spiked wheel and sword as well

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F igu r e 3.10. Diego de Borgraf, Saint Catherine of Alexandria. 1656. Oil on canvas, 167 × 116 cm. Denver Art Museum. Photograph © Denver Art Museum.

as a golden crown denoting her noble lineage. In some instances, however, a floral crown of martyrdom replaces or supplements her earthly crown of nobility. One such example is a New Spanish painting signed and dated 1656 by Diego de Borgraf (1618–1686), an artist based in Puebla but born in Flanders (fig. 3.10). Kneeling on a broken portion of a spiked wheel, Catherine rests one hand on the hilt of a sword and wears a golden crown on the back of her head. She extends her left hand into the

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sky toward two hovering angels, who rush toward her with a palm frond and crown of roses, attributes that here symbolize the rewards of martyrdom. In the background the emperor’s guards and executioners scatter at the sight of the breaking spiked wheels. In the case of virgin saints, the crown came to signify their special bond to Christ, forged in their vows of chastity. Eventually, the crown of virginity came to be conflated with the idea of being married to Christ. In life, Saint Catherine of Siena and, in emulation of her, Saint Rose of Lima both wore thorny crowns in imitation of Christ and as a personal act of penance. In fact, many European and viceregal images of Saint Catherine of Siena show her wearing a crown of thorns. Saint Rose appears most frequently in art wearing a wreath of roses, which she apparently wore in death.40 According to her biographer, Francisco Hansen, when she died, there was no floral crown with which to adorn her, as was the custom for deceased maidens. A garland was therefore removed from a nearby statue of Saint Catherine of Siena and improvised as a maiden’s crown for Rose. A palm frond was placed on her corpse, in another custom that applied specifically to virgins. The earliest known portrait of Rose—attributed to Angelino Medoro (1567–1631), a painter with whom the saint was acquainted—pictures her crowned with a ringlet of roses (fig. 3.11). Apparently, Medoro was called to paint Rose’s portrait shortly after she died. A copy of the portrait was later sent to Rome to facilitate her canonization, a goal toward which many residents of Lima ardently worked. Saint Rose of Lima’s characteristic iconography and physiognomy, however, were not based on Medoro’s portrait; apparently, artists developed standardized images based on her fi rst hagiographies.41 It seems they were not concerned with capturing Rose’s physical likeness; rather, their interest was in emphasizing her sanctity by idealizing her as a beautiful young woman.42 The fi rst known painting of Saint Rose by a major artist in New Spain was completed in 1671—the year she was canonized—by Juan Correa (see fig. 0.2). The saint wears a floral wreath and holds a bouquet in which sits the Christ Child. She also wields a lily stalk surrounded at its base by three roses. A painted frame showing various episodes from her life encloses the central composition. However, it was the main image of Rose that would recur most frequently in viceregal portrayals of her and would inform the portraits of New Spain’s Dominican nuns. In particular, Saint Rose’s bouquet, with its figure of the Christ Child, appears in profession portraits of nuns from the Dominican convents of

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F igu r e 3.11. Attributed to Angelino Medoro, Saint Rose of Lima. 1617. Oil on canvas. Santuario de Santa Rosa de Lima, Lima. Photo courtesy of Ramón Mujica Pinilla.

Santa María de Gracia and Jesús María in Guadalajara, deliberately linking these nuns to the saint (see, for example, fig. 2.15).43 Saints Rose of Lima and Catherine of Siena were among the most popular female subjects in viceregal religious art. Many New Spanish nuns and laypersons read their hagiographies, prayed before their images, and regarded them as ideal models of feminine virtue. Their palms and crowns linked them to virgin saints and martyrs like Catherine of Alexandria, Rosalie of Palermo, Cecilia, Pulcheria, and others. And Saint Rose of Lima localized these symbols while simultaneously enhancing the religious presence of Spanish America on the world stage. For the fi rst time, Spanish Americans could point to one of their own as a model for all Christians, worthy of veneration, and on a par with any European saint. The iconography of Saint Rose of Lima, like that of the Virgin

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Mary and other virgins and martyrs, would inform the manner in which the nuns appeared at the moment of their profession (when they became Christ’s brides) and on their funeral biers (when they achieved full union with their divine spouse).

Codifying Sanctity in New Spain The saints demonstrated their holiness by living piously, experiencing holy raptures, performing miracles, and flouting the putrefying effects of death. They dedicated their lives fully to Christ and sometimes suffered martyrdom as a consequence. In rejecting the world, they became alive in spirit and joined the Virgin and angels in their nearness to God. Using the saints as models, many viceregal hagiographies of nuns emphasize these same qualities. Some authors and their ecclesiastical supporters even promoted beatification and canonization for their subjects. Such was the case with Sor María de Jesús Tomelín—the subject of this chapter’s opening paragraph—who still awaits beatification (the step before officially becoming a saint) and still enjoys the support of many pious Mexicans, who have circulated printed materials and even established Internet sites dedicated to her promotion. The requirements for becoming a saint, which have varied somewhat throughout history, are formulaic, and the Church closely scrutinizes (sometimes over a period of centuries) just how much a potential saint’s life and death conform to those criteria. Hagiographies, fi rsthand accounts, and relics are often taken into consideration and can have a tremendous impact on the Church’s deliberations. Such was the case for Saint Rose of Lima, whose death portrait was sent to Rome as part of her promotion for sainthood (see fig. 3.11). Traditional iconographic elements that appear in many images of virgin saints and martyrs are present in this portrait: a religious habit (in this case, that of the Dominicans) and a wreath of roses signifying Rose’s maidenhood, symbolic martyrdom, and fidelity to Christ the Divine Spouse. The iconography of sanctity, in other words, is as codified as the requirements for sainthood. For women, the traditional symbols of holiness are floral accoutrements, palm fronds, and garden imagery, which link the Virgin to particular saints and martyrs. What female saints and nuns have in common is their marriage to Christ, sometimes experienced in a mystical vision—as with saints Rose and Catherine—and sometimes in their martyrdom. Nuns in New Spain frequently encountered sermons, religious liter-

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ature, and works of art that used floral imagery to impart lessons in morality and virtue. Torres’s Directorio, religious paintings like Christ in the Garden of Virtues (see fig. 3.3), and images of the Virgin, saints, and martyrs, as well as crowned-nun portraits, drew upon the symbolic language of flowers and were primarily directed to nuns and those close to them. Torres even states that nuns should “blossom” in all of the virtues that are symbolized in the flowers he mentions.44 In another influential hagiographic work, Paraíso occidental, Sigüenza y Góngora frequently identifies the nuns of the convent of Jesús María as flowers. The full title of his book deliberately employs floral imagery to amplify the virtuousness of the convent’s nuns: “Paraíso occidental, planted and cultivated by the liberal and beneficent hand of the most Catholic and powerful Kings of Spain, Our Lords, in their magnificent Real Convento of jesus maria of Mexico City: of whose foundation and progress, and prodigious marvels and virtues, with which the Venerable Madre marina de la cruz and other exemplary religious women, giving off sweet smells of perfection, flowered in its cloister, don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Mexican Presbyter, gives notice in this volume.” The New Spanish hagiography of Sor Barbara Josepha de San Francisco describes her entirely traditional Euro-Christian interpretation of the trappings she wore during her profession. She, like other nuns of her milieu, saw her profession as a metaphorical “dying to the world” and her religious habit as a kind of shroud, a memento mori that prefigured her appearance on the day of her actual death, when she would fi nally join Christ in heavenly bliss. And I understood that I will always wear my habit with veneration, and as a reminder of death; it is the shroud that the body wears, and in religion I will be as a dead person to all the things of this world, deaf, blind, mute, my five senses alive only to obedience, carrying it out in our ministries with humility. The cloak made me understand how I should be a good example to my sisters, and to those outside [the convent], hiding the shortcomings of my neighbors within me, to ponder them only in the presence of His Majesty, and supplicate him with charity and purity of intention for their sake, and I was made to understand this by the stars of gold and silver on my cloak. The veil, and headdress, made me understand how I should maintain purity in my five senses, and what I should do in each of these to martyr them, so that I

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might earn the palm and crown that had been put on me. The stole I understood to signify the yoke of religion that I will carry with swift obedience and humility; observing the rule and constitutions [of the order]. The Child Jesus [figurine] showed me how I should always have him in sight from the manger to the cross in the works that religion offers.45

Insightful as Sor Bárbara Josefa’s personal account is, it does not fully capture the varied meanings that a nun’s profession and funerary trappings carried in New Spain. Nuns’ floral accoutrements were also based on indigenous practices and knowledge that reached back to pre-Hispanic times and were combined with Euro-Christian concepts and traditions in the viceregal period. The following chapter examines this topic in depth, with particular attention to depictions of indigenous nuns.

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Chapter 4 I n dige nou s C on t r i bu t ion s t o Con v e n t A rt s a n d C u lt u r e

A

s t h e f i rst con v e n t for i n dige nous n u ns i n the Americas, Mexico City’s Corpus Christi convent was the inspiration for the establishment of a handful of other such institutions in New Spain.1 However, when it received its fi rst indigenous women in 1724, a small group of Creole nuns, appointed as the convent’s administrators, entered with them. In an anonymous letter written by a native nun, a number of the convent’s Creole women are negatively portrayed. They were constantly watching us for even the smallest thing that we did, so [as to] accuse us of wrongdoing before Father Navarrete. When we were least expecting it, he was already there, acting as a despot, punishing us and taking away our veils. He wanted to force us to vote for the Spanish novices so they could profess in the convent. We did not want that because our patron’s idea was that the convent be only for Indian women. Until fi nally, God saw fit that by a royal decree of the king our lord and of a Papal brief of his Holiness, the Mother and the novices had to leave the convent.2

Corpus Christi was not the only convent to experience unrest between its native and Creole members.3 Even after a prolonged battle between supporters and detractors, in which the supporters ultimately triumphed, native nuns experienced years of resistance at the hands of an obstructive group of clerics. Despite their victory and the eventual establishment of three other

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indigenous convents in New Spain, only a small percentage of the subjects of crowned-nun portraits are native women. Significantly, in these works the sitters are nearly indistinguishable from Creole nuns. In their profession and funeral ceremonies, Creole and indigenous nuns wore similar dress, which in their portraits has the effect of blurring ethnic lines and creating the impression of a unified identity among New Spain’s nuns across the various religious orders. Floral trappings and the formal conventions of crowned-nun portraits especially contribute to this homogenizing effect, which at first glance seems to exclusively reference the Euro-Christian concepts of martyrdom, mystic marriage, and sexual purity. However, upon closer examination, these same accoutrements could also be said to carry Mesoamerican meanings of nobility, divinity, and spiritual transformation that easily blend in with Christian significations. This visual heterogeneity can be explained by the presence of native women in New Spain’s convents for nearly two centuries before Corpus Christi was realized. The present chapter examines the impact of the native presence in New Spain’s convents, beginning with an examination of the profession portraits of indigenous nuns. In this section I contextualize the portraits both in light of the controversy that surrounded the opening of Corpus Christi, and, more broadly, within the colonial debate on the nature of Amerindians in general and of Amerindian women in particular. In asking why the sitters’ indigenousness is obfuscated in their profession portraits, my analysis frames these works within the discourses of commensurability and colonial mimicry, in which natives visually equated their spiritual and social worth with that of Creoles and Spaniards in order to advance their positions in New Spain by demonstrating their religious orthodoxy and spiritual exceptionality. The discussion below also considers elements in crowned-nun portraits and other convent arts that are at least partly based on aspects of native visual culture that survived the conquest. In particular it focuses on the unique floral trappings in nuns’ profession portraits and relates them to Christian and Mesoamerican symbols that overlapped in concept and form. It also examines feather mosaics, another culturally heterogeneous art form that was practiced in some of New Spain’s convents. The mixed cultural and artistic traditions to which floral and feathered objects belong took on new meanings and forms in New Spain’s convents and encompassed the ethnic boundaries of its inhabitants. In sum, this chapter complicates the traditional image of New Spain’s convents as institutions that primarily preserved Euro-Christian culture and values. This revised

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image contributes to recent scholarship that identifies New Spain’s convents as microcosms of a larger multiethnic and hierarchical society.4

Indigenous Nuns and the Profession Portrait After Corpus Christi was founded for native women, three other convents followed suit: Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Cosamaloapan in Morelia (formerly Valladolid) (1734), Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles in Oaxaca (1774), and Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe y Enseñaza de Indias (also called Enseñanza Nueva) in Mexico City (1811). Except for Enseñanza Nueva, which was under the jurisdiction of the Company of Mary and was connected to a school for girls, these convents belonged to the Capuchins and fi rst-order Clarists, austere branches of the Franciscan order. Corpus Christi’s requirements for entry were the most stringent: (1) aspirants had to be of noble status, (2) they had to prove their untarnished indigenous lineage (limpieza de sangre), (3) they had to be of legitimate birth, (4) they had to prove that their parents had never engaged in lowly occupations, (5) they had to demonstrate that they chose to enter the convent freely, (6) they had to have no history of prosecution by the Inquisition, and (7) they had to be physically capable of enduring the requisites of the religious life, such as fasting and penitence.5 Additionally, they had to demonstrate a rudimentary understanding of Latin as well as literacy in Spanish, possess mathematical and musical knowledge, practice the so-called feminine arts, and be versed in moral and religious education. The requirements to enter the other convents for native women, although similar, allowed some flexibility regarding lineage and social class.6 In general, however, unsullied bloodline and high social rank were required of native professants, as they were for Creole and Spanish nuns. Corpus Christi’s founding and early years of operation were controversial. In fact, the very proposal of a convent exclusively for indigenous nuns required colonial officials and ecclesiastics to make a determination on whether the “natural disposition” of Amerindians was consistent with the religious life—a question whose roots stretched back to the sixteenth-century debate between the Aristotelian, “natural slave” perspective of the theologian Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1489–1573) and the protectionism of Bartolomé de las Casas (ca. 1484–1566).7 Even after two centuries, the fundamental question of the nature of Amerindians was still at issue for many Spaniards. Many influential prelates,

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government officials, and nuns argued that native women were naturally “dim-witted” ( falta de luz), emotionally immature, incapable of observing chastity, rustic, superstitious, and unsociable. The characterization of them as lacking in maturity and intelligence, much like children, resonated in their legal status as minors. Summing up the position of native women in New Spain, Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela notes, “If a person were a barbarian and a minor before the law, her also being a woman made her disenfranchisement from full rationality all too obvious.”8 In the debate over Corpus Christi, many opponents based their arguments on this very point. However, an opposing group, led by the Franciscan order, praised native women for their natural piety, honesty, chastity, and ability to practice the rules of the religious life. Asunción Lavrin has pointed out that this strategy distinguished native women as God’s faithful servants, on whom he bestowed his grace because of their simplicity and lowliness.9 This notion stems from the New Testament, in which Christ declares that God reveals his mysteries to the dispossessed, uneducated, and underprivileged rather than to the powerful and erudite.10 Despite the vociferous protests of those groups that opposed indigenous women from professing, and to the delight of Corpus Christi’s supporters, a royal decree dated March 5, 1724, endorsed the convent, overruling local prohibitions. Nonetheless, it was stipulated that native nuns would not run the convent until its fi rst-generation Spanish founders died. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the new convent’s abbess, Sor Petra de San Francisco—a nun from the convent of San Juan de la Penitencia in Mexico City, and the daughter of a Spanish merchant—was accompanied by a handful of Creole nuns from other Franciscan convents, who served as her administrative staff. Corpus Christi’s fi rst native professants were students and servants who had formerly lived in New Spain’s various convents. The controversy surrounding the profession of native women raged for some time after Corpus Christi opened and resurfaced in tensions that erupted between the convent’s Creole founders and the native professants. In one instance, Sor María de San Juan Crisóstomo and Sor María del Sacramento, two founding nuns, attempted to prohibit more native women from entering the convent. They revived the contention that this group was simply incapable of following the religious life because of their “natural limitations” as natives.11 The native nuns, sensitive to these accusations, were not silent on this matter. In an anonymous document that was probably penned by one of them, their Spanish

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counterparts are characterized as the least pious and observant among the religious.12 It was not until the fi rst generation of founding mothers died and a royal decree prohibited Spanish women from entering native convents that these confl icts were resolved and native nuns were able to administer their own institutions and live in relative peace. As Lavrin has pointed out, the single most effective advocacy for native nuns was a small body of hagiographic literature that extolled the natural virtues of indigenous women.13 Sigüenza y Góngora, for example, wrote glowingly of Petronila de la Concepción and Francisca de San Miguel, native servants in the convent of Jesús María who were renowned for their exemplary piety and mystical visions.14 Other New Spanish hagiographies praised the religious aptitudes of native women and were partly intended to promote their rise to the cloisters.15 Significantly, most historical documents that support this point of view do not place native nuns above their Creole or Spanish counterparts, but instead establish parity between the two groups. For example, in a compilation of native nuns’ biographies, probably penned by a confessor in Corpus Christi, the nuns are described as exemplars of chastity, abstinence, obedience, physical discipline, humility, and other virtues that were normally attributed to Spanish and Creole nuns.16 The message here was that indigenous women were just as capable of excelling in the religious life as European and Creole women. This seemingly innocuous point takes high relief in a letter drafted by three native leaders whose daughters were among the fi rst nuns to profess in Corpus Christi. They complain that since the time of the conquest Spaniards have failed to distinguish between native nobles and plebeians, an attitude that has meant disgrace for members of their social class.17 They recommend that the Spanish and Creole nuns of Corpus Christi be removed so that native nuns can administer their own facility. The founding of a convent for elite native women allowed native nobles to enjoy the same honor and recognition as their Spanish and Creole counterparts—no small matter to indigenous leaders. One of the ways that elite native families demonstrated or perhaps even amplified their social status was by commissioning portraits of their religious relatives in their profession trappings. Until Corpus Christi was established, profession portraits were of course made only for Creole and Spanish families. To date, only three profession portraits of indigenous nuns are known: those of Sor Juana María de Señor San José (fig. 4.1), Sor María Joaquina de Señor San Rafael (fig. 4.2), and Sor Manuela de Mesa (fig. 4.3). Each work pictures its subject in a full-length, three-

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F igu r e 4.1. Anonymous, Sor Juana María de Señor San José, profession portrait (First-order Franciscan). Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas. Whereabouts unknown (in the public domain).

F igu r e 4.3. Anonymous, Sor Manuela de Mesa, profession portrait (Company of Mary). 1827. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photograph © Marco Antonio Pacheco.

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F igu r e 4.2. Anonymous, Sor María Joaquina de Señor San Rafael, profession portrait (Capuchin). 1824. Oil on canvas, 170 × 67 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

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quarter pose, wearing a floral crown and standing in an undefi ned interior space meant to suggest the austerity of the cloister and its removal from the secular realm. Sor Juana María and Sor María Joaquina wear the habits of the fi rst-order Franciscans and Capuchins, respectively, and hold professional candles and immense floral staffs that mirror the elaboration of their crowns. Sor María Joaquina’s profession trappings are the most spectacular, comprising actual and artificial flowers, religious figurines, and small artificial butterfl ies. To demonstrate their humility, a requirement of their religious orders, Sor María Joaquina and Sor Juana María cast their eyes downward. To the left of Sor Juana María’s figure a framed oval escutcheon contains her biographical data. As a nun of the Company of Mary, Sor Manuela is pictured fingering a booklet, in a gesture that demonstrates the company’s dedication to the education of New Spain’s young women. An artificial white dove, a symbol of the Holy Spirit, is suspended inside the frame of her crown, which is intertwined with leaves and colorful flowers. To the left of her figure, a biographical inscription utilizing a conventional formula seen in most crowned-nun portraits reads, True portrait of the honorable Manuela de Mesa, legitimate daughter of don Lucas Mesa and of doña Anastacia Reinoso. She was born on 25 of December 1809 in San Bartolomé in the jurisdiction of Capulhuac. She became a novice in this convent of the Company of Mary Most Holy of Guadalupe and Enseñanza de Indias on 2 July 1824 and professed on 18 March 1827, the prioress being the Most Reverend Mother María Luisa de Corral.18

In these three surviving works (though it is probable that there were other crowned-nun portraits of indigenous women), only a few clues betray native heritage, the most significant being the inscriptions naming the convents to which they belonged and their religious habits, which identify orders that allowed indigenous women to profess, in these cases, fi rst-order Franciscans, the Capuchins (specifically of the Convent of Nuestra Señora de los Angeles in Oaxaca), and the Company of Mary. Aspects of the sitters’ physiognomy also hint at Amerindian heritage, but these alone would not be enough of an indicator, since skin tone is often an unreliable marker of ethnicity. Given the uproar that the establishment of Corpus Christi caused, it is significant that these portraits do not emphasize the fact of their sitters’

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indigenous origins. Rather, pictorially they fully conform to the graphic conventions of all crowned-nun profession portraits. This conformity visually equates Euro-American and native nuns, for whose families the elevation of their daughters into the cloisters was a means of verifying their social distinction, Christian orthodoxy, and family honor. By commissioning these works, indigenous patrons and their families demonstrated their parity with Spaniards and Creoles who also entered their daughters into convents and commissioned their portraits. Furthermore, although the portraits were privately commissioned and displayed in domestic settings, it is likely, in light of their patrons’ high social rank, that they were viewed by other members of social elite groups—Creole, Spanish, and indigenous—who entered those spaces for various occasions. As with all crowned-nun portraits, these obscure their sitters’ individuality by means of a codified pictorial composition and content that are dominated by spectacular floral trappings, which tend to overshadow the sitters’ personal attributes. This pictorial strategy is akin to the hagiographic tactic of identifying certain religious attributes in its subjects that are diagnostic of this literary genre (humility, penitance, piety, chastity, etc.). The product is an iconic image of the New Spanish nun, that highlights the sitter’s lineage, social rank, and spiritual bearing rather than her indigenous, Spanish, or Creole background. In a related genre, portraits of indigenous laywomen on the eve of entering the convent accentuate their elite status by showcasing high-end local and foreign possessions—rich clothes, jewelry, and other signs of social prestige—that also appear in contemporaneous portraits of Creole and Spanish women. In these works, the sitters’ native heritage is often evident in the sumptuous huipils (native blouses) that they wear. For example, in her three-quarter portrait, Sebastiana Inés Josepha de San Agustín wears an elaborate huipil patterned with crowns, bicephalic eagles, and Chinese silk galleons and adorned with jewelry, ribbons, and Spanish lace (see fig. 1.3). Her rich garb and the swag of red cloth behind her denote her elite status, while the carnation symbolizes her betrothal to Christ and her fan identifies her as a modest and chaste and therefore honorable woman.19 The biographical inscription contained in an elegant escutcheon at the upper left denotes her high social rank: “Portrait of Sebastiana Inés Josepha de San Agustín. Legitimate Daughter of don Matías Alexo Martínez and of doña Tomasa de Dios y Mendoza. [She was] 16 years old in the year 1757.”20 Sebastiana’s poise and modest demeanor comply with the standards of early modern Western portraiture, which is meant to convey the sitters’

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elevated social rank and virtue through elegant dignity and restraint. Indeed, her virtue and high status would gain her entry into Corpus Christi, where as the daughter of native lords she would amplify her family’s honor.21 Like crowned-nun portraits, works such as this constituted a means by which elite native families could match their social status, honor, and religious orthodoxy with those of elite Creoles and Spaniards.22

Crosscultural Forms and Meanings in the Crowned-Nun Image Although there is nothing obviously “indigenous” about the way that native nuns are depicted in their profession portraits, the floral trappings that accompanied them in their profession and death rituals often contain overlapping Mesoamerican and Euro-Christian elements. Some of these elements appear in other works from the viceregal era—most notably, paintings of indigenous newlyweds. In Europe, the practice of crowning newlyweds with flowers dates back to classical antiquity and the early Christian period, when married couples wore floral wreaths to signify their conjugal union. By the medieval period nuns throughout Europe were crowned with floral wreaths when they made their professions and became Christ’s brides. However, in New Spain, these symbols took on new forms and encompassed a range of meanings that also drew from time-honored Mesoamerican knowledge and customs. In Desposorio de Indios, attributed to Juan Rodríguez Juárez (1675– 1728), which pictures the wedding of a young native couple, a welldressed, upper-class bride and groom process from their wedding ceremony with their marriage sponsors, who appear to be Spaniards or Creoles (fig. 4.4). Each figure holds up a brightly colored floral staff, similar to those in crowned-nun portraits, and wears a floral wreath and garland. An elderly woman holds up a bouquet of flowers behind them, and a dancer, jester, and musician stand in their path, providing entertainment. Two small dogs, probably representing marital fidelity, frolic in the foreground as a group of natives in the background carry pulque, a local indigenous alcoholic drink, to the wedding reception. In the upper right corner of the composition, the painting’s subject is denoted with a gloss that reads “Desposorio de Indios” (Indian Wedding). In his 1763 manuscript on the natural history, inhabitants, and cus-

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F igu r e 4.4. Attributed to Juan Rodríguez Juárez, Desposorio de Indios (Indian Wedding). Ca. 1715. Oil on canvas. Museo de América, Madrid.

toms of New Spain, Joaquín Antonio de Basarás explained that native newlyweds and their sponsors were adorned with crowns, floral staffs (súchiles), and garlands during their wedding ceremonies and again when they arrived at the groom’s residence. Musicians and a dancer, who set the celebratory tone for this happy occasion, accompanied them along the way.23 Rodríguez Juárez’s painting and other ones like it suggest that floral trappings were a well-established part of natives’ nuptials.24 Indeed, roughly one hundred years before Rodríguez Juárez painted this work, Fray Juan de Torquemada mentioned the use of floral staffs and garlands in an indigenous wedding in Texcoco.25 Sexual purity and conjugal love, traditionally represented by floral crowns and wreaths in Christianity, certainly resonated with traditional native behavioral codes for elite women, which also extolled these virtues.26 As Basarás noted, after the nuptial meal the party’s venerable elders would stand and recite long speeches in which they would advise the bride in marital and family matters.27 The Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century ethnographic compendium of Nahua culture compiled by Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and his native amanuenses, details Nahua marriage ceremony customs in which family elders, at the wedding reception, admonished the bride to adhere to her wifely duties.28 In the Desposorio de Indios,

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the themes of sexual purity and marital fidelity especially come across in the bride’s floral wreath, constructed entirely of roses, a Christian symbol with which brides and grooms were crowned to indicate their conquest of sexual desire before marriage and their fidelity to one another. New Spanish paintings of the marriage of the Virgin Mary may have set the precedent for works like this one. Works on this theme consistently feature Saint Joseph with a flowering staff—a symbol of his purity and God’s favor toward him as the Virgin’s husband—while angels shower flowers on the scene.29 In a typical New Spanish example, Sebastián López de Arteaga (1610–1655) highlights the saint’s blossoming staff—a bouquet of red roses and white almond tree blossoms—against a darkly contrasting background and directly below a glowing image of the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove (fig. 4.5), just as Pacheco prescribes in his Arte de la pintura, with which both Spanish and New Spanish artists were acquainted (fig. 4.5).30 Cherubs hover above the scene and sprinkle flowers on the holy couple as a sunburst above the rabbi, symbolizing God the Father, authorizes the union. Priests who were responsible for the indoctrination of New Spain’s natives would have established Saint Joseph and the Virgin as the Christian model for married couples, and in early viceregal times religious images were often used as supplements or substitutes for catechism. Thus, pictures of Saint Joseph’s staff may have been one model for the floral staffs that natives carried in their nuptials.31 Floral trappings also appear in seventeenth-century funerary portraits of Spanish nuns, as a means of emphasizing their symbolic martyrdom, marriage to Christ, and triumph over life’s many temptations and difficulties. The New Spanish works diverged from these by picturing deceased and newly professed nuns with crowns rather than wreaths, and bearing palm fronds that, in many cases, are so decorated with flowers and other ornaments that they completely lose any resemblance to the Spanish palm fronds. Instead, they look more like floral staffs or bouquets, similar to those in the Desposorio de Indios and in images of Saint Rose of Lima. This distinction suggests a local tradition in constructing these floral trappings that was not entirely based on European models. In New Spain the practice of decorating palm fronds with flowers and other ornaments dates back at least to the mid-sixteenth century. The Franciscan friar and author Motolinía recounted how the natives attached flowers and ribbons to their palm fronds on Palm Sunday: “It is interesting to see the different devices into which they fashion their palms. Over the palm many place crosses made of flowers of various forms and colors. Others have the palms themselves entwined with roses

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F igu r e 4.5. Sebastián López de Arteaga, Marriage of the Virgin. Ca. 1650. Oil on canvas, 224 × 167 cm. © D.R. Museo Nacional de Arte/Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura, Mexico City.

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and flowers of various forms and colors.”32 Because the palm frond is often used as a symbol of virginal purity, in addition to its more popular signification of martyrdom, it is a particularly appropriate symbol for the sacrament of matrimony as well as for a nun’s profession. It seems likely, then, that in early New Spain, when friars and their native subjects lived in communities that emulated the fi rst Christian communities described in the New Testament,33 flowery palm trappings like those characterized by Motolinía were also used for such sacraments. Flower art, however, has a long history in Mesoamerica, with origins that predate the conquest. The Florentine Codex states how xochimanque (flower artists/workers) constructed and offered their assemblages in ancient times: I arrange flowers. I thread a flower. I string flowers. I make flowers. I form them to be extended, uneven, rounded, round bouquets of flowers. I make a flower necklace, a flower garland, a paper of flowers, a bouquet of flowers, a flower shield, hand flowers. I thread them. I string them. I provide them with grass. I provide them with leaves. I make a pendant of them. I provide one with flowers. I make flowers, or I give them to one that someone will observe a feast day. Or I merely continue to give one flowers; I continue to place them in one’s hand, I continue to offer them to one’s hands. Or I provide one with a necklace, or I provide one with a garland of flowers.34

An accompanying illustration made by an indigenous artist pictures a native flower worker seated before an assortment of garlands, wreaths, floral staffs, and bouquets that he has made. He holds up a bunch of flowers in one hand and a single-stem flower in the other (fig. 4.6). In another illustration, a seated lord wears a floral wreath and holds up a bunch of flowers before a scattering of similar accoutrements while a nobleman approaches him with more offerings (fig. 4.7). Apparently, such elaborate floral trappings were given only to persons of high social rank and were considered an honor.35 In fact, certain flowers were reserved for lords and outstanding warriors.36

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F igu r e 4.6. Anonymous, flower artist, from the Florentine Codex, book 11. Ca. 1580. Ink and pigments on paper. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenzana, Florence. Drawing by author.

F igu r e 4.7. Anonymous, nobleman receiving flowers, from the Florentine Codex, book 11. Ca. 1580. Ink and pigments on paper. Biblioteca Medicea Laurenzana, Florence. Drawing by author.

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The indigenous production of floral works survived well into viceregal times. In his 1756 comedy Relación del festejo que a los Marqueses de las Amarillas les hicieron las Señoras Religiosas del Convento de San Jerónimo, Joaquín de Barruchi y Arana attributed floral productions to native women. In one section, he wrote from the point of view of an indigenous woman who worked as a convent servant and was looking forward to the viceroy and vicereine’s visit to the San Jerónimo convent. After describing a dedicatory structure that she would like to make to honor the viceroy, she goes on to propose making “a crown and staff of olive leaves and thousands of flowers for my Lady, the Vicereine, because she is modest and holy.”37 Barruchi y Arana’s character would naturally want to honor the noblest of New Spain’s women, the queen’s representative, with a crown and floral staff. After all, her experience of queenly women would have included the nuns of San Jerónimo, who, as the “brides of Christ,” were considered queens and wore crowns and floral staffs at their profession and death ceremonies to emphasize that fact. It seems certain that the Nahua tradition of arranging and offering flowers for ritual purposes, in which elite individuals were adorned with floral accoutrements, carried over into some Catholic ceremonies that already incorporated floral trappings. A pre-Hispanic Nahua ritual that involved adorning elite individuals with flowers was the investiture of priestesses (cihuatlamacazque) in central Mexico. According to Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578– 1648), a historian of the pre-Hispanic past, aspiring priestesses arrived at the temple wearing a floral wreath and underwent an initiation ceremony similar to a nun’s profession. Sigüenza y Góngora, citing Ixtlilxochitl’s account, claimed that Aztec priestesses established a foundation for New Spain’s religious excellence and, despite their heathenism, shared some fundamental qualities with nuns, including chastity, obedience, and enclosure.38 Nuns’ floral trappings embody other forms of indigenous knowledge and practices that go beyond the art of the xochimanque. Like those in many crowned-nun portraits, Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo’s stunning profession trappings contain religious figurines that are framed by actual and artificial flowers, as well as artificial birds and butterfl ies (see fig. 2.7). Her crown, capped by a white paper dove (representing the Holy Spirit), also carries two angel figurines fluttering inside and is embellished with small artificial flowers, a scarlet bird perched in a floral arrangement between the angels, and two crimson butterfl ies on its outer

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F igu r e 4.8. Anonymous, Sor María Juana de Señor San Rafael y Martínez, profession portrait (Urbanist Franciscan). 1810. Oil on canvas, 98 × 75 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

F igu r e 4.9. Anonymous, Sor María Vincenta de San Juan Evangelista, profession portrait (Dominican). 1812. Oil on canvas, 185 × 103 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Photo by author.

F igu r e 4.10. Anonymous, Madre Ana María de la Preciosa Sangre de Cristo, profession portrait (Urbanist Franciscan). Ca. 1770. Oil on canvas, 124 × 101 cm. Denver Art Museum: Collection of Frederick and Jan Mayer.

