Abstract
Indigenous people in Mexico encountered and interacted with the visual images of Mary, Jesus, and the Saints via Catholic missionaries in the sixteenth century. I examine the complexity of Franciscan changing attitudes and practices toward transforming what they perceived as idols into icons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indigenous Christians also adapted and synthesized artistic forms and meanings. Furthermore, artists from various cultures drew sources from Indigenous Mexican, European, and Asian traditions and created a visual Christian culture.
Introduction
From the early sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth century, Franciscan friar missionaries and Indigenous artists in Mexico demonstrated nuanced and complex attitudes and practices regarding the transformation of the perceived idols into sacred icons. Images and sculptures of Mary, Jesus, and the Saints played a quintessential role in recapturing the theological imagination of the Indigenous people in Mexico. Art facilitated both public processions, pilgrimages, and communal liturgical celebrations of the Catholic Church. Some Christian images traveled with friars and laypeople and became treasured objects in private homes for prayers and devotions. Scholars have analyzed the importance of iconography, similarities between Indigenous deities and the Christian Madonna, and to some extent, the cross-cultural exchange with Europe and East Asia. However, the artistic inculturations exhibited in these two centuries are distinctively different from each other.
This paper argues that Christian artistic inculturation took place despite Franciscan replacement theology in the sixteenth century and only thrived in the seventeenth century. The friar missionaries’ inability to regulate the synthesized Indigenous Catholic visual piety led to the seventeenth-century embrace of cultural and religious diffusion. I underscore Franciscan deculturation and inculturation through the visual arts, especially on the images of Mary, Jesus, and the Saints (Bailey, 1999: pp. 144–182). 1 This paper primarily covers the areas of Puebla-Tlaxcala, Michoacán, Hidalgo, and the Yucatán where the Franciscan mission occupied a concentrated presence (Jackson, 2018: p. 7). I will first identify the sixteenth-century Franciscan missional use of art and ascertain why and how certain pre-Colombian artistic traditions have been preserved and incorporated into European Christian art. The tension between the perceived idols and icons heightened the Franciscan strive to distinguish Catholic art from Indigenous religious art. However, Indigenous Catholics bestowed more sacred meanings into the diffused icons because of their reverence for both material and spirit. Second, based on the theological meanings of hybrid Mexican Christian art, I will analyze why and how Franciscans adapted to a more syncretistic type of art in the seventeenth century. Third, early modern Christian art in Mexico reflects styles and features that draw sources from a great variety of artistic traditions, themes, and iconographies not only from Mexico and Europe but also from Asia. I will highlight the multicultural influence in Christian art. Through the three-fold process of deculturation, inculturation, and interculturation, theological and cultural encounters transformed both the perceived idols and icons in Mexico.
Part One: Franciscan Deculturation and Art in Their Mission
Pre-Colombian artistic traditions survived into Franciscan mission art despite the paradoxical attitudes toward Indigenous cultures and their visual arts. Prior to 1517, artistic traditions of the five major civilizations of Mesoamerica—Olmec, the Teotihuacán, the Zapotec and Mixtec, the Maya, and the Aztec—thrived in present-day Mexico. Indigenous people's encounters with the Spaniards reflected complexity because the Spanish explorers exhibited multiple, conflicting, and changing attitudes toward Indigenous cultures in Mexico. One rare Spanish perception, as Joseph Kroger and Patrizia Granziera (2012: p. 119) assert, elevated Indigenous artistic traditions how the Spanish regarded Indigenous art as “a source of wonder and amazement.” However, most Franciscans in sixteenth-century Mexico viewed Indigenous art as the handiwork of evil that demanded destruction as discussed in the following section.
