Speaker 
 
Clare Kobasa 
Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs 
Saint Louis Art Museum 

Hello, my name is Clare Kobasa, and I’m the Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs.

As you look at these two paintings with the same title—The Virgin of Guadalupe—what similarities do you notice? What are the differences? In large scale at the center of each canvas appears the Virgin herself, the mother of Jesus in Catholic tradition, but as she miraculously appeared to Juan Diego in 1531 in Mexico. This story is recounted in the four roundels at the corners of each, culminating in the bottom right, where Diego has dropped his tilma, or cloak, to reveal the heavenly apparition in material form as a painting. By both replicating the miraculous image and including the narrative of its making, these two later copies participate in and expand on a long history of powerful images in Catholic practice. The Spanish introduced Catholicism as part of their often-violent colonial project, seeking to convert Indigenous inhabitants to this new religion. This process often occurred through the appropriation of existing sacred practices, such as the landscape where Diego first encountered the Virgin—the hilltop of Tepeyac, the site of previous Mexica worship of the goddess Tonantzin. In Antonio de Torres’s painting, he also included a depiction of a new sanctuary, completed in 1709, which quickly became the site of pilgrimage, the goal of a journey. While people could go to the image, the image itself also began to travel in the form of these copies, whose authority was confirmed by the involvement of celebrated artists who closely followed rules laid down for the reproductions. The extent of that spread extends to the present, with images of her still visible worldwide today.