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edges.39 Similarly, her profession candle boasts an elaborate paper pelican (symbol of Christ) that picks at its breast in front of a small kneeling figurine of a nun, which is flanked by two scarlet birds and a crimson butterfly perched on the ribbon just below the figurine. The entire assemblage is surrounded by paper streamers and artificial flowers.40 In addition, Sor María holds up a crucifi x and a painted scene of the Virgin of the Apocalypse, framed with colorful artificial flowers. Even her elaborately embroidered cape features floral motifs among a series of fanciful scroll designs that together echo the flowery qualities of her crown, candle, and staff. In this way, her body is almost entirely clad in flowers. According to the portrait’s biographical inscription, Sor María Ignacia professed in the convent of Santa Clara in Mexico City, which admitted only Spanish and Creole women as nuns. I suspect that the convent’s native servants constructed Sor María’s floral trappings, perhaps with the assistance of the nuns themselves. Sor María Juana del Señor San Rafael y Martínez’s profession portrait also includes many of these elements (fig. 4.8). Her crown, for example, contains real and artificial flowers, interspersed with artificial birds and butterfl ies (on the crown’s outer edges and in the negative spaces inside its frame). Her elaborate floral staff displays two small scarlet birds perched on artificial flowers. These embellishments, which appear in other crowned-nun portraits (for example, note the butterfly and moth elements in the crowns of figs. 0.1, 2.16, 2.17, 4.9, 4.10, and 5.3, and the cherub heads on the candle in fig. 4.10, which were associated with birds in the Mesoamerican mind), are absent in both Spanish and South American portraits of nuns. Such distinctively New Spanish productions seem to indicate the persistence and transformation of traditional indigenous beliefs; bird, flower, and butterfly elements feature prominently in Mesoamerican concepts of the human soul and the paradisiacal afterlife. The same elements also appear in the elaborate headdresses of some Aztec goddesses and women. For example, in its marriage almanac, the Codex Borgia—a late pre-Hispanic manuscript from the central highlands of Mexico—shows a number of women crowned with wreaths of white flowers, facing their husbands (fig. 4.11). Although it is difficult to determine the species to which these flowers belong, a wide array of indigenous flowers carried symbolic values in Mesoamerica, and many were associated with certain feasts, gods, or elites.41 For example, the water lily helped women to guard their chastity;42 the marigold, associated with death, was used in the autumn ceremony that honored the dead.43 Thus the general practice of floral symbolism would have pre-

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pared indigenous people to accept the European symbolic values, along with the European flowers, described in chapter 3. Butterfl ies and birds, along with flowers, can be seen in the headdresses of certain deities in Aztec art. Another illustration from the Codex Borgia pictures the goddess Xochiquetzal seated on a rich throne and gesturing before a bifurcated and blossoming tree (fig. 4.12). Her headdress is a gaping quetzal head covered in resplendent blue and green feathers, a gold disk, and colorful streamers that run down the length of her back and terminate in stylized flowers.44 The headdress is further embellished by two white geometric elements representing butterfl ies, which appear to be fluttering over flowers and sucking their nectar. Butter fl ies symbolized preciousness (like flowers) and were also regarded as the souls of dead warriors and of women who had died in childbirth.45 According to the Florentine Codex, warriors who died on the battlefield and sacrificial victims carried the sun to its zenith every day. After four years, they were transformed into precious birds and butterfl ies and “sucked honey [from the flowers] there where they dwelt. And here upon earth they came to suck [honey] from all the various flowers.”46 This pleasant afterlife, a kind of resurrection in a gardenlike setting, has a long history in Mesoamerican thought.47 The “flower world” is a place of ancestral origin and return and is related to the sun, heat, music, and luminous colors.48 The Classic period (roughly 300– 900 CE) civilizations of Teotihuacan and the Maya developed this theme into the

F igu r e 4.11. Anonymous, married couple; detail from the Codex Borgia, fol. 59v. Late fi fteenth or early sixteenth century. Pigments and gesso on deerskin, 27 × 26 cm. Vatican Apostolic Library, Vatican City. Photograph © 2011 Vatican Apostolic Library. 

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F igu r e 4.12. Anonymous, Xochiquetzal; detail from the Codex Borgia, fol. 9r. Late fi fteenth or early sixteenth century. Pigments and gesso on deerskin, 27 × 26 cm. Vatican Apostolic Library, Vatican City. Photograph © 2011 Vatican Apostolic Library.

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F igu r e 4.13. Anonymous, detail of a paradisiacal mountain scene (restored reproduction). 600– 750 CE. Pigments on plaster. Teotihuacan, Mexico. Photograph © Marco Antonio Pacheco.

“flower mountain” motif, which includes a range of symbols that represent life force and a paradisiacal afterworld.49 Some scholarship has argued that the flower mountain and the flower world in general are frequent elements in Teotihuacan art, most notably in ceramic censers and murals.50 In one mural, humans dance, sing, and play in and around a watery mountain of sustenance that is surrounded by butterfl ies and precious objects (fig. 4.13).51 While recent scholarship has proposed that this scene may be related to a tree raising ceremony akin to the Aztec xocotl celebration, the mural also resonates with one description of paradise given in the Florentine Codex: And in Tlalocan there was great wealth, there [were] great riches. Never did one suffer. Never did the ears of green maize, the gourds, the squash blossoms, the heads of amaranth, the green chilis, the tomatoes, the green beans, the cempoalxochitl [marigold], fail. . . . So they said that in Tlalocan there is always the putting forth of young shoots, there is always sprouting, it is always spring, it is continually springtime.52

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F igu r e 4.14. Anonymous, goddess and priests in a paradisiacal scene (restored reproduction). 600– 750 CE. Pigments on plaster. Teotihuacan, Mexico. Photograph © Marco Antonio Pacheco.

Numerous jade- and turquoise-colored scrolls unfurl from human mouths in this mural scene, suggesting song or poetic discourse. For the Nahuas, “flower and song” referred to metaphysical knowledge, the noblest of human aspirations.53 It was believed that the supernatural world could actually be conjured through rituals that involved incantations.54 Together, the watery mountain of sustenance, singing humans, flying insects, and floating or falling flowers may refer to the paradisiacal flower mountain. Another eternal springtime scene is evident in the adjacent wall painting (fig. 4.14). It pictures a frontal deity figure standing upon the fertile earth and beneath a helically twisted tree that rises into the sky and may refer to a tree raising ceremony. Two human figures in elaborate regalia (probably priests or priestesses) stand in profi le at either side of the deity and deposit colorful seeds into the partitioned surface while the deity provides moisture in the form of droplets that stream down from its hands. The tree, dripping nectar from its floral blossoms, is fi lled with birds and butterfl ies that suck its nectar.55 This bucolic scene echoes the Aztec account of the paradisiacal afterworld where the deceased, in the

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form of birds and butterfl ies, enjoy sucking the nectar from the various flowers of heaven and earth.56 Even in particular details, this theme resonates with Christian ideas of resurrection and heaven. Because of its mutable nature, the butterfly is a traditional Christian symbol for the human life cycle and resurrection.57 A variety of birds, too, symbolize spirit; in particular, the dove enjoys pride of place as emblematic of the Holy Spirit. For Mesoamericans and Europeans alike, birds generally represented privileged human spirits. Christians saw them as resurrected souls that were rewarded with heaven, and Mesoamerican religious traditions held that nobles were transformed into precious things—birds, jewels, and clouds—when they died.58 Shortly after the conquest, these symbols appeared in New Spanish art and literature that natives produced under the supervision of Spanish friars. Among the earliest and most notable examples are the murals of a sixteenth-century monastery in Malinalco, in which birds, bees, and butterfl ies flutter in a paradisiacal setting of foreign and local flora.59 The theme of these murals is the Christian paradise, but the inclusion of native plants and creatures signals the incorporation of indigenous ideas of paradise as well. Although Christians believe that the quality of the afterlife corresponds to the manner in which the deceased lived on earth (virtuously or sinfully), whereas Nahuas believed that the quality of one’s afterlife corresponded to the manner in which one died, the correspondence among their concepts allowed certain indigenous emblems to carry symbolic currency in a new colonial and Christian society. Recently, Eleanor Wake has argued that the pre-Hispanic practice of conjuring the sacred through the use of flowers continued in the Christian milieu of New Spain through painting and religious song and dance.60 She proposes that painted floral imagery in church murals, such as those at Malinalco, helped create the context in which the sacred was invoked in ritual. Nahua devotional literature also demonstrates this phenomenon. As Louise Burkhart has noted for this genre, mention of birds and flowers constituted a “rhetorical mode by which Christianity was rendered meaningful” for Nahuas.61 For example, birds, flowers, and precious stones frequently represent deceased human beings or those who are otherwise ritually transformed. In particular the Virgin Mary and the saints, who are conceived as nobles, are described in these terms, with the most elaborate and evocative descriptors assigned to the Virgin: “oh soft-fragrant-lily-girl fresh/green-flower,” or “oh red-fresh/green-rose

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F igu r e 4.15. Anonymous, Sor María Manuela de Señor San Ignacio, profession portrait (Capuchin). Late eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 89 × 70 cm. Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico. Photograph by Carlos Varillas.

flower.”62 Because Mary is also the Queen of the Angels, she was associated with birds, which natives closely aligned with angels and the souls of deceased humans. The apparent correspondence of Christian and native concepts facilitated the survival and transformation of some Mesoamerican practices and symbols well into viceregal times. Thus, nuns’ portraits that picture birds, butterfl ies, and saints in a mountainlike arrangement of flowers

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composing their crowns strongly suggest that native knowledge and craft practices were able to persist because there was an overlap between analogous Christian and ancient Mesoamerican concepts of spiritual transformation and ideas of paradise. However, there is no evidence that New Spain’s nuns regarded their flowery trappings as anything other than Christian in concept and appearance. Furthermore, while it is impossible to determine what colonial flower artists thought of their crowns and staffs, it is unlikely that they regarded them as subversive symbols of ancient Mesoamerican religion. Instead, they probably thought of them as ritually meaningful objects that were particularly appropriate in ceremonies involving the apotheosis of privileged or elite individuals. Of course, nuns’ floral trappings also contained exclusively European symbols—most notably the pelican, as seen on the profession candles of Sor María Manuela de Señor San Ignacio (fig. 4.15) and Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo (see fig. 2.7)—which symbolize the body of Christ and his resurrection. Even birds and butterfl ies were invoked in Christian terms. For example, José de Ibarra ‘s Christ in the Garden of Virtues identifies these creatures, which flutter around Christ’s head, as “contemplation” and “prayer” (see fig. 3.3).

Disseminating Indigenous Knowledge in New Spain’s Convents Floral works were not the only indigenous crafts that entered into the material and religious culture of New Spanish nunneries. In the mid-nineteenth century Frances Calderón de la Barca wrote that some Mexican nuns produced feather mosaics (amantecayotl), a practice with pre-Hispanic roots, but one that was nearly extinct by the time of her writing.63 Unfortunately, she did not specify what kinds of objects these nuns made, nor did she identify the nuns who made them. Like floral works, feather mosaics were produced in pre-Hispanic times by specialized artisans called amanteca.64 Plumage from birds such as the quetzal, the hummingbird, the roseate spoonbill, the blue cotinga, and other species was collected and masterfully arranged to produce feather headdresses, warriors’ costumes, and other objects and ritual trappings for elite individuals. The Florentine Codex explains that the Toltecs—whom the Mexica considered to be the greatest of artists and civilized peoples as well as their own esteemed ancestors—invented the art of feather mosaic.65 For them, feathered objects were particularly

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precious and were dedicated to the gods as well as to leaders and great warriors. Shortly after the conquest, friars encouraged feather artists to produce religious images and ecclesiastical trappings using their traditional materials and techniques. Alessandra Russo has argued that natives especially prized feather mosaics not only because they frequently pictured sacred subject matter such as Christ, the Virgin, and saints but also because they utilized an inherently sacred material that could embody divine essence.66 Thus, a feather mosaic picturing Christ would have itself been considered sacred by a recently indoctrinated native audience and may even have made divinity present for them.67 Feathered trappings worn by prelates may have accentuated their connection to the divine. What sort of feathered objects did Calderón’s nuns make? Were they the equivalent of traditional oil-on-canvas religious paintings? Or perhaps small adornments intended for religious statues to which the nuns were devoted? Or perhaps even adornments for the nuns themselves? One wonders whether there were featherwork versions of the pictorial badges (escudos de monja) that some nuns wore on their habits. As seen in some crowned-nun portraits, escudos de monja appear on two parts of the habit: just below the chin, usually as a painted pectoral plaque, and as an embroidered element on the cape, along the shoulder area (for example, see figs. 0.1, 2.1, 2.4, 2.12, 2.14, 5.3, 5.6, 6.6, 6.8). The more prominent of the two is the pectoral plaque, which features a religious scene that is framed by a tortoiseshell or glass border. The subject matter of these badges is invariably the Virgin Mary. As Elizabeth Perry has pointed out, escudos de monja visually associate nuns with the model bride, the religious figure with whom they most identified.68 Many of these objects were painted on parchment or copper plates, and a small number of them were created by some of New Spain’s most prominent artists, including Luis Juárez (1590?–1639?), José de Paez (1720–1790?), and Miguel Cabrera. The shoulder badges were fabricated with silk and metallic threads. Because most escudo artists did not sign their work, it is difficult to determine who made many of them. However, their materials may provide some clues. Because sewing and embroidery were considered “feminine arts” and taught at home and in convents, nuns or their servants and students may have fabricated the embroidered escudos. In shape, function, and subject matter, escudos de monja have a close analogue in relicarios (lockets featuring religious imagery), which were worn by laypeople or offered by them to religious statues. In fact, we

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F igu r e 4.16. Anonymous, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios (Our Lady of the Remedies). Seventeenth century. Feathers and silver frame, 7.9 cm. diameter. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

know that some colonial relicarios were made of feathers; a number of them have survived to the present day, allowing the modern viewer to imagine what sorts of feathered objects may have circulated in New Spain’s convents (fig. 4.16). The brilliant, natural colors and iridescent quality of feathered relicarios distinguish them from embroidered and painted escudos de monja and relicarios. Although there is no evidence that feathered escudos were made, if the objects Calderón saw were worn by the nuns, they would have amplified the sense of holiness and nobility that floral trappings already established, since feathers and flowers were linked in the flower world.

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There is no evidence that indigenous nuns wore escudos de monja, so if the objects that Calderón saw were escudos, they would have been produced in nunneries that originally restricted profession to Creole and Spanish women. But this need not militate against the existence of feathered escudos in colonial times. Native servants and students who lived and worked in these convents may have made them or taught the nuns how to make them, as they may have done for floral trappings. While I have come across no documentation that indicates who made nuns’ floral trappings, from the indigenous parallels explained above, I suspect that they were produced by the convents’ native servants, perhaps with the assistance of the nuns themselves and/or their students. It is also possible that aspiring nuns’ families or their families’ native servants contributed some. Whatever the sources and circumstances of production, convents became centers in which floral arts and, to a lesser degree, featherworks were desired and sometimes may even have been (co)produced by nuns, regardless of their ethnic background. If this was the case—and I suspect that it was—we are reminded that indigenous elements in the material and visual culture of New Spain’s convents need not imply native craftsmanship.69 On the contrary, traditional indigenous practices—namely, floral works and feather mosaics— entered into the broader cultural milieu of New Spain’s convents, where Spanish, Creole, African, Amerindian, and ethnically mixed women came into contact and expanded each other’s base of cultural knowledge.

Persistence and Transformations in Colonial Contexts New Spanish nuns and the artists who painted their portraits projected an image that was distinctly local and unlike that of their European and South American counterparts. In other words, there is no mistaking these portraits and their sitters as anything but New Spanish. Transforming the European precedents of wreaths and unadorned palm fronds that symbolized purity and martyrdom, indigenous and/ or nonindigenous women inflected their flowery crowns and staffs with Mesoamerican floral practices that carried basic meanings of eminence, preciousness, and divinity. The result was an amplification of the nuns’ spiritual supremacy and the projection of a sense of solidarity, real or imaginary, among New Spain’s nuns regardless of religious order or ethnic identity. Despite their popular image as impenetrable fortresses, colonial con-

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vents were microcosms of a multicultural society through which people and ideas continually flowed. From the beginning, native women and their cultural knowledge and practices had a place in the convents, and certain aspects of Mesoamerican concepts of the divine overlapped with corresponding Christian notions. In an excerpt from the sixteenthcentury Cantares mexicanos (a compendium of Nahua songs or poems), birds and flowers radiate from heaven, a vision commensurate with the Christian ideas of a heavenly paradise: “Only from his home do they come, from the innermost part of heaven, only from there comes the myriad of flowers.  .  .  . Where the nectar of the flowers is found, the fragrant beauty of the flower is refi ned.  .  .  . They interlace, they interweave; among them sings, among them warbles the quetzal bird.”70 Because these celestial symbols created a context for transforming the mundane into the sacred, it was fitting that they should be included in the nuns’ floral crowns and staffs, along with some floral-embroidered vestments, which symbolized and activated the metamorphosis of something ordinary (a laywoman, albeit socially elite) into something sacred (a “bride of Christ”). In these trappings, birds, butterfl ies, and images of the saints appeared among “interlacing” and “interweaving” flowers— to use the language of the poem—conjuring images of paradise and its paramount ruler, Christ, the divine groom. In the profession and death rituals, these trappings would have been activated by music, song, and prayer (certain veins of which would have qualified as “flower and song” in the indigenous world), which combined to make the sacred present and sanctify the nuns, who took on the qualities of their vestments. Floral arts and other indigenous traditions that circulated in New Spain’s convents are not straightforward versions of pre-Hispanic knowledge and practices. Rather, they are part of a larger body of ancient Mesoamerican traditions that persisted into postconquest times because they resonated with and conformed to Christian concepts.71 The high degree of commensurability between the Mesoamerican flower world and the Euro-Christian concept of heaven would have made the former seem unremarkable or perhaps even undetectable to nonnatives who saw or even wore nuns’ floral trappings. Meanwhile, native nuns and their families may have understood these same trappings to be objects of divine embodiment that actually evoked the spiritual realm as well as symbols of virtue, martyrdom, and marriage to Christ. If this was the case, and I suspect that it often was, the trappings may exemplify James Lockhart’s “double-mistaken identity,” in which two culturally distinct groups wrongly assume that they understand an object and its meaning

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in the same manner.72 It is likely that natives did not feel the need to distinguish between Mesoamerican and Christian concepts of the sacred, which they harmoniously brought together in beautiful objects like floral crowns and flowering staffs. Since George Kubler’s seminal essay “On the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Precolumbian Art,” scholars have challenged his uncompromising position that the deepest symbolic and expressive behaviors of native peoples in Mexico collapsed after the conquest and that the art objects that they produced in viceregal times are no more than hollow expressions of an extinct or dying culture.73 First, this position does not adequately account for the continual transformations in which cultures and their expressive forms engage, be they gradual and subtle or abrupt and destructive. Second, it privileges visuality among cultural practices. In a more recent critical study on notions of cultural mixing, Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn have disputed the premise that we must be able to see pre-Hispanic forms in art in order to prove that native cultures were not totally obliterated by the conquest.74 Arguments for the extinction of indigenous knowledge and cultural practices also depict the views of distinct groups (for example, Europeans and Amerindians) as internally homogeneous, when in fact they were and are heterogeneous in ethnic, political, social, and gendered terms. It is just as problematic to characterize “native art” or “native culture” as a unified whole that either survived or became extinct as it is to collapse all European art and culture into the same category.75 Furthermore, as Claire Farago has recently pointed out, this framework reproduces the colonial subjugation of the vanquished and their cultural productions, rendering them exotic and unintelligible. She calls for scholarship that avoids reinforcing the colonizer’s perspective and is more attuned to the values of indigenous or colonized subjects.76 Dean and Leibsohn observe that art objects are often considered “hybrid” because modern viewers perceive them as a jarring admixture of distinct cultural traditions, but that in their original contexts many of these objects were probably not so regarded. The authors argue for a more inclusive defi nition of “hybridity” that allows for both the “unsettling and the daily nature of things.”77 To modern eyes, crowned-nun portraits and the flowery trappings that appear in them may seem “daily” or ordinary on one level because they do not explicitly display the customary signs of cultural admixture. This may also have been the case for many colonial Euro-Americans, who did not perceive indigenous practices and knowledge in these works or fi nd them remarkable. However,

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for their makers and the nuns who wore them, flowery trappings were far from ordinary objects. Floral crowns and staffs were symbols of—and even instruments that invoked—the sacred transformations that nuns experienced in their rituals. By abandoning an epistemological framework that measures the relative value of colonial art and culture against the diametrically opposed notions of “survival” and “extinction,” and instead becoming sensitive to the multivalent meanings and precedents of these otherwise ordinary-looking works, we witness yet another feat of their extraordinary transformative power as cross-cultural and otherworldly objects.

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Chapter 5 T h e P rof e s sion P ort r a i t i n a T i m e of C r i s i s

I

n 1723 don Lu ís de la Pe ña, a M e x ico Ci t y r ector 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

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“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 fulfi lling 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 fi nancial 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 fulfi ll 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

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system of mutually beneficial relations that colonial reforms threatened. However, the portraits’ polysemic nature does not limit their relevance to this reading alone. Religious orders that were not affected by the reforms also utilized the profession portrait to articulate their institutional and religious identity. For them, the profession portrait was a means of expressing their values, history, and identity in local terms that visually connected them to those orders that felt they were under attack by colonial reforms.

Clients, Patrons, Convents, and the City Convents embodied the spiritual and economic prosperity of their cities. They also spread Catholic values, educated young women, and were centers of cross-cultural knowledge and practices. Students populated most of New Spain’s convents and constituted one of several groups of laywomen that resided in the cloister in addition to servants and nuns’ family members. Other laywomen, such as widows and orphans, who entered convents were there for asylum. In fact, numerous convents were partially founded as a safe haven for orphans, the poor, or unmarried women who could not afford to profess and had no family on which they could rely.5 Laywomen often outnumbered the nuns and provided an important link between the nuns and the secular world. In addition to functioning as asylums and schools, several convents were the sites of local shrines that attracted the devout and bolstered a city’s prestige. The Carmelite nuns of Santa Teresa la Antigua in Mexico City, for example, maintained one of the most renowned shrines in New Spain, which was dedicated to a miraculous sculpture. The shrine of el Cristo de Santa Teresa (also called Cristo Renovado and Cristo de Ixmiquilpan) attracted many pilgrims, some of whom rewarded the convent with fi nancial and other donations. Possessing and caring for a publicly revered effigy was an important fi nancial asset to convents and cities. In 1797 the nuns of Santa Teresa la Antigua petitioned Church authorities for the exclusive right to fabricate and sell devotional medals featuring their miraculous image. The income generated was to be used to pay the expenses of maintaining the figure and its shrine. Permission was duly granted and a new chapel was constructed to accommodate the faithful who wished to venerate this effigy.6 Arguably, providing loans to eligible individuals, groups, and institutions was the greatest economic contribution that convents made to

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their cities. This was a lucrative business that financially bound nuns to their borrowers, who repaid their debts with interest and made convents their lien holders. For example, La Concepción in Mexico City received 400,000 pesos just in loan payments between 1763 and 1812, while its sister institution in the same city, La Encarnación, received 185,000 pesos between 1791 and 1812.7 These impressive sums often contributed significantly to a convent’s total wealth, which was further augmented by rents received from properties, donations called censos, nuns’ dowries, and institutional endowments from founding patrons. Convent patrons were typically members of the local elite who wished to distinguish themselves as socially responsible, pious, and prestigious citizens. For example, in the closing decade of the sixteenth century, Diego Caballero and his wife, Inés de Velasco, wealthy Mexico City nobles, founded the convent of Santa Inés for poor Spanish maidens who could not afford the expenses required for profession. Although not all convents could offer this service, any woman who was eligible to become a nun but could not afford the cost was free to seek the financial support of individual benefactors or sodalities (cofradías) to fi nance her profession. By the time of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was mostly wealthy, nonnoble families who sent their daughters to profess in New Spain’s convents. This group, primarily composed of landed Creole town councilmen, military officers, government bureaucrats, and wealthy merchants, was the same one favored with convent loans.8 Borrowers also contributed to the wealth of convents by providing dowries, expense accounts (reservas), profession funds, and payment for other expenses that nuns incurred before, during, and after profession. Additionally, they donated censos and portions of their estate such as liturgical items, religious art, real estate, and other resources that amplified convent assets. Thus, when a nun professed, she and her family entered into and expanded their convents’ financial network and created new, lucrative client–patron relations for it. One outcome of this client–patron system was an exchange of nuns’ religious services for their benefactors’ fi nancial support: patrons often requested that masses and prayers be said in their name for a specified period of time. In the case of Santa Inés, whose patrons provided for its nuns’ dowries, the nuns were required to sign a contract that stipulated they pray daily for the salvation of the patrons’ souls. Failure to comply would result in a fi ne. Furthermore, the patrons reserved the rights to display their family crests in the convent, handpick the applicants, make governing statutes (with episcopal approval), and name the convent’s

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chaplain—rights that were passed down to their heirs.9 Doña Jerónima de Gamboa, a wealthy widow and founding patron of Puebla’s Santa Inés convent, exercised her patronage rights to name the convent’s founding nuns as well as to endow eight women from her family, which would allow them to profess free of charge. In addition to choosing the rules and constitutions that the nuns of her convent would follow, doña Jerónima reserved a prominent place for herself in the convent’s church, received a lit candle during feast day functions, designated her own burial site inside the convent, and erected an altar to her patron saint, which the nuns were obligated to maintain.10 As symbols of civic identity, convents represented a city’s spiritual values through material riches, a practice that to the modern eye may seem discordant with Christianity’s emphasis on poverty and restraint.11 But many New Spaniards saw the material opulence of religious expression as a suitable use of wealth; visually spectacular churches, bishop’s palaces, and convents bespoke an affluent and moral society that gave its fi rst fruits to God. The assets that convents accumulated from their benefactors over the years made them economic powerhouses and opulent emblems of local values. Furthermore, the client–patron system inextricably bound convents to their communities. It was not until the late eighteenth century that local traditions of extravagant religious expression were countered by Enlightenment-minded colonial reformers who imposed peninsular preferences for restraint (economic, religious, and aesthetic) in New Spain. The founding of the new convent of Santa Catalina de Siena in Valladolid (modern-day Morelia) is the subject of a grand-scale painting that displays the architectural richness of New Spain’s convents and the various social interests invested in women’s monasticism (fig. 5.1). On 3 May 1738, with much fanfare, Dominican nuns processed through the city’s streets to their newly built convent, accompanied by various civic and ecclesiastical factions, and surrounded by Valladolid’s ethnically and socioeconomically diverse populace. The overall tenor of the event is one of muted exuberance, as the city respectfully observes the solemn procession while a group of dark-skinned men, presumably of African heritage, in the extreme-right foreground of the composition provide music. Near them, native men, dressed as stereotypical “Chichimecs” (barbarous Indians), gesturing to one another and observing the procession with interest, stand in poor formation and clear contrast to the orderly procession of civic and church officials who collectively demonstrate the triumph of Christianity and civility in New Spain.

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F igu r e 5.1. Anonymous, Dominican nuns entering the Convent of Santa Catalina de Siena, Valladolid (Morelia). 1738. Oil on canvas. Museo Regional de Morelia, Michoacán. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

Although Santa Catalina’s nuns are the center of attention, they cast their eyes downward in humility and self-containment. Behind them the dean of the cathedral, Mateo de Hijar y Espinoza, who carries a monstrance between two candle-bearing deacons, represents the diocesan Church while city council members walk behind him under a canopy and carry silver gilded staffs, the symbol of their office. They, in turn, are followed by a group of city councilmen wearing fashionable Frenchstyle powdered wigs and topcoats. Two single-fi le lines of nuns flanked by priests—all of whom carry enormous candles—lead the viewer’s eye to the open doors of the new convent. At the front of the procession, near the church’s portal, priests hold large-scale statues of the saints that represent their religious orders. Inside the church, the figure of Saint Catherine of Siena faces the procession, as if to receive the nuns. At the base of the convent’s tower a group of men carry a life-size crucifi x on an elaborate litter of red silky fabric. The statue, embellished with a silver halo and base, is the Cristo de la Preciosa Sangre, an effigy that was cared for by a prominent local cofradía.12 A passage taken from the book of Revelation runs along a floating banner above the scene, identifying the nuns in eschatological terms: “They are virgins who follow the Lamb wherever he goes,” a reference to those whom God would save at the end of time because of their perfected spiritual state.13 In other

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words, having successfully traveled the road to perfection, the nuns of Santa Catalina have transcended the normal sinfulness of humans and have become God’s chosen. This work pictures in detail the various religious and secular agencies that normally invested in New Spain’s convents. The diocesan Church and municipal officials are represented in full pomp and enjoy pride of place as they accompany the nuns in procession. All of the city’s monastic orders also join in, neatly organizing themselves in groups near the church’s entrance, while the local cofradía prominently announces itself with its religious statue. Meanwhile, among the onlookers, well-dressed men and women with unique physiognomies probably represent actual individuals who patronized the convent and its nuns. What is certain is that the gathering of these groups in a single place is meant to demonstrate the various interests that were bound to Santa Catalina convent and depended on it just as the nuns depended on them. Evidently, it is not only the nuns who are on exhibit here; their patrons and clients are deliberately pictured as wealthy, pious affi liates and, therefore, model Christians and citizens. These qualities are brought into high relief by the “Chichimec” men in the foreground, who represent uncivilized, pagan natives made to look small by the organized networks and civic structure of a Christian society that has yet to fully incorporate them. In addition to bolstering civic economies, convents like Santa Catalina provided for their cities’ religious needs, especially through prayer, undoubtedly their single greatest service. As the brides of Christ, nuns could act as powerful advocates for the laity. For example, in his 1681 Teatro mexicano, Agustín de Vetancurt poetically describes the awesome supernatural matters to which Mexico City’s nuns were privy and that they could actually affect through prayer: Blessed city where the prayers of prudent virgins and brides of Jesus among its convents are like armies of angels arranged by Choirs, appalling to hell and beautiful to heaven; God has established his presidios in convents and in them forms armies that, with their prayers, oppose His rigors and soothe and pay homage to Divine Justice obliging Him to be merciful, they are an aff ront to the infernal enemies, and foil deceitfulness because it is divine worth’s blessing to conquer with lilies, triumph with roses, subjecting monstrous demons with women who are like doves.14

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Numerous stories attribute the prevention of major disasters to the prayers of religious women. One of the most notable examples credits the failed sacking of Lima in 1615 to its local saint, Rose of Lima. On another occasion, the concentrated prayers of Saint Teresa of Ávila were said to have saved the city of Puebla from imminent disaster. Miracles and visions frequently transpired in convents and quickly reverberated among the laity. Tales of nuns’ mystical raptures, miraculous cures, and battles with demons captivated the public’s attention and could inspire its moral and financial support or provoke condemnation by the Church, if they somehow challenged its authority. Such phenomena are often commemorated in hagiographies, convent histories, and, in a few instances, paintings. A notable example is a 1759 canvas that shows Sor Jacinta María Nicolasa de Señor San José with the Virgin of Guadalupe (fig. 5.2); the work memorializes a miraculous cure that brought the nun back from the brink of death. According to the story, which is recapitulated in the painting’s lengthy inscription, in 1755 Sor Jacinta fell gravely ill in her convent of Santa Catalina de Siena in Puebla. She was expected to die—until her nurse applied an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which had touched the original miraculous image in Tepeyac, to Sor Jacinta’s body on December 12, Guadalupe’s feast day. Upon praying for the Virgin’s intercession, the terminally ill nun immediately recovered, her health completely restored. In the painting, a youthful and robust Sor Jacinta kneels to one side of the Virgin of Guadalupe, her hands pressed together in prayer as she gazes directly at the viewer. True to the traditional donor-portrait format, the nun’s diminutive size and lateral positioning create a visual hierarchy in which the figure of the Virgin dominates. As Sor Jacinta would testify, she implored the Virgin for a recovery not so much to save her own life as to inspire others to glorify Guadalupe, an intention that her supplication and intense gaze appear to express.15 Roundels containing the portraits of ecclesiastical officials or Church fathers appear in the composition’s top corners, functioning as stamps of approval. Indeed, on 16 November 1758 a local church commission officially declared the event a miracle.16 A few months later the bishop of Puebla ratified the commission’s fi ndings, and the portrait was executed and housed in the convent of Santa Catalina de Siena, the site of the miracle. The public, often held spellbound by such tales, regarded these women as powerful intercessors for entire communities as well as for living and deceased individuals. In particular, their prayers could diminish one’s

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F igu r e 5.2. Anonymous, Sor Jacinta María Nicolasa de Señor San José, with the Virgin of Guadalupe (Dominican). 1759. Oil on canvas, 69 × 211 cm. Museo de Arte Religioso Ex-Convento de Santa Mónica, Puebla, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

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time in purgatory. Masses dedicated to the salvation of souls functioned similarly. On the one hand, families whose daughters entered the convent may have encouraged their vocation not only because it was socially prestigious and a means to enter into a coveted client–patron network, but also because the salvation of their own souls would have rested partially on the prayers of their cloistered daughters. On the other hand, nuns regarded their benefactors’ support as necessary to carrying out their religious duties. Without it they might have had to spend more time tending to their convent’s mundane needs, such as cleaning, cooking, and maintenance, at the expense of intercessory prayer.17

Monastic Reforms All nuns professed poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure. However, the manner in which they observed these obligations varied substantially among religious orders, which, as we discussed in chapter 1, practiced one of two distinct methods of the religious life: the private life (vida particular) or the communal life (vida común). Critics of the private life argued that its nuns experienced a more “relaxed” and less austere existence than their sisters in the communal life, who were obligated to share their convents’ resources equally and generally live without earthly comforts.18 Despite the larger number of communal-life orders in New Spain, the majority of convents practiced the private life. These nuns, referred to as “calced” (calzadas), generally lived in private quarters that ranged in size and amenities. The quarters—some of which included a sitting room, kitchen, servants’ rooms, private bath, and bedroom—could accommodate a nun and her servants, family members, and students. Habits were made of fi ne materials and were sometimes embellished with embroidered designs, pearls, and escudos de monja. Finally, calced nuns were permitted reservas from which they could withdraw at their discretion to cover any number of personal expenses. In contrast, communal-life nuns, called “discalced” (descalzadas or recoletas), slept in common dormitories, ate together in a dining hall, and were not permitted to have house servants or students. Renowned for their austerity, discalced nuns fasted frequently and followed a restricted diet. Because they were not allowed reservas, as a community they relied on alms for food. Finally, their habits were made of coarse wool and generally remained unembellished. A painting of the women from Mexico

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City’s various religious institutions groups discalced and calced nuns separately (see fig. 1.1). The former appear in the far left column as Capuchins, Carmelites, First-Order Franciscans, Brigittines, and members of the Company of Mary. Their plain habits contrast with the more colorful, bell-shaped ones of calced nuns, many of whom wear vibrant capes, pleated scapulars, and escudos de monja. Originally, every one of New Spain’s convents practiced the communal life. However, the precarious financial circumstances of many convents in the late seventeenth century prompted Archbishop Payo y Ribera of Mexico City to lift the financial constraints placed on nuns and relieve convents of their responsibility to provide food and other basic necessities. Nuns who were affected by the archbishop’s new policy now had to pay for their own food and other personal items, which their families or other benefactors provided for them. Thus, nuns’ families/benefactors came to the fi nancial rescue of floundering convents and became a vital source of support for them from this point forward. Although not all convents adopted these measures, and instead maintained the communal life, this policy effectively allowed for a widespread reinterpretation of the religious life in many of New Spain’s convents. It also opened up another avenue of client–patron relations that consolidated nuns’ contact with their families, in particular, and the secular world, more broadly, through their interaction with servants and students. By the eighteenth century many Church and governmental officials in Spain and New Spain had come to disparage the “relaxed” lifestyle that ensued as a result of Payo y Ribera’s policy. They deplored the rise of sumptuous garb, which included gloves, lace, and jewels. They also denounced playing cards, chewing tobacco, drinking chocolate at leisure, watching public processions from convent roofs, and possessing pets, fi ne furniture, and personal items. In particular, they feared that frequent private gatherings, excessive communication with the public, and contact with servants and students endangered nuns’ vows of chastity and enclosure. The frequent admittance of boys, male workers, and other men into convents for business purposes was also seen as a breach of the nuns’ vow of enclosure and a threat to their vow of chastity. Opponents of the private life argued that the number of secular inhabitants residing in, and entering, convents considerably strained convent expenses. Even nuns’ personal expenses were denounced as excessive and in violation of their vow of poverty. Critics argued that nuns placed constant and unacceptable demands on their families to finance their daughters’ expenses. They also regarded any mismanagement of

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convent fi nances as an unmistakable indicator of monastic decadence. Church authorities were especially concerned with the nuns’ tendency to appeal to secular, rather than ecclesiastical, authorities to advocate for them in their institutional and personal problems. Accordingly, critics identified the private life as contradictory to the original spirit of monasticism, which they claimed the communal life embodied. As early as the late seventeenth century, Church authorities were attempting to purge private-life convents of their alleged decadence and the corrupting forces of secular society.19 However, such attempts were not effective until the late eighteenth century, when Bishop Fabián y Fuero of Puebla instituted measures to curb the “laxity” of the convents of his diocese and implement a religious method akin to that of the discalced Capuchin order, which practiced the communal life. His pastoral letter of 1765 forbade sumptuous decorations in convents and ordered that convent expenses be submitted to him. The following year the bishop prohibited students from living with the nuns. Additionally, to curtail the power of convent administrators like the abbess, he shortened their tenure. Fabián y Fuero’s reforms were intended to subject all of Puebla’s convents to the rules of the communal life and consolidate the bishop’s power. Archbishop Lorenzana of Mexico City proposed the implementation of similar reforms in Mexico City’s private-life convents. The king supported his iniatives, and in 1769 he issued a royal decree stating the need for provincial councils to combat the decadence of convents, their disregard of the religious rules of their respective orders, and their challenge to Church authority. Dutifully, Archbishop Lorenzana formed a council that brought together all of New Spain’s bishops to review the current state of the local Church. In the meantime, several private-life convents in Puebla and Mexico City aggressively appealed the reforms, arguing that they should not be subject to the same religious life practiced by the Capuchins.20 They defended the private life, stating that it had been approved by previous prelates (Payo y Ribera). Some convents also argued that the fi nancial measures necessary to implement the reforms would put them in debt. In sum, they reminded governmental and ecclesiastical officials that the private life was the only method of religious life to which they had professed and which they were obligated to fulfi ll. Their written protests, addressed to the viceroy, the Consejo de Indias, and even the king, were passed on to the archbishop’s provincial council and the heads of the regular orders—all of whom were male authorities who disregarded the

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nuns’ appeals and ordered that all of New Spain’s convents be subject to the communal life. The king, however, hesitated before making a fi nal decision. In the interim, he stipulated that convents opposed to adopting the communal life should not be forced to change. Next, he attempted to reach a middle ground between New Spain’s private-life nuns and ecclesiastical officials who advocated reform. In 1774 he officially decreed that all of New Spain’s convents must adopt the communal life. Students were banned from the cloister—except for those who attended convents like La Enseñanza in Mexico City, whose primary purpose was teaching—and novices of all monastic orders were to profess and observe the communal life. However, each already-professed nun was permitted to reject this method if she so chose. Those who rejected the reforms were authorized to continue practicing the private life, but were permitted only one personal servant. Although some convents quietly accepted reform, the majority opposed it despite the king’s concessions. For example, in Mexico City, shortly after the reforms took place, the convents of San Juan de la Penitencia and Santa Clara admitted only novices who would not accept the communal life.21 But the king’s order took effect nevertheless, and by the end of the century the communal life was proclaimed (if not practiced) by all of New Spain’s newly reformed convents. Of all the changes that reformed convents were obligated to make, it seems that only one was carried out with any success: the profession of new nuns under the communal life. And even this was truer to the word of the law than to its spirit.22 Then in 1796 a royal decree annulled the prohibition of students in convents. By the early nineteenth century the original reforms of 1774 were still mostly unobserved in New Spain’s formerly private-life convents. The monastic reforms of the late eighteenth century greatly disrupted the religious lives of calced nuns, even causing rifts between reform supporters and protesters within convents. However, in the end, dissenting religious factions quietly retained their original lifestyle, sometimes alongside the reformed one. Furthermore, by the early nineteenth century prelates began to change their attitudes about the sustainability of the communal life in convents. Those who subscribed to Enlightenment ideals—in particular that of maintaining a fi nancially viable institution and a healthy bottom line—could not justify the costly maintenance that the communal life required.23 Protesting nuns were quick to seize on this line of reasoning by informing their prelates about the debt that their convents had incurred in switching to the communal life. They ar-

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gued that the private life was more economical because it allowed them to purchase their food individually through their private expense accounts. This line of reasoning especially resonated with the Enlightenment notion of using economic incentives to inspire rational behavior in the individual.

