Page 13 - Guadalupe of Mexico in Spain

The birth of an idea. Guadalupe at the Prado

Every exhibition is accompanied by a museographic project stemming from a dialogue between the
curators’ expertise and the creativity of its design, which envelops and shapes its discourse. In this case,

that encounter is expressed through architecture, with inspiration drawn from the parish church of
Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Madrid. Built in the 1960s, it was a joint project involving the architects
Enrique de la Mora and José Ramón Azpiazu and the engineers José Antonio Torroja and Félix Candela.
The latter, a Hispano-Mexican, worked in collaboration with Enrique de la Mora to bring his experiments
with hyperbolic paraboloid surfaces to the project from Mexico. These parabolas evoked the Virgin’s
mantle of golden stars, a symbol which Candela materialised with the use of faceted concrete. That
architectural reference is now transferred to the exhibition in the form of radial structures that house the
different thematic sections. The itinerary thus leads the visitor through not only an exhibition on the
Guadalupan world but also a pervasive symbolic interpretation of it.

The most exact copies of the Holy Original were on a 1:1 scale, which was achieved by tracing.
Nevertheless, the workshops in Mexico City that reproduced the original image offered their clients
equally exact copies of the model in a variety of sizes, which must have involved using transfer
techniques like grids or pantographs to produce reduced sketches or stencils. Seen here is a comparison
of the scales of the pieces in the next room.

Creation, copy and materiality (room D)

Some painters examined the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe to verify its miraculous nature and explain
its pictorial peculiarities and its extraordinary state of conservation. Their observations helped them
perfect their artistic techniques and professional instruments like tracings and cartoons, which they used

to make “exact” copies. Sometimes, however, fidelity to the original was more ideal than real, and the
size and details of the mantle can be seen to vary.

During the inspection of 1751, an unusual and “whimsical” detail was noticed. Appreciable on the lower
part of the tunic was a paint stroke resembling a figure eight, which was given various meanings. From
then on, some artists included it as proof of the faithfulness of their copies. It was also common to add
inscriptions certifying that a work was an exact copy or had been “touched” against the original image so
that its sanctity would be passed over to it. The artists who carried out these inspections had a more
prestigious reputation than those who were not given the privilege of approaching the Guadalupan cape.

Art

The artists who argued that the Virgin of Guadalupe was a divine work formed part of a literary culture
that propounded the theory and practice of painting on the basis of texts like Antonio Palomino’s Museo

pictórico [Pictorial Museum]. Miguel Cabrera, the painter from New Spain, cited this treatise in
his Maravilla americana [American Wonder], written after studying the original Guadalupan image in
1751 and 1752 and dedicated to proving its supernatural status. Years later, also accompanied by
painters, the scientist José Ignacio Bartolache analysed the image and reached very different
conclusions, though without denying its miraculous nature. In his book, he included the pattern followed
by the seam that joined the two cloths of the cape and an engraving of the plant with which he thought it
had been made, proposing the fibre as the cause of the figure eight. These artistic speculations were of

great importance in the debates centred on the Virgin of Guadalupe.