Destroying “Works of Satan”
Spanish conquistadors and the Franciscan missionaries in the sixteenth century viewed Indigenous Mexican art as “works of Satan” and unleashed a mass destruction of Indigenous art, especially stone sculptures (Von Winning, 1968: p. 233). Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés’ arrival in 1517 marked a drastic change because Cortés regarded his mission as to conquer the land and the people, and to “replace all pagan idols with Christian images” (Kroger and Granziera, 2012: p. 119). He also entrusted to the same Indigenous people the newly installed crosses and images of the Virgin Mary, hoping that they would embrace his initiative (Cervantes, 1994: p. 11). Cortés’ own advisor, the Mercedarian priest Bartolomé de Olmedo, advised him not to demand the destruction of the indigenous images (MacLachlan, 2015: p. 206). Colin MacLachlan (2015: p. 206) argues that Cortés’ militant actions of destroying Indigenous altars “directed at the religious core of Indo-Mexico's worldview had already been made before the arrival of the first missionaries: the end of mass human sacrifice removed the keystone that supported the indigenous belief structure.” Reconstructing of the Indigenous worldview was further facilitated through Catholic orders in Mexico and their evangelization efforts.
Upon the request of Cortés, twelve Franciscan missionaries arrived in Mexico in 1524 with the mission to preach to the Indigenous people (Spears and Perry, 2017: p. 11). Franciscans viewed indigenous art and even the people as works of the devil (Kroger and Granziera, 2012: p. 120). Franciscan missionary Motolinía (Toribio de Benavente) formulated his negative view of Indigenous art in the 1530s based on his experience upon arrival in Mexico with the first twelve Franciscans in 1524 (Tene, 2015: p. 19). Correspondingly, following the fourteenth century St Vincent Ferrer and his methodology of converting Jews and Muslims in Spain, another Franciscan friar, Andrés de Olmos (1990a and 1996b) waged a war against Indigenous cultures in his Tratado de hechicerías y sortilegios (Treatise on Witchcraft and Sorcery) and Tratado Sobre Los Siete Pecados Mortales (Treatise on the Seven Mortal Sins). From the Franciscan perspective, Indigenous art bore no evidence of Christianity but rather exhibited characteristics of superstitions. Therefore, Franciscan friar missionaries sought to replace “idols” with Christian “icons” from Europe, relying on the instilled Christian beliefs through visual piety.
Replacing Indigenous Art with European Images
Apart from the large-scale destruction of Indigenous art in Mexico, the second most salient feature of the Franciscan view of Mexican art was the latter's replacement with Christian images imported from Europe. The genesis of Franciscan art in Mexico was rooted in the Spanish conquest of the land. The philosophical framework of Millenarian theology heavily motivated how they viewed the Indigenous people as future rulers (Cervantes, 1994: pp. 72–73). However, to achieve such an apocalyptic vision, the friars required Indigenous people to abandon their servitude to idolatry and embrace salvation through Franciscan sacraments (Kauffmann, 2010: pp. 119–136).
Furthermore, the Law of Burgos (1512) imposed the system of encomienda, including requiring anyone who received a grant of Indigenous labor to erect a church building with a bell and the image of “Mother Mary” (Hall, 2004: p. 108; Castile, 1960: p. 17). Art historian Marcus Burke (2001: p. 42) argues that “it was reformed Franciscan piety that underlay much Spanish Catholicism in the late 1400s and 1500s and contributed so heavily to the initial missionization of Mexico. Franciscan images are a reminder of the central importance of the order and its theology in both Spain and Mexico—an element of a common religious culture.” The imposition of the reduction posed foundational changes to Indigenous communities (Spicer, 1962: p. 288).
Most importantly, newly installed Christian images must be interpreted within the context of churches built. Franciscan missionaries built the first church of Santiago Tlatelolco on top of an Aztec temple and as an extension of a Franciscan college for Indigenous children in the sixteenth century (Kelemen, 1967: p. 79). In Izamal, under the leadership of Diego de Landa (1524–1579), Franciscans leveled a Maya pyramid, constructed a church on top of it in 1560, and congregated Indigenous converts from Calkini, Chancenote, Izamal, Mani, Tekanto, Oxkutzkab, Tizimin, Sotula, Hanacma, and Uman (Jackson, 2013: p. 40; Blom, 1936: p. 108). 2 The destruction of previously active or abandoned temples also extended to images. De Landa took office as the second bishop of Yucatán in 1573 and championed the mass destruction of Mayan clay and stone images (Blom, 1936: pp. 107–108).