The Rise of the Profession Portrait Despite the declining number of aspiring nuns during the last two decades of the eighteenth century in New Spain, convents and women’s monasticism experienced a kind of blossoming. Although the reforms aimed at the private life undoubtedly caused many nuns to reexamine their vocation, the majority of them defended their traditional way of life, one they had inherited from their predecessors, which they considered to be not only legitimate but time-honored in their respective convents. In so doing, they coherently articulated their values and interests at a time when reforms threatened to undermine them. It was in these embattled circumstances that the profession portrait in New Spain experienced a surge in production. A survey of dated profession portraits reveals that most of them were commissioned and produced during the reform era and the decades following it (ca. 1770s–1810).24 This is especially apparent for portraits that depict calced, private-life nuns, which, based on this survey, saw a 62 percent surge in production in the reform and post-reform period. Comparatively, communal-life portraits experienced a 30 percent production increase for this same period. Furthermore, the majority of these works come from Puebla and Mexico City, the sites of most vociferous protests (table 5.1). In fact, of the fourteen private-life convents of Mexico City and Puebla that formally complained about the reforms, only one—San Bernardo, in Mexico City—is not represented among the crowned-nun portraits studied here. Those remaining are La Concepción, La Encarnación, Jesús María, San Jerónimo, San Lorenzo, San José de Gracía, and Regina Coeli in Mexico City. In Puebla they are La Concepción, La Santísima Trinidad, San Jeronimo, Santa Clara, Santa Inés, and Santa Catalina. Furthermore, the order that protested most vociferously (the Conceptionists) accounts for the majority of profession portraits. Profession portraits proliferated also among discalced orders. This may be explained by a number of factors. First, several communal-life convents were founded by nuns of New Spain’s earliest convents, who

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Ta ble 5.1 Con v e n ts R e pr e se n t e d i n E xta n t Prof e ssion Port r a i ts (1727– 1820)* Calced, Private-Life Convents

City Mexico City

Convent (Order) La Concepción (C) La Encarnación (C) Jesús María (C) San José de Gracia (C) Regina Coeli (C) San Jerónimo ( J) San Lorenzo ( J) Santa Clara (U)

Total Portraits (Prereform/ Postreform) 3 (0/3) 2 (1/1) 4 (1/3) 1 (0/1) 2 (0/2) 1 (0/1) 1 (0/1) 1 (0/1)

Discalced, Communal-Life Convents

Convent (Order) Santa Teresa la Antigua (Ca) Santa Teresa la Nueva (Ca) Corpus Christi (1st Order) El Salvador y Santa Brígida (B) Enseñanza Antigua (CM) Enseñanza de Indias (CM) San Felipe de Jesús (Cu)

Total Portraits (Prereform/ Postreform) 3 (1/2) 4 (2/2) 1 (1?) 1 (1/0) 1 (1/0) 1 (0/1) 3 (2/1)

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Puebla

Salvatierra Guadalajara

La Concepción (C) Santísima Trinidad (C) Santa Catalina (D) Santa Inés (D) Santa Clara (U) San Jerónimo ( J)

4 (1/3) 1 (1/0) 2 (0/2) 2 (0/2) 2 (0/2) 4 (2/2)

Santa María de Gracia (D)

2 (0/2)

*Only portraits that identify sitters’ convent and date of profession are represented. Key A = Augustinian B = Company of the Savior (Brigittine) C = Conceptionist Ca = Carmelite Cu = Capuchin (Franciscan) CM = Company of Mary D = Dominican J = Jeronymite U = Urbanist Franciscan 1st Order = First-Order Franciscan

Santa Mónica (A) Santa Rosa de Lima (D) La Soledad (Ca) Santa Ana (Cu)

5 (0/5) 3 (0/3) 1 (0/1) 2 (1/1)

La Purísima y San Francisco (Cu) Jesús María (D) Santa Teresa (Ca)

1 (0/1) 2 (0/2) 2 (2/0)

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would have brought some of their institutional traditions with them. For example, in Mexico City’s fi rst Carmelite convent, Santa Teresa la Antigua (founded in 1616), its Concepionist founders continued to observe the rules and consitutions of their original order before adopting the Carmelite rule.25 It is likely that the founders also reproduced the profession and death ceremonies they learned in Jesús María (the Conceptionist convent from which they originated), thus spreading a local elaboration of ritual to a newly founded discalced convent. Preserving and modifying these traditions would have become part of the newer convents’ institutional identities and perhaps even a reminder of their founders and origins. Second, the religious symbolism of crowned-nun portraits would have been meaningful to women professing in many of the discalced orders.26 After all, every nun was a bride of Christ, and the local manner of signifying this speaks to the penetration of broad cultural values and practices into New Spain’s cloisters. No matter what the order, the portraits’ patronage patterns and utilization of normative, gendered symbols indicate a persistent association of nuns and their primary patrons (their families). In fact, all of New Spain’s convents relied on the fi nancial support of their nuns’ families in the form of dowries and censos. Admittedly, private-life convents relied more heavily on them than did communal-life convents; reservas arguably put calced nuns in greater contact with their personal benefactors and directly affected their method of religious life. Regardless of order and lifestyle, the profession portrait conflates two related models of monastic identity: the perfecta religiosa and the bride of Christ. The fi rst signifies a nun who perfectly embodies the ideals of her religious order.27 In his history of the convent of Santa Teresa la Antigua, the priest J. B. Méndez notes that an individual can reach perfection only by impeccably observing the rules and constitutions of the Carmelite order.28 As guidebooks of the religious life, monastic constitutions outline the goals of the order and stipulate specific methods to achieve them. A 1744 version of the rules and constitutions of the convents of La Concepción and La Santísima Trinidad in Puebla states, “The observance and precise execution of these Rules and Constitutions leads to true spiritual encouragement, happiness, and consolation, as well as daily strength to zealously follow your vocation.”29 These guidebooks deliberatively outline how nuns could become perfectas religiosas, emphasizing their vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and enclosure. For example, the same guidebook states that nuns are not allowed personal property; however, the abbess could grant them items that were considered necessary. Ad-

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ditionally, it states that rents and possessions that La Concepción and La Santísima Trinidad collected did not violate the nuns’ poverty vow because they were used for the good of the convent and not for any one nun or group. Statements like these artfully create a concordance between private-life values and the universal requisities of monasticism. A major aspect of monastic identity addressed in rules and constitution manuals is the religious habit. Again, the manual for La Concepción and La Santísima Trinidad stipulates that its nuns are required to wear a white habit and scapular, a blue woolen mantle, an escudo de monja attached to the scapular along the chest area, and another on the mantle along the nun’s right shoulder. The cincture is to be made of hemp, and the wimple must be white and should cover the nun’s ears, cheeks, neck, and throat. The nuns were permitted to wear shoes or sandals (thus, they were literally calced), and, most important, the abbess could allow her nuns to don other garments not specified in the rules and constitutions.30 This measure allowed the convents to augment or elaborate on their habits as they saw fit. In her 1754 portrait, for example, Sor Ana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad of Santísima Trinidad convent complies with this prescription, but also dons a richly embroidered stole that drapes over each shoulder and terminates in fringe (fig. 5.3). And although her wimple covers her throat, cheeks, and ears, as prescribed in the manual, she bears a prominent chiceador on her right temple, an adornment that critics of the private life would have considered a sign of vanity. However, it and her embroidered stole are not specifically prohibited in the rules and constitutions to which she was bound. Similarly, the 1795 portrait of Sor María Ana Josefa de Señor San Ignacio (see fig. 2.14), a Conceptionist nun from the convent of San José de Gracia in Mexico City, depicts its sitter in a richly embellished habit that conforms to the prescription given above, but considerably elaborates upon it. In particular, Sor María’s cape, stole, and veil are entirely covered with multicolored embroidered designs and lace trimmings. Arguably, the rich visual effect of this and similar profession portraits identifies the sitters as calced nuns, as much as the prescribed elements of their habits identify them as conforming members of their particular monastic orders. Other orders, like the Dominicans, placed greater restrictions on their habits, as the 1773 edition of the rules and constitutions for the convents of Santa Catalina de Siena and Santa Inés of Puebla demonstrates. As a means to practice the modesty that is required of Christ’s brides, the nuns are ordered not to elaborate in any way on their simple black-and-

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F igu r e 5.3. Anonymous, Sor Ana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad, profession portrait (Conceptionist). 1754. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

F igu r e 5.4. Anonymous, Sor María Manuela Josefa de Zamacona y Pedraza, profession portrait (Dominican). 1796. Oil on canvas, 191 × 106 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepoztotlán, Mexico. CONACULTAINAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Photo by author.

white habits: gloves, jewelry, and other ornaments are specifically prohibited, as are pleated scapulars and veils that come to a point over the forehead. According to this manual, the Dominican habit is meant to remind all nuns of their religious commitments and mortality. Any adornments or signs of personal fashion are said to cover these truths and distract the nuns from their obligations.31 The 1796 portrait of Sor María Manuela Josefa de Zamacona y Pedraza, a nun of Puebla’s Santa Inés convent, exemplifies the Dominican aestheic (fig. 5.4). In it she wears a simple white robe and scapular under an unadorned black cape and veil.

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Her habit’s single adornment is a long rosary that hangs down over her scapular, a reference to the Dominicans’ dedication to praying the rosary that appears in all portraits of members of this order. Thus, roughly contemporaneous rules and constitutions of two distinct monastic orders evince different methods of dress: the Conceptionists were allowed richer habits than the Dominicans, and with the approval of the abbess, they could modify them—an entitlement that Dominicans apparently lacked, although there are some exceptions. Yet despite these differences, every convent strove to move its members along the path of religious perfection in accordance with its rules and constitutions. Thus, profession portraits picture their sitters’ adherence to the fundamental requisites of the religious life according to their convents’ interpretation of it in a specific time and place. And just as religious orders determined the manner in which their nuns were to appear so that their institutional identity would not be compromised, each convent’s institutional culture determined the degree and kind of habit elaboration that appear in that convent’s crowned-nun portraits. Long before the Bourbon reforms, New Spain’s Church had criticized the dress of private-life nuns, noting that the secular world’s vanity had entered the cloister. One prelate went so far as to suggest that nuns committed a mortal sin in dressing fashionably to “enamor” men with whom they were in contact.32 In this spirit, in 1635, Archbishop Manso y Zúñiga (1587–1655) ruled against the wearing of veneras (small devotional plaques that some calced nuns attached to their habits) made of gold, enamel, and stone. As a countermeasure, nuns commissioned the first escudos de monja, which were crafted out of painted parchment or metal panels and encased in tortoiseshell frames. This creative response, which Elizabeth Perry has argued was a form of resistance to the archbishop’s ruling, resulted in the establishment of a new category of devotional art, which by the eighteenth century had come to dwarf its venera predecessor in size and artistic elaboration.33 In 1673 the popularity and ornateness of escudos de monja prompted Archbishop Payo y Ribera to warn nuns about the wearing of exceedingly elaborate escudos, which might violate their solemn vow of poverty.34 Then in the early eighteenth century Archbishop José Lanciego y Eguilaz (1712–1728) forbade nuns from wearing jewelry and silk veils.35 Yet, despite several campaigns to regulate dress, many crowned-nun portraits show the persistence of lavish trappings, especially those that picture women entering (formerly) private-life convents. Perry argues that the escudo de monja became a symbol of calced nuns’ values and resis-

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tance to the communal-life reforms of the late eighteenth century, since it was still worn by many of these nuns throughout the reform period.36 When New Spain’s Church began its campaign to reform women’s monasticism, many convents argued that compliance would be tantamount to a betrayal of their orders’ rules and constitutions, which they considered binding and sacred. Thus, religious profession became a highly contested ritual in and immediately after the era of reform. The calced strategy of obeying the reforms in word, but not in spirit, seems to have carried over into the profession ceremony. The concomitant surge in the production of profession portraits, which retained all of the trappings that had always been integral to the profession ceremony, suggests that nuns (with the support of their families, who commissioned the paintings) wanted to identify themselves as members in good standing of their religious orders, and as adherents to the constitutions and institutional culture of their convents. It also suggests that on some level convents represented their institutional identity in the same manner that they always had, despite reform. In particular, the high degree of prereform-style elaboration in nuns’ habits in these portraits suggests that reforms were either ignored or shrewdly negotiated by many private-life convents. A 1774 appeal against the reforms, written by the Urbanist nuns of Santa Clara convent in Puebla, argues that if the same rules and constitutions were applied to all the convents of New Spain, there would be no distinction between private-life and communal-life orders (“No hacer distinccion de Capuchinas y Claras: de Theresas y Brígidas de los demas”).37 Aspiring nuns at this time were in a precarious position: obligated to the communal life (if only in word), but sensitive to their seniors’ preference for the private life, or to the differing preferences of opposing factions within the convent. The manner in which they and their convents responded to or negotiated the reforms directly shaped how they appeared at their profession and consequently in their portraits. One such sign of negotiation is apparent in several calced-nun portraits from the postreform years (ca. 1780s–1790s) in which the richness of the bridal trappings is visibly restrained. For example, the half-length portrait of an unidentified Conceptionist (fig. 5.5) that probably dates to this period contains all of the usual bridal trappings—a crown, a flowery palm frond, and a statue of the Christ Child—but without the same visual richness and profusion of flowers and ornaments that all prereform Conceptionist portraits contain. Scholars have attributed this restraint to artists’ adherence to the moderate Neoclassical style that the newly

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formed Academy of San Carlos in Mexico City ushered in. However, the more likely reason for this restraint is the balance nuns had to strike in representing themselves to different groups and interests. By preserving local profession trappings but moderating their opulence, nuns simultaneously demonstrated their commitment to monastic reforms and honored prereform traditions. New Spain’s artists, fulfi lling their patrons’ commissions, visually captured these negotiations in nuns’ profession portraits. However, this restraint is not consistent among all postreform profession portraits. Because each convent had its own institutional culture and identity and responded uniquely to reform, there seem to have been fluctuations in the way nuns dressed and were painted in their portraits. For example, Sor Ana Rita de Guadalupe, who professed in the convent of La Concepción in Puebla in 1777, appears in a plain Conceptionist habit and holds no floral staff, nor does she wear a floral crown (fig. 5.6). The only notable adornment in her profession portrait is the large escudo de monja beneath her chin, which, along with the blue-andwhite habit, identifies her order. This unusual austerity in the image of a Conceptionist nun is further accentuated by Sor Ana’s self-contained pose, wherein she hides her hands behind her scapular, a gesture that simulates the self-containment in contemporaneous portraits of Capuchin nuns (see, for example, fig. 2.18). Significantly, in his measures to reform Puebla’s private-life convents, Bishop Fabián y Fuero put forth the Capuchins as an ideal model for all nuns. At the time of Sor Ana’s profession, her abbess would have been under tremendous pressure to fulfi ll the bishop’s order, which potentially explains the atypical, quasiCapuchin restraint of Sor Ana’s portrait. The absence of the usual floral and related accoutrements used in professions is notable in this and a group of other profession portraits of calced nuns from this period.38 Among the private-life orders, the postreform portraits are likelier to show visual restraint than the prereform ones, yet most of these works show not an abandonment of profession trappings, but rather a diminution of their size and elaboration. This strategy suggests the sitters’ compliance with the reforms in word rather than spirit, for these works are still recognizably calced profession portraits. It may also be that some of the sitters genuinely subscribed to the reforms and wished to indicate their position by muting their profession trappings.39 Historically, nuns had used their habits to confront threats that reforms posed to monastic identity. An outstanding example of this resistance comes from Spain under the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand, who

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F igu r e 5.5. Anonymous, profession portrait of a Conceptionist nun. Late eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 104 × 73 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

F igu r e 5.6. Anonymous, Sor Ana Rita de Guadalupe, profession portrait (Conceptionist). 1777. Oil on canvas, 177 × 106 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

set out to modify female monasticism, which they and their supporters considered to be in a decadent and inaustere state.40 Although the 1493 papal decree Exposuerunt nobis allowed the Crown to institute monastic reforms where it deemed them necessary, the convent of Santa Clara in Barcelona resisted reformers’ demands. Just as many protesting convents in New Spain would argue three centuries later, the abbess of Santa Clara pointed out that she and her nuns were members in good standing of their religious order and that their own standards of discipline and decorum were congruent with the constitutions of that order. Thus,

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from the nuns’ point of view, they were in compliance with the religious life to which they had professed and should not be subject to any other method. Submitting to the reforms would imply acknowledgment that their religious life was unacceptable or even illegitimate. Their critics, unrelenting, demanded that the nuns of Santa Clara make the changes, one of which included granting Franciscan friars administrative oversight of the convent. However, Santa Clara was affi liated with the Benedictine order and so chose to wear the Benedictine, rather than the Franciscan, habit as a means to defy their critics and exercise their autonomy. This move allowed the embattled nuns a degree of agency in a turbulent encounter that pitted male ecclesiastical authority, as well as the Crown, against Santa Clara.41 Choosing their habits, then, was a form of protest in which nuns articulated their values and religious identity. Nuns’ reputation for apprehending divine matters and receiving God’s graces was long considered a threat to male ecclesiastical authority. In fact, their special connection to their divine spouse prompted the institutional Church, at various points in history, to institute monastic regulations that emphasized enclosure and various forms of physical and spiritual discipline.42 Church authorities also vigorously regulated mysticism, a potential threat to the intermediary power of the Church and, in some cases, that of governmental officials. Such was the reason for the issuance of a royal decree dated 1768, one year after the king expelled the Jesuits from his American realm—a matter of considerable dissent in New Spain. According to the king, he had been made aware of several nuns who were pronouncing “false prophesies and fanatical revelations” about the return of the Jesuits, which did “disturb the peace of the nuns, divide them into factions, and involve them in governmental matters, altogether improper to the weakness of their sex, and contrary to the withdrawal demanded by monastic profession, but is a clever means for publicly spreading ideas that disturb the peace.”43 Archbishop Lorenzana, who dutifully distributed the king’s decree to Mexico City’s convents, asserted his order that these prophesies and revelations cease, and that the nuns fully comply with this mandate: “[A]nd desiring its due fulfi llment, we order that convent administrators read this edict to their communities, exhorting silence and obedience among their subjects . . . [and to explain] that it is never acceptable to speak ill of the Sovereign, prelates, and superiors . . . that all inferiors do not judge the dealings of their superiors.”44 The considerable influence that nuns could wield through the discourse of mysticism is revealed in this case.

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It impelled the king and the archbishop to legally engage the nuns in a matter involving a controversial policy that quickly came up against a strong, local voice of dissent for its unwanted alteration of New Spain’s religious landscape. Because many nuns had a propensity for mysticism, a number of early modern treatises written by priests differentiated between genuine orthodox visions and heretical ones.45 Additionally, the Church promoted certain hagiographies of mystics whom it had endorsed, such as saints Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, and Rose of Lima, which New Spanish nuns eagerly read and adopted as models for their own religious lives.46 In the face of the Church’s attempts to restructure their religious lives, many calced nuns strategically reasserted their status as brides of Christ, both in their portraits and in their legal protests against adopting the communal life. In a telling example, a document written on behalf of Santa Clara convent in Puebla refers to the nuns’ honor and good name, which ecclesiastical authorities had challenged by calling their religious life “relaxed,” an evaluation the nuns found offensive. The nuns argued that the reforms interfered with their calling to be Christ’s brides and that their provincial leader did not have the right to modify “the quiet state of spiritual marriage that the nuns had enjoyed” previously.47 In defending the private life, the nuns of Santa Clara appealed to unimpeachable, time-honored principles of women’s monasticism that had been recognized and promoted by the same Church that now threatened to alter them. The rise in the production of profession portraits around the period of monastic reforms partially suggests an interest in articulating longstanding, but now endangered, private-life values that allowed calced nuns to fulfi ll their role as Christ’s brides and model members of their orders. These values were enunciated in the manner in which nuns professed. On one hand, they were required to profess the communal life in order to comply with the reforms, but on the other hand, the elaboration of habits, persistence of floral attributes, and continuing use of portrait inscriptions that identified the sitters’ primary benefactors—their families—demonstrated a persistence in calced values. Patrons seem to have wanted images that pictured their daughters in the local manner to which they were accustomed; to commission and possess a nun’s profession portrait was to demonstrate a special relation to her and her convent (and, by extension, its fi nancial and spiritual assets). In this sense, the portraits may have served as unofficial contracts that bound nuns and

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their religious communities to their benefactors. In the same spirit, nuns frequently demonstrated the fusion of convent and family by combining their given names or surnames with a new religious name.48 Consider, for example, Sor María Clara Josepha (fig. 2.18), whose secular name was María Rosa; Madre María Antonia de Rivera (fig. 2.19), who kept her surname; and Sor Manuela de Mesa (fig. 4.3), who also kept her surname, as did Sor María Juana de Señor San Rafael y Martínez (fig. 4.8) and Sor María Manuela Josefa de Zamacona y Pedraza (fig. 5.4). As these and other works demonstrate, profession portraits combine a local take on the universal qualities of nuns as perfectas religiosas and brides of Christ (against which the Church could not argue) with the sitters’ ties to the secular world (which the Church did attempt to police). Protesting nuns were not seeking to undermine the institutional Church; rather, they were strategically utilizing a vocabulary of mainstream gender norms to preserve some degree of autonomy and institutional culture for their religious communities.49 It may also be that private-life convents’ funeral portraits of crowned nuns in this period articulated and promoted their deceased sitters’ calced values to the convents’ newly professed members in an effort to maintain traditional values and institutional history. Sally McKee has noted that “the ability to manipulate one’s environment and the people in it does not always lead to empowerment—implying change—but it does embody ‘agency,’ meaning . . . the capacity to act for oneself and by oneself.”50 In New Spain, this agency occupied the interstices between the institutional Church, local convents, and the secular world, whose presence was most felt through the client–patron system that bound the sacred and secular realms of society. Calced nuns effectively utilized time-honored concepts of women’s spirituality and nuptial mysticism and expressed them in local terms to exercise their agency in difficult circumstances that pitted them against patriarchal Church authority. In the end, by relegating religious women to the realm of mysticism rather than rationality, the patriarchal Church unintentionally provided New Spain’s nuns with a viable foundation upon which they could exercise their agency.51

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Chapter 6 C ol on i a l I de n t i t y R h e tor ic s

F

rom short ly a f t e r t h e t i m e of Eu rope a n con tact, 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. Sebastián 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

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F igu r e 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).

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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 fi rst 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 fi ngering 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 works, and related productions, New

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F igu r e 6.2. Sebastián Salcedo, Virgin of Guadalupe. 1779. Oil on canvas, 63 × 48 cm. Denver Art Museum. Photograph © Denver Art Museum.

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Spain’s artists provided local alternatives to Europe’s more derogatory images of the Americas.

European Images of the Americas As early as the late fi fteenth century, Spain grappled with the problems presented by a “new world” and its native population, which were suddenly under its political and economic control. Written accounts by explorers and conquerors that were illustrated with fantastical images described complex and dangerous civilizations nestled in sublime landscapes. For Europeans, the association between the Americas and their inhabitants was not limited to the indigenes. By the late sixteenth century, some Spaniards claimed that the climate and southern constellations of the Americas largely determined the characteristics of all Americans, including those of European and mixed ancestry. For example, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún stated that “those who are born here [are] very similar to the character of the Indians, in aspect they appear Spaniards and in their condition they are not; if those who are born in Spain do not take precautions after a few years here they become [as those born here]; and this I believe is due to the climate or constellations of these lands.”6 Sahagún also notes that those born in the Americas (presumably Creoles, mestizos, and natives) “are intolerable to govern and most difficult to save: their parents are incapable of steering their children from the vices and sensualities that this land causes.”7 Shortly thereafter, the Spanish author and physician Juan de Cárdenas dedicated several chapters in his Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias to explaining the qualities of Creoles. He states disparagingly that premature aging and death diminished the intellectual abilities of Creoles, and that Creole men and their children had a tendency to become effeminate.8 Echoing Sahagún and Cárdenas, Fray Juan de la Puente, a Dominican, stated: “The heavens of America induce inconstancy, lasciviousness and lies: vices of the Indians which the constellations make characteristic of the Spaniards who are born and bred there.”9 By the eighteenth century such views were commonplace among European intellectuals and colonial policy makers for the Americas. They argued that Europeans were, as a whole, hearty and healthy in stature, intellectually gifted, and industrious, while Creoles, Amerindians, and the racially mixed castas lacked strength of character and were physically weak, terminally lazy, and vicious. As well, Creoles were said to expe-

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rience a rapid loss of intellectual powers as mature adults, which caused them to fall further into sloth and vice. The temperate climate of the Americas was partially to blame. Eighteenth-century critics also cited concern regarding miscegenation: the biological and cultural mixing of Europeans, Amerindians, Africans, and other groups was thought to directly affect the already debilitated character of those born in the Americas. As early as the sixteenth century, royal cosmographer López de Velazco noted that mestizos— the offspring of Spanish and Amerindian parents and the fastest-growing multiethnic group in New Spain—were largely given over to vice.10 Those of African ancestry fared even worse, for they carried the social stigma of slavery, religious infidelity, and moral degeneracy. The association between temperament and miscegenation in New Spain is apparent in a number of casta paintings (images of ethnically diverse couples and their progeny) from the latter half of the eighteenth century, and may be most evident in a series by the Puebla painter José Joaquín Magón (active ca. 1754–1770), which expounds on these “American” temperaments in inscriptions. For example, in his painting of a Spanish man, his native wife, and their mestizo child (fig. 6.3)—the fi rst canvas in a series of sixteen—Magón constructs a pleasant family scene that is set in a domestic study. The framed inscription in the upper center portion of the composition reads: “In the Americas people of different colors, customs, temperaments, and languages are born.” Just below that, another inscription identifies the figures: “Born of the Spaniard and Indian woman is a Mestizo, who is generally humble, tranquil, and straightforward.” Pictured between his smartly dressed Spanish father, who is fi ngering a copy of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, and his native mother, who is bejeweled and dressed in an elaborate lace-bordered huipil, the mestizo child holds up a sheet of paper to his father as if to show him (and the painting’s viewers) his writing exercise. The term PARCO written on the boy’s page reinforces mestizos’ supposed qualities: parco signifies someone who is laconic. In viceregal times, literacy was a quality through which many Europeans distinguished themselves from natives, since natives did not have a system of alphabetic text prior to the conquest.11 For example, in his biography of Hernán Córtes, Francisco López de Gómara emphasizes the importance of teaching the natives how to read and write alphabetic text: it is through “letters that they are truly men.”12 This may well explain why the boy’s mother also holds an inscribed sheet of paper, to

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F igu r e 6.3. José Joaquín Magón, Del Español, y la Yndia nace el Mestizo, por lo común, humilde, quieto, y sensillo (Born of a Spaniard and an Indian woman is a mestizo, who is generally humble, tranquil, and straightforward). Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 102 × 126 cm. Private collection.

which she points, revealing an undecipherable grouping of letters repeated in list format—not only is she a native, she is also a woman. As if to emphasize this inability, a scarlet macaw—a symbol that, for Europeans, denoted the exoticism of the Americas and may also refer to the simple parroting of speech and thought without understanding—is perched on the Spaniard’s chair, while the father affectionately gazes at his son in approval of his writing exercise.13 Casta paintings—many of which were intended for export to Europe but invented and produced by New Spanish artists—combined negative and positive qualities of the Americas and their inhabitants.14 In this inventive genre, exclusive to Spanish America and free from the formal restraints of religious painting and portraiture (colonial Latin America’s most popular pictorial genres), some of New Spain’s best artists demonstrated their knowledge of contemporaneous trends in European paint-

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ing. Significantly, the most influential casta paintings were created by eighteenth-century artists who were actively involved in informal art academies and who petitioned for a royal academy of art in order to elevate the status of painting and painters in New Spain, as had been done in Europe. Many of these paintings stood as models for other local artists. In demonstrating their ability to produce a unique painting genre, and also in using virtuoso techniques that called attention to facture, New Spanish artists meant to prove their parity with Europe’s leading artists (who achieved fame for their ability to innovate).15 Yet, while this and other positive qualities evident in casta paintings were generally intended to raise the level of the Americas in the eyes of their audience, the theme of miscegenation and the colonial status of these works and their artists undermined that intention. Significantly, European collectors often placed casta paintings in curiosity cabinets that also displayed exotic natural specimens from the Americas, rather than in the great art collections of Europe. The real effect that the assertions of American inferiority had on all Americans is irrefutable: native lords complained that Spaniards never recognized their nobility and lumped them with the indigenous plebeian class, while Creoles suffered indignities for their removal from Europe, as Garcilaso de la Vega explains in his Comentarios reales de los Incas: They call a Spanish man or woman who comes from Spain a Spaniard or a Castillian; for they have both names for the same thing. . . . The sons of a Spanish man and woman, born in that country, are called Creoles, which means that they were born in that country. It is a name that was invented by the Negroes. Among them it means a Negro born in the Indies, as distinguished from one born in Guinea. They hold those who are born in their native country in more honour than the children who are born in a strange land, and the parents are offended if they are called Creoles. The Spaniards, to express the same thing, have adopted the word into their language to designate those born in the country. Thus both Spaniards and Negroes born in the Indies are called Creoles.16

The analogy between American-born Africans and American-born Spaniards would have been degrading to the latter group, who also

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shunned the term indiano since it was often mistaken for indio, the Spanish designation for “Indian.”17 As they saw it, they were related to but also somewhat distinct from Spaniards because of their American birth and legacy; however, they most adamantly distinguished themselves from natives, Africans, and castas, and often referred to themselves as americanos. The colonial restructuring of eighteenth-century Spanish America instated by the Bourbon reforms was intended to consolidate the Spanish Crown’s power by restructuring the political, economic, military, and ecclesiastical apparatuses of its American possessions, thereby better controlling local institutional bodies and facilitating its access to American resources. These reforms tended to favor Spaniards for the highest political and ecclesiastical offices. Explaining why he found Creoles unfit for leadership roles, the visitor general to New Spain, José de Gálvez, stated that their local faction and kinship ties made them naturally biased and poor candidates for those positions.18 While this situation frustrated many Creoles’ desires for upward social mobility and high political office, the most elite Creole families maintained or enhanced their social and economic standing by marrying their daughters to wealthy Spanish merchants and influential bureaucrats.19 Thus, in many cases Creoles and Spaniards created mutually beneficial alliances and likely downplayed their differences. However, on an ideological level, Europeans constituted a standard measure against which most Americans fell short. The Spanish predominance in the Americas was philosophically supported by the important contemporaneous writings of Cornelius de Pauw, Abbé Guillaume Raynal, and William Robertson. They promulgated the old argument—earlier articulated by Sahagún, Cárdenas, and de la Puente—that the Americas produced people who were deficient in particular qualities in which Europeans excelled.20 This position benefited the elite Creole families who built ties with Spaniards, while excluding less influential ones (such as those who entered their daughters into New Spain’s convents), casta groups, and natives. This disparity had artistic and intellectual repercussions, as the Allegory of America and Virgin of Guadalupe images demonstrate. Works like these, premised on local identity formations and implying the relation of the Americas to Europe, or to the Christian world more broadly, contribute to what Walter Mignolo has termed the barroco de Indias: a critical expression of Spanish colonialism in local art and ideas, and a cornerstone of New Spanish identity formation.21

