Visualizing Guadalupe
Subtitle: from Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas
By: by Jeanette Favrot Peterson
Edition: First edition.
Series: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture; Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 332
ISBN-13: 9780292737754
Subjects: Our Lady of Guadalupe; Black Virgins; Christian art and symbolism; Art; Art and society
Description: "The Virgin of Guadalupe is famously migratory, traversing continents and crossing and recrossing oceans. Guadalupe's earliest cult originated in medieval Iberia, where Our Lady of Guadalupe from Extremadura, Spain, played a significant role in the reconquista and garnered royal backing. The Spanish Guadalupe accompanied the conquistadors as part of the spiritual arsenal used to Christianize the Americas, where new images of the Virgin acted as catalysts to implant her devotion within multiethnic constituencies. This masterful study by Jeanette Favrot Peterson traces the transmission of Guadalupe as la Virgen de ida y vuelta from Spain to the Americas and back again, analyzing how the Spanish and Mexican titular images, and a selection of the copies they inspired, operated within the overlapping spheres of religion and politics. Peterson explores two central paradoxes: that only through a material object can a divine and invisible presence be authenticated and that Guadalupe's images were made to work for enacting revolutionary change while preserving the colonial status quo. She examines the artists who created images of Guadalupe, their patrons, and the diverse viewing audiences for whom those images were intended. This exegesis reveals that visual evidence functioned on a par with written texts (treatises, chronicles, and sermons of ecclesiastical officialdom) in measuring popular beliefs and political strategies."--

"Spanning more than three hundred years and straddling several continents, this image-based survey analyzes the iconography and political ramifications of both the medieval Spanish devotion to Guadalupe, a black Madonna, and her American counterparts in South America and Mexico. Peterson explores the power of images that operate within the overlapping spheres of religion and political life. As a symbol both of conquest and liberation, Guadalupe embodies the ambivalence and tension of a powerful image that historically fostered independence and yet simultaneously, as a symbol of colonial authority, endorsed the very political structure it was often deployed to overthrow"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 307-318) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction : The Subjectivity of Seeing; title: The Sacrality of Blackness; title: "Because She Was of Their Color"; title: Her Presence in Her Absence; title: Making Guadalupe; title: A "Book of Miracles"; title: Sacred Cloth and Veiled Body; title: Aura and Authorship; title: The Civil/Savage Paradox; title: The Viceroys and the Virgin; title: Collecting Guadalupe.