In 1751, New Spain’s most famous painter, Miguel Cabrera, was given unusual access to the enormously popular Virgin of Guadalupe icon. By this point, devotees near and far had little doubt that the image in the Tepeyac sanctuary was divinely made, miraculously imprinted on the cloak (tilma) of a humble Indian in the first decade after the conquest. After meticulous examination, scientific analysis, and devotional considerations, Cabrera acknowledged the holy tilma’s incorruptible brilliance—the image’s divine origin was confirmed and its perfection as a work of art was touted in a remarkable treatise entitled Maravilla Americana (1756). Standing before the case-free icon, Cabrera painted three copies: one for Pope Benedict XIV, a second for Archbishop José Manuel Rubio y Salinas, and a third for himself (intended to serve as a model for future iterations). Not surprisingly, the Cabrera workshop flourished in the following decade and a half, offering up copies that were authenticated on multiple fronts: the “certified replications” followed the likeness and exact measurements of the Tepeyac image, claimed to have touched the original, and bore the artist’s signature. Earlier Mexican portraits of Guadalupe had similarly balanced devotional exactitude with artistic originality, yet Cabrera does more than confirm the numinous icon’s status and its relevance as a religious image: his eighteenth-century “true portraits” fuel the proto-patriotic frenzy of his viewing public, an audience still euphoric over the promotion of the olive-skinned Virgin to patroness of Mexico City (1737) and of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (1746).

Just as there have been a seemingly infinite number of Guadalupe copies produced since Cabrera’s day, perhaps it is fair to ask whether another monograph dedicated to this devotional image is needed. No other icon has commanded so much scholarly attention: Francisco de la Maza (El guadalupanismo mexicano, Mexico City: Porrúa, 1953), Jacques Lafaye (Quetzalcóatl et Guadalupe: La formation de la conscience nationale au Mexique (1531–1813), Paris: Gallimard, 1974), Edmundo O’Gorman (Destierro de sombras: Luz en el origen de la imagen y culto de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe del Tepeyac, Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México, 1986), Stafford Poole (Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995; The Guadalupan Controversies in Mexico, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), and D. A. Brading (Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition across Five Centuries, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) have all produced classic book-length studies that address key aspects of the Guadalupe phenomenon, from the early controversies and the validity of the apparitions, to her importance during the Independence movement and relevance as a national symbol. Indeed, several scholars have recently felt the need to look beyond and around the vortex of Tepeyac in an effort to more fairly survey the devotional landscape of Spanish America (see, for instance, the recent work of William B. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010). Jeanette Favrot Peterson’s Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas, however, is a rich, original, and much-needed art-historical contribution that will no doubt be essential reading for Guadalupe scholars as it will for all art historians who contend with early modern devotional icons and the global matrix from which they emerged and in which they operated.

The book is actually centered on an assortment of Guadalupes: the late medieval sculpture from Extremadura, Spain (late twelfth century); Diego de Ocaña’s South American interpretations of the Spanish sculpture (ca. 1599–1605); and the Mexican image (ca. 1555) that came to be celebrated as an acheiropoietic icon (not made of human hands). While Peterson’s chief focus is the Mexican object, her book’s historical and pictorial breadth make it clear that the Spanish Romanesque sculpture and the South American example—she concentrates on a Guadalupe from Sucre, Bolivia—must be explored for a fuller understanding of the Mexican object’s history, delineation, and phenomenological import. By weaving the three major icons into one historical tapestry, furthermore, the book’s ten compact and well-written chapters are able to address themes critical to each. Race and representation, materiality, transatlantic patronage, and the connection between a Marian devotion and a pre-Christian cultic landscape are just a few of the many topics successfully explored.

The Extremadura sculpture is a wooden black Madonna, a medieval type common in the Iberian Peninsula and venerated in many locations such as Montserrat, Atocha (Madrid), and Zaragoza. The historiography attributes Marian blackness to environmental accidents, pre-Christian Iberian goddess cults, a biblical Palestine, a previous state of entombment, and St. Luke’s legendary Marian portrait. Peterson is less concerned with the initial reasons for Guadalupe’s coloration—“origins of cult figures are almost always beyond historical confirmation” (32)—and is more invested in how blackness became “an integral part of the devotional object’s potency” (33). Remarkably, the earliest accounts (ca. 1400–40) make no mention of her color. But in the sixteenth century, when devotion to the image was at its peak, her blackness confirmed authenticity, incorruptibility, and divinity. Despite the importance placed on age, the sculpture’s Romanesque figure is largely hidden due to the premium placed on her sumptuous wardrobe. As Peterson notes, “archaism . . . became an aesthetic embarrassment in an era of extravagantly clothed Marian images” (31).