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Local American Emblems In response to discrimination, many New Spanish Creoles constructed a corporate identity in literature and the arts that established them as the rightful heirs of the Spanish conquerors and the Aztecs, the latter whom they likened to the Romans of Europe’s classical past. Additionally, they emphasized the unique religious character of New Spain, claiming the Americas in general, and Mexico City in particular, as major sites in Christendom.22 The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe exemplifies the second system. Miguel Sánchez’s groundbreaking Imagen de la Virgen María, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (1648), which narrates the story of her apparitions, popularized devotion to this Marian cult and infused it with Creole patriotic sentiments. Sánchez identifies Guadalupe as the fi rst Creole woman, which in turn made New Spain’s Creoles her children. He also interprets the Virgin’s apparitions as proof of the divine favor that God bestowed on the Creoles of New Spain, and her miraculous image as the physical proof of that favor. In this image and all viceregal copies of it, the crowned Virgin steps on a crescent moon, clasps her hands in prayer, and is surrounded completely by a mandorla (body halo). By the eighteenth century, this basic iconographical program had been expanded to include four or more vignettes containing important scenes from the story of Guadalupe: namely, three apparitions to Juan Diego, and the presentation of the Virgin’s miraculous image to Bishop Zumárraga. Additionally, artists began to incorporate floral ornamentation, angels, and references to Tepeyac, Mexico City, and New Spain in their paintings of Guadalupe (see fig. 6.2). Sánchez contributed to Creole identity formation in New Spain by elevating the colonial discourse on the Americas to a spiritual level where, because of Guadalupe, Creoles were judged as God’s favored people. The 1757 papal declaration that officially named the Virgin of Guadalupe patroness of the Americas was a watershed event for New Spain. In his sermon celebrating the announcement, José Rodríguez Vallejo y Díaz proudly proclaimed that his countrymen, once “vilified” by the Spaniards, were now blessed by the Virgin’s apparitions in Tepeyac and her new title as patroness of the Americas: The day has arrived, most felicitous America, in which insult has transformed into praise, that which had been pale

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with insults has become an object of acclamation. What does it matter, o most pleasing and beloved motherland of mine, what do the works of so many authors who arch their fi ngers, their quills as if arrows, matter if you strengthen your shields of prudence, refuting their venomous points, and not permitting them to diminish your glories? What does it matter that they scheme to suppress your sons’ noble works, calling them savage, ignorant, rude, idolatrous, without any desire to know, against the Duventones, Martinos, Acostas, and Garcias, [and] already the presses clamor nobly and learnedly, publishing not only erudite political treatises but also devout works in Catholic matters produced by [New Spain’s] beloved sons? In the end what does it matter that they vilify you repeatedly as blind, gentile, barbarous, representing you as wretched and unfortunate, lacking in faith, and we say it as such, that canonized by the supreme head of the Church, today you are recognized as faithful, fortunate, and blessed? This was the great praise that was given the Mother of the Word Made Flesh, that extraordinary and blessed Mother on the day of her Visitation when the Baptist was already six months in the womb. Blessed art thou, said Elizabeth to the Virgin Mary. Blessed art thou that knew to believe: Beata quae credidisti. Therefore, I, with the fundamental statement of such a sacred clause, joyfully exclaim: Blessed are the children of America! Blessed are the Creoles! Not just because you, like Mary, knew to believe, but because you also knew to believe in the Virgin Mary!23

Local proclamations that America was blessed were partly intended to eclipse its idolatrous past and to nullify the argument that Americans were intellectually and morally deficient.24 Some local authors even advocated the notion that the gospel had come to the Americas long before European contact in the figure of Saint Thomas the Apostle. In New Spain, the Dominican friar and author Diego Durán suggested this as early as 1579.25 In Peru, Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua and Antonio de la Calancha suggested that Saint Thomas, fulfi lling Christ’s command to go out and preach the gospel to all nations, evangelized the Americas.26 However, it is the New Spanish Creole priest and scholar Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora who imbued this notion with a distinctly Mexican twist by

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claiming that the ancient Toltec culture-hero Quetzalcoatl was, in fact, Saint Thomas the Apostle.27 Specifically, Quetzalcoatl’s chastity, selfmortification, belief in one god who was the creator of all things, and refusal to permit human sacrifice resonated deeply with Sigüenza y Góngora’s desire to link New Spain’s pagan past with its Christian present. A late eighteenth-century painting by Juan Manuel Yllanes del Huerto in the Basilica of the Virgin of Ocotlan, as well as similar contemporaneous works, speaks to the persistence of and local investment in Sigüenza y Góngora’s enterprise (fig. 6.4). In this striking image, Saint Thomas, who appears Christ-like, holds up a cross and points to it dramatically while a group of natives sitting in a bucolic landscape watch him attentively. In the center foreground, an allegorical image of Tlaxcala or New Spain gestures to the saint and supports an escutcheon emblazoned with Tlaxcala’s heraldic symbol. A banderole around it reads, “The very noble, illustrious and ever loyal City of Tlaxcala, where the law of the Holy Gospels began in this New Spain.” A lengthy inscription along the composition’s bottom edge recapitulates Sigüenza y Góngora’s claim that Quetzalcoatl was actually the apostle come to evangelize the natives in ancient times.28 This folklore did not achieve the widespread currency of the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe, but for some Creoles (and presumably other devout New Spaniards), the two in combination not only redeemed New Spain from its heathen past by resetting it in biblical time, but also elevated it above all other nations of the world. Sigüenza y Góngora again elevated New Spain’s standing when he identified Mexico City’s convent of Jesús María as the site of the New Earthly Paradise, whose most precious treasures were its nuns. He linked the nuns to Aztec priestesses, their noble predecessors: “If until now the oft-referred-to example of ancient Rome’s Vestal virgins has inspired the pious souls of Christian maidens, I do not know why what I have presented here would be less effective if it is given the credit that it is owed.” But he also laments that Aztec priestesses did not share the same esteem as Roman Vestal virgins because of New Spain’s lowly place on the world stage, compared to Europe—a criticism epitomizing Sigüenza y Góngora’s contribution to the barroco de Indias.29 It is doubtful that the nuns of Jesús María or of other convents considered themselves the heirs of Aztec priestesses, but many nuns were sensitive to the discrimination that they suffered on account of their lineage. Convent chronicles criticize Spanish nuns for their desire to keep current with European trends, characterize Creole nuns as spoiled, vain, and decadent, and generally portray native women as sensual and lazy30—at-

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F igu r e 6.4. Juan Manuel Yllanes del Huerto, The Preaching of Saint Thomas in Tlaxcala and the Introduction of the Veneration of the Holy Cross. 1791. Oil on canvas, 180 × 150 cm. Basilica of Ocotlán, Tlaxcala, Mexico. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas.

tributing all these qualities to the place and (in the case of Creole and indigenous women) climate in which each group was born. Such identifications could affect the manner in which rival groups within a convent characterized each other’s interpretations of the order’s rules and constitutions. Sometimes for this reason, nuns occasionally left their original

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convents to found other convents that adhered to different rules. Such was the case with Sor Mariana de la Encarnación, who left Jesús María to found the more austere Santa Teresa la Antigua convent. The nuns of Jesús María criticized her and her followers as novelas, or lovers of novelty (a label frequently applied to Spanish nuns), for imitating the newly reformed European Carmelite order.31 In contrast to convent chronicles, which record internal disputes, New Spain’s hagiographies of nuns characterize their subjects in sweeping patriotic terms, perhaps partly taking their cue from Sigüenza y Góngora. Numerous tomes praise their subjects’ virtues and exceptional piety and note that the Americas benefited greatly from them. For example, in his 1683 hagiography of Sor María de Jesús (see fig. 2.4), Diego de Lemus emphasizes the love that Puebla had for this saintly nun, whom it dubbed “the Lily of Puebla.” The city respected and venerated her for her many virtues, and she repaid it with the “odor of her sanctity,” which delighted her countrymen.32 Lemus even claimed that Spain benefited from the morality of New Spain’s nuns: “[I]t is for this [Spain] is more indebted to us than for our other riches, since moral edification is more precious than opulence.”33 Hagiographers and prelates frequently measured Spanish America’s value by the angelic state of its nuns and their adherence to orthodoxy. Juan Ignacio de la Peña noted how New Spain’s Capuchin nuns rose above the perceived hindrances of the local environment: Virgin Capuchin ladies, Creoles, legitimate daughters of the spirit and breath of the fi rst Capuchin mothers, so that Europe might see there are fitting vocations in America, because even though the influences, the food and the air can debilitate strength to such an extent that the complexions of bodies become more delicate, Grace is powerful enough to form gigantic spirits.34

Significantly, de la Peña does not dispute the supposed ill-effects of the land and its food; instead he moderates their consequences by identifying grace as the particular virtue found among its Capuchin nuns that seems to make them immune to the harmful American environment. Nearly a hundred years after Lemus praised “the Lily of Puebla,” Bishop Fabián y Fuero of Puebla directly confronted the issue of the derogatory image of the Americas, by stating that its “degeneracy” was solely the invention of thoughtless minds, a fact that the nuns of Puebla’s

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discalced orders made obvious. Addressing the calced nuns of his bishopric, Fabián and Fuero wrote: With your constant carrying out [of the religious life], you have disproved and are disproving those who carelessly discredited the Americas, portraying them as weak and little, as if it were such, it would be a pity to inhabit these regions; but it is the case that this weakness exists only in the imagination, not in nature; the discalced nuns of this city and other cities of New Spain demonstrate this well. (emphasis added)35

The bishop, a major proponent of monastic reforms, qualifies his assertion by referring only to discalced orders (recoletas). His omission of the private-life orders not only denotes his position as a reformer, but also implies that they were vulnerable to the European characterization of the Americas. It is significant that the bishop’s statement is addressed to the calced nuns of Puebla, who by his order had recently been required to adopt the communal life. It may be that the bishop strategically rationalized his controversial decree by positioning the communal life against that derogatory European perception. Although monastic reforms were intended to force all of New Spain’s nuns into the same mold, many private-life nuns diligently preserved their separate religious values and traditions. Thus two distinct models of the perfecta religiosa coexisted in late viceregal times: the ascetic discalced nun formally endorsed by the Church, and the private-life, calced nun. Both were intended to demonstrate the exceptional virtues of New Spain’s nuns. While the discalced nun model emphasized the parallels between American and European nuns by stressing adherence to the monasticism of Counter-Reformation Europe, the calced nun model epitomized a local take on a variant form of monasticism that allowed New Spain’s nuns a greater degree of autonomy and interpretation in their vocation.36 Significantly, printed images of nuns accompanying viceregal hagiographies favor the fi rst model. Kelly Donahue Wallace has noted that printed portraits of nuns do not so much record their sitters’ actual visages as embody particular qualities emphasized in the accompanying text and advocated by the Church.37 Those qualities, which result from the denial and mortification of the female flesh for the sake of the soul’s salvation, are articulated in the subjects’ youthful beauty as rendered in the portraits. In other words, physical beauty symbolizes the spiritual

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F igu r e 6.5. Francisco Sylverio, Madre María de San José (Augustinian). 1773. Print. Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, the University of Texas at Austin.

refi nement nuns experienced in denying their flesh and, by extension, the world. The 1773 portrait of Madre María de San José, by Francisco Sylverio, for example, pictures the nun as a youthful maiden praying before a crucifi x inside her cell (fig. 6.5). The table that supports the image also features a flagellant instrument at the base of the crucifi x,

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which Sor María would have used to mortify her flesh in private. The downward gaze of discalced nuns evident in this printed work and in many painted portraits also emphasizes religious austerity and compliance with discalced values at the expense of individual identity by partly hiding the sitters’ eyes or faces, a characteristic often absent from calced portraits. Why would hagiographers and their patrons deliberately omit crowned-nun images from their texts, given this image type’s popularity with a local audience? I would argue that because the Tridentine Church wanted to regulate representations of religious or holy women, which could threaten male ecclesiastical power if left unchecked, mystical themes like marriage to Christ were downplayed in favor of other subjects that supported ecclesiastical authority, namely penitence, enclosure, obedience, and humility. As Kathleen Myers puts it, the image of the religious or holy woman “had to reflect post-Tridentine guidelines that advocated subordination to the guidelines of ecclesiastical hierarchy.”38 In the case of the printed portraits, the expression of the nun’s supposed “interior” and personal makeup through particular outward signs—youthful beauty, downcast eyes, self-containment, instruments of penance, etc.—is not so much a portrait of idiosyncratic individuals, but a visual manifestation of the institutional Church’s regulations and consolidation of prescriptive practices for all nuns. However, the biographical quality of these portraits and of the hagiographic genre itself effectively camouflages the institutional forces that actually comprise these identities by making them seem as if they are simply the natural products of the nuns’ spiritually refi ned natures.39 Whereas the crowned-nun image defi nes its subjects in mystical terms that elevate them to near-angelic heights (recall Palafox y Mendoza’s statement in the introductory chapter’s epigraph), hagiographic authors and patrons who were responsible for the printed works chose the current institutional Church’s preference for the subservient, discalced nun, who placed more emphasis on these qualities than on mystical ones. The majority of the printed images Donahue Wallace examines depict nuns of the communal-life orders. As for the calced subjects, the degree to which they practiced the communal life cannot be accurately deduced, since the priests who authored these works often infused discalced qualities in their subjects to meet the Church’s requirements for orthodoxy and present an acceptable protagonist to the public.40 Although Church officials did not record their judgment of the

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crowned-nun image, its absence from official published literature may suggest that it did not fully conform to their ideas of orthodoxy. At the same time, it was not considered to be heterodox either. Instead, it fell somewhere in-between, in a space where artists, nuns, and patrons conflated local understandings of religious orthodoxy and practices with established cultural and pictorial conventions to produce New Spanish models of religious women’s spiritual distinction. The result speaks more to local beliefs and practices than to the strict precepts of the late eighteenth-century Church. The same can be said of Miguel Cabrera’s magnificent portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, painted posthumously in 1750 for the nuns of her convent, San Jerónimo, in Mexico City (fig. 6.6). Sor Juana was New Spain’s most celebrated woman, a fact that explains why her image was so often reproduced. Known in Europe and New Spain as the “Phoenix of America” and “the Tenth Muse,” this Jeronymite nun achieved international fame in her lifetime for her erudition and literary accomplishments. Unlike most nuns, Sor Juana published primarily in nonautobiographical genres, and especially excelled in poetry. In her lifetime, the Church scrutinized her for pursuing theology, an intellectual endeavor traditionally reserved for male ecclesiastics. However, Cabrera’s rendition boldly shows her seated in her study, surrounded by the books on the shelves of her personal library: theological tomes and the writings of Church doctors, as well as philosophical works from classical antiquity and early modern treatises on painting. Furthermore, the inkwells and plumes on her desk identify her as an author.41 In fact, Cabrera’s portrait depicts his sitter in a most unusual manner for a woman: as an author seated in her study, in the same way that male theologians and doctors of the Church are characteristically depicted in their portraits. It is telling that the nuns of her convent commissioned this rendering of their most famous sister nearly a quarter-century before monastic reforms swept through the convents of New Spain. Before the reforms, the nuns of San Jerónimo observed the private life, and to the modern mind, the figure of Sor Juana embodies this monastic lifestyle, which reformers found so decadent. Yet, pictorially and textually, Sor Juana is configured to combine San Jerónimo convent’s institutional pride and values with the Church’s mainstream teachings on women’s monastic lives. While pictured as an author and scholar, she also fi ngers the beads of her rosary and displays its cross on her shoulder, a gesture that symbolizes her interior life of prayer. The lengthy inscription below

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F igu r e 6.6. Miguel Cabrera, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ( Jeronymite). 1750. Oil on canvas, 207 × 148 cm. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

her feet identifies her not only as an intellectual, but also as an exemplar of the religious life. Portrait of the American Phoenix, Mother Juana Inés de la Cruz, known in Europe as the “Tenth Muse,” owing to her position as the sole successor of Minerva, who applied the treasure of her wisdom to enhance her deep understand-

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ing of the scriptures and all Sacred Erudition in her career of 44 years, which came to a close with an exemplary and penitent life and sealed with her precious death in 1695 / This [portrait] is based faithfully on the true copy [portrait] that her sisters, the nuns, keep with the greatest admiration in the Contaduría of the most Religious Convent of the Great Doctor Saint Jerome in this imperial city of Mexico.42 (emphasis added)

The nuns of San Jerónimo commissioned the portrait and provided the artist with a model (which they probably elaborated on in order to instruct him as to how the new painting should look). Collaborating with them, Cabrera skillfully negotiated between the seemingly opposing poles of Sor Juana’s “manly” erudition, for which she was criticized in her lifetime, and her more feminine, devotional life (characterized as “exemplary” and “penitent,” key words that are iterated in New Spanish hagiographies of nuns). Furthermore, this portrait does not emphasize Sor Juana’s literary production, which included, among other works, a controversial religious tract. Rather, the numerous tomes in her library and the inscription’s statement that she devoted herself to understanding the scriptures and related literature portray her not as an active producer of knowledge, but as a passive recipient of it. In other words, Sor Juana’s manly erudition is tempered by the traditional qualities of nuns’ contemplative lives, which involved their prayerful reflection on the scriptures and related works. The inclusion of secular books in her library emphasizes her impressive ability to apply their contents to her understanding of religious matters. In sum, Cabrera’s portrait brilliantly transformed this image of an unconventional nun into a model of religious exemplarity while maintaining her uncommon distinction. It would seem that most New Spaniards, and certainly their most ardent admirers, saw all nuns, regardless of order and religious lifestyle, as economic and spiritual assets to their country. This patriotic perspective is conspicuously present in an eighteenth-century painting of Mexico City’s Alameda Park, which is rendered from an elevated position that nearly gives the viewer a panoptic bird’s-eye view (fig. 6.7). The park, which is symmetrically divided into quadrants smartly aligned with the cardinal directions, was a prestigious public space praised by local and foreign visitors and associated with then-current ideas of progress. The convent of Corpus Christi, newly built, according to the painting’s legend, figures prominently in the background, with its ornate façade and

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F igu r e 6.7. Anonymous, Mapa de la Alameda, Paseo de la Muy Noble Ciudad de México (Map of the Alameda, Promenade of the Very Noble City of Mexico). Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 206 × 147 cm. Palacio de la Almudaina. Photograph © Patrimonio Nacional, Spain.

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an enclosed garden. Well-dressed residents and elegant horse-driven carriages are scattered throughout this pleasant cityscape, giving the viewer an impression of a highly ordered, peaceful, and aristocratic society. This rigidly structured park, with its resemblance to Europe’s palatial gardens, conveys the idea of humankind’s domination of Nature, a notion that had special implications for Americans, who were, according to European discourse on the Americas, decadent, disorderly, and ultimately shaped by their natural environment.43 The presence of Corpus Christi heightens the impression of human triumph over Nature in New Spain, since its nuns, the direct descendants of the country’s original inhabitants, apparently participate in the civic structuring of Mexico City. The convent’s garden—a miniature replica of the Alameda—implies that city and convent share the same organizing principles, symbolically reflecting each other’s values and enhancing each other’s standing. In this painting, Corpus Christi, a model of female monasticism in New Spain, belongs to the same grand social project as its host city, and walks in lockstep with it. Together they transform Mexico City’s noble but heathen Aztec heritage into an elite indigenous Christian institution, a triumph both for Christianity and for New Spain’s population.

New Spanish Patriotism and Images of Nuns Like the painting of the Alameda Park and Corpus Christi convent, crowned-nun portraits impart a deep sense of morality, incorruptibility, dignity, and nobility amid a society anxious about the supposed deterioration of the social order that miscegenation, illegitimate sexual unions, and the natural environment implied, especially to Europeans and colonial officials. Differences between religious orders, conveyed by the various habits worn by the sitters, are largely elided by a uniformity in the rich iconography of crowns, staffs, and religious figurines that conjures the image of Saint Rose of Lima, a patently Creole symbol of religious excellence. Each nun also embodies the particular rules and constitutions of her order, making her a perfecta religiosa. Instead of acknowledging any disruption caused by colonial ecclesiastical reforms, crowned-nun portraits present—through their homogeneous syntactic and iconographical formula—resilient local religious expressions capable of withstanding, negotiating, and complying with the changing ecclesiastical environment. Whereas casta paintings demonstrate the necessity of colonial order and its socioracial system of hier-

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archy as means to counter the inherent “degeneracy” or “deterioration” of a mixed society, crowned-nun portraits deny the implied indignity. Rather, the portraits picture local emblems of American greatness and identity, using a visual vocabulary that is culturally heterogeneous and entirely positive in what it depicts, regardless of the sitters’ ethnicity. In so doing, they counter the allegations of local inequality and degeneracy that had composed the discourse of American identity since the times of Vespucci, Sahagún, Cárdenas, and de la Puente with images of constancy, morality, untarnished lineage, high social standing, and religious exemplarity. The subordinated positions that some Creoles and native elites in Bourbon New Spain occupied contrast sharply with the nobility implied in crowned-nun portraits. The profession image of Sor Juana de la Cruz (fig. 6.8) lucidly illustrates this point. In her half-length portrait the nun appears, in her richly embellished habit and profession trappings, much like a queen. Pearls and other jewels highlight her veil, wrists, and fi ngers, while her ornately embroidered cape and pleated scapular feature large escudos de monja. She carries a small dressed statue of the Christ Child and a richly embellished floral staff. A family crest appears in the upper-right corner of the composition, denoting the nun’s nobility. The portrait’s inscription confi rms her high status as well as her mixed lineage: The Very Reverend Mother Sor Juana de la Cruz, granddaughter of don Luis Cortés, son of the Great Captain don Hernando Cortés y Monrroy, Conquistador of New Spain, and of doña Antonia Arauz, legitimate heir of titles and goods that she bequeathed to her children, granddaughter of doña Marina Cortés de Tabasco; she professed at seventeen years of age in Mexico [City] being the founder of the convent of San Jerónimo on 20 October 1661.44

The inscription, impressive in its genealogical referents, is chronologically and genealogically misleading: although this is Sor Juana’s profession portrait it was not, in fact, executed at the time of her profession, but probably much later. Her sumptuous habit, jewels, escudos de monja, and white-wigged statue of the Christ Child are particular to the eighteenth century. Additionally, her lineage and the date given for the founding of the convent of San Jerónimo are inaccurate. Nevertheless, these data suggest that the portrait’s patron desired to associate himself/

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F igu r e 6.8. Anonymous, Sor Juana de la Cruz ( Jeronymite). Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 123 × 97 cm. Museo de América, Madrid.

herself with local nobility (rooted in the Aztec and conquistador past) and with the prestigious convent of San Jerónimo. In New Spain there was no nobler a lineage than that of Hernán Cortés. Yet Sor Juana’s portrait also specifically claims her descent from doña Marina, or Malintzin (Malinche), Cortés’s indigenous translator and mistress, who inaccurately bears the conqueror’s surname, in an apparent attempt to legitimize that union and its offspring. In this case, mestizaje is portrayed positively through the tropes of (high) social class, marriage, and Sor Juana’s moral and religious standing.

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In the end, the bride-of-Christ image in its several manifestations functioned as a redemptive symbol for America, a rhetorical tool used by male ecclesiastics and Creole intellectuals to defend the integrity of their homeland and consolidate an American identity by tapping into Spanish America’s vast repository of religious symbols. There is no evidence that nuns sought to make themselves icons of New Spanish patriotism or religious identity. However, they and their patrons must have been aware of this tendency, since they were the primary audience of New Spain’s hagiographic literature, which actively engaged in New Spain’s patriotic discourse. In fact, this literary genre may have increased the late viceregal demand for profession portraits by animating society’s esteem for nuns. Owning their effigies would have honored the social contract patrons and families entered into with particular nuns and convents, as well as satisfying their patriotic affection for city and country—concepts that were embodied in the sacred feminine.

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F i g ure 0.1. Anonymous, Sor María Francisca Josefa de San Felipe Neri, profession portrait (Jeronymite). 1767. Oil on canvas, 181 x 121 cm. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Fig ure 1.1. Anonymous, Traje de las Religiosas de los Conventos de México, de los Colegios y Recogimientos (Vestments of the religious women of Mexico’s convents, colleges, and retreats). Late eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 134.5 x 104 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

F i g ure 2.7. José de Alcíbar, Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo, profession portrait (Urbanist Franciscan). 1777. Oil on canvas, 180 x 109 cm. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTAINAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

Fi g ure 2.14. José de Alcíbar, Madre María Ana Josefa de Señor San Ignacio, profession portrait (Conceptionist). 1795. Oil on canvas, 104 x 84 cm. Szépmüvészeti Múzeum/ Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest. Photograph © Szépmüvészeti Múzeum.

F i g ure 2.16. Anonymous, Madre María Salvadora de San Antonio, profession portrait (Augustinian). 1792. Oil on canvas, 84 x 63 cm. Museo Nacional del Virrei­ nato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Photo by author.

F i gure 2.17. Attributed to José de Alcíbar, Madre Rosa María del Espíritu Santo, profession portrait (Carmelite). 1775. Oil on canvas, 182 x 100 cm. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

F i g ure 3.3. José de Ibarra, Christ in the Garden of Virtues. Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 112 x 168 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

F i g ure 3.4. Anonymous, Symbolic Nuptials of Christ and a Religious Soul. Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 98 x 119 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Photo by author.

F i g ure 3.7. Anonymous, Dormition of the Virgin. 1793. Oil on canvas. Convento de San Bernardino de Siena, Xochimilco, Mexico. Photo by author.

F i g ure 4.4. Attributed to Juan Rodríguez Juárez, Desposorio de Indios (Indian Wedding). Ca. 1715. Oil on canvas. Museo de América, Madrid. F i g ure 4.2 (opposite page). Anonymous, Sor María Joaquina de Señor San Rafael, profession portrait (Capuchin). 1824. Oil on canvas, 170 x 67 cm. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

F i g ure 4.10. Anonymous, Madre Ana María de la Preciosa Sangre de Cristo, profession portrait (Urbanist Franciscan). Ca. 1770. Oil on canvas, 124 x 101 cm. Denver Art Museum. Photograph © Denver Art Museum.

F i g ure 4.12. Anonymous, Xochiquetzal; detail from the Codex Borgia, fol. 9r. Late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Pigments and gesso on deerskin, 27 x 26 cm.Vatican Apostolic Library, Vatican City. Photograph © 2011 Vatican Apostolic Library.

F i g ure 5.1. Anonymous, Dominican nuns entering the Convent of Santa Catalina de Siena,Valladolid (Morelia). 1738. Oil on canvas. Museo Regional de Morelia, Michoacán. Photograph © Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, UNAM.

F i g ure 4.16. Anonymous, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios (Our Lady of the Remedies). Seventeenth century. Feathers and silver frame, 7.9 cm. diameter. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTA-INAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

F i g ure 6.6. Miguel Cabrera, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (Jeronymite). 1750. Oil on canvas, 207 x 148 cm. Museo Nacional de Historia, Mexico City. CONACULTAINAH-MEX; reproduction authorized by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia.

F i g ure 6.7. Anonymous, Mapa de la Alameda Paseo de la Muy Noble Ciudad de México (Map of the Alameda, Promenade of the Very Noble City of Mexico). Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 206 x 147 cm. Palacio de la Almudaina. Photograph © Patrimonio Nacional, Spain.

Fig ure 6.8. Anonymous, Sor Juana de la Cruz (Jeronymite). Eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 123 x 97 cm. Museo de América, Madrid.

Fig ure 7.2. Ray Martín Abeyta, Rosario de Besos. 2001. Oil on linen, 203 x 162 cm. National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

E p i l o gu e

P

roduct ion of crow n e d -n u n port r a i ts con t i nued well into the nineteenth century, long after Mexican independence in 1821. For example, consider the profession portrait of Sor Manuela de Mesa (see fig. 4.3), an indigenous nun of the Company of Mary, who is pictured in the simple black-and-white habit of her order and wearing a magnificently decorated floral crown. Despite the painting’s postindependence production date (1827), Sor Manuela appears in much the same manner as her viceregal predecessors in their portraits. Even her biographical inscription conforms to the viceregal formula of sitter’s name, lineage, date of profession, and convent. But there is one notable difference here: while all portraits of this order’s nuns invariably feature their sitters holding books—a visual allusion to their role as teachers—only Sor Manuela is portrayed as actively reading, that is to say, carrying out a facet of that role. Margaret Chowning notes that according to the nineteenth-century liberal view of convents in Mexico, nuns were expected to be socially responsible citizens and participants in active, rather than purely contemplative, religious life. The viceregal ideal of elite, cloistered women became a sign of social uselessness, their institutions expensive to maintain and prohibitive of personal liberty and social responsibility. In contrast, the Company of Mary, in its dedication to educating the country’s youth, embodied the liberal ideal that advocated the active life among nuns.1 Nuns’ crowning ceremonies in profession and death rituals also continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and are still practiced in some Mexican convents, but the painted portraits were eventually replaced by photographs, which retained the pictorial conventions

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of their predecessors (fig. 7.1).2 In the mid-nineteenth century the Mexican government seized Church properties and commodities and ejected nuns and priests from their institutions. This anticlericalism endured until the early twentieth century, and many male and female religious, although they continued to profess and carry out their religious duties, did so clandestinely. Furthermore, the mainstream trajectory of the visual arts in the late eighteenth to nineteenth century also experienced a gradual distancing from the Baroque religious aesthetic to which most crowned-nun portraits belong. Sor Manuela’s portrait demonstrates this shift in its relatively plain but psychologically charged character, which demonstrates the artist’s knowledge of Neoclassical and Romantic conventions. Unlike the viceregal portraits, which generally picture their subjects in an even light that seems to emanate from them, this work situates Sor Manuela under an unseen light source, located just beyond the upper left part of the composition, that highlights her beautiful, contemplative face. Deep shadows appear below her chin, along her wimple, and to the right of her figure, giving the viewer a sense of the time of day and the particularities of her environment. In sum, we are presented with an intimate view of Sor Manuela that captures a fleeting moment in time when her quiet, interior demeanor is exposed to us. Walter Mignolo has argued that when Creoles won political independence in the early nineteenth century, they fi lled the power vacuum that Spanish colonial authority left, and reproduced the colonial model that once suppressed but now favored them.3 In this new political milieu, Creoles distinguished themselves without relying as much on religious icons and symbols, which were anathema to the new secular order. Instead, the pre-Hispanic past, political allegory, and secular portraits of the bourgeoisie—themes that generally lent themselves to the objectives of Neoclassical and Romantic painting—became the acceptable icons of nineteenth-century Mexican nationalism.4 In lieu of a sistema de castas, which was abolished after independence, the mestizaje model became the primary concept through which Mexico and other Latin American nations identified themselves in the twentieth century. This nationalist ideology celebrated the mixed Spanish and native elements of Mexican society. J. Jorge Klor de Alva has described mestizaje as “the powerful nation-building myth that has helped to link dark- to light-skinned mestizos and Euro-Americans in frequent opposition to both foreigners and the indigenous ‘others’ in their midst.” He adds: “It has been effectively used to promote national amnesia about or to salve the national conscience in what concerns the dismal past and still

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F igu r e 7.1. Anonymous, portrait of a crowned nun (Augustinian). Ca. 1935–1940. Photograph. Archivo General de la Nación, Colección Enrique Díaz, Mexico City.

colonized condition of the native peoples of Latin America.”5 Perhaps for this reason, among others, twentieth-century Mexican artists favored pre-Hispanic imagery and contemporary folk-art references, which fulfi ll the objectives of mestizaje more effectively than do references to the viceregal past.

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F igu r e 7.2. Ray Martín Abeyta, Rosario de Besos. 2001. Oil on linen, 203 × 162 cm. National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

F igu r e 7.3. Joseph López, Monja Coronada. 2000. Reeds, orchid bulbs, nopal cactus, gesso, bole pigment, gold leaf, egg tempera paint, wood, bread. Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

More recently, Chicano artists have revitalized the crowned-nun image in works like Rosario de Besos, by Ray Martín Abeyta, and Monja Coronada, by Joseph López (figs. 7.2, 7.3).6 Abeyta’s image appropriates Alcíbar’s 1777 profession portrait of Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo (see fig. 2.7) and juxtaposes her figure with two vignettes containing popular icons of Chicano identity: a bouncing low-rider and masked Mexican (lucha libre) wrestlers, respectively labeled Orgullo and Vergüenza, or “Pride” and “Shame.” Sor María’s figure is surrounded by blue lowrider-style flames, which call to mind the Virgin of Guadalupe (see, for example, fig. 6.2), another Mexican/Chicano icon that features a fiery body-length halo. Abeyta’s appropriation of a historic work, his blending

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of sacred and vernacular images, and his use of glosses that refer to virtues and vices piece together a complex and visually stunning image of contemporary Chicano identity that is composed of seemingly disparate and anachronistic, although somehow related, parts. López’s Monja Coronada conveys a more conventional religious quality that befits the artist’s work as a New Mexican santero (a sculptor or painter of Catholic religious figures). However, the materials and technique that López used to construct it add another level of cultural meaning to the piece: in 1999 López traveled to Michoacán, Mexico, to learn the indigenous process of making three-dimensional figures from local organic materials, such as reeds, cactus, and cornstalk paste, a method practiced by the Purépecha. The sculpture’s materiality, along with its patently Mexican subject matter, refers to Mexican contributions to the visual arts, which have become important components of contemporary Chicano identity. Both López and Abeyta are New Mexican–born artists who, like others, have found a rich source of cultural icons in Spanish America’s viceregal past. Their contributions have revitalized the crowned-nun image as a model of a new and complex cultural identity that crosses national borders and bridges the viceregal past to contemporary interests in the postcolonial world.

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No t e s

I n t roduct ion 1. “O estado altísimo, en las Esposas de el Señor, justamente comparado con los Angeles del Cielo! O estado altísimo! Que no solo se compara con los Angeles; sino que en cierta manera, les excede” (13). This passage also appears unattributed in Reglas y Constituciones que han de guardar las Religiosas de los Conventos de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción y la Santísima Trinidad de la Ciudad de los Angeles (Reimprimirlas la Reverenda Madre Francisca de Santa Cruz, Abadesa del Convento de la Concepción, Puebla, 1744), 13. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 2. “Ro de Sor Maria Franca. Josepha de Sn. Phelipe Neri, professo en el combento de . . . desta Ciudad de la Puebla en 26 de Abril del año de 1767 de edad de . . . “ The inscription is eroded here and is partially obstructed by the frame. 3. Nora E. Jaffary, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 5– 6. 4. Toussaint’s claim is reprinted and translated into English in Manuel Toussaint, Colonial Art of Mexico, trans. Elizabeth Wilder Weissman (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967), 248. 5. “En aquel entonces, tiene un profundo sentido, resonde a un estilo del pensamiento, a una idea de la vida, es un modo de expreción de éstos” ( Josefi na Muriel and Manuel Romero de Terreros, Retratos de monjas [Mexico City: Jus, 1952], 25). 6. Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, “Portraits of Nuns,” Artes de México 198 (1978): 99. 7. Ibid., 100. 8. Ibid. 9. Kirsten Hammer, “Monjas coronadas: The Crowned Nuns of Viceregal Mexico,” in Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin American Portraits, ed. Elizabeth P. Benson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 86.