Second, some Franciscans commissioned Conventos (which included both a monastery and its adjacent mission church or chapel) on ruins of Indigenous sacred sites which were destroyed during the previous conquest. Hugh Thomas indicates that the church of San Francisco and the Capilla de los Reyes were built on the temple inaugurated to Quetzalcoatl (the feathered serpent) (Thomas, 1993: p. 258). San Gabriel Convento was built on top of the ruins of a temple likewise dedicated to Quetzalcoatl in Puebla City. Cortés, his Spanish soldiers, and Tlaxcaltecan allies dismantled the temple and killed approximately three thousand people in Cholulu during the Cholula Massacre in 1519 (Basista, 2013: pp. 101–102; Thomas, 1993: pp. 262–264).
Christianity hails a long history of replacing non-Christian temples with Christian buildings, starting from Constantine's time in the fourth century (Patrick, 2024: p. 31). The action of building a Christian church on top of a former pagan temple signifies discontinuity and connections with a former religion or spirituality. It also denotes a sense of Christian triumphalism over other religions and visibly marks a new Christian beginning.
Third, Franciscans readily inaugurated and gradually added Christian art to churches, friary floors, walls, and ceilings. Franciscan art was rich with retablos, murals, bas reliefs, and sculptures, both for decorative purposes and didactic instructions of Indigenous converts and friars (Spears and Perry, 2017: pp. 40–41). Richard Philips (2007: pp. 289–303) analyzes the mural paintings of the Virgin Mary being strategically placed in mendicant cloisters, including the Franciscan monastery of Cuauhtinchán, Puebla and the Franciscan monastery of Huejotzingo. Philips (2007: p. 290) points out that, “A basic intent of these Marian mural paintings was to secure, or allude to, the protected, inviolate piece of the heavenly Paradise that is the monastery, symbolized by the cloister and its Eden garth, against the depraved physical world that it occupies but of which it is not a part.” Therefore, the Franciscan missional use of Christian art is more than visual, symbolic, and instructional. Art became an integral identity marker of Christians.
Additionally, the attitudes and actions of the Indigenous people mostly and indirectly came from the Franciscan missionaries’ writings. For instance, Motolinía noted the spread of painting, sculpture, fresco, and engraving of Mary among the Indigenous people who perceived all Marian images in sixteenth-century Mexico as “Santa María” and thought of Mary as God (Hall, 2004: p. 108). Replacing Indigenous temples and images with Franciscan convents and art meant replacing the mind and the embodied spirituality of the Indigenous people and reconstructing a new Christian identity of the Indigenous population. However, Franciscan missionary priests still faced the task of reconciling with Indigenous perceptions and distinguishing between Indigenous deities and Christian images.
Distinguishing Between Idols and Icons
Franciscan friar missionaries attempted to differentiate the Christian veneration of the Virgin of Guadalupe from Tonantzin, a Nahuatl goddess. Although Bernardino de Sahagún's ethnographical study of the Nahua (Aztec) people, Florentine Codex (c. 1565), documented missionaries who commissioned Indigenous painters to paint the lives of the Aztecs, the motivation for such a detailed anthropological study was to shed light on Nahuatl languages, meanings, and cultural practices of good and evil, thus explaining why Nahua religion is not the same as Christianity (Markey, 2016: p. 97). 3 Guilhem Olivier (2019: p. 114) argues that Sahagún's Florentine Codex refuted the divine nature of the Nahua pantheon and redefined the Indigenous concept of teotl through its iconography of gods and devils.
A few exceptional Franciscan friars hoped to recreate a Christian culture among the Indigenous people, therefore they attempted to preserve Indigenous languages and guard against what they viewed as corrupt European customs (MacLachlan, 2015: p. 207). Shortly after 1535, Jacobo Testera was the first Franciscan friar to transcribe sermons and prayers into images for the Aztec-speaking Indigenous people in Yucatán (Blom, 1936: p. 75). In 1579, Mestizo Franciscan missionary Diego Valadés (1579: pp. 1–378) from Mexico published Rhetórica Christiana in Perugia, Italy, and included twenty-seven engravings. Valadés’ allegorical use of the Franciscan Tree of Life reveals what Cristina Cruz González argues as “multivalent in a colonial manner: both the pater familias and the emperor are linked to God the Father, but they are also connected to Nahuatl tree-fathers through their powerful and protective position of authority” (González, 2020: p. 130). These Franciscan enculturation efforts also reveal Indigenous persistence in Colonial Mexico because some Indigenous cultural values resonated with Christian principles that Franciscans aimed to instill.