The impressively draped Spanish Guadalupe was visually captured and distributed in South America by a Jeronymite friar, Diego de Ocaña. Hailing from the Extremadura monastery, Ocaña hoped to disseminate her devotion throughout the Americas and procure funds for the motherhouse. During his nine-year journey, he produced seven images of Guadalupe; most were intended for public display and customarily painted, bejeweled, and exhibited with dramatic impact, revealing the artist’s understanding of tactile piety, sacred theater, and “the spectacle of seeing” (43). Our Lady of Guadalupe from Sucre, Bolivia, perhaps the finest example, was painted on a two-dimensional surface and literally loaded with precious gems. Neither a wooden sculpture nor a black Madonna, her physiognomy and materiality nevertheless are significant. Ocaña claimed the popularity of his images was due in large part to the virgin’s “brown, but not black” skin color. Whereas the friar found racial parity to be vital to her reception, the spectacle of a mountain-shaped disembodied image—composed more of gems and stones than a human figure—was perhaps more important to an indigenous public. As Peterson rightly points out, pre-Christian Andean concepts of the sacred were more inclined to locate an “animating essence” in natural, nonhuman forms. “If skin color may not have been as noteworthy a factor as Ocaña presumed, indeed hoped for, as a lure to attract the indigenous constituency, Ocaña’s lavish use of precious stones and metals in his icons was a more powerful draw for their association with native values of sacrality” (63).

As scholars of the Mexican Guadalupe know well, “there is a stunning lack of visual similarity” between “the Romanesque wooden sculpture in Spain and the icon on cloth in Mexico” (103). Although the Mexican icon deviates from the Extremadura prototype, it follows early modern European conventions for the Immaculate Conception and the Virgin of the Assumption. The icon’s olive-grey skin and striking black hair, however, are unknown features in the early sixteenth-century European corpus. Perhaps Archbishop Alonso de Montúfar, an early proponent of the cult and possible patron of the painting, hoped that the “racially corrected Virgin Mary” might “lure the indigenous constituency,” as Peterson suggests (135). She further speculates that a native audience saw itself reflected in Guadalupe’s ethnic features, as did perhaps the alleged artist himself (the native painter Marcos Cipac de Aquino). Yet the primary sources are especially silent on this matter. The questions are valid, yet perhaps Peterson might have enriched her discussion by referencing other racialized or darkened Mexican images and their colonial reception. In the spirit of intervisuality, a concept she borrows from Michael Camille, what might be gained by putting Guadalupe in dialogue with the brown-skinned Virgin of Tecaxic or the black Christ of Encino (Aguascalientas)?

As in colonial Bolivia, perhaps a native audience in New Spain cared less about overt racial correspondences and more about the link between materiality and sacrality. Here Peterson is at her best, describing the tilma not only as cloth but also as garment, icon, relic, and skin. She focuses on the slippage between these categories and, reinforcing her argument that the apparition legend responded partly “to native, and specifically Nahua, concepts of the sacred” (173), explores the pre-Columbian concept of ixiptla. In the Nahua world, all accouterments were “transformative, converting both man-made and human likenesses of divinities into containers of a god’s energy” (173). In Aztec festivals, the sacred was made present via the practice of donning specific paraphernalia and garments (including, at times, the human skin of a sacrificial victim). As Peterson explains, sacred clothing could have a metonymic status and be a surrogate for the deity itself. Thus, it is possible to see Juan Diego not only as a Christian Indian-seer but also as a native deity-impersonator who literally wore the olive-skinned virgin like a second skin, simultaneously supporting and becoming the divine. Peterson is persuasive, and the numerous portraits of Juan Diego-Guadalupe underscore the fusion she describes: “her body is his” (160).