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10. Ibid., 99. 11. Elizabeth Perry, “Convents, Art, and Creole Identity in Late Viceregal New Spain,” in Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America, ed. Kellen Kee McIntyre and Richard E. Phillips (Boston: Brill, 2007), 321–341. 12. James M. Córdova, “Aztec Vestal Virgins and the Brides of Christ: The Mixed Heritage of New Spain’s monjas coronadas,” Colonial Latin American Review 18, no. 2 (2009): 189–218. 13. Alma Montero de Alarcón, Monjas coronadas: Profesión y muerte en Hispanoamérica virreinal (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 2008), 31. 14. Other studies that link crowned-nun portraits and female monasticism in New Spain include Elisa García Barragán, “En la intimidad de un artificio: Retratos de monjas coronadas,” in Una mujer, un legado, una historia. Homenaje a Josefina Muriel, ed. Amaya Garritz (Mexico City: UNAM, 2000), 86– 93, which is primarily an iconographic analysis of crowned-nun portraits; García Barragán, “Mística y esplendor barrocos en Méjico colonial: Retratos de monjas coronadas,” in Boletín del Museo e Instituto “Camon Aznar” 48 (1992): 61–82; and the various essays in Monjas coronadas: Vida conventual femenina en Hispanoamérica, ed. Sara Gabriel Baz (Mexico City: CONACULTA-INAH, 2003), which are mostly studies on Spanish, New Spanish, and South American female monasticism that were brought together as part of a museum exhibition and symposium on crowned-nun portraits at the Museo Nacional del Virreinato in Tepotzotlán, Mexico, in 2003. 15. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 36. For more on intertextuality, see Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Steven Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 159–160. 16. A growing group of scholars, however, has identified an unstable and highly nuanced relation between European Spaniards and Creoles, groups that were once perceived as distinct. These scholars specifically argue against a monolithic divide between Creoles and European Spaniards by demonstrating that these groups experienced a double consciousness of group identity that in certain contexts unified them as a single body, and in other contexts divided them. See, for example, Mark Burkholder, Spaniards in the Colonial Empire: Creoles vs. Peninsulares? (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Ruth Hill, Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America: A Postal Inspector’s Exposé (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 6–15; Gloria Espriu Artís, Familia, riqueza y poder: Un estudio genealógico de la oligarquía novohispana (Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1994), 21; Michel Bertrand, “Comment peut-on être créole? Sur les relations sociales en Nouvelle-Espagne au XVIIIe siècle,” Caravelle 62 (1996): 99–109; Bertrand, “La élite colonial en la Nueva España del siglo XVIII: Un planteamiento en terminus de redes sociales,” in Beneméritos, aristócratas y empresarios: Identidades y estructuras sociales de las capas altas urbanas en América hispánica, ed. Bernd

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Schrörter and Christian Büschges (Frankfurt: Vervuert-Iberoamericana, 1999), 35–52; and Bertrand, Grandeur et misères de l’office: Les officiers de finances de Nouvelle-Espagne (XVIIe–XVIIe siècles) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999). 17. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995), 7. 18. See Louise Burkhart, Before Guadalupe: The Virgin Mary in Early Colonial Nahuatl Literature (Albany, NY: Institute of Mesoamerican Studies, University of Albany, 2001), 50, for the cross-cultural notions of sacredness in the Virgin of Guadalupe. 19. For current critical perspectives regarding this issue see James Elkins, “Can We Invent a World Art Studies?,” in World Art Studies: Concepts and Approaches, ed. Kitty Zijlmans and Wilfred Van Damme (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2008); David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art and the Rise of Western Modernism (New York: Phaidon, 2002); Carolyn Dean, “The Trouble with (the Term) ‘Art,’” Art Journal 65, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 24–32; and Cecelia Klein, “Objects Are Nice, But . . . ,” Art Bulletin 76, no. 3 (Sept. 1994): 401–404. 20. In recent critical discussions on teaching and studying world art topics, James Elkins (“Can We Invent a World Art Studies?”) and David Summers (Real Spaces) debate the usefulness of employing non-Western or Western terms and concepts to describe non-Western art traditions. However, these arguments, and others like them, do not adequately acknowledge the heterogeneity of societies, and tend to treat them as autonomous and homogeneous entities. Recent postcolonial scholarship in colonial Latin American art history offers an alternative, highlighting instead the pluralism of Latin American societies and their cultural productions. For outstanding examples, see Thomas B. F. Cummins, “From Lies to Truth: Colonial Ekphrasis and the Act of Crosscultural Translation,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago, 152–174 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Claire Farago and Donna Pierce, eds., Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos in-between Worlds (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); Carolyn Dean, “The Trouble with (the Term) ‘Art’”; and Dean, “The After-life of Inka Rulers: Andean Death before and after Spanish Colonization,” in Death and the Afterlife in the Early Modern Hispanic World, ed. John Beusterien and Constance Cortez, Hispanic Issues On Line 7 (Fall 2010), http://hispanicissues.umn.edu/assets/doc/03_DEAN.pdf. 21. Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 62. 22. Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its (Dis)Contents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5–35. 23. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 136. 24. Butler (Undoing Gender [New York: Routledge, 2004], 3) states that a

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subject’s agency is predicated on that person’s constitution by a social world that he did not choose. Furthermore, while the subject is dependent on the norms that constitute his identity, he can also “endeavor to live in ways that maintain a critical and transformative relation to them.” 25. Based on Joan Scott’s outline for gender analyses. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics, ed. E. Weed (New York: Routledge, 1989), 1068.

Ch a p t e r 1 1. Cited in Josefi na Muriel, La sociedad novohispana y sus colegios de niñas (Mexico City: UNAM, 1995), 208. 2. For in-depth studies on sexual relations and female honor in colonial Spanish America see Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds., The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998); Steve Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Sergio Ortega Noriega, ed., Amor y desamor: Viviencias de parejas en la sociedad novohispana (Mexico City: INAH, 1992); Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conflicts over Marriage Choice, 1574–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 3. LALTU, Viceregal and Ecclesiastical Mexican Collection, Leg. 67, Exp. 11. 1772. 4. Cited in Kevin Stayton, “The Algara Romero de Terreros Collection: A Mexican Aristocratic Family in the Colonial Era,” in Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America, ed. Diana Fane (New York: Brooklyn Museum and Abrams, 1996), 71. 5. Martín de Córdoba, Jardín de nobles doncellas, Fray Martin de Córdoba: A Critical Edition and Study, trans. and ed. Harriet Goldberg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974), 270–271. 6. Juan Luís Vives, Instrucción de la mujer cristiana (Madrid: Signo, 1936), 41. 7. Vives, Instrucción, 28. 8. Asunción Lavrin, “Introduction: The Scenario, the Actors, and the Issues,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Latin America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 27. 9. José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, La educación de las mujeres; ó, La Quijotita y su prima (1818–1819; Mexico: J. Ballescá y companía, successor, 1897), 164.

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10. Sylvia Arrom, “Women and the Family in Mexico City” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1977), 92. 11. The three orders of the religious life were male clergy (fi rst order), nuns (second order), and the laity (third order). Among women, second-order religious took solemn vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience and lived a monastic life—that is, a regimented life inside a monastery and in accordance with the rules and constitutions of the religious life. Third-order members took simple vows of poverty and, in the case of some beatas, enclosure. 12. Cited in D. A. Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacán, 1749–1810 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 100. 13. Padre Domingo de Quiroga, Compendio breve de la vida, y virtudes de la V[enerable] Francisca de S[an] Joseph, del tercer orden de Santo Domingo (Mexico City, 1729), 6. 14. Quiroga, Compendio, 298. 15. For a comprehensive study of institutional recogimientos in New Spain, see Josefi na Muriel, Los recogimientos de mujeres: Respuesta a una problemática social novohispana (Mexico City: UNAM, 1974). See Nancy E. van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001) for the myriad meanings of the term recogimiento in colonial Spanish America. 16. Kristine Ibsen, Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 4. 17. Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, Motolinía’s History of the Indians of New Spain, trans. Francis Borgia Steck (Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1954), 313. 18. Joaquín García Icazbalceta, “La instrucción publica en México durante el siglo XVI,” in Obras de D. J. García Icazbalceta (Mexico City: Imprenta de V. Agüeras, 1825–1894), 151. 19. Asunción Lavrin, “Values and Meaning of Monastic Life for Nuns of Colonial Mexico,” Catholic Historical Review 58 (Nov. 1972): 367. 20. For the year 1790, Alexander von Humboldt (Ensayo político sobre el reino de Nueva España [Mexico City: Porrúa, 1966], 156, 159) lists 888 nuns in Mexico City’s convents, 427 in those of Puebla, and 143 in the convents of Querétaro. Additionally, at the time of his writing the residents of Salvatierra (Guanajuato), Atlixco (Puebla), Patzcuaro (Michoacan), Valladolid (Morelia), San Miguel el Grande (Guanajuato), Guadalajara ( Jalisco), Santa María de los Lagos ( Jalisco), Mérida (Yucatán), Antequera de Oaxaca (Oaxaca), and San Cristóbal de las Casas/Ciudad Real (Chiapas) could proudly claim nunneries of their own. 21. For studies on women’s education in New Spain see Joaquín García Icazbalceta, “La instrucción pública en México durante el siglo XVI,” in Obras de D. J. García Icazbalceta (Mexico City: V. Agüeros, 1896–1899), 1:163–265; García Icazbalceta, “El colegio de niñas de México,” 428–434; Pilar Gonzalbo Aiz-

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puru, Las mujeres en la Nueva España: Educación y vida cotidiana (Mexico City: Colegio de México, Centro de Estudios Históricos, 1987); José María Kobayashi, La educación como conquista: Empresa franciscana en México (Guanajuato: Colegio de México, 1974); Lino Gómez Canedo, La educación de los marginados durante la época colonial: Escuelas y colegios para indios y mestizos en la Nueva España (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1982). 22. Although a nun’s dowry was a fraction of that of a married woman, it was a substantial amount. In the sixteenth century the average convent dowry ranged from one to two thousand pesos. By the end of the seventeenth century it had risen to approximately three thousand pesos, and in the eighteenth century it averaged four thousand pesos. See Susan Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 96. Wedding dowries, however, were never uniform throughout Latin America and depended largely on the social and economic worth of a bride’s family. For a nun’s profession expenses see Alma Montero de Alarcón, Monjas coronadas: Vida y muerte en Hispanoamérica virreinal (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdéz, 2008), 117–120, and Alicia Bazarte Martínez, Enrique Tovar Esquivel, and Martha A. Tronco Rosas, El convento jerónimo de San Lorenzo (1598–1867) (Mexico City: Instituto Politécnico Nacional, 2001): 55–59. 23. Regla, y Constituciones de las Religiosas Descalzas de la Orden de la Gloriossisima Virgen MARIA del Monte Carmelo (Mexico City, 1779). 24. Out of the nine Dominican convents in New Spain, seven adhered to the private life, while the remaining two ( Jesús María in Guadalajara and Santa Rosa de Lima in Puebla) practiced the communal life (Sor María de Cristo Santos Morales and Fray Esteban Arroyo González, Las monjas dominicas en la cultura novohispana [Mexico City: Instituto Dominicano de Investigaciones Históricas, de la Provincia de Santiago de México, 1992], 22). 25. See Asunción Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 118–119, for a typical daily schedule in the Dominican convent of Santa María la Gracia (Guadalajara) and in Conceptionist convents in New Spain. See Octavio Paz, Sor Juana; or, The Traps of Faith, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 199, for a description of quarters and living conditions in some of New Spain’s private-life convents. 26. The rule of enclosure was not applicable to persons of noble status, such as viceroys and vicereines, who were allowed to enter the convent. In addition, professional men such as barber-surgeons, bleeders, and priests were allowed entry when their services were required. 27. Thomas Gage, Travels in the New World, ed. J. Eric S. Thompson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 72. 28. For estimations of convent populations in New Spain, see Josefi na Muriel, “The Role of Convents in Colonial Society,” Artes de México 98 (1978): 98.

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29. Sor Juana’s half-sisters, Antonia and Inés, may have lived with her briefly in San Jerónimo, too; Paz, Sor Juana, 128. Apparently, women from the same family often professed in the same convent. For examples, see Manuel Ramos Medina, Místicas y descalzas: Fundaciones femeninas carmelitas en la Nueva España (Mexico City: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México, Condumex, 1997), 277, 287, 291, 297, 300; Rosalva Loreto López, Los conventos femeninos y el mundo urbano de la Puebla de los Ángeles del siglo xviii (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2000), 209–213, 215, 218–222; Margaret Chowning, Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 44–50. 30. Vida de la venerable madre María de Señor San José, religiosa augustina recoleta, “Parecer del Doctor Don Luis de la Peña” (Mexico City: Los Herederos de la Viuda de Miguel de Rivera, en el Empedradillo, 1723). 31. Medieval European convents were also populated by nuns who were members of the elite class. In fact, some Spanish convents even required their entrants to present proof of their nobility. See Jacqueline Holler, “Escogidas Plantas”: Nuns and Beatas in Mexico City, 1531–1601 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 14–15. 32. For examples of this phenomenon see R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1600–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 33. For examples, see Manuel Carrera Stampa, Los gremios mexicanos: La organización gremial en Nueva España (Mexico City: Edición y Distribución Ibero Americana, 1954), 51; Montero, Monjas coronadas, 84; and Socolow, Women, 110. 34. Regla, y Constituciones de las Religiosas Descalzas de la Orden de la Gloriossisima Virgen MARIA del Monte Carmelo (1779), 107. 35. For a more comprehensive treatment of this ceremony see Montero, Monjas coronadas, 92– 98. 36. Patricia Ranft, Women and Religion in Premodern Europe (New York: Saint Martin’s, 1996), 130. 37. Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico (London: Century, 1966), 264. 38. Josefi na Muriel, Conventos de monjas en la Nueva España (Mexico: Santiago, 1946), 34. 39. For secondary accounts regarding the profession ceremony of nuns in New Spain see Muriel, Conventos de monjas, 34; Muriel and Manuel Romero de Terreros, Retratos de monjas (Mexico: Jus, 1952), 37–39; and Montero, Monjas coronadas, 108–117. For primary sources see Calderón, Life in Mexico, 260–267; Practica de dar Abitos y professiones a las que han de ser religiosas en el sagrado Convento de Santa Catarina de Sena, del Sagrado orden de Predicacores de esa Ciudad de la Puebla de los Ángeles: y modo que se observa para recibir los hábitos y hacer las Profesiones, Puebla de los Ángeles (Mexico: Impresa en la Oficina nueva matritense de D. Pe-

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dro de la Rosa, en el Portal de las Flores, 1777), 5–19; and Formula para dar el hábito y profession en la orden de las recoletas de nuestra Madre santa Brigida, sacada de la regla de la misma orden. Reformada por nuestra muy venerable Madre Doña Marina de Escobar (Madrid: Oficina de Antonio Perez de Soto, 1700). 40. Paul Vandenbroeck, Le jardin clos de l’âme: L’imaginaire des religieuses das les Pays-Bas du Sud, depuis le 13e siècle (Brussels: Palais de Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1994), 104. 41. Fray Antonio Arbiol, La religiosa instruida con doctrina de la Sagrada Escritura, y Santos Padres de la Iglesia Católica, para todas las operaciones de su vida regular, desde que recibe el Hábito Santo, hasta la hora de su muerte (Madrid, 1791), 58, 213. 42. “YO SOROR N. Por el amor, y servicio de Nuestro Señor Jesu-Christo, y de la Inmaculada Concepción de su Madre Santísima, ofrezco, y prometo a Dios, y a la Bienaventurada Virgen Santa Maria, a San Francisco, y a todos los Santos, y a vos Madre Abbadesa, de vivir toda mi vida en obediencia, y pobreza, sin cosa propria, y en castidad, y perpetuo encerramiento: debaxo de la Regla confi rmada a esta Santa Orden, por Nuestro Santo Padre Julio segundo” (Regla y Constituciones que han de guardar las Religiosas de los Conventos de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción y la Santísima Trinidad de la Ciudad de los Angeles [Reimprimirlas la Reverenda Madre Francisca de Santa Cruz, Abadesa del Convento de la Concepción, Puebla, 1744], 20). 43. Montero, Monjas coronadas, 115. 44. “Preg: Y que significan aquellas nuptuales ceremonias con que Professamos? Resp: Las principales, altissimas, y de verdad divinas obligaciones de vuestro Angelico estado; especialissimamente, la suprema independencia, y santo desprecio de toda cosa, y persona criada. Una Esposa verdadera de Christo se ha de dexar prendar, ni aun pender, ni aun imaginar de cosa, o persona criada? O que indignidad tan digna de abominarse, aun sonada. Ya no haveis de tratar sino con Angeles, y del Cielo, y vuestro Esposo De criaturas como si no las huviera en el mundo para vosotras, Dios, y vosotras, y no mas, en todo el mundo” (from Antonio Núñez de Miranda, CARTILLA DE LA DOCTRINA RELIGIOSA DISPUESTA POR UNO DE LA COMPANIA DE JESUS: Para 2 Niñas, hijas espirituales suyas, que se crian para Monjas, y desean serlo con toda perfeccion [Sacala a luz, en obsequio de las llamadas a Religion, y para alivio de las Maestras que las instruyen: El Licenciado Francisco de Salzedo, primer Capellan de las Señoras Religiosas de Sta. Theresa, en su Convento de San Joseph de esta Corte, y Prefecto de la Purissima, 1696], 38). 45. “Atento, que las Religiosas deben guardar compostura, y modestía, no solo en el Hábito, sino en el lenguaje, con diferencia de las seculares” (Regla y Constituciones que han de guardar las Religiosas de los Conventos de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción y la Santísima Trinidad de la Ciudad de los Angeles, 52). 46. See, for example, R. Carrasco Vargas, Arqueología y arquitectura en el ExConvento de San Jerónimo (Mexico City: INAH, 1990).

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Ch a p t e r 2 1. Pedro Salmerón, Vida de la venerable Madre Isabel de la Encarnación, Carmelita Descalza, natural de la Ciudad de los Ángeles (Acuydado de la Cesarea, 1675), 117r. 2. For one examination of nuns’ relics and nuns’ perception of themselves as relics, see Helen Hills, “Nuns and Relics: Spiritual Authority in Post-Tridentine Naples,” in Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008), 11–38. 3. For a description of the funerary practices of nuns in colonial Latin America, see Alma Montero de Alarcón, Monjas coronadas: Profesión y muerte en Hispanoamérica Virreinal (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdéz, 2008), 128–139. Montero notes that Antonio de Pereda’s portrait of Sor Ana Margarita de Austria is the only known Spanish painting of a nun that directly references religious profession (ibid., 27). 4. Ibid., 147–165. 5. “RETRATO. La figura contrahecha de alguna persona principal y de cuenta, cuya efigie y semejança es justo quede por memoria a los siglos venideros” (Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, ed. Martín de Riquer de la Real Academia Española [Barcelona: Alta Fulla, 1987]). 6. In his Trattato delle perfette proporzioni (1567), Vincezo Danti makes clear the distinction between ritrarre and imitare: “By the term ritrarre, I mean to make something exactly as another thing is seen to be; and by the term imitare I similarly understand that it is to make a thing not only as another has seen the thing to be (when that thing is imperfect) but to make it as it would have to be in order to be of complete perfection” (trans. David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981], 279). 7. Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura, vol. 2 (1638; Madrid: Editorial Maestre, Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, 1956), 141. Carducho makes a similar point: Francisco Carducho, Dialogos de la pintura (1633; Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel Galiano, 1865), 126–127. 8. For a foundational study of portraiture in New Spain, see Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, “Portrait Painting in New Spain,” in El retrato novohispano en el siglo XVIII (Puebla: Museo Poblano de Arte Virreinal, 1999), 135–144. 9. Nigel Glendinning, “Goya y el retrato español del siglo XVIII,” in El retrato español: Del Greco a Picasso (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2004), 233. 10. EL ILLVSMO Y R MO SR D. FRAY IVAN D SVMARAGA, PRIMER ˜ DADOR DE ESTE HOSPITAL DL OBPO Y ARÇOBO D MEXCO Y FV AMOR D DIOS. 11. Lorenzana, Concilios provinciales primero, y segundo celebrados en la muy noble, y muy leal ciudad de Mexico (Mexico City: Impr. de el Superior Gobierno, de Joseph Antonio de Hogal, 1769), 15. For other examples of the legal authority and veracity of paintings and portraits in colonial Latin America see Tom Cummins,

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“We Are the Other: Peruvian Portraits of Colonial Kurakacuna,” in Transatlantic Encounters: The History of Early Colonial Peru, ed. Rolena Adorno and K. Andrien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 203–231; “From Lies to Truth: Colonial Ekphrasis and the Act of Cross- Cultural Translation,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 152–174; Lori Boornazian Diel, “Manuscrito del aperramiento (Manuscript of the Dogging): A ‘Dogging’ and Its Implications for Early Christian Cholula,” Ethnohistory 58, no. 4 (Fall 2011): 586– 611; and Eduardo de Jesús Douglas, “Our Fathers, Our Mothers: Painting an Indian Genealogy in New Spain,” in Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, ed. Ilona Katzew (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011), 117–132. 12. “Todo Príncipe es compuesto casi de dos personas. La una es obra salida de manos de la Naturaleza, en cuanto que se comunica un mesmo ser con todos los hombres. La otra, es merced de Fortuna y favor del cielo, hecho para gobierno y amparo del bien público, a cuia causa la nombraremos persona pública” (cited in Leticia Ruiz Gómez, “Retratos de corte en la monarquía española [1530–1660],” in El retrato español: Del Greco a Picasso, ed. Javier Portús Pérez [Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2004], 98). See Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico (New York: Routledge, 2004) for an extensive study of the king’s two bodies, and royal and viceregal power in the Americas. 13. On imperial imagery in Spanish and New Spanish visual culture see Michael Schreffler, “‘No Lord without Vassals, nor Vassals without a Lord’: The Royal Palace and the Shape of Kingly Power in Viceregal Mexico City,” Oxford Art Journal 27 (2004): 155–172; Schreffler, The Art of Allegiance: Visual Culture and Imperial Power in Baroque New Spain (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). 14. For some telling examples from early modern Spain, see Miguel Falomir, “Los orígenes del retrato en España: De la falta de especialistas al gran taller,” in El retrato español: Del Greco a Picasso, ed. Javier Portús Pérez (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2004), 68–83. 15. This expression frequently appears in devotional paintings and engravings of popular local New Spanish religious icons such as the Christ of Chalma and the Virgin of Zapopan. In early modern Europe, too, this expression commonly serves in Marian and Christological images as a means to relate the likeness and powers of the original to its pictorial representation. 16. The full inscription reads, “V.R.D.La.B.M. Maria de Jesus, Religiosa Profesa, en el Convento de la Purisima Concepcion de esta Ciudad de la Puebla de los Angeles.” 17. Elisa Vargaslugo—in “La pintura del retrato,” in Historia del arte mexicano, 8: Arte colonial IV (Mexico City: Salvat Mexicana de Ediciones, 1992), 1085— calls this portrait type a retrato hablado.

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18. Javier Portús Pérez, “Varia fortuna del retrato en España,” in El retrato español: Del Greco a Picasso, ed. Javier Portús Pérez (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2004), 20–21; G. A. Davies, “Pintura: Background and Sketch of a Spanish Seventeenth-Century Court Genre,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 38 (1975): 288–313; and Davies, “The Anatomy of Spanish Habsburg Portraits,” in 1648: War and Peace in Europe, ed. Klaus Bussmann and Heinz Schilling (Münster-Osnabrück: Stiebner, 1998), 69– 79. 19. For the case of Spain, see Glendinning, “Goya,” 233. 20. María Concepción Amerlinck de Corsi, “Pintura de retrato,” in México en el mundo de las colecciones de arte, ed. Elisa Vargaslugo and María Olga Sáenz González, Nueva España 2 (Mexico City: D. R. Primera edición, 1994), 227. 21. See David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1982), 82, for an examination of the symbol of the constricted fan in early modern illustrations. 22. E. H. Gombrich, “The Mask and the Face: The Perception of Physiognomic Likeness in Line and in Art,” in Art, Perception, and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), 34. 23. Carducho, Dialogos, 251. 24. Montero, Monjas coronadas, 309. 25. In many convents in Europe and the Americas, nuns produced artistic objects. For a study of the visual culture that late medieval nuns in Germany produced, see Jeff rey F. Hamburger, Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also Hamburger, The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 26. Montero divides profession portraits into two groups: those that picture their subjects with crowns and those that do not. I have combined these groups into the single category of “profession portraits.” She identifies eight thematic groups altogether: profession portraits without crowns, profession portraits with crowns, exemplary nuns, death portraits, distinguished nuns, nuns who carried out relevant work in their convents or celebrated an anniversary of their profession, allegories of the religious life, and genre paintings. Alma Montero de Alarcón, “Monjas coronadas en América Latina: Profesión y muerte en los conventos femeninos del siglo xviii” (PhD diss., UNAM, 2002), 28–31. Since my study focuses on portraits, I have eliminated Montero’s last two categories, which do not pertain to portraiture. 27. Josefi na Muriel and Manuel Romero de Terreros, Retratos de monjas (Mexico City: Jus, 1952), 29. 28. Her high social standing, which her convent would have highly valued, was largely due to her impressive lineage. Sor María Ignacia’s father, Manuel de Uribe y Sandoval, was the son of José Joaquín Uribe Castejón y Medrano (ca. 1666–1738), an oidor ( judge) of the audiencia of Mexico, a knight of Santiago, and justicia major (senior judge) for Puebla. Her mother, María Josefa Val-

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cárcel y Velazco, was the daughter of Domingo Valcárcel y Formento Banquerizo (1700–1783), a criminal judge (alcalde del crimen) on the viceregal tribunes of Mexico City and Lima, a knight of Calatrava, and an oidor. He had married Ana María Altamirano Velazco Gorráez y Legaspi of Mexico City, the daughter of Nicolás Altamirano Velazco y Legaspi, the conde de Santiago de Calimaya, marqués de Salinas del Rio Pisguero, and adelantado de las Islas Filipinas. Marcus A. Burkholder and D. S. Chandler, Biographical Dictionary of Audiencia Ministers in the Americas, 1687–1821 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1982), 333–340. 29. “Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Christo Hija legítima del Sr. Dn. Manuel de Uribe y Sándoval, y de la Sra. Da. Ma. Josefa Valcarcel y Velasco. Profesó en 1 de Mayo de 77, en el Religiocissimo Convto. de Sta. Clara de esta Ciud. de Mexico de edad de 22 as. y 3 meses.” 30. Viceregal convent records do not list payments to artists for portraits of their nuns. Therefore, Ruiz Gomar deduces that the portraits were commissioned by the nuns’ parents and hung in family living rooms. Rogelio Ruiz Gomar, “Portraits of Nuns,” in “Monjas coronadas,” special issue, Artes de México 198 (1978): 100. 31. However, a few profession portraits omit this iconography and instead feature their sitters as they would have appeared daily. Chapter 5 discusses this portrait variant. 32. “La Serenís.ma S.ra Sor Mariana de la Cruz, y Austria. Reli.sa prof.a de este l R. Monast.io tomó el abito de edad de 5 a.s en el de 1646 i profesó en el de 1659, murio de 74 a.s en el de 1715.” 33. Ana García Sanz and Leticia Sánchez Hernández, “Iconografía de monjas, santas y beatas en los monasterios reales españoles,” in La mujer en el arte español (Madrid: Alpuerto, 1997), 137–138. 34. “Y aunque es verdad, que quando le di la Extrema uncion, estava tan disfigurada, y flaca, como la mesma muerte, le bolvio el Senor su hermosura, y entereza antigua, de tal fuerte que ponia admiracion, y parecia que estava viva, con el rostro apacible, y risueno, como solia. Fue grande el discurso, y mocion con que la venian a ver, acclamandola por santa, por toda la Ciudad” (Salmerón, Vida, 117r). 35. Portús Pérez, “Varia fortuna,” 23. 36. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Paraíso occidental (1683; Mexico City: Cien de México, 1995), 323–324. 37. For an examination of the convents of La Encarnación and Santa Isabel de Madrid, and the deceased that appear in their portraits, see María Leticia Sánchez Hernández, “Conventos españoles del siglo XVII. Dos clausuras singulares: La Encarnación y Santa Isabel de Madrid,” in Monjas coronadas: Vida conventual femenina en Hispanoamérica, ed. Sara Gabriel Baz (Mexico City: CONACULTA-INAH, 2003), 116–31. 38. “Me. Ma. de la Encarnasion Albaredo de edad de 74 años y murio el dia 25 de diciembre de 1756.”

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39. Archaeological excavations at the Mexico City convents of San Jerónimo and La Encarnación have revealed that nuns were buried with the crowns that appear in their funerary portraits. In only a few cases were they also interred with escudos de monja, however, suggesting that the escudos were held back from burial and recycled within convents. R. Carrasco Vargas, Arqueología y arquitectura en el Ex-Convento de San Jerónimo (Mexico: INAH, Serie Arqueología, 1990). 40. The incomplete inscription reads, “La M. Rda Ma Mathiana Francisca de r n S S Joseph. Fué Electa Vicaria de edad de 3 . . .” (The Most Reverend Mother Matiana Francisca del Señor San José. She was Vicar Elect from the age of 3 . . . ). 41. “Venerable Madre María de San Joseph el qual nombre se puso el día que professo en el Religiosísimo Conbento de Recoletas de San Agustín y Santa Mónica de la Puebla aviendose llamado en el Siglo .  .  . Ygnacio y Solorsano murio en el conbento de la Soledad de Oaxaca de misma orden donde paso por fundadora de 8 de diciembre de 1719 . . . de . . . edad de 63 años como semblante que representa.” 42. Elizabeth Perry, “Escudos de monjas/Shields of Nuns: The Creole Convent and Images of Mexican Identity in Miniature” (PhD diss., Brown University, 1999), 325. 43. It reads, “ . . . M. Maria Salvadora de San Antonio Religiosa d Velo y Coro en el Conv to. de Relig s. Aust s. Profeso en 10 de Abril de 1792. añ s de edad de 17 añs . y un mes. Hija lexitima de Dn. Joseph Anto Martiñon y de Da Franca. Josefa de la Peña.” 44. “V.R. de la M. Rosa Maria del Espiritu Santo Religiosa profeza en el Convento de la nueva Fundación de Carmelitas descalzas de esta Corte: tomo el Avito en 12 de Octubre de 1774, y profeso en 15 d dho. de 1775” (True portrait of Mother Rosa María del Espiritu Santo, a nun of the convent of the new foundation of discalced [=unshod] Carmelites of this Court: she took the habit on 12 October of 1774 and professed on 15 of the said [month] 1775). 45. “Verdadero Retrato de la Madre Soror María Clara Josepha, en el Siglo Doña María Rosa Chamorro, Hija lexitima de Don Juan Chamorro de Bayona y Doña María Andrea de Salas Maldonado, Nacida en la Ciudad de Zacatecas y Professa en el Convento de Señor San Joaquín y Señora Santa Anna de Religiosas Capuchinas en la Ciudad de la Puebla, a 25 de Junio de 1769 años” (True portrait of Mother Sor María Clara Josefa, [known] in the world [as] Doña María Rosa Chamorro, legitimate daughter of don Juan Chamorro de Bayona and doña María Andrea de Salas Maldonado, born in Zacatecas and professant in the convent of San Joaquín and Santa Ana of the Capuchin nuns in Puebla, [she professed] on 25 July 1769). 46. “Por Dios dexó aquesta Esposa / hasta el Nombre, que tenía; / pues aunque quedó María, / ya no quedó María Rosa. / Renuncia hizo escrupulosa / de Rosa su virtud rara / porque qual flor no sonara / entre Monjas Capuchinas / quien solo entre las espinas / tiene su corona Clava[da].”

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47. Similarly, profession portraits of Brigittines (Company of the Savior) lack floral accoutrements, presumably for the same reasons that the Capuchins rejected them. 48. “La Ra. Madre Maria Antonia de Rivera, Religiosa de la Sagda. Compa. de Maria SSma. comunmente llamada de la Enseñanza. Resibio el habito de edad de diez y nueve años, el dia 9 de Noviembre de 1755, y Professo el dia 12 de diziembe. de 57, en el Sagdo Conv to. de N.S. del Pilar de la Ciud. d Mexco. En Manos del ylustrismo. Sr. Dr. Dn. Manuel Ano. Rojo de Río y Bieyra digni mo. Arsov po. dla Ciud. d Man. Fue electa Priora en 24 de Marzo de 1791. Relecta e la misma f ha, y mes dl año d 94. Fallecio el día Miercoles 12 a Marzo d 1806” (The Very Reverend Mother María Antonia de Rivera, of the Sacred Company of Mary Most Holy, commonly called la Enseñanza. She received the habit at the age of 19 years, on 9 November of 1755, and professed on 12 December of ’57, in the Sacred Convent of Nuestra Señora de Pilar in Mexico City. At the hands of the illustrious doctor don Manuel Antonio Rojo de Río y Vieyra most dignified archbishop of Manila. She was elected prioress on 24 March 1791. She was reelected on the same date and month in the year ‘94. She died on Wednesday, 12 March 1806). 49. A related portrait type is the niño muerto subgenre of portraiture (also known as angelitos), in which deceased children are depicted wearing floral wreaths, a symbol of their spiritual purity and closeness to God. Notable studies on this portrait type include Elisa C. Mandell, “Posthumous Portraits of Children in Early Modern Spain and Mexico,” in Death and Afterlife in the Early Modern Hispanic World, ed. John Beusterien and Constance Cortez, Hispanic Issues On Line 7 (Fall 2010), 68–88; and the various essays in “El arte ritual de la muerte niña,” special issue, Artes de México 15 (1998).

Ch a p t e r 3 1. The “odor of sanctity” is synonymous with another expression that dates from late Christian antiquity: “the fragrance of virtue,” which denoted divine presence and God’s favor. For a study on the fragrant aspects of sanctity see Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 2. “Pension es del cuerpo humano difunto la corrupcion; y accidente que la acompaña el mal olor: pero el de la sierva de Dios se experimento tan privilegiada de esta miseria, que reconocieron las religiosas que la assistian, que exhalava de si una fragrancia tan extraordinaria, que las recreava, como que aplicaran al olfato aromas, y perfumes suavissimos. A las doce de la noche, estando velando el cuerpo muchas religiosas, advirtieron que le comenzo a sudar el rostro, un licor tan fragrante, y oloroso que vencia las confecciones aromaticas mas suaves, deleitando admirablemente los sentidos. Manevale en forma de unas

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perlas netas, y claras, semejantes a gotas de oleo puro” (Diego de Lemus, Vida, virtudes, trabajos, favores y milagros de la Ven. M. Sor Maria de Jesus Angelopolitana Religiosa en I’ll insigne Convento de la limpia Concepción de la Ciudad de los Angeles, en la Nueva España; y natural de ella [Lyon, France, 1683], 439). 3. Harvey, Scenting Salvation, 162–168. 4. In 1599, Diego de Yepes wrote the following on the death of Saint Teresa of Ávila: “Who can tell what transpired during that time between that holy soul and her sweet Spouse: the vision, the conversations, the expression of love, as she now approached the bridal bed she had so intensely longed for, the flowery bed of her beloved?” (cited and translated in Carlos M. N. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995], 409). 5. “[F]rondosos Jardines, o amenos Penciles de la Iglesia, donde tantas Sagradas Virgines se desatan en olor las suavidades, y se exhalan en gragrantes humos viviente confeccion de Aromas; aqui esta Esposa entre las demas queridas de Dios, me parece un Azuzena, que domina entre la turba de las otras flores, porque la veo con la cabeza inclinada igualmente, y coronada” (“Aprobación,” in Sebastián Santander y Torres, Vida de la venerable Madre María de San Joseph Religiosa Augustina Recoleta, Fundadora en los conventos de Santa Monica de la Ciudad de Puebla, y despues en el de la Soledad de Oaxaca [Por los Herederos de la Viuda de Miguel de Rivera, en el Empedradillo, 1732]). 6. Jeanette Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Imperial Policy in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 127–129, notes that in sixteenth-century New Spain, the cloister gardens of monasteries, the monastery complexes themselves, and the Christian church as a whole were thought to represent the “earthly paradise.” Also see Terry Comito, The Idea of the Garden in the Renaissance (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1978), for the metaphorical meaning of the cloister garden and its architectural manifestation in medieval and Renaissance Europe. 7. Paul Vandenbroeck, Le jardin clos de l’âme: L’imaginaire des religieuses dans les Pays-Bas du Sud, depuis le 13e siècle (Brussels: Palais de Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1994), 93. 8. The plaque on the tree trunk closest to Christ’s head reads, “Entre estas Flores que miras quantas el Campo ostenta[e]s JESVS Galan Divino, la mas singular y Bella” (Among these many Flowers which you see enclosed in this Garden is Jesus the young, Divine Bridegroom, the most singular and Beautiful of all). A plaque above Christ’s feet reads, “Entre Flores de Virtudes, Almas, el Señor reposa, Mas advertid que el Amor A todas las haze hermosas” (Among Flowers of Virtues, Souls, rests the Lord, Better be forewarned that [his] Love makes all [souls] beautiful). The third and fi nal plaque, below Christ’s feet, reads, “Almas vosotras que veis, Esta Belleza tan rara, Mirad que es grande lo [cura] El no resolverse a amar” (You souls who see This most rare Beauty, See that it is a great madness should He decide not to love).

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9. For an analysis of flowers and floral symbolism in what are probably early twentieth-century crowns worn by Mexican nuns that are housed in the exconvento de Santa Mónica in Puebla (now a museum) see J. Katia Perdigón Castañeda, “La colección: Una propuesta de lectura iconográfica,” in La conservación de las coronas de monjas del Museo de Arte Religioso Ex-Convento de Santa Mónica, Puebla, ed. J. Katia Perdigón Castañeda (Mexico City: INAH, 2011), 91– 102; Perdigón Castañeda, “Flores de Tela,” ibid., 112–121; Fernando Sánchez Guevara and Fernando Sánchez Martínez, “Análisis dea materiales constructivos de las coronas del convento de Santa Mónica y un acercamiento a la identificación de los elementos florales,” ibid., 148–150. Also see Ana Paulina Gámez, “Las flores: Ornamentos obligados,” in La esencia del paraíso: La flor en el arte mexicano (Mexico City: INAH, 1998), 25–32, for a study of floral iconography that includes viceregal sources. 10. BNAH 137. Also cited in Nuria Salazár Simarro, “El lenguaje de las flores en la clausura femenina,” in Monjas coronadas: Vida conventual femenina en Hispanoamérica, ed. Sara Gabriel Baz (Mexico City: CONACULTA-INAH, 2003), 138. 11. BNAH, 136. 12. Gámez, “Las flores,” 28. 13. Stanley N. Seward, The Symbolic Rose (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 12. 14. Frank Graziano, Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Saint Rose of Lima (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 69. 15. Graziano, Wounds of Love, 195–197. 16. Paul Vandenbroeck, “Novias coronadas,” in Monjas coronadas: Vida conventual femenina en Hispanoamérica, ed. Sara Gabriel Baz (Mexico City: CONACULTAINAH, 2003), 169. 17. Raymond of Capua, The Life of Catherine of Siena, trans. George Lamb (London: Harvill Press, 1960), 25. 18. Raymond of Capua, Life of Catherine, 100. 19. Raymond of Capua, Life of Catherine, 340. 20. The inscription reads, “Ven hermana mia serás coronada” (Come, my sister, you shall be crowned). 21. For an examination of how discalced Carmelite spiritual ideas were disseminated visually to novices in seventeenth-century Belgium and France, see Cordula van Wyhe, “The Idea Vitæ Teresianæ (1687): The Teresian Mystic Life and Its Visual Representations in the Low Countries,” in Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View, ed. Cordula van Wyhe (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008), 173–207. 22. This theme is based on ancient mother-goddess devotions, especially when the goddess was the mother of a dying or resurrecting deity—the equivalent in classical antiquity of the Virgin and Christ. Graziano, Wounds of Love, 188.

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23. While fans embodied a variety of nuanced meanings depending on the context of the portrait, the sitter, and her marital status, “the chief connotation of the fan has traditionally been erotic” (David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1982], 82). 24. Smith, Masks of Wedlock, 77. 25. Sebastiana Inés was from Tlatelolco, and her father was a governor. This portrait was likely done just before the young girl entered the convent. Josefi na Muriel, “El convento de Corpus Christi,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 7 (1941): 37. 26. John B. Knipping, Iconography of the Counter Reformation in the Netherlands: Heaven on Earth (Nieuwkoop: de Graaf, 1974), 256. 27. Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura, vol. 2 (1638; Madrid: Editorial Maestre, Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, 1956), 211. 28. For a discussion of these themes in Spanish art see Suzanne L. Stratton, The Immaculate Conception in Spanish Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 10–38. 29. Stratton, Immaculate Conception, 35. 30. John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World: A Study of the Writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta (1525–1604) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 42. 31. Two accounts of the apparition of the Virgin to Juan Diego were published in the 1640s and became seminal texts in spreading the devotion to Guadalupe and popularizing the story. The earlier, Imagen de la Virgen María, Madre de Dios de Guadalupe (1648), by Miguel Sánchez, a diocesan priest, was primarily responsible for its popularity among Creoles (Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 [Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995], 1). The second account, Huei tlamahuiçoltica, known popularly as the Nican mopohua, by Luis Laso de Vega, was published the following year (1649). A third account, published in 1660 by Mateo de la Cruz and based on Sánchez’s chronicle, made the story of Guadalupe even more popular than the previous two had done. As the story goes, Bishop-elect Fray Juan de Zumárraga was incredulous of Juan Diego’s claim that the Virgin had appeared to him on multiple occasions with the request that the bishop erect a shrine in her honor on a hill sacred to the natives in the place called Tepeyac, just north of Mexico City. Zumárraga dismissed Juan Diego, explaining to him that he required evidence of this spectacular claim. Shortly thereafter, the Virgin told Juan Diego to go to the top of the hill at Tepeyac, where he would fi nd Castilian roses miraculously blooming out of season and in a place where they normally could not grow. He collected them in his cape (tilma) and took them back to Zumárraga as evidence of his claims. When Juan Diego opened his tilma before the bishop, the roses fell to the floor, revealing a miraculously emblazoned image of the Virgin on the cape.

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Notes to Pages 82–92

32. Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, ed. Granger Ryan and Helmut Ripperger (New York: Arno Press, 1969), 451. 33. Pacheco, Arte de la pintura, 298. 34. Pacheco, Arte de la pintura, 301. 35. Stratton, Immaculate Conception, 42. 36. Pamela Askew, Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 64. 37. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, Dictionary of Christian Art (New York: Continuum, 1994), 265. 38. Voragine, Golden Legend, 452. 39. Apostolos-Cappadona, Dictionary of Christian Art, 296. 40. Cited in Graziano, Wounds of Love, 70. 41. Elisa Vargaslugo, “Proceso iconológico de santa Rosa de Lima,” in Actes du XLIIe Congrès international des américanistes: Congrès du centenaire (Paris, 2–9 septembre 1976) (Paris: Société des américanistes, 1979), 10:73. 42. When the cult of Saint Rose of Lima fi nally arrived in New Spain, artists pursued not a faithful representation of her physical appearance but rather a symbolic image of her spiritual personality; Vargaslugo, “Proceso,” 73. 43. Alma Montero de Alarcón, Monjas coronadas: Vida y muerte en Hispanoamérica virreinal (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdéz, 2008), 262. 44. “En todas estas virtudes deben florecer las Capuchinas: y en todas florecen; pero es preciso que sean como flores” (cited in Nuria Salazár Simarro, “El lenguaje de las flores,” in Monjas coronadas: Vida conventual femenina en Hispanoamérica [Mexico City: CONACULTA-INAH, 2003], 138). 45. “Y entendí que el Abito he de traer siempre con veneracion, y acuerdo de la muerte; pues es la mortaja, que trae el cuerpo, y este he de tener, como muerto a todas las cosas del mundo en la religion, sorda, ciega, muda, solo vivos los cinco sentidos a la obedencia, para executarla en nuestros ministerios con humildad. El Manto me daba a entender, como debo dar buen exemplo a mis hermanas, y a los de afuera, escondiendo las faltas de mis proximos en mi interior, para ponerlas solo en presencia de su Magestad, y pedirle por ellas con charidad, y pureza de intencion; que esta me daba a entender en las estrellas de oro, y plata, que tenia el Manto. El Velo, y tocado de la cabeza, me daba a entender la pureza, que debo tener en los cinco sentidos, y me decia lo que debo hazer en cada uno, y como debo traerlos martyrizados siempre para lograr la palma, y corona, que me avia puesto. La Estola entendi significarme el yugo de la Religion, que he de cargar con prompta obedencia, y humildad; observando la regla, y constituciones. El Niño Jesus me enseno, como debo tenerlo siempre a la vista desde el pesebre, de la Cruz, en los trabajos, que ofrece la religion” (Miguel de Torres, Vida exemplar, y muerte preciosa de la madre Barbara Josepha de San Francisco Religiosa de velo, y choro del convento de la Santissima Trinidad, de la Puebla de Los Angeles [Puebla, 1725], 132–134).

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Ch a p t e r 4 1. For another version of this chapter, see James M. Córdova, “Clad in Flowers: Indigenous Arts and Knowledge in Colonial Mexican Convents,” Art Bulletin 93, no. 4 (Dec. 2011): 449–467. 2. Translated in Mónica Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), 165. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid.; Asunción Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Margaret Chowning, Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Rosalva Loreto López, Los conventos femeninos y el mundo urbano de la Puebla de los Ángeles del siglo XVIII (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2000); Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999). 5. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 256. 6. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 257. 7. This debate involved utilizing and scrutinizing the Greco-Roman and Christian concepts of human behavior that had historically informed the Spanish colonial enterprise in the Americas. On the one hand, Aristotle’s notion of barbarous peoples being less than human and thus “natural” slaves for civilized groups served as the justification for the forceful subjugation and enslavement of Amerindians in the late fi fteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the perspective spearheaded by Sepúlveda. On the other hand, Las Casas, the bishop of Chiapas, argued for indigenous peoples’ humanity and civility and declared it unjust and sinful to enslave them and forcibly convert them to Christianity, as had been done in the early years of colonial rule. Las Casas’s efforts were partially responsible for the New Laws of 1542, in which, among other things, the Crown prohibited Amerindian enslavement and other Spanish abuses against native peoples. For a penetrating examination, see Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580–1750 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 83. 8. Ibid., 84. 9. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 248–255. 10. Matthew 11:25; 18:1– 7. 11. This colonial strategy, by which colonizers position native colonized groups as “a subject of difference that is almost the same but not quite”—that is to say, incapable of successfully adopting the colonizers’ values and behavior—is examined in Homi K. Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85.

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Notes to Pages 97–102

12. Díaz, Indigenous Writings, 85–109. 13. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 255–274. 14. Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, Paraíso occidental (1683; Mexico City: Cien de México, 1995), 282–289. 15. For a concise discussion of this body of literature see Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 248–255. 16. See Díaz, Indigenous Writings, 89–110, for an examination of this anonymous manuscript. 17. Cited in Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 262. 18. “Verdadero Retrato de la H na Manuela de Meza, hija legítima de Don Lucas Meza y de Doña Anastacia Reinoso. Nació en 25 de Dbre de 1809 en San Bartolomé jurisdicción de Capulhuac. Vistió nuestro santo abito en este conbento de la Compañía de María Sma de Guadalupe y enseñanza de indias en 2 de julio de 1824 y profesó en 18 de marzo de 1827 siendo priora la M.R.M. María Luisa de Corral.” 19. For the betrothal value of the carnation in Western art see Robert A. Koch, “Flower Symbolism in the Portinari Altar,” Art Bulletin 46, no. 1 (March 1964): 73; and F. Mercier, “La valeur symbolique de l’oeillet dans la peinture du Moyen-Âge,” Revue de l’Art Ancien et Moderne 81 (1937): 232ff. For the symbolic meaning of fans see David R. Smith, Masks of Wedlock: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Marriage Portraiture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1982), 82. 20. “Retrato de Sebastiana Ynes Josepha de Sn Aug tin Hija legítima de n D  Mathias Alexo Martínez y de Dna Thomasa de Dios y Mendoza. de Edad de 16 años. del Año de 1757 años.” 21. Josefi na Muriel, “El convento de Corpus Christi,” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 7 (1941): 37. 22. As Jaime Cuadriello has argued in The Glories of the Republic of Tlaxcala: Art and Life in Viceregal Mexico, trans. Christopher J. Follett (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011), 269, upper-class natives in New Spain illustrated their desire to be perceived as exceptional Christians, rather than as part of the marginalized, conquered masses, by commissioning works of art that demonstrated their social, religious, and historical distinction. 23. Joaquín Antonio de Basarás, “Costumbres de indios y mapas de las generaciones, y algunas frutas de Nueva España, que carecen en la Europa,” in Una vision del México del Siglo de las Luces: La codifi cación de Joaquín Antonio de Basarás, transcribed by Ilona Katzew (Mexico City: Landucci, 2006), 120–121. Also see Katzew’s recapitulation of Basarás’s narrative in Katzew, Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 172–174. 24. For a study of the origins of the “Indian nuptial” image in New Spain, see Katzew, Casta Painting, 174–179. 25. Torquemada, Monarchía Indiana, book 16, chapter 22 (Seville: Matthias

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Clavijo, 1615), 220–221. Katzew notes (“Remedo de la ya muerta América: The Construction of Festive Rites in Colonial Mexico,” in Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World, ed. Ilona Katzew [Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2011], 172) that Arias de Villalobos also mentions these accoutrements in his discussion of a native wedding; Arias de Villalobos, Obediencia que México, cabeza de la Nueva España dió a la Majestad Católica del Rey Felipe de Austria, alzando perdón del vasallaje en su real nombre (Mexico City: Imprenta de Diego Garrido, 1623), reprinted in Genaro García and Carlos Pereyra, Documentos inéditos ó muy raros para la historia de México (Mexico City: Vda. de C. Bouret, 1907), 173–174. 26. For example, in the Florentine Codex’s volume on rhetoric and morality, Aztec noblewomen are admonished to be chaste and not commit adultery or indulge in licentious behavior. Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, book 6, trans. and ed. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles Dibble (1580; Santa Fe: School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1950–1982), 102. 27. Basarás, “Costumbres,” 121. 28. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 6, 92–103, 216–218; book 10, 2–4, 12– 13, 46–47. 29. According to the Apocrypha, in a competition of suitors for the Virgin Mary, God made known his choice of Saint Joseph by causing his staff to bloom. 30. Francisco Pacheco, Arte de la pintura, vol. 2 (1638; Madrid: Editorial Maestre, Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan, 1956), 229–230. 31. The Counter-Reformation reinvigorated the cult of Saint Joseph and held him up as a model for married men and fathers. For a study of the image of Saint Joseph in early modern Spain and Latin America, see Charlene Villaseñor Black, Creating the Cult of Saint Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 32. Toribio de Benavente Motolinía, Motolinía’s History of the Indians of New Spain, trans. Francis Borgia Steck (1858; Washington, D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1954), 143. 33. John Leddy Phelan, The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World: A Study of the Writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta (1524–1604) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956). 34. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 11, 214–215. 35. Jeanette Favrot Peterson, The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Imperial Policy in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993), 85, 118. 36. For example, indigenous lords held the macpalxochitl ( flor de la manita or Chiranthodendron pentadactylon) in high esteem and used it to adorn other flowers. Because it had to be imported into Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, it was especially desirable. Doris Heyden, Mitología y simbolísmo de la flora en el México prehispanico (Mexico City: UNAM, 1983), 17, 49.

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Notes to Pages 107–109

37. The full passage includes stereotyped characteristics of an Amerindian speaking Spanish, which accounts for imperfect spelling and syntax: “¡Ojalá que yo en mi tierra lo estoviera! Lo cortara de mi chinampa las rosas para ponerlo a sos plantas; lo hiciera un arco de toles, y aún mas: que lo empetatara, colgado de corazones mío, de mi Pagre, y hermana, un santocale. Y también lo adornara con las ramas de laurel, porque es valiente lo Señor vigrey de mi alma; de olivas con mil flores corona y zúchil formara a mi Señora el Virreina, porque lo es discreta y santa.”

Joaquín de Barruchi y Arana, Relación del festejo que a los Marqueses de las Amarillas les hicieron las Señoras Religiosas del Convento de San Jerónimo, ed. Frederick Luciani, Biblioteca Indiana (1756; Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2011), 138–139. 38. James M. Córdova, “Aztec Vestal Virgins and the Brides of Christ: The Mixed Heritage of New Spain’s monjas coronadas,” Colonial Latin American Review 18, no. 2 (2009): 211–212. 39. For a study of wax figurines in nuns’ crowns see J. Katia Perdigón Castañeda, “Ceriescultura,” in La conservación de las coronas de monjas del Museo de Arte Religioso Ex-Convento de Santa Mónica, Puebla, ed. J. Katia Perdigón Castañeda (Mexico City: INAH, 2011), 123–134. 40. For a study of artificial flowers in nuns’ crowns see Perdigón Castañeda, “Flores de tela,” ibid., 105–122. 41. Book 10 of the Florentine Codex identifies flora and fauna that were important to late pre-Hispanic and early colonial central Mexican natives. Other important colonial sources outlining Mesoamerican flora are Martín de la Cruz, Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis: Manuscrito azteca de 1552 (1552; Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica: Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, 1991), and Francisco Hernández’s Historia natural de Nueva España, trans. José Rojo Navarro (1576; Mexico City: UNAM, 1959). For more recent studies on this topic, see Peterson, Paradise Garden Murals, 83–102; Heyden, Mitología y simbolísmo; and La esencia del paraíso: La flor en el arte mexicano (Mexico: INAH, 1998). 42. Antonio Lot and Ma. Guadalupe Miranda-Arce, “Nota sobre las inter-

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pretaciones botánicas de plantas acuáticas representadas en códices mexicanos,” in Flora and Fauna Imagery in Precolumbian Cultures: Iconography and Function, ed. Jeanette F. Peterson (Oxford: BAR, 1983), 85– 92. 43. Heyden, Mitología y simbolísmo, 16; and Peterson, Paradise Garden Murals, 100. In Mexico, the cempoalxochitl is still used to honor the dead on All Souls’ Day, more commonly known as Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). 44. The flowers of the goddess’s headdress indicate her preciousness and association with flowers (her name also conveys this association: “Xochiquetzal” translates as “flower [or precious] quetzal bird”). 45. Heyden, Mitología y simbolísmo, 101–102; Peterson, Paradise Garden Murals, 109; and Mary Miller and Karl Taube, An Illustrated Dictionary of the Gods and Symbols of Ancient Mexico and the Maya (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 48. 46. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 3, 49. On dying, most people were sent to the smoky and dangerous underworld (Mictlan). Another afterworld, a kind of terrestrial paradise called Tlalocan, was reserved for those whose deaths were associated with water and individuals sacrificed to the rain god, Tlaloc. Sa hagún, Florentine Codex, book 3, 47. See Alfredo López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan: Places of Mist, trans. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997), for an in-depth study of Mesoamerican concepts of creation, death, and paradise. 47. Karl Taube traces the flower world complex to the Olmec Middle Formative period (600–300 BCE): Taube, “Flower Mountain: Concepts of Life, Beauty, and Paradise among the Classic Maya,” Res 45 (Spring 2004): 69. 48. Jane Hill, “The Flower World of Old Uto-Aztecan,” Journal of Anthropological Research 48 (1992): 117–144. 49. Taube, “Flower Mountain,” 90. 50. Ibid., 88; Annabeth Headrick, The Teotihuacan Trinity: The Sociopolitical Structure of an Ancient Mesoamerican City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 144. Esther Pasztory, Teotihuacan: An Experiment in Living (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 167, links these motifs more broadly to notions of transformation and immortality. In linking these murals with Aztec concepts of paradise and the afterlife, I intend to identify broad religious traditions shared by ethnically and temporally distinct groups in Mesoamerica. 51. Alfonso Caso, in “El paraíso terrenal en Teotihuacan,” Cuadernos Americanos 6, no. 6 (1942): 127–136, interpreted the scene as a depiction of Tlalocan. However, Salvador Toscano broadened that interpretation to TlalocanTamoanchan, a reinterpretation that, according to López Austin (Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, 272), seems to be supported by the evidence. 52. Headrick, The Teotihuacan Trinity, 154–155; Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 3, 47. 53. Miguel León Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture: A Study of the Ancient Nahuatl Mind (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1963), 74– 79.

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Notes to Pages 112–118

54. Taube, “Flower Mountain,” 78. 55. See López Austin, Tamoanchan, Tlalocan, 274, for a variety of interpretations that have been applied to this work. Also, see Headrick, The Teotihuacan Trinity, 154–156. 56. It is generally accepted that the Aztec cult of warrior butterfl ies originated in Teotihuacan, where images of warriors with butterfly wings abound. Taube, “Flower Mountain,” 88. 57. George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 13. 58. Gerónimo de Mendieta, Historia eclesiástica indiana (1596; Mexico City: Porrúa, 1980), 170. 59. For a compendium and interpretation of the Malinalco murals’ flora and fauna see Peterson, Paradise Garden Murals, 83–123. 60. Eleanor Wake, Framing the Sacred: The Indian Churches of Early Colonial Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010), 249. 61. Louise Burkhart, “Flowery Heaven: The Aesthetics of Paradise in Nahuatl Devotional Literature,” Res 21 (Spring 1992): 89. 62. Ibid., 101. 63. Frances Calderón de la Barca, Life in Mexico (1843; London: Century, 1987), 583–584. According to Ferdinand Anders, by the nineteenth century most Mexican featherworks were intended as tourist souvenirs. Anders, cited in Esther Pasztory, Aztec Art (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983), 278. 64. For a concise discussion of Aztec feather mosaics see Pasztory, Aztec Art, 278–280. Also see Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 10, 93– 97, for an account of how Aztec feather artisans accomplished their work. Other notable studies of viceregal Mexican feather mosaics are Elena Estrada de Gerlero, “La plumaria, espresión artística por excelencia,” in México en el mundo de las colecciones de arte, Nueva España 1, ed. Elisa Vargaslugo and Maria Luisa Sabau Garcia (Mexico City: UNAM, 1994), 73–118; Alessandra Russo, “Plumes of Sacrifice: Transformations in Sixteenth-Century Mexican Feather Art,” Res 42 (Autumn 2002): 226–250; and Russo, Gerhard Wolf, and Diana Fane, El vuelo de los imágenes: Arte plumario en México y Europa / Images Take Flight: Feather Art in Mexico and Europe (Mexico City: INBA and INAH, 2011). 65. Sahagún, Florentine Codex, book 10, 167. 66. Russo, “Plumes of Sacrifice,” 239–240. 67. Ibid. 68. Elizabeth Perry, “Convents, Art, and Creole Identity in Late Viceregal New Spain,” in Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America, ed. Kellen Kee McIntyre and Richard E. Phillips (Boston: Brill, 2007), 332. 69. Claire Farago points out that cultural traditions do not indicate their practitioners’ ethnicity; Farago, “Transforming Images: ‘Managing the Interstices with a Measure of Creativity,’ ” in Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos in-between Worlds, ed. Farago and Donna Pierce (University Park: Pennsylva-

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nia State University Press, 2006), 161. George Kubler also argues as much when he opposes using the term “mestizo art” to identify colonial Mexican art that exhibits Mesoamerican artistic qualities because “it carries a burden of racial meaning”; Kubler, “On the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Precolumbian Art,” in The Collected Essays of George Kubler, ed. Thomas F. Reese (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 67. 70. In León Portilla, Aztec Thought and Culture, 77. 71. Similarly, James Lockhart observes that “whenever the two cultures (Nahua and Spanish) ran parallel, the Nahuas would soon adopt the relevant Spanish form without abandoning the essence of their own form” (Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992], 243). 72. Ibid., 445. 73. Kubler, “On the Colonial Extinction,” 66. 74. Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its (Dis)Contents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 14. 75. Ibid. 76. Farago, “Transforming Images,” 159. See note 20 in the Introduction. 77. Dean and Leibsohn, “Hybridity,” 26.

Ch a p t e r 5 1. In the introductory “Parecer” in Fray Sebastián de Santander y Torres, Vida de la venerable Madre María de San Joseph Religiosa Augustina Recoleta, Fundadora en los conventos de Santa Monica de la Ciudad de Puebla, y despues en el de la Soledad de Oaxaca (Por los Herederos de la Viuda de Miguel de Rivera, en el Empedradillo, 1732). Also see Miguel Godinez, Practica de la theologia mystica (Sevilla, 1672). More recently, Jean Franco, Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), xiv, notes that in the seventeenth century “mysticism became accepted as a form of knowledge in which women were especially adept.” 2. In his Directorio para las novicias de este convento de San Phelipe de Jesús y Pobres Capuchinas de México, BNAH, 192, Cayetano Antonio de Torres instructs all nuns to practice the vita contemplativa and the vita activa. For the former, he recommends mental prayer (oración mental), especially through Divine Office (the continuous cycle of daily prayer), and for the latter, he recommends exercising humility through mortification and penance. This, however, was not exclusive to New Spain or even Spanish America. For example, see Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, eds., Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, trans. Margery J. Schneider (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

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Notes to Pages 122–128

3. The profession portrait in New Spain was not exclusive to nuns. Fray Francisco de Santa Ana’s portrait of 1754, which commemorates the sitter’s profession into the Carmelite order, depicts the young friar adorned with a towering crown of flowers. Additionally, a small number of New Spanish portraits depict deceased male religious wearing floral crowns to denote their virtue. 4. “La contemplativa, que por si es mas perfecta y fue la mejor parte, que escogió la Magdalena” (Directorio para las novicias, BNAH, 189). 5. Asunción Lavrin, “Women in Convents: Their Economic and Social Roles in Colonial Mexico,” in Liberating Women’s History: Theoretical and Critical Essays, ed. Bernice A. Carroll (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976), 255. 6. AGN, “Templos y conventos, 1797–1798,” vol. 30, exp. 11, fols. 335–341. 7. Asunción Lavrin, “The Role of Nunneries in the Economy of New Spain in the Eighteenth Century,” Hispanic American Historical Review 46, no. 4 (Nov. 1966): 380. 8. Lavrin, “Women in Convents,” 263. Rosalva Loreto López has argued that because roughly 50 percent of Puebla’s nuns had a relative in the ayuntamiento between 1650 and 1750, convent interests were well represented in cabildo matters that involved water rights, donations, and urban promotion. Rosalva Loreto López, Los conventos femeninos y el mundo urbano de la Puebla de los Ángeles del siglo XVIII (Mexico City: Colegio de México, 2000), 186. 9. Josefi na Muriel, Conventos de monjas en la Nueva España (Mexico City: Editorial Santiago, 1946), 97. Such benefits were not unusual among New Spain’s convent benefactors and founders, nor were they exclusive to New Spain: patronage rights were common in medieval and early modern Spain. Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt, Religious Women in Golden Age Spain: The Permeable Cloister (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2005), 30–44. 10. María Concepción Amerlinck de Corsi and Manuel Ramos Medina, Conventos de monjas: Fundaciones en el México virreinal (Mexico City: Condumex, 1995), 175. 11. For example, see Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), 5. 12. Nelly Siguat, “Azucenas entre espinas: El traslado del convento de las monjas de Santa Catalina de Siena en Valladolid en 1738,” in El Arte y la vida cotidiana: XVI coloquio internacional de Historia del Arte, ed. Elena Estrada de Gerlero (Mexico City: UNAM, 1995), 209. 13. The passage continues, “no lie was found in their mouths and no fault can be found in them” (Rev. 14:4–5). 14. “Dichosa Ciudad donde las oraciones de Virgenes prudentes, y Esposas de JESUS repartidas en Conventos son exercitos de Angeles bien ordenados de Coros terribles para el infierno, y hermosos para el Cielo; en los Conventos de Monjas ha puesto Dios sus presidios, y en ellos forma exercitos, que se oponen a los rigores de Dios, aplacan con sus ruegos, y rinden a la divina Justicia con sus

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oraciones obligandole a repartir misericordias, son afrenta a los enemigos infernales ignominia de su astucias, porque es donayre del valor divino vencer con acuzenas, triumphar con rosas, sujetando a Elefantes Demonios, con mugeres, Palomas” (Agustín de Vetancurt, Teatro mexicano: Descripción breve de los sucesos exemplares, históricos, políticos, militares, y religiosos del nuevo mundo Occidental de las Indias [1698; Mexico City: Aguilar, 1956], 41). 15. Gaspar Antonio Méndez de Cisneros y el notario Manuel Gómez de Escobar Manleón, “Averiguación del milagro que obró la Sma Virgen María de Guadalupe, en favor de la Madre Nicolasa María Jacinta de San José” (1776), in Sor María de Cristo Santos Morales and Fray Esteban Arroyo González, Las monjas dominicas en la cultura novohispana (Mexico City: Instituto Dominicano de Investigaciones Históricas, de la Provincia de Santiago de México, 1992), 83. 16. Antonio Martínez, “Parecer,” 16 November 1758, cited in Morales and González, Las monjas dominicas, 88–89. 17. Lehfeldt, Religious Women, 32. 18. Though communal-life nuns received alms to help fi nance their living expenses, they did not limit their sources of income to the generosity of almsgivers. Consider, for example, the 1797 petition by the nuns of Santa Teresa la Antigua in Mexico City, cited above, for rights to sell devotional medals. Nuns also sold goods they had produced, such as pastries and textiles. 19. In 1667 Franciscan provincial Fray Mateo de Heredia attempted unsuccessfully to restrict the number of servants who lived and worked in Franciscan convents. By 1750 another provincial was complaining that the high costs of assuming an administrative position in convents were deterring nuns from accepting these positions. In 1727, 1744, and 1750 provincials complained in official documents of the laxity nuns demonstrated in observing the rules and constitutions of their orders. Finally, in 1754 New Spain’s viceroy, the Conde de Revillagigedo, opined that convents were incurring unnecessary expenses that were paid in part by the nuns’ families. The Franciscan provincial concurred and noted that a good portion of these expenses came from lavish celebrations of patron saints, church ornamentation, and food for special occasions. See Asunción Lavrin, “Ecclesiastical Reforms of Nunneries in New Spain in the Eighteenth Century,” The Americas 22, no. 2 (1965): 183; and Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 275–309. 20. By the end of the eighteenth century a number of convents from Mexico City, Puebla, Oaxaca, and Querétaro had formally protested the reform. In Mexico City they were La Concepción, La Encarnación, Jesús María, San Jerónimo, San Lorenzo, San José de Gracia, San Bernardo, and Regina Coeli; in Puebla, la Santísima Trinidad, Santa Clara, Santa Catalina, Santa Inés, San Jerónimo, and La Concepción protested. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 291–293. Protesting nuns formed ties that extended beyond their convents, orders, and cities, which created a supportive environment and a sense of solidarity. However,

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many convents were split between nuns who supported the reforms and those who did not. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 276. 21. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 305. 22. See Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 306–309, for some examples of how dissenting nuns quietly continued practicing the private life. 23. Margaret Chowning, Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent, 1752–1863 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6. 24. The present survey is incomplete and subject to adjustment. Because a number of these portraits are not dated, or their sitters’ convents are not identified, I have excluded them. Additionally, it is likely that more viceregal profession portraits will come to light after this publication, which will alter the numbers in this chart. It is difficult to conclusively prove that the disproportionate concentration of profession portraits from the reform era is solely due to response to the reforms and is not also based on other influences that may or may not be related to monastic reforms. 25. Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580–1730 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), 17. 26. Notable exceptions are the Capuchin order and the Company of Mary (Brigitites), which seem to have shunned the elaborate trappings of profession that other orders used. Profession portraits of Capuchin nuns notably lack floral regalia and related paraphernalia; see, for example, fig. 2.18. Brigitite portraits—such as those of Sor María Ignacia del Espíritu Santo (1768; Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzlán) and of Sor María Tomasa de San Gabriel (date illegible; Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City)—also lack the profession trappings seen in crowned-nun portraits. 27. Carol K. Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American Life, 1836–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 75. 28. Undated manuscript, cited in Tudela, Colonial Angels, 166, n. 7. 29. “[L]a observancia, y execución puntual de la Regla, y Constituciones, cria aliento, alegría, y consuelo, verdaderamente espiritual, y cada dia nuevas fuerzas, y vigor, para seguir, fervorosamente su vocación” (Reglas y Constituciones que han de guardar las Religiosas de los Conventos de Nuestra Señora de la Concepción y la Santísima Trinidad de la Ciudad de los Angeles [Reimprimirlas la Reverenda Madre Francisca de Santa Cruz, Abadesa del Convento de la Concepción, Puebla, 1744], 8). 30. Reglas y Constituciones, 21–22. 31. Reglas y Constituciones, 24–28. 32. In 1694 Fray Raimundo Lumbier noted, “[E]stos trages . . . en las Monjas no se pueden escusar de pecado venial. . . . Essos mismos trages en ellas traidos a fi n de pareder bien y enamorar a los hombres con quien hablan, certisimamente son pecado mortal” (quoted in Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Las mujeres en la Nueva España: Educación y vida cotidiana [Mexico City: Colegio de México, 1987], 239).