The divine cloak was an emphatically native accoutrement, but it also mimicked one of the most paradigmatic Christological icons, Veronica’s Veil. Belonging to a female believer, the cloth allegedly touched the face of Christ and miraculously captured his visage with blood and sweat. Whereas the legendary Veronica has long been purged from the Roman liturgical calendar, the equally legendary Juan Diego counts himself as a recent addition (canonized in 2002). Yet in portraits of both, their respective icons tend to simultaneously hide and stand-in for the human body. Peterson illustrates her point with the arresting The Patronage of Our Lady of Guadalupe (ca. 1746) and St. Veronica with the Sudarium (ca. 1420). Theological and formal similarities between Guadalupe and the sudarium are all the more conspicuous due to the fact that the Mexican icon once hung above Alonso López de Herrera’s copy of the Holy Face (ca. 1624), an arrangement wonderfully captured in José Juarez’s epic painting The Franciscan Penitential Procession from Tlatelolco to Tepeyac against the Plague (ca. 1653–55). For colonial viewers, the intended correspondence must have seemed clear: “The Holy Face legitimated Guadalupe’s acheiropoietic status, offered similar protective and healing functions, and, as an image that authorized further copies, also provided an excellent exemplar” (170).

Not surprisingly, the Jeronymite monastery in Spain attempted to copyright, control, and profit from devotion to Guadalupe in the Americas. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the monastery sent friar Diego de Santa María to Mexico and, as already mentioned, Diego de Ocaña to South America. Santa María demanded tithes, threatened censorship, and eventually requested that the sanctuary in Tepeyac be moved to Chapultepec where it could be under the purview of Jeronymite friars. The Mexican Guadalupe not only resisted attempts at regulation, within a century it came to supersede the popularity of the Spanish icon. As interest and devotion to the thaumaturgic tilma spread throughout New Spain and reached Iberia via text and image, Spanish friar Francisco de San José published a history (1743) maintaining that the Mexican image was “a perfect copy” of the Virgen del Coro, a fifteenth-century choir sculpture from the monastery in Extramadura. Given the visual similarities, many scholars have repeated the contention. Peterson systematically debunks the notion and argues, instead, that the influence was reversed: the transatlantic popularity of the Mexican icon compelled the monastery to “expand the importance of the Choir Virgin, claiming that she too had miraculous powers as an equally resplendent celestial body in the Extremaduran sanctuary” (131). Even more intriguing, Peterson strongly suggests that the choir image’s renovation in 1743—the Virgin received a blue mantle and stars—was completed “in an effort to make her look more like her Mexican cousin” (131).

The last two chapters continue the theme of the virgen de ida y vuelta (the “round-trip virgin”)—as the Guadalupe cult was sometimes called—by focusing on two Spanish patrons, the 8th and 10th Dukes of Albuquerque. As Peterson explains, both viceroys were crucial to the recognition, support, and global expansion of the cult. When the 8th Duke arrived in Mexico in 1653, he tactfully entered the capital city via Tepeyac; throughout his tenure he made the trip to the sanctuary and, on one important occasion, was even privy to a miracle. It was on his watch that the apparition story spread, and, indeed, a member of his retinue—Francisca Ruíz de Valdivieso, a lady in waiting to the Duchess of Albuquerque—commissioned the earliest surviving painted renditions of the apparition story. The composition, by Mexican artist José Juarez, was made explicitly for the Conceptionist monastery in Agreda, since Ruíz intended to enter the convent upon her return to Spain. One wonders, as Peterson does, the extent to which this particular painting—a devotional work focused on the supernatural appearance of Mary in America—inspired the global imagination of the convent’s abbess, the celebrated mystic Sor Maria de Jesus.

When the 10th Duke of Albuquerque arrived in Mexico City half a century later, he made it his mission to build a new, magnificent sanctuary in Tepeyac, a feat celebrated in 1709 and commemorated by Manuel de Arellano in an intriguing, minutely detailed composition. Unsurprisingly, when this viceroy returned to Spain he did so with treasured copies of the Mexican icon. Yet as Peterson reveals, value was not always located in an artist’s signature. The viceroy’s inventory lists confirm that one especially important image of the Mexican Mary was “embroidered in feathers, protected by crystal, and encased in a silver frame” (265). The point is that in elite Spanish homes, Guadalupan works ceased to be confined to the oratory and, like caste paintings and other curiosities, were displayed as American exotica. As Peterson puts it, “their very materiality, ‘embroidered in feathers,’ painted on mother of pearl, or framed in white silver, speaks to the rare and wonderful properties of the foreign” (269).

Peterson’s book is masterful study of three titular icons. If Brading’s Mexican Phoenix followed the meticulous, historiographical approach of Jaroslav Pelikan, Visualizing Guadalupe is written in the style and methodological approach of Hans Belting. It is a major contribution, an especially astute art-historical one in which icons are charged by communities of viewers with varying perspectives and concerns. Then and now, the process of seeing a sacred image is not simply a question of optics, but of the spatial and experiential aspects of viewing.