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33. Elizabeth Perry, “Convents, Art, and Creole Identity in Late Viceregal New Spain,” in Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America, ed. Kellen Kee McIntyre and Richard E. Phillips (Boston: Brill, 2007), 325–326. 34. Noted in Perry, “Escudos de monjas/Shields of Nuns: The Creole Convent and Images of Mexican Identity in Miniature” (PhD diss., Brown University, 1999), 178. 35. Perry, “Escudos de monjas,” 179. 36. Ibid., 334–335. Although Perry associates all calced nuns of Mexico City and Puebla with the escudo de monja, arguing that they used it as a symbol of resistance to reform, the Urbanist Franciscans, who were among the most vocal protestors of the communal-life reforms, did not wear escudos de monja. 37. AGN, “Templos y Conventos,” leg. 20, exp. 2, fol. 30v. 38. Calced nuns from Regina Coeli convent in Mexico City (Conceptionist) are shown without floral accoutrements and related trappings in their postreform-era profession portraits. 39. Larkin, The Very Nature of God, 16, has broadly noted that New Spaniards’ responses to the religious reforms of the late eighteenth century were mixed, at best. 40. For other studies of religious reforms in Europe’s medieval and early modern convents see, for example, Anne Winston-Allen, Convent Chronicles: Women Writing about Women and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 41. Lehfeldt, Religious Women, 153. 42. Cited in Coburn and Smith, Spirited Lives, 82–83. 43. “[P]retendidas Profesías, y revelaciones fanaticas de algunas Religiosas a cerca del regreso de los Regulares de la Compañia . . . cuya . . . perturba la tranquilidad de las mismas religiosas, dividiendolas en partidos, y mezclandolas en negocios de gobierno, de todo improprios de la debilidad de su sexo, y del retiro de la Profesión Monastica, sino que es un medio astuto, para divulgar en publico ideas contrarias a la tranquilidad” (AHAM, “Nos D. Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana por la Gracia de Dios y de la santa Sede apostólica, Arzobispo de México, del Consejo de S.M. &c. A las Reverendas Madres Preladas, a cada una de todas las Religiosas de nuestra Filación, y a sus Confesores, y Directores Espirituales salud en nuestro Sr. Jesu-Christo,” fol. 2 [1768]). 44. “Y deseando, que tenga su debido cumplimiento, mandamos, que las Preladas de los Conventos, lean en Comunidad este nuestro Edicto, exhortando a sus Subditas a el Silencio, y obediencia con expresiones eficazes, y sencillas como son; que nunca es licito hablar mal del Soberano, Prelados, y Superiores . . . que a los inferiores no toca juzgar de las operaciones de los Superiores” (ibid., fol. 6).

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Notes to Pages 146–150

45. Asunción Lavrin, “Female Visionaries and Spirituality,” in Religion in New Spain, ed. Susan Schroeder and Stafford Poole (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 164. Also see Nora E. Jaffary, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 46. Literature by and of Saint Teresa of Ávila was especially influential and provided a model for New Spanish nuns’ behavior and as well as a means by which they understood mysticism; Franco, Plotting Women, xv. 47. Cited in Lavrin, Brides of Christ, 288. 48. López, Los conventos femeninos, 203. 49. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 136, and Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 3, for the relation of a subject’s identity to the external forces comprising the norms that construct that identity and for the circumstances that produce a subject’s agency in that relation. 50. Sally McKee, review of Erler and Kowaleski, Gendering the Master Narrative, Sixteenth Century Journal 37 (Spring 2006): 179–180. Also cited in Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency, Identity, ed. Andrea Pearson (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008), 5. 51. An argument also made by Franco (Plotting Women, xv), although she does not distinguish between empowerment and agency, and argues for the former.

Ch a p t e r 6 1. “Donde se ha visto en el Mundo / Lo que aqui estamos mirando / Los Hijos propios gimiendo / Y ella nodriza a los forasteros” (translation in Carolyn Dean, “Savage Breast/Salvaged Breast: Allegory, Colonization, and WetNursing in Peru, 1532–1825,” in Women and Art in Early Modern Latin America, ed. Kellen Kee McIntyre and Richard E. Phillips [Boston: Brill, 2007], 252). 2. Ibid., 253. Dean identifies the adult native figures as representatives of the Inca, on the left, and “jungle dwellers,” on the right. 3. Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995), 2. 4. See Joseph Sebastian and Johann Baptist Klauber’s Exaltación del Patronato de la Virgen de Guadalupe sobre la Nueva España, in Juegos de ingenio y agudeza: La pintura emblemática de la Nueva España (Mexico City: D.R. Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1994), 109. 5. On the early modern European feminization of America—or, more broadly, its colonial territories— see, for example, José Rabasa, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993); Lois Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” in New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berke-

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ley: University of California Press, 1993), 177–217; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Knopf, 1997); and Dean, “Savage Breast/Salvaged Breast.” 6. “Los que en ella nacen, muy al propio de los indios, en el aspecto parecen españoles y en las condiciones no son; los que son naturales españoles, si no tienen mucho aviso, a pocos años andados de su llegada a esta tierra se hacen otros; y esto pienso que lo hace el clima, o constelaciones de esta tierra” (Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, book 10 [Mexico City: Porrúa, 1956], 160). 7. “[Y] cierto, se cría una gente, así española como India, que es intolerable de regir y pesadísima de salvar: los padres y las madres no se pueden apoderar con sus hijos e hijas para apartarlos de los vicios y sensualidades que esta tierra cría” (Sahagún, Historia, book 10, 160). 8. “[S]e afeminan los hombres y los hijos que producen” ( Juan de Cárdenas, Problemas y secretos maravillosos de las Indias [1590; Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1945], 160). 9. Cited in David Brading, Origins of Mexican Nationalism: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico (Cambridge: Center of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, 1985), 10. 10. R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in a Colonial Mexico City, 1600–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 19. 11. Walter Mignolo, “When Speaking Was Not Good Enough: Illiterates, Barbarians, Savages, and Cannibals,” in Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, ed. René Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 335. 12. Francisco López de Gómara, Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary, trans. and ed. Lesley Byrd Simpson (1552; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 367. 13. My thanks to Claire Farago, who coauthored an essay with me that examines this casta painting, among other works; James M. Córdova and Claire Farago, “Casta Paintings and Self-Fashioning Artists in New Spain,” in At the Crossroads: The Arts of Spanish America and Early Global Trade, 1492–1850, ed. Donna Pierce (Denver: Denver Art Museum and Mayer Center, 2012), 129–154. 14. For a study of the positive qualities that are emphasized in casta paintings’ content, see Ilona Katzew, Casta Paintings: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). See Susan Deans-Smith, “The Colonial Subject: Casta Paintings, Collectors, and Critics in EighteenthCentury Mexico and Spain,” Colonial Latin American Review 14, no. 2 (Dec. 2005): 164–204, for a helpful study of the trends in patronage and collection of casta paintings. 15. Córdova and Farago, “Casta Paintings,” 139. Also see Susan DeansSmith, “‘Dishonor in the Hands of Indians, Spaniards, and Blacks’: The (Ra-

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Notes to Pages 155–158

cial) Politics of Painting in Eighteenth-Century Mexico,” in Race and Classification: The Case of Mexican America, ed. Ilona Katzew and Susan Deans-Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 43– 72, for a discussion of New Spanish painters and the racial and social politics of painting in New Spain. 16. Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru, trans. Harold V. Livermore (1617; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), 502–503. 17. Ronald J. Morgan, Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1810 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002), 11. 18. David Brading, Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico, 1763–1810 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 35. 19. Gloria Artís Espriu, Familia, riqueza y poder: Un estudio genealógico de la oligarquía novohispana (Mexico City: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, 1994), 21; Susan Midgen Socolow, The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769–1810: Amor al Real Servicio (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987), 193; and Ruth Hill, Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America: A Postal Inspector’s Exposé (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 15. Also see Michel Bertrand, “Comment peut-on être créole? Sur les relations sociales en Nouvelle-Espagne au XVIIIe siècle,” Caravelle 62 (1996): 99–109; and Bertrand, “La élite colonial en la Nueva España del siglo XVIII: Un planteamiento en términos de redes sociales,” in Beneméritos, aristócratas y empresarios: Identidades y estructuras sociales de las capas altas urbanas en América hispánica, ed. Bernd Schröter and Christian Büschges (Frankfurt: VervuertIberomericana, 1999), 35–52; and Bertrand, Grandeur et misères de l’office: Les officiers de finances de Nouvelle-Espagne (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999); see Mark A. Burkholder, Spaniards in the Colonial Empire: Creoles vs. Peninsulares? (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). 20. Anthony Pagden, “Identity Formation in Spanish America,” in Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 74, 81. 21. Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 62. 22. Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813, trans. Benjamin Keen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 89– 90. 23. “Llego el dia, felicisima Septentrional America, llego el dia, en que convertido el dicterio en elogio, pasasse a ser objeto de las acalamaciones, la que solo avia sido blanco de la injurias. Que importa, o Region amenissima, amada Patria mia, que importa, que hechos arcos los dedos de tantos Escritores, fuesen sus plumas saetas, Si multiplicandote escudos la prudencia, rebatidas sus puntas, no deterioro la vida de tus glorias su veneno? Que importa maquinasen suprimir las nobles producciones de tus hijos, llamandolos brutales, incultos, ru-

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dos, idolatras, sin deseo de saber, si contra los Duventones, Martinos, Acostas, y Garcias, claman ya noblemente ilustradas las prensas, publicando de tus amados hijos, no solo las instrucciones sabias en lo politico, sino los devotos progressos en lo Catholico? Que importa en fi n te ayan vilipendiado en las repeticiones de ciega, gentil, barbara, para acreditarte de infeliz, y nada venturosa, sin declarada ya tu fe, y digamoslo assi, como canonizada por la Suprema Cabeza de la Iglesia, te da oy a conocer por fiel, dichosa, y bienaventurada? Este fue el elogio mayor con que exalto en el dia de su Visitacion a la Madre del Encarnado Verbo, aquella extemoranea dichosisima Madre, que avia seis meses que lo era del Baptista. Bienaventurada eres, dixo Isabel a la Virgen MARIA. Bienaventurada Tu que supiste crer: Beata, quae credidisti. Por eso Yo, con el fundamento de la exposicion de tan sagrada clausula exclamo lleno de regocijo: Bienaventurados los hijos de la America! Bienaventurados los Indianos! No solo porque como MARIA supieron crer, sino porque tambien supieron crer a la Virgen MARIA” ( Joseph Rodríguez Vallejo y Díaz, Sermon, Mexico City, 1758, 1–2). 24. See David Brading, Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), for a penetrating examination of the role of Guadalupe as a New Spanish emblem and a focus of local patriotism. 25. Diego Durán, The Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar, trans. and ed. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 59. 26. Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Relación de antiguedades deste reyno del Piru, ed. Pierre Duviols and César Itier (1613; Lima: Institut Français D’Études Andines and Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de las Casas, 1993), 189; and Antonio de la Calancha, Crónica moralizada del Orden de San Augustín en el Peru, con sucesos ejemplares en esta Monarquía (Barcelona: Pedro Lacavalleria, en la Calle de la Librería, 1638), 309–339. Susan Schroeder has pointed out (pers. comm., 2006) that the Jesuit missionary and author Juan de Tovar furnished much of his information regarding the natives of central Mexico and their ancestors to José de Acosta. It is plausible, therefore, that subsequent Peruvian authors like Calancha and Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua were informed of Tovar’s suppositions by Acosta, who also worked in Peru. 27. See Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe, 76. 28. For a penetrating study of this painting and related works, as well as local iterations of distinction in colonial Tlaxcala, see Jaime Cuadriello, The Glories of the Republic of Tlaxcala: Art and Life in Viceregal Mexico, trans. Christopher J. Follett (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2011). 29. “Y si hasta ahora al repetido ejemplo de las vestalas romanas se conmovían los ánimos piadosos de las cristianas doncellas, no sé por qué no ha de ser más eficaz y activo el que aquí he propuesto, si a no es que también se mide el

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Notes to Pages 159–162

crédito que se le debe, con la poca fortuna que nuestro nombre ha tenido perdiendo, por mexicano y doméstico, lo que aquél ha merecido en todas partes por europeo y romano, como si la bondad de las cosas no la distribuyese Dios indefi nidamente a todas las partes donde llegó su poder” (Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Paraíso occidental [1683; Mexico City: Cien de México 1995], 65). For an examination that relates Sigüenza y Góngora’s Paraíso occidental to the viceregal image of the crowned nun see James M. Córdova, “Aztec Vestal Virgins and the Brides of Christ: The Mixed Heritage of New Spain’s Monjas Coronadas,” Colonial Latin American Review 18, no. 2 (2009): 189–218. 30. Elisa Vera Sampson Tudela, Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580–1750 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), xiv–xv. 31. Tudela, Colonial Angels, 17. 32. Diego de Lemus, Vida, virtudes, trabajos, favores y milagros de la Ven. M. Sor Maria de Jesus (Lyon, 1683), 532. 33. Lemus, “Al lector,” in Vida. Translated in Kristine Ibsen, Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Latin America (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1999), 13. 34. Cited and translated in Tudela, Colonial Angels, 29. 35. “Haveis desmentido, y estais desmintiendo con vuestra permanente egecucion a Los que poco cautos quitaban el credito sin pensar a las Americas, pintandolas tan debiles y para poco, que si fuera asi, seria una lastima habitar estas regiones; pero es el caso que esta la flaqueza en su imaginacion, no en vuestras Naturalezas; bien demuestran esto asimismo las observantisimas Religiosas Recoletas, asi de esta Ciudad como de otras de esta Nueva España” (Don Francisco Fabián y Fuero, “A Nuestras amadas Reverendas Preladas y demas Religiosas de todos los Conventos Calzados de este Nuestro Obispado de la Puebla de los Angeles,” in Regla, y Constituciones que han de guardar las Religiosas de los Conventos de Santa Catarina de Sena, y Santa Inés de Monte Policiano de la Ciudad de los Angeles [1773], 19). 36. Nuns and convents in early modern Europe also experienced scrutiny from their reformers and critics, and varied in the manner in which they interpreted the religious life. For example, see K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Craig Monson, Divas in the Convent: Nuns, Music, and Defiance in Seventeenth-Century Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Cordula van Wyhe, ed., Female Monasticism in Early Modern Europe: An Interdisciplinary View (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008). 37. Kelly Donahue Wallace, “Bajo los tormentos del tórculo: Printed Portraits of Male and Female Clergy in Eighteenth-Century New Spain,” Colonial Latin American Review 14, no. 1 (2005): 113.

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38. Kathleen Myers, Neither Saints Nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 32–40. 39. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 136, for the relation of the individual to external forces that construct identity norms. 40. Tudela (Colonial Angels, 49) instructively notes, “The New World was already too much the world-turned-upside-down, and anything less than absolute orthodoxy and consonance with the authoritative model (social, religious, or rhetorical) was in danger of being unacceptably deviant.” 41. Studies pertaining to images of Sor Juana include Ermilo Abreu Gómez, “Iconografía de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” Anales del Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía, 5a. época, vol. 1 (1934), 169–187; Ceferino Palencia, “El pintor de Sor Juana,” México en la Cultura 145 (11 Nov. 1951), 4; Francisco de la Maza, “Primer retrato de Sor Juana,” Historia mexicana 2 ( July–Sept. 1952): 1–26; Maza, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ante la historia (Mexico City: UNAM, 1980); Octavio Paz, Sor Juana; or, the Traps of Faith, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); Marcus Burke, entry for Juan de Miranda’s portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990), 351–356; Noemí Atamoros Zeller, Nueva iconografía de Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: 1695–1995, Trescientos años de inmortalidad (Mexico City: Química Hoechst de México, 1995); Pamela Kirk, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Religion, Art, and Feminism (New York: Continuum, 1999); and Ryan Prendergast, “Constructing an Icon: The SelfReferentiality and Framing of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7 (2007): 28–56. 42. “Retrato de la Phenix Americana La Madre Juana Inés de la Cruz conocida en la Europa como la Décima Musa, debiendo contarla por única sucesora de Minerva quien vinculó el tesoro de su sabiduría sirviéndose de ella para fecundar su portentoso entendimiento con la noticia de la escritura divina y toda Erudición Sagrada en la carrera de quarenta y quatro años qe. cerró con exemplar y penitente vida y Selló con su preciosa muerte Año de 1695 / Está sacado puntualmente de la copia fiel que sus hermanas las religiosas guardan con el mayor aprecio en la Contaduría del muy Religioso Convto. del Máximo Dr. San Gerónimo de esta Imperial Ciudad de México.” 43. In the tradition of de Pauw, Buffon, Raynal, and Robertson, Hegel emphasizes the effect of America’s geographical condition on its ontological identity. He states that not until the vast geographical expanses of the American continents are populated will America take its own place in history. Until this happens, America necessarily belongs not to the realm of history but to that of Nature. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914), 90. 44. “La M.R.M. Sor Juana de la Cruz nieta d D. Luis Cortes, quien fue hijo

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Notes to Pages 173–176

del Gran Capitan D. Hernando Cortez y Monrroy Conquistador de N.E y de Da. Antonia Arauz heredera lejitima de títulos y bienes que cedió a sus menores, Nieta de Da. Marina Cortes de Tabasco; Profesó de 17 años en Mexico siendo la fundadora del Convento de San Geronimo el dia 20 de Obre. de 1661.”

E pi logu e 1. Margaret Chowning, Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8– 9. 2. For a study of twentieth-century crowning ceremonies in Mexican convents see Alma Montero de Alarcón, Monjas coronadas: Vida y muerte en Hispanoamérica virreinal (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdéz, 2008), 381–385. 3. Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 47. 4. For a examination of nineteenth-century Mexican painting and nationalism see Stacie G. Widdifield, The Embodiment of the National in Late NineteenthCentury Mexican Painting (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996). 5. J. Jorge Klor de Alva, “Colonialism and Postcolonialism as (Latin) American Mirages,” Colonial Latin American Review 1, nos. 1–2 (1992): 9. 6. See Kristina Perea, Cuentos y encuentros: Paintings by Ray Martín Abeyta (Albuquerque: National Hispanic Cultural Center, 2003), and Chuck Rosenak and Jan Rosenak, The Saint Makers: Contemporary Santeras y Santeros (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland, 1998), 62.

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G l o s s a ry

adelantado. The governor of a frontier province. alcalde del crimen. A criminal judge of the tribunal of Mexico City. a lo natural. A painting produced by direct observation of the subject portrayed. amanteca. Nahuatl term for “feather artists.” amantecayotl. Nahuatl term for “feather art.” audiencia. A supreme viceregal court and governing body. ayuntamiento. A municipal council. beata. A pious laywoman, or beguine, who takes informal religious vows; beaterio resident. beaterio. A community house for pious laywomen (beatas). cabildo. A municipal or ecclesiastical council. cacique. An Amerindian lord/leader. calced. Lit. “shod.” See calzada. calzada. A nun belonging to the private life (vida particular) or to an unreformed order; also urbanista. camino de perfección. Also camino a la perfección; a series of spiritual practices developed by Saint Teresa of Ávila in her book of the same title, through which one eventually attains unity with God; more broadly, the practice of fully realizing the objectives of the religious life. casta. A racially mixed individual of Spanish America. casta paintings. A series of images featuring racially mixed couples and their progeny, produced primarily in eighteenth-century New Spain. censo. A donation given to a convent by its benefactors. chiceador. An artificial beauty mark, usually made of velvet and attached to a woman’s face. A common eighteenth-century fashion among elite women. cihuatlamacazque. Nahuatl term for “priestesses”; Aztec priestesses (sing. cihuatlamacazqui).

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cincture. A belt worn by monastics. In some orders it is a twined, ropelike belt with a series of knots representing religious vows. cofradía. A religious organization for the laity; “sodality” or “brotherhood.” colegiala. A student at a colegio de niñas. colegio de niñas. A school for girls and young women. Consejo de Indias. “Council of the Indies”; a ruling body situated in Seville that dealt with the governmental matters of Spain’s colonies. coro bajo. The lower choir of a convent church, separated from the nave by a wooden or metal grating (reja) through which the public could view the nuns and vice versa. Creole. Generally, an American-born individual of Spanish descent; also criollo. criada. A convent servant, usually of Amerindian or mixed heritage; also moza. debilidad. “Weakness” or “frailty”; a state associated with women. descalzada. A nun belonging to the communal life (vida común) or a reformed order; also recoleta. discalced. Lit. “unshod.” See descalzada. escudo de monja. A plaque or badge worn by nuns of certain orders, and featuring a painted or embroidered religious scene. Worn as a pectoral and shoulder ornament. flaqueza. “Emaciation”; a state of being associated with religious women who were expected to practice fasting and other forms of penance in order to counter sinfulness. fragilidad. “Frailty” or “weakness”; a state associated with women. huipil. A blouse worn by indigenous women in Mesoamerica. imitare. Idealized representation in which a profound truth is conveyed, usually in painting. Traditionally contrasted with ritrarre. imitatio Christi. A spiritual/meditative practice based on experiencing Christ’s passion. justicia mayor. A senior judge. lega. A convent student; also niña. leyenda. An inscription on a painting that contains information about the work’s content (e.g., biographical notes about the portrait’s subject, a key identifying monuments in a cityscape, etc.). libros de profesión. Convents’ profession registries; books containing the names and biographical data of professed members. limpieza de sangre. Also pureza de sangre; lit. “purity” or “cleanliness of blood.” Most commonly denotes unbroken line of Euro-Christian ancestry, which conferred certain privileges in colonial Spanish America. locutorio. A convent’s parlor, where nuns received guests but were segregated by a reja (metal or wooden grating). Madre. A title given to a nun; lit. “Mother.” mestiza. A girl or woman of Spanish and Amerindian parentage.

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Glossary

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Mexica. Nahuatl term for a resident of Mexico Tenochtitlan. Also the Nahuatl designation for the “Aztec” people of Mexico Tenochtitlan. monja. A woman who has taken the solemn vows of the religious life; in viceregal art, visibly identifiable by her black veil; a nun (see also religiosa de velo negro). monja coronada. Lit. “crowned nun”; a subgenre of viceregal portraiture that features nuns in their profession and funerary trappings. moza. A convent servant, usually of native or mixed heritage; also criada. mujer varoníl. A woman who exhibits heroic virtues and thereby rises above the “natural limits” of her sex; lit. “manly woman,” a common term in hagiographic literature. Nahua. An indigenous group primarily located in central Mexico, bound by linguistic and cultural traits, many of which date back to the late Postclassic period (ca. 1100–1520 CE); a native speaker of Nahuatl. Nahuatl. A major indigenous language of Mesoamerica concentrated in central Mexico. The language of the Nahuas since pre-Hispanic times, and spoken by the Mexica (Aztecs), among other Nahua groups. niña. A convent student, usually of Euro-American heritage; also lega. oidor. An audiencia or chancellery judge. olor de santidad. An expression signifying the holiness of a deceased individual. patrono. A convent patron or benefactor. perfecta religiosa. A model nun who embodies the full potential of the religious life. recogida. A resident of a recogimiento; a woman who has withdrawn from the world for a more spiritual life. recogimiento. A retreat house for laywomen that provides them asylum, spiritual guidance, and a basic education; also a term for “spiritual withdrawal.” recoleta. See descalzada. regidor. A town council member or alderman. reja. A wooden and/or metal grating in a convent that separated nuns from laypeople; featured especially in locutorios and coros bajos. relicario. A locket featuring religious imagery. religiosa de velo blanco. A girl or woman who has entered the novitiate; visibly identifiable by her white veil; a person in the stage before becoming a nun, usually lasting one to two years. religiosa de velo negro. A woman who has taken the solemn vows of the religious life; in viceregal art, visibly identifiable by her black veil; a nun (also see monja). reserva. A private-life nun’s personal expense account. retrato hablado. A portrait based on descriptions or other accounts of the sitter rather than direct observation. ritrarre. The accurate copying of nature in painting. Traditionally contrasted with imitare.

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scapular. An apron-like rectangular cloak worn by monastics that hangs over the shoulders and covers the front and back sides. sistema de castas. A legally codified system that ranked the mixed-blooded individuals of colonial Spanish America. Sor. From the Latin soror, meaning “sister.” A title given to nuns and novices. súchile. Spanish corruption of xochitl, signifying native-made floral contraptions such as floral staffs; also zúchile. tertulia. Social gatherings in which are discussed common or literary/intellectual interests; salons. third order. A religious community composed of pious laymen or laywomen who took simple vows of poverty and, in some cases, enclosure. tomar el hábito. The ceremony through which one became a novice (see religiosa de velo blanco); lit., “taking the habit.” tomar el velo. The ceremony through which one became a nun (see religiosa de velo negro); lit., “taking the veil.” urbanista. See calzada. verdadero retrato. Lit. “true portrait”; a term commonly used to authenticate the veracity of the subject portrayed in a portrait. vida común. Lit., “communal life”; a monastic lifestyle that required its members to sleep and eat in communal quarters. vida particular. Lit., “private life”; a monastic lifestyle that permitted nuns’ personal expense accounts (reservas) and private quarters. vita activa. Lit. “active life”; the religious life of most priests, which emphasizes extensive contact and interaction with the secular world through such means as proselytization and charitable works. For nuns, the vita activa mostly involved teaching girls (niñas/legas) and acts of self-mortification and penance. vita contemplativa. Lit. “contemplative life”; the religious life of most cloistered nuns, and an aspect of priests’ religious lives which emphasizes a private, or interior, spiritual life of prayer and a detachment from the secular world. xochimanque. Nahuatl term for a “flower artist/worker.” xochitl. Nahuatl term for “flower.”

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Bi bl io gr a p h y

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Córdoba, Martín de. Jardín de nobles doncellas, Fray Martín de Córdoba: A Critical Edition and Study. 1467. Trans. and ed. Harriet Goldberg. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974. Covarrubias, Sebastián de. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. 1611. Ed. Martín de Riquer de la Real Academia Española. Barcelona: Alta Fulla, 1987. Cruz, Martín de la. Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis: Manuscrito azteca de 1552. 1552. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica: Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social, 1991. Durán, Diego. Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar. 1579. Trans. and ed. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Fabián y Fuero, Francisco. “A Nuestras amadas Reverendas Preladas y demas Religiosas de todos los Conventos Calzados de este Nuestro Obispado de la Puebla de los Angeles.” In Regla, y Constituciones que han de guardar las Religiosas de los Conventos de Santa Catarina de Sena, y Santa Inés de Monte Policiano de la Ciudad de los Angeles (1773), 3–33. Fernández de Lizardi, José Joaquín. La educación de las mujeres; ó, La Quijotita y su prima. 1818–1819. Mexico City: J. Ballescá y companía, successor, 1897. Formula para dar el hábito y profession en la orden de las recoletas de nuestra Madre santa Brigida, sacada de la regla de la misma orden. Reformada por nuestra muy venerable Madre Doña Marina de Escobar. Madrid: Oficina de Antonio Pérez de Soto, 1700. Gage, Thomas. Travels in the New World. 1648. Ed. J. Eric S. Thompson. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958. Godinez, Miguel. Practica de la theologia mystica. Sevilla, 1672. Hernández, Francisco. Historia natural de Nueva España. 1576. Trans. José Rojo Navarro. Mexico City: UNAM, 1959. Humboldt, Alexander von. 1811. Ensayo político sobre el reino de Nueva España. Mexico City: Porrúa, 1966. Jesús María, Felix de. Vida virtudes, y dones sobrenaturales de la Ven. Sierva de Dios la Madre Sor Maria de Jesus Religiosa Professa en el V. Monasterio de la Inmaculada Concepcion de la Puebla de los Angeles en las Indias Occidentales. Rome: Imprenta de Joseph y Phelipe de Rossi, 1756. Laso de Vega, Luis. The Story of Guadalupe: Luis Laso de la Vega’s Huei tlamahuiçoltica of 1649. Ed. and trans. Lisa Sousa, Stafford Poole, and James Lockhart. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Lemus, Diego de. Vida, virtudes, trabajos, favores y milagros de la Ven. M. Sor Maria de Jesus Angelopolitana Religiosa en I’ll insigne Convento de la limpia Concepcion de la Ciudad de los Angeles, en la Nueva España; y natural de ella. Lyon, France, 1683. Letona, Bartholomé. Perfecta religiosa. Puebla: Viuda de Juan de Borja, 1662. López de Gómara, Francisco. Cortés: The Life of the Conqueror by His Secretary.

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Paz, Octavio. Sor Juana; or, The Traps of Faith. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Pearson, Andrea, ed. Women and Portraits in Early Modern Europe: Gender, Agency, Identity. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008. Perdigón Castañeda, J. Katia. “Ceriescultura.” In La conservación de las coronas de monjas del Museo de Arte Religioso, Ex-Convento de Santa Mónica, Puebla, ed. J. Katia Perdigón Castañeda, 123–134. Mexico City: INAH, 2011. ———. “La colección: Una propuesta de lectura iconográfica.” In La conservación de las coronas de monjas, 91–104. ———. “Flores de tela.” In La conservación de las coronas de monjas, 105–122. ———. “De hábito y corona.” In La conservación de las coronas de monjas, 75– 90. Perea, Kristina. Cuentos y encuentros: Paintings by Ray Martín Abeyta. Albuquerque: National Hispanic Cultural Center, 2003. Perry, Elizabeth. “Convents, Art, and Creole Identity in Late Viceregal New Spain.” In Woman and Art in Early Modern Latin America, ed. Kellen Kee McIntyre and Richard E. Phillips, 321–341. Boston: Brill, 2007. ———. “Escudos de monjas/Shields of Nuns: The Creole Convent and Images of Mexican Identity in Miniature.” PhD diss., Brown University, 1999. Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Imperial Policy in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. ———. “The Virgin of Guadalupe: Symbol of Conquest or Liberation?” Art Journal 51, no. 4 (Winter 1992): 39–47. Phelan, John Leddy. The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World: A Study of the Writings of Gerónimo de Mendieta (1524–1604). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956. Pierce, Donna, ed. At the Crossroads: The Arts of Spanish America and Early Global Trade, 1492–1850. Denver: Denver Art Museum and Mayer Center, 2012. Pointon, Marcia. Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Poole, Stafford. Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995. Portús Pérez, Javier, ed. El retrato español: Del Greco a Picasso. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2004. ———. “Varia fortuna del retrato en España.” In El retrato español: Del Greco a Picasso, ed. Javier Portús Pérez, 16– 67. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2004. Prendergast, Ryan. “Constructing an Icon: The Self-Referentiality and Framing of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 7 (2007): 28–56. Rabasa, José. Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

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I n de x

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and tables. Abeyta, Ray Martín, Rosario de Besos, 176–177, 176 Academia de San Carlos, Mexico City, 46, 142–143 Africans, 20, 153, 155–156 Alameda Park, Mexico City, 167, 168, 169 Alcíbar, José de, 46; Madre María Ana Josefa de Señor San Ignacio, professional portrait (Conceptionist), 58– 60, 59, 139; Sor María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo, profession portrait (Urbanist Franciscan), 47– 48, 49, 60– 61, 107, 109, 115, 176, 189–190n28 Alcíbar, José de (attributed), Madre Rosa María del Espíritu Santo, profession portrait (Carmelite), 61– 62, 63 An Allegory of America Nursing Foreigners (Anonymous), 149, 156 the Americas: allegorical images of, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 156, 208n2; Creole images of, 157–167, 169; European images of, 152–156, 159– 160, 169, 213n40, 213n43

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Amerindians: and allegorical images of the Americas, 148, 152; Christian society’s full incorporation of, 126, 128; colonial debate on nature of, 94, 95– 97, 197n7, 197n11; European images of, 152, 156; literacy of, 153; nobility of, 22, 79, 95, 97, 101, 105, 107, 198n22, 199n36; and Saint Thomas the Apostle, 159; wedding traditions of, 101, 102. See also indigenous nuns; indigenous women; Mesoamerican cultural traditions Ana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad, Sor, 139, 140 Ana María de San Francisco y Neve, Sor, 26, 27 Aristotle, 95, 197n7 Augustinian order, 23, 24, 54–57, 61 avian motifs: in crowned-nun portraits, 60, 61, 64, 99, 107, 109, 114; and Euro-Christian tradition, 99, 103, 107, 113, 115, 119; and garden imagery, 74; and Mesoamerican cultural traditions, 12, 109, 110,

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avian motifs (continued) 112–113, 114, 119; and Virgin Mary, 114 Aztec deities, 110, 110, 112, 112, 201n44 Aztec women, 7, 107, 109, 110, 159 Barbara, Saint, 35, 37 baroque style, 4, 6– 7, 174 barroco de Indias, 10, 12, 156, 159 beatas and beaterios, 18–19, 20, 40, 183n11 Benedictine order, 145 Benedict XIV (pope), 150 Borgraf, Diego de, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 87–88, 87 Bourbon reforms, 8– 9, 141, 156 Brigittines, 48, 132, 192n47 butterfly motifs: in crowned-nun portraits, 60, 61, 99, 107, 109, 114; and Euro-Christian traditions, 113, 115; and garden imagery, 74; and Mesoamerican cultural traditions, 12, 109, 110, 111, 112–113, 119, 202n56 Cabrera, Miguel, 46, 116; Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ( Jeronymite), 165– 167, 166; Sor María Narcisa / Doña Ana María Pérez Cano (Capuchin), 29 Calancha, Antonio de la, 158, 211n26 Calderón de la Barca, Frances, 30, 115, 116, 117–118 Capuchin order: austerity of, 31, 64, 123, 133, 143, 192n47; and communal life, 23, 58; and convents for indigenous nuns, 95, 99; and Creole nuns, 161; habits of, 63, 99, 132; and profession portraits, 48, 62– 64, 143, 206n26; and Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, 70 Cárdenas, Juan de, 152, 156, 170

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Carducho, Vincente, 38, 45–46, 51 Carmelite order: austerity of, 22, 32, 123; and communal life, 23, 58, 62; and crowned-nun portraits, 35, 61; habits of, 61, 62, 132; men’s profession portraits, 204n3; and nuptial mysticism, 77; and profession portraits, 138; rules and constitutions of, 22–23, 28, 138–139, 161; and shrine of el Cristo de Santa Teresa, 124 casta paintings, 153, 154–155, 169–170, 209n13 castas, 25, 152, 156, 174 Castillo, José del, Madre María Clara Josefa, profession portrait (Capuchin), 63– 64, 63, 147 Catherine of Alexandria, Saint, 86– 88, 87, 89, 90 Catherine of Siena, Saint, 61, 76, 77, 88, 89, 127, 146 Catholic Church: and canonization requirements, 90; and convents’ rights to fabricate devotional medals, 124, 205n18; on dress of private-life nuns, 141; Mexican government’s seizing of properties, 174; normative gender values of, 123; and nuns’ mysticism, 129, 145–146, 147; orthodoxy of, 165; patriarchal role toward women, 12, 13, 122, 145, 147, 164; sacred subjects, 67; Tridentine Church, 26, 164; and Virgin Mary, 80. See also monastic reforms Charles V (Holy Roman emperor), 14–15, 38, 40 Chicano identity, 176–177 client-patron relations: and crownednun portraits, 8, 11, 12, 165, 170– 171, 172; and founding of convents, 126–128; and monastic reforms, 10, 123–129, 131, 146–147;

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and normative, gendered symbols, 138; and nuns’ religious services, 125–126, 128–129, 131, 204n9 Codex Borgia, 109, 110, 110 colegios de niñas, 18, 20, 22, 73 colonialism: and art production, 117– 118, 120, 202–203n69; colonial context of crowned-nun portraits, 5– 6, 9, 10, 11, 13; and colonial difference, 9, 96– 97, 197n11; colonial mimicry, 94; discourse on the Americas, 148, 150, 152–156, 157, 169; and hybrid art objects, 120– 121; reforms in, 123–124, 126; sexual and socioeconomic hierarchies of, 11 Company of Mary, 24, 32, 64, 95, 99, 132, 173, 206n26 Conceptionist order: convents of, 14, 22; and crowned-nun portraits, 56, 58– 60, 61, 62; habits of, 55, 58, 61, 84–85, 139, 141, 143; and private life, 23, 58, 59; and profession ceremonies, 31; and profession portraits, 135, 142, 144; rules and constitutions of, 26, 32, 138, 139; and women’s education, 24 convents and cloisters: and commissioning of crowned-nun portraits, 51, 52, 56, 190n30; culturally heterogeneous art forms in, 94, 115–118, 202n63; Euro-Christian values of, 10, 94; expenses of, 133, 205n19; factions within, 22, 134, 142, 145, 160–161; founding of, 14, 123, 126; function of, 21, 124–125; garden as symbol of, 72; indigenous artistic practices influencing, 12, 119; and indigenous nuns, 93– 94, 95; influences of secular society on, 9–10, 25, 123, 124, 128, 132, 133, 141, 147; institutional identity of, 32, 138, 141, 142, 143,

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147; loans provided by, 124–125, 204n8; and locutorios, 23, 24, 58; as microcosms of multiethnic and hierarchical society, 95, 119; opportunities for women in, 1, 15, 20– 21; personal servants and slaves in, 20, 24–25, 107, 109, 118, 119, 124, 131, 132, 134, 205n19; protests against monastic reforms, 133–134, 135, 142, 143, 144, 205–206n20, 207n36; represented in profession portraits, 136–137; as symbols of civic identity, 126–128; and tertulias, 23–24; and vita contemplativa and vita activa, 32, 122, 123, 203n2; wealth generated and accumulated by, 125, 126; and women’s education, 14–15, 21, 24, 132, 133, 134. See also female monasticism; monastic reforms; nuns; and specifi c convents Coronation of the Virgin (Anonymous), 84, 85 Corpus Christi convent, Mexico City, 22, 32, 79, 93– 97, 99, 101, 167, 169 Correa, Juan, Saint Rose of Lima, 4, 5, 88 Cortés, Hernán, 40, 153, 171 Counter-Reformation, 83, 122, 162, 199n31 Creole nuns: confl icts with indigenous nuns, 93, 94, 96– 97; in convents, 21, 22, 24; European characterization of, 159–160; and hagiographies, 161; nun’s badges as expressions of pride as Creoles, 7; requirements for profession, 95, 118 Creoles: European images of, 152– 153, 155–156; identity formation of, 157; political independence of, 174; and Virgin of Guadalupe, 70,

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Creoles (continued) 72, 157, 159; wealthy, nonnoble families, 125, 156; women, 9, 11, 15, 17, 19–20, 180n16 crowned-nun (monjas coronadas) portraits: bridal rings, 30, 48, 56, 60, 64, 76, 78; and bride of Christ model, 46, 48, 60, 61, 66– 68, 172; candles in, 48, 56, 60, 61, 99, 109, 115; colonial context of, 5– 6, 9, 10; commissioning of, 46, 47, 51, 56, 190n30; compositional makeup of, 46, 48, 100; crosscultural forms and meanings in, 101–103, 105, 107, 109–115, 170; and death portraits, 33, 35, 46, 51–56, 83, 147, 191n39; Euro-Christian iconography in, 6, 11–12, 80, 94, 100; and fans, 78, 79, 100, 195n23; and floral crowns and staffs, 34, 35, 37, 48, 51, 53, 54, 55–56, 60, 61– 63, 64, 66, 91, 99, 101, 109, 114–115, 118, 173; iconographical meanings in, 8, 11, 46, 58, 68, 100, 169; as image of exceptional woman, 150; and indigenous influences on profession portraits, 5– 6, 8, 10, 11–12, 94, 109, 118; of indigenous nuns, 94, 97, 99–100; inscriptions on, 2– 3, 7, 11, 37, 48, 50, 54–55, 56, 57– 58, 60– 61, 62, 64, 66– 67, 68, 99, 100, 170, 173; and institutional identity, 11, 37, 46, 68, 141; and monastic reforms, 12, 123, 141; of nuns who held high office, 46, 56– 57, 58, 67; and patriotism of New Spain, 169–172; perfected spiritual state featured in, 4, 13; photographs replacing, 173–174; and physiognomy, 56, 67, 68, 99; and posthumous portraits of exemplary nuns, 46, 51, 56; and religious orthodoxy, 165; revival of, 176–177;

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as rhetorical devices, 8, 13; sacred interweaving with mundane in, 11, 67, 68; social relevance of, 6– 7, 8, 9; thematic groups of, 46, 189n26; tradition of, 2, 4–5, 6, 35; unsigned artists of, 46, 60– 61 Dean, Carolyn, 11–12, 120, 208n2 death ceremonies: and crowned-nun portraits, 8; crowning ceremonies, 173–174; and floral crowns and staffs, 2, 4, 30, 31, 33–34, 35, 44, 84, 107, 119; indigenous influences on, 12; and relics, 33, 35, 51; as symbol of spiritual apotheosis, 32–33; traditions of, 138 death portraits: and crowned-nun portraits, 33, 35, 46, 51–56, 83, 147, 191n39; and floral imagery, 70, 83, 103; as models of piety, 51–52, 68; nuns as Christ’s brides in, 122; tradition of, 7, 33, 35 de la Peña, Luís, 26, 122 de la Puente, Juan, 152, 156, 170 de Pauw, Cornelius, 156, 213n43 Descalzas Reales convent, Madrid, 50, 53 Diego, Juan, 82, 150, 195n31 Dominican nuns entering the Convent of Santa Catalina de Siena, Valladolid (Morelia) (Anonymous), 126–128, 127 Dominican order: beatas of, 19; convents of, 126–128; habits of, 61, 139–141; and private life, 23, 58, 184n24; and profession portraits, 88–89; and Saint Rose of Lima, 88; and women’s education, 24 Donahue Wallace, Kelly, 162, 164 Doña María Moreno y Buenaventura (Anonymous), 44, 45, 79 Don Manuel Payno de Bustamante and His Wife (Anonymous), 78, 79

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Dormition of the Virgin (Anonymous), 82–83, 82 dowries, 22, 26, 28, 47, 125, 138, 184n22 el Cristo de Santa Teresa, 124 Enlightenment, 18, 126, 134, 135 escudos de monja. See nun’s badges (escudos de monja) Euro-Christian traditions: and avian motifs, 99, 103, 107, 113, 115, 119; and butterfly motifs, 113, 115; constructs of women in, 1–2, 6, 11; and crowning of Virgin Mary, 80– 85; and floral imagery, 75– 76, 91– 92, 94, 101, 102, 103, 110, 113, 115, 119; in iconography of crownednun portraits, 6, 11–12, 80, 94, 100; and nuptial mysticism, 76, 78; and profession ceremonies, 31, 80; values of, 10 Europe: convents of, 185n31, 212n36; early modern portraiture of, 37– 38, 40, 44; images of the Americas in, 152–156, 159–160 European-born women: avoidance of employment, 17; and convents, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28, 97; group identity of, 180n16; and religious institutions, 19–20; requirements for profession, 95, 118; social rank of, 9, 11, 15 Fabián y Fuero, Francisco, 133, 143, 161–162 Farago, Claire, 120, 202n69, 209n13 feather mosaics, 94, 115–118, 202n63, 202n64 female monasticism: and communallife orders, 23, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 131–132, 133, 134–135, 136–137, 138, 142, 146, 162–164, 205n18; and dowries, 22, 26, 28, 47, 125, 138,

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184n22; in New Spain, 1–2, 5– 6, 11, 21–25, 60, 123, 132–135; and private-life orders, 23, 24, 25, 58, 59, 60, 131, 132–133, 134, 135, 136– 137, 138–139, 141, 142–143, 146, 147, 162, 164, 165, 184n24, 206n22; social honor in, 1–2, 7, 17, 21; social interests invested in, 126. See also convents and cloisters; monastic reforms; nuns Ferdinand (king of Spain), 122, 143–144 floral crowns: and austerity of Capuchin order, 64, 143, 192n47; in crowned-nun portraits, 34, 35, 37, 48, 51, 53, 54, 55–56, 60, 61– 63, 64, 66, 91, 99, 101, 109, 114–115, 118, 173; and men’s profession and death portraits, 204n3; in profession and death ceremonies, 2, 4, 30, 31, 33–34, 35, 44, 107, 119; and saints, 85– 90; and Virgin Mary, 80, 82; in women’s portraiture, 44 floral imagery: and death portraits, 70, 83, 103; in Euro-Christian traditions, 75– 76, 91– 92, 94, 101, 102, 103, 110, 113, 115, 119; as iconography of sanctity, 90– 91, 119, 121; lilies, 4, 70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 80, 82, 86; and Mesoamerican cultural traditions, 12, 92, 94, 101, 105, 107, 109–115, 118, 119, 199n36, 201n44, 201n47; and monastic reforms, 143, 146, 207n38; nun’s production of floral arts, 117, 118; and nun’s status as bride of Christ, 33, 37, 56, 66, 70, 101, 107; and odor of sanctity, 69– 70, 83; and palm fronds, 30–31, 35, 48, 53–54, 56, 60, 76– 77, 82–83, 85–86, 88– 90, 92, 103, 105, 118, 142; roses, 75– 76, 78–80, 82, 86, 88, 103, 195n31; symbols of flowers, 75, 91, 100, 109, 111,

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floral imagery (continued) 194n9, 201n43; and Virgin Mary, 82, 83, 113–114, 195n31; and virtues, 74, 91; in wedding paintings, 101, 102–103, 199n25. See also garden imagery floral staffs: in crowned-nun portraits, 48, 54, 55–56, 60, 66, 99, 109, 118; in profession and death ceremonies, 2, 4, 30, 31, 33–34, 35, 44, 107; and Virgin Mary, 83, 103; and weddings of Amer indians, 101, 102 Florentine Codex, 102, 105, 106, 110, 111–112, 115, 199n26, 200n41 flower artist; from the Florentine Codex (Anonymous), 105, 106 Franciscan order: as advocates of immaculate conception, 80–81; austerity of, 32; and cinctures, 60, 63; habits of, 99, 132; and humanist education, 14; and indigenous women, 22, 96, 99; and monastic reforms, 145; and private life, 60, 205n19; and profession ceremonies, 31; Urbanist branch, 23, 24, 47–48, 58, 60, 142, 207n36; and women’s education, 20. See also Capuchin order Franco, Jean, 203n1, 208n51 Gage, Thomas, 23–24 garden imagery: and enclosed garden, 72– 73, 78, 80, 81; as iconography of sanctity, 90; and Mesoamerican cultural traditions, 110; and Virgin Mary, 72– 73, 74, 82; and virtues, 70, 72– 75, 78, 193n8 gender: and client-patron relations, 138; and crowned-nun portraits, 9, 12; and negotiation of monastic reforms, 10, 12, 147; normative European gender archetypes,

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11, 12; and power differential, 12; and vita contemplativa and vita activa, 122, 123. See also men; women goddess and priests in paradisiacal scene (Anonymous), 112 hagiographers and hagiographies: and beatas, 19; and characterization of women, 25–26; crowned-nun portraits based on, 56; floral imagery in, 75; and “garden of virtues” theme, 70; and images of nuns, 150, 164; and indigenous nuns, 97; and mysticism, 129, 146; and nuns’ religious conviction, 32–33, 167; and nuptial mysticism, 76– 77; and odor of sanctity, 69, 70, 192n1; patriotism of, 161, 167, 172; and religious attributes of subjects, 100, 162–164; of Saint Catherine of Siena, 89; of Saint Rose of Lima, 88, 89; saints as models for, 90; of Sor Bárbara Josepha de San Francisco, 91– 92 Hortus conclusus (Anonymous), 72– 73, 73 humanist education, 11, 14, 20 Ibarra, José de: Christ in the Garden of Virtues, 74, 74, 91, 115; informal art academy founded by, 46 imitare (insightful representation), 38, 40, 187n6 indigenous nuns: confl icts with Creole nuns, 93, 94, 96– 97; and convents, 93– 94, 95; and floral imagery, 119; noble status of, 79, 95, 97, 101; as novices, 26, 28; profession ceremonies of, 22; profession portraits of, 11, 94, 97, 99–101 indigenous women: colonial characterization of, 96– 97, 197n11; ed-

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ucation of, 15, 20, 21, 118; elite women, 15, 22, 26, 28, 79, 102, 107, 199n26; and huipils, 79, 100, 153; non-Christian past of, 9; and religious institutions, 19–20; as servants to nuns, 25, 107, 109, 118, 119 Inquisition, 4, 95, 122 Isabel de la Encarnación, Sor, 35, 51, 52, 68 Isabella (queen of Spain), 122, 143–144 Jacinta María Nicolasa de Señor San José, Sor, 129, 130 Jeronymite order, 23–24, 35, 58, 60– 61, 165 Jesuit order, 145, 211n26 Jesus Christ: and avian motifs, 109, 115; Christ Child images, 2, 4, 30–31, 49, 60– 61, 77– 78, 88– 89, 170; and garden imagery, 73, 74– 75, 193n8. See also nuptial mysticism Jesús María convent, Mexico City: and death portraits, 51–52; factions within, 22, 161; and monastic reforms, 205n20; for poor daughters of conquistadors, 21; and profession ceremonies, 138; and profession portraits, 135; Sigüenza y Góngora on, 91, 97; as site of New Earthly Paradise, 159 Joseph, Saint, 77, 78, 103, 199n29, 199n31 Juana de la Cruz, Sor, 170, 171 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, 23, 25, 28, 165–167, 166, 185n29 Juana María de Señor San José, Sor, 97, 98, 99 Klor de Alva, J. Jorge, 174–175 Kubler, George, 120, 203n69

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La Concepción convent, Mexico City, 15, 22, 26, 125, 135, 205n20 La Concepción convent, Puebla, 31, 32, 135, 138–139, 143, 205n20 La Encarnación convent, Madrid, 51, 53 La Encarnación convent, Mexico City, 30, 125, 135, 191n39, 205n20 La Enseñanza convent, Mexico City, 32, 134 La Santísima Trinidad convent, Puebla, 31, 32, 135, 138–139, 205n20 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 95, 197n7 La Soledad convent, Oaxaca, 56, 57–58 Lavrin, Asunción, 96, 97 Leibsohn, Dana, 11–12, 120 Lemus, Diego de, 69, 161 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph, 44–45 limpieza de sangre, 18–19, 22, 26, 28, 47 Lockhart, James, 119–120, 203n71 López, Joseph, Monja Coronada, 176, 176, 177 López de Arteaga, Sebastián, Marriage of the Virgin, 103, 104 Lorenzana, Francisco de, 42, 133, 145 Madre Ana María de la Preciosa Sangre de Cristo, profession portrait (Urbanist Franciscan) (Anonymous), 108, 109 Madre María Antonia de Rivera, profession portrait (Company of Mary) (Anonymous), 64, 65, 147 Madre María de Jesús Tomelín (Conceptionist) (Anonymous), 42–43, 43, 44, 56, 161 Madre María de la Encarnación, funeral portrait (Augustinian) (Anonymous), 54–55, 54 Madre María de San José (Augustinian) (Anonymous), 56–58, 57, 61

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Madre María Salvadora de San Antonio, professional portrait (Augustinian) (Anonymous), 61, 62 Madre Matiana Francisca del Señor San José, funeral portrait (Conceptionist) (Anonymous), 55–56, 55 Magón, José Joaquín, Del Español, y la Yndia nace el Mestizo, por lo común, humilde, quieto, y sensillo, 153– 154, 154 Manuela de Mesa, Sor, 97, 98, 99, 147, 173, 174 Mapa de la Alameda, Paseo de la Muy Noble Ciudad de México (Map of the Alameda, Promenade of the Very Noble City of Mexico) (Anonymous), 167, 168, 169 Margarita de la Cruz, Sor, 53, 53 María Ana Josefa de Señor San Ignacio, Madre, 58– 60, 59, 139 María Antonia de Rivera, Madre, 64, 65, 147 María Clara Josefa, Madre, 63– 64, 63, 147, 191n45 María de Guadalupe, Madre, 35, 36, 37, 67 María de Jesús Tomelín, Madre, 42– 43, 43, 44, 56, 58, 69, 90, 161 María de la Encarnación, Madre, 54– 55, 54 María de San José, Madre, 25–26, 56– 58, 57, 61, 70, 163–164, 163 María Engracia Josefa del Santísimo Rosario, Sor, 61, 62 María Francisca Josefa de San Felipe de Neri, Sor, 2–4, 3, 13, 60 María Ignacia de la Sangre de Cristo, Sor, 47–48, 49, 60– 61, 107, 109, 115, 176, 189–190n28 María Joaquina de Señor San Rafael, Sor, 97, 98, 99 María Juana de Señor San Rafael y Martinez, Sor, 108, 109, 147

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María Manuela de Señor San Ignacio, Sor, 114, 115 María Manuela Josefa de Zamacona y Pedraza, Sor, 140–141, 140, 147 Mariana de la Cruz y Austria, Sor, 48, 50–51, 50 Mariana de la Encarnación, Sor, 22, 161 Mariana de San José, Madre, 51, 52 María Salvadora de San Antonio, Madre, 61, 62 María Vincenta de San Juan Evangelista, Sor, 108 marriage portraits, 78, 101, 109 married couple; detail from Codex Borgia (Anonymous), 109, 110 Matiana Francisca del Señor San José, Madre, 55–56, 55 Maximilian II (Holy Roman emperor), 53 Medoro, Angelino (attributed), Saint Rose of Lima, 88, 89 men, 18, 122, 204n3. See also priests Mesoamerican cultural traditions: concepts of, 12, 92, 94, 109, 110– 114, 201n46, 201n47, 201n50; and crowned-nun portraits, 5– 6, 8, 10, 11–12, 101, 109, 118; customs surviving conquest, 5, 113–115, 119– 121; devotional literature, 113–114; and floral imagery, 12, 92, 94, 101, 105, 107, 109–115, 118, 119, 199n36, 201n47, 201n44; and flower mountain motif, 110–112, 114–115, 201n47, 201n50; indigenous artistic practices, 12, 113, 115–118; and profession portraits, 5– 6, 7, 8, 10, 11–12, 92, 94, 109, 118 mestizaje, 171, 174–175 mestizos, 15, 19–20, 152, 153 Mexican nationalism, 174–175 Mignolo, Walter, 156, 174 miscegenation, 153, 155, 169

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Index

monasteries, garden as symbol of, 72, 193n6 monastic reforms: and client-patron relations, 10, 123–129, 131, 146– 147; convents protesting, 133–134, 135, 142, 143, 144, 205–206n20, 207n36; lack of observance of, 134, 206n22; and lifestyle in New Spain’s convents, 22, 25, 60, 123, 132–135; mixed responses to, 143, 162, 207n39; nuns’ agency in negotiation of, 10, 12, 13, 123–124, 135, 141–142, 143, 144–145, 146, 147; policing of, 123, 133; in Spain, 143–145; and students in convents, 133, 134; and surge in profession portraits, 8, 12, 135, 138– 147, 206n24 Montero de Alarcón, Alma, 7–8, 187n3, 189n26 Moreno y Buenaventura, María, 44, 45, 79 mother-goddess devotions, 78, 194n22 Motolinía, Toribio de Benavente, 14, 20, 103, 105 Muriel, Josefi na, 6, 8 Nahua traditions, 102, 107, 112, 113– 114, 119, 203n71 neoclassical style, 7, 142–143, 174 New Spain: aesthetic complexities of the baroque in, 4, 6– 7, 174; allegorical representations of, 148, 150; artists of, 154–155; cultural heterogeneity in, 8, 10, 120, 170, 181n20; female monasticism in, 1– 2, 5– 6, 11, 21–25, 60, 123, 132–135; identity formation in, 156, 157; patriotism of, 161, 167, 169–172; portraiture of, 34, 40, 42–46, 50–51; providential destiny of, 81–82, 150; and religious identity formation, 7,

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13, 68; role of women in, 9–10, 11, 17–18. See also colonialism nobleman receiving flowers; from the Florentine Codex (Anonymous), 105, 106 Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe y Enseñaza de Indias convent, Mexico City, 22, 95 Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción convent, Mexico City, 14–15 Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción de Cosamaloapan convent, Morelia, 22, 95 Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles convent, Oaxaca, 22, 95, 99 Nuestra Señora de los Remedios (Our Lady of the Remedies) (Anonymous), 117 Núñez de Miranda, Antonio, 31–32 nuns: as advocates in spiritual matters, 122; agency as Christ’s brides, 1–2, 5– 6, 10, 12, 13, 15, 128, 146, 147, 181–182n24; artistic objects produced by, 46, 189n25; Aztec priestesses compared to, 7, 107; as Christ’s mother, sister, and bride, 76; corporate identity among, 11; floral arts produced by, 117, 118; and humanist education, 14; and legitimacy of birth requirement, 26, 28, 47, 66; and limpieza de sangre requirement, 18–19, 22, 26, 28, 47; metamorphosis of face at death, 35, 51, 52, 68; mysticism and visions of, 129, 145–146, 147; as novices, 26, 28–30, 47, 61, 134; occasions for crowned-nun portraits, 37; and patriarchal Church, 12, 13, 122, 145, 147, 164; and perfecta religiosa, 13, 30, 33, 123, 138, 141, 147, 162, 169; printed portraits of, 162– 164; reasons for choosing religious

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nuns (continued) life, 29–30; religious names of, 147; ritual life of, 25–26, 28–34; and road to perfection, 122–123, 128; rule of enclosure, 23, 184n26; as second order of religious life, 183n11; as socially responsible citizens, 173; “taking the habit” ceremony, 28–29; vows of, 19, 23, 132, 138–139, 141, 183n11. See also Creole nuns; indigenous nuns nun’s badges (escudos de monja): as component of habits, 139; in crowned-nun portraits, 48, 55, 56, 60, 170, 191n39; and feather mosaics, 116–118; of private-life orders, 131, 132, 141–142, 207n36; in profession portraits, 143; social relevance of, 7; Virgin Mary on, 2, 84, 85, 116; and Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, 85 nuptial mysticism: in crowned-nun portraits, 4, 60, 66– 67, 80, 94, 164; and crown of virginity, 88; in death portraits, 70; in EuroChristian tradition, 76, 78; and iconography of sanctity, 90; imagery of, 77– 78; and profession ceremonies, 31–32, 66; as theme in profession portraits, 4, 12, 66, 122, 123–124, 142, 146, 147 Ortiz Sotomayor, Francisca de (attributed), Madre Mariana de San José, 51, 52 Pachacuti Yamqui Salcamayhua, Juan de Santacruz, 158, 211n26 Pacheco, Francisco, 38, 80, 81, 83, 103 Palafox y Mendoza, Juan de, 1, 2, 13, 164 Pantoja de la Cruz, Juan, 38, 40

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paradisiacal mountain scene, detail of (Anonymous), 111, 111 Payno de Bustamante, Manuel Antonio, 78, 79 Payo y Ribera (archbishop), 23, 132, 133, 141 Perry, Elizabeth, 7, 116, 141–142, 207n36 Philip II (king of Spain), 38, 39, 40 portrait of a crowned nun (Augustinian) (Anonymous), 174, 175 Portrait of Archibishop Fray Juan de Zumárraga (Anonymous), 40, 41, 42 portraiture: in early modern Europe, 37–38, 40, 44, 100–101; essence of subject in, 42, 51; formal restraints of, 154; in New Spain, 34, 40, 42– 46, 50–51; and physiognomy, 44– 45; popular portraiture, 10; printed portraits of nuns, 162–164; and socioeconomic status, 28, 43–46, 78; in Spain, 38, 44, 51, 52–53, 56, 67; “true portrait” inscription, 42–44, 188n15; as verifiable documents, 42, 66; of viceregal society, 40, 42–43, 44, 53–54, 55, 67– 68, 101, 174. See also crowned-nun (monjas coronadas) portraits; death portraits; profession portraits priests, 32, 122. See also men profession ceremonies: costs of, 21–22, 125, 126, 184n22; and crowned-nun portraits, 8, 46– 47, 189n26; crowning ceremonies, 30–31, 173–174; days spent at home before, 29, 30; EuroChristian roots of crowning practices, 31, 80; and floral crowns and staffs, 2, 4, 30, 31, 33–34, 35, 44, 84, 119; indigenous influences on, 12; and nuns as Christ’s brides, 15, 21, 31, 32–33, 72, 138; and nuptial

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Index

mysticism, 31–32, 66; sacrament of marriage linked to, 66; and socioeconomic hierarchies, 11; as symbol of spiritual apotheosis, 32–33; traditions of, 138, 142, 146 profession portrait of a Conceptionist nun (Anonymous), 142, 144 profession portraits: and bride of Christ model, 138; convents represented in, 136–137; demand for, 8, 9, 172; floral crowns and flowery staffs in, 2, 34; of indigenous nuns, 11, 94, 95– 97, 99–101; inscriptions on, 2–3, 146; and monastic reforms, 8, 12, 135, 138–147, 206n24; and perfecta religiosa model, 138, 141, 162; and religious identity formation, 7, 13, 124, 145; and Saint Rose of Lima, 88–89, 90; surge in production of, 12, 123, 135, 138–147, 206n24; thematic groups of, 189n26; theme of nuptial mysticism in, 4, 12, 66, 122, 123–124, 142, 146, 147. See also crowned-nun (monjas coronadas) portraits Protestantism, 81, 83 Raynal, Guillaume, 156, 213n43 Regina Coeli convent, Mexico City, 135, 205n20, 207n38 religious identity formation: and crowned-nun portraits, 68; and profession portraits, 7, 13, 124, 145; and Virgin of Guadalupe, 70, 72, 81–82, 157–158, 159, 195n31 religious paintings: depictions of Virgin Mary in, 80–85; formal restraints of, 154; symbolic conventions of, 51, 68, 74– 75, 82–84, 88, 89, 103 reservas (expense accounts), 23, 131, 135, 138

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retrato (portrait), defi nition of, 38 Revelation, 80, 83, 127 ritrarre (imitative copying), 38, 40, 187n6 Robertson, William, 156, 213n43 Rodríguez Juárez, Juan (attributed), Desposorio de Indios (Indian Wedding), 101, 102–103, 102 Romero de Terreros, Manuel, Retratos de monjas, 6, 8 Rosa María del Espíritu Santo, Madre, 61– 62, 63 Rose of Lima, Saint: canonization of, 4, 5, 88, 90; and crownednun portraits, 10, 169; crown of, 88, 89, 90; and Dominican habits, 61; and floral staff, 103; iconography of, 89– 90; mysticism of, 146; and nuptial mysticism, 76– 77, 78; prayers of, 129; and Spanish American religious identity, 70, 72 Ruíz, Juan Patricio Morlete, 46; Sor María Francisca de San Pedro, profession portrait (Carmelite), 47 Ruiz Gomar, Rogelio, 6– 7, 190n30 the sacred, 10–12, 113, 119–121, 147, 172 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 102, 152, 156, 170, 202n64 saints: female saints, 4, 11, 49, 61, 66, 67, 88, 90; and floral crowns, 85– 90; iconography of, 4, 119; requirements for canonization, 90. See also specifi c saints Salcedo, Sebastián, Virgin of Guadalupe, 148, 150, 151, 156, 157 San Agustín, Sebastiana Inés Josepha de, 28, 29, 79–80, 195n25 San Bernardo convent, Mexico City, 135, 205n20 Sánchez, Miguel, 157, 195n31

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sanctity: iconography of, 90– 92, 119, 121; odor of, 69– 70, 83, 91, 161, 192n1 San Jerónimo convent, Mexico City: and crowned-nun portraits, 170– 171; and death portraits, 191n39; and indigenous women as servants, 107; and Juana Inés de la Cruz, 23, 25, 28, 165–167, 185n29; and monastic reforms, 135, 205n20; as private-life order, 165 San Jerónimo convent, Puebla, 60, 67, 135, 205n20 San José convent, Puebla, 22, 35, 51 San José de Gracia convent, Mexico City, 135, 139, 205n20 San Juan de la Penitencia convent, Mexico City, 96, 134 San Lorenzo convent, Mexico City, 22, 23, 135, 205n20 Santa Catalina de Siena convent, Morelia, 126–128, 127 Santa Catalina de Siena convent, Puebla, 129, 135, 139, 205n20 Santa Clara convent, Barcelona, 144, 145 Santa Clara convent, Mexico City, 47–48, 109, 134 Santa Clara convent, Puebla, 135, 142, 146, 205n20 Santa Inés convent, Mexico City, 21, 125–126 Santa Inés convent, Puebla, 126, 135, 139, 140–141, 205n20 Santa Mónica convent, Puebla, 54–55, 58, 194n9 Santa Teresa la Antigua convent, Mexico City, 22, 32, 124, 138, 161, 205n18 Sebastiana Inés Josepha de San Agustín (First-order Franciscan) (Anonymous), 28, 29, 79–80, 100–101, 195n25

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Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 95, 197n7 Sigüenza y Gógora, Carlos de, 7, 51– 52, 91, 97, 107, 158–159, 161 slaves and slavery: debates on, 95, 197n7; European images of, 153; personal servants and slaves in convents, 20, 24–25, 107, 109, 118, 119, 124, 131, 132, 134, 205n19 social honor, 1–2, 7, 17, 18, 21, 61, 68, 78– 79 socioeconomic status: of Amerindians, 101, 198n22; in convents, 25; of Creole and European-born women, 9, 11, 17; and crownednun portraits, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 66– 67, 68, 100, 101, 189–190n28; and indigenous nuns, 79, 95, 97, 100; and marriage portraits, 78; and portraiture, 28, 43–46 sodalities (cofradías), 20, 28, 125, 127, 128 Song of Songs, 72, 76, 80, 81 Sor Ana Josefa de la Santísima Trinidad, profession portrait (Conceptionist) (Anonymous), 139, 140 Sor Ana María de San Francisco y Neve (Conceptionist novice) (Anonymous), 26, 27 Sor Ana Rita de Guadalupe, profession portrait (Conceptionist) (Anonymous), 143, 144 Sor Jacinta María Nicolasa de Señor San José, with the Virgin of Guadalupe (Dominican) (Anonymous), 129, 130 Sor Juana de la Cruz ( Jeronymite) (Anonymous), 170–171, 171 Sor Juana María de Señor San José, profession portrait (First-order Franciscan) (Anonymous), 97, 98, 99 Sor Manuela de Mesa, profession portrait (Company of Mary) (Anonymous), 97, 98, 99, 147, 173, 174

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Sor Margarita de la Cruz, funeral portrait (Anonymous), 53, 53 Sor María Engracia Josefa del Santísimo Rosario, profession portrait (Dominican) (Anonymous), 61, 62 Sor María Francisca Josefa de San Felipe Neri, profession portrait ( Jeronymite) (Anonymous), 2–4, 3, 13, 60 Sor María Joaquina de Señor San Rafael, profession portrait (Capuchin) (Anonymous), 97, 98, 99 Sor María Juana de Señor San Rafael y Martínez, profession portrait (Urbanist Franciscan) (Anonymous), 108, 109, 147 Sor María Manuela de Señor San Ignacio, profession portrait (Capuchin) (Anonymous), 114, 115 Sor María Manuela Josefa de Zamacona y Pedraza, profession portrait (Dominican) (Anonymous), 140–141, 140, 147 Sor Mariana de la Cruz y Austria (Anonymous), 48, 50–51, 50 Sor María Vicenta de San Juan Evangelista, profession portrait (Dominican) (Anonymous), 108 Spain: and depictions of the Americas, 152; and depictions of Assumption of the Virgin Mary, 83; and depictions of Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, 80; and funerary portraits, 33, 35; monastic reforms in, 143–145; and nuns’ religious services, 204n9; portraiture in, 38, 44, 51, 52–53, 56, 67 Sylverio, Francisco, Madre María de San José (Augustinian), 163, 163 Symbolic Nuptials of Christ and a Religious Soul (Anonymous), 77– 78, 77 Teresa of Ávila, Saint: and Carmelite order, 22, 62; mysticism of, 146,

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208n46; and nuptial mysticism, 76, 77, 78, 193n4; prayers of, 129; and soul as garden, 70; and way of perfection, 30 Thomas the Apostle, Saint, 158–159 Titian, 40, 42; Philip II in Armor, 38, 39, 40 Toltecs, 115, 159 Torres, Cayetano Antonio de, 75, 91, 123, 203n2 Tota Pulchra (Anonymous), 80–81, 81 Toussaint, Manuel, 6, 7, 179n4 Traje de las Religiosas de los Conventos de México, de los Colegios, y Recogimientos (Vestments of the religious women of Mexico’s convents, colleges, and retreats) (Anonymous), 15, 16, 132 Tudela, Elisa Sampson Vera, 96, 213n40 Urban VII (pope), 83 Vallejo y Díaz, José Rodríguez, 157–158 viceregal society: and floral imagery, 107; and funerary portraits, 33; and literacy, 153; marriage registries, 66; and Mesoamerican cultural traditions, 114–115; portraiture of, 40, 42–43, 44, 53–54, 55, 67– 68, 101, 174; role of crownednun portraits in, 6– 7, 11, 37, 51, 53–54, 60, 61, 66, 172, 190n30; socioracial hierarchy of, 15, 25; symbolism in religious paintings, 74, 75, 82–84, 88, 89, 103; and Virgin of Guadalupe, 150 Villalobos, Juan de, 46; Madre María de Guadalupe, 35, 36, 37, 67 Villalpando, Cristóbal de, Assumption of the Virgin, 83–84, 84

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Virgin Mary: annunciation of, 75; assumption of, 82, 83, 84; coronation of, 80–85, 85; crowned-nun portraits linked with images of, 4, 11, 59, 62; dormition of, 82–83, 82, 84; and floral imagery, 82, 83, 113–114, 195n31; and garden imagery, 72– 73, 74, 82; iconography of, 90; lily as symbol of, 74, 75, 80, 82; and Mesoamerican cultural traditions, 113–114; on nun’s badges, 2, 84, 85, 116; and nuns’ death ceremonies, 33; and nuptial mysticism, 76, 77, 78; paintings of marriage of, 103, 199n29; symbol as well of living water, 73; Tota Pulchra, 80; Virgin of the Apocalypse, 109; Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, 60, 62, 70, 80–81, 85; women modeled on qualities of, 2, 6, 73, 116 Virgin of Guadalupe: images of, 10, 129, 150, 156, 157, 176; miracles associated with, 129, 150, 157; and Spanish American religious identity, 70, 72, 81–82, 157–158, 159, 195n31 Virgin of the Immaculate Conception as Protector of the Capuchin Order of Nuns (Anonymous), 70, 71 virtues, 70, 72– 75, 78, 91, 193n8 Voragine, Jacobus de, 82, 83, 86 women: and acceptance of conjugal relations with men outside mar-

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riage, 17; avenues of spiritual formation, 17–21; Aztec women, 7, 107, 109, 110, 159; education of, 11, 14–15, 18, 19–20, 21, 24, 32, 64, 99, 118, 124, 132, 133, 134, 173; EuroChristian constructs of, 1–2, 6, 11; and Hispanic social norms, 15, 25; institutions dedicated to, 14– 15; moralists’ views of, 17–18, 25; moral weakness of, 25, 26, 30, 31; and mysticism, 122, 203n1; population of unmarried women, 18; portraits of, 44; role in New Spain, 9–10, 11, 17–18; story of Eve as model applied to, 6, 25. See also convents and cloisters; Creole women; European-born women; female monasticism; indigenous women xochimanque (flower artists/workers), 105, 107 Xochiquetzal; detail from Codex Borgia (Anonymous), 110, 110, 201n44 Yllanes del Huerto, Juan Manuel, The Preaching of Saint Thomas in Tlaxcala and the Introduction of the Veneration of the Cross, 159, 160 Zumárraga, Juan de, 14–15, 21, 40, 41, 42, 157, 195n31

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