Not only did Franciscans negotiate theological distinctions between Indigenous spiritualities and Spanish post-Tridentine veneration of the Saints, but they also wrestled with cultural and political conflicts and convergences. Therefore, Franciscans demonstrated a cautious stand in a simplistic way of replacing their perceived idols with sacred images. Although they made it amply clear that they rejected pre-Columbian idols and desired Indigenous Catholics to follow suit, they also concerned themselves with how Indigenous Catholics viewed icons as objects that incited miracles. Despite the Inquisitional power exercised by Franciscan friars such as Diego de Landa's disciplining the Mayans in Yucatán, images dedicated to santos (saints) blended Indigenous and Christian symbols and were popularized in every barrio (neighborhood) (MacLachlan, 2015: pp. 215–218).
Additionally, Franciscan art in Mexico traveled with monks, nuns, and Indigenous Catholics as they distributed these devotional images among non-Catholics and circulated them among believers. These traveling images primarily occupied the home and public spaces while stationary art mainly existed in liturgical spaces. These images were also linked as Franciscans and Indigenous artists often copied church art to facilitate their traveling. Only occasionally, portable art was housed in a chapel or friary. They were religiously and culturally informed and influenced each other while serving similar functions of Christian teaching and devotional cultivation in different social spaces.
Part Two: Inculturation: From Dissenting to Embracing
Franciscan art in seventeenth-century Mexico reveals a characteristic of inculturation in Christian images. Cristina Cruz González (2013: pp. 132–134) points out a significant paradigm shift in terms of the Franciscan dissenting attitude about miraculous icons in the sixteenth century, to an open embrace of Marian images and devotional objects in the seventeenth century. The change of Franciscan posture toward the Indigenous-incorporated Christian images may have come from the friars’ mass baptisms of Indigenous people without appropriate religious instruction and their inability to regulate the persistent Indigenous worldviews (MacLachlan, 2015: pp. 213–214). 4
Indigenous artists acquired the European artistic traditions of mannerism, oil painting, and modeling after Flemish prints due to missionary introduction. First, the Image of Madonna and Child is one of the most prominent European traditions synthesized as Christian iconography in Mexico. Kroger and Granziera (2012: pp. 128–129) trace how the Virgin Mary was associated with struggle and conquest in Byzantium in the sixth and seventh centuries and throughout the Crusades in Europe. Mexican Marian images such as the Virgin of Remedies, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin of Mercy, and the “Virgen de la Bala” became powerful symbols of protection of the conquistadores and intercession for believers (González, 2009: p. 62; Taylor, 1999: pp. 7–9). 5 In 1632, the Franciscan friars installed a sculpture of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception to reconvert the baptized but lapsed Otomies (González, 2013: p. 125). The Marian apparition to Juan Diego, the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the large attraction of pilgrimage sites further affirmed the Indigenous Christian piety and political identity.
Second, the Franciscans emphasized woundedness in depicting the body of Christ crucified (Kilroy-Ewbank, 2018: p. 39). They continued the tradition through the sculptures of Christ, such as Señor de la Capilla (the Lord of the Chapel) at the Santiago Apóstol Parish, and paintings of the Sacred Heart of Jesus during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Numerous Franciscan insignia also depicted the blood of Christ in the Indigenous form of cintli (maize cobs) and further cemented the indigenization of Christian art in Mexico (Wake, 2010: p. 2010).
Third, images of saints played a significant role in Franciscan cultivation of Indigenous piety. Charlene Villaseñor Black (2006: p. 16) examines the rise of the cult of Saint Joseph in the seventeenth century and asserts that Mexican artists repurposed pictorial prototypes for female holy persons in order to articulate Joseph with “new ideals of virtuous masculinity, which valorized caring husbands and doting fathers.” She further points out that the rise of Josephine images caused a decrease in the maternal type of Madonna and a replacement of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (Villaseñor Black, 2006: p. 17). Franciscan friars also fomented Josephine devotion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Villaseñor Black, 2006: pp. 25, 33, 101).
The visual depictions of Saint Francis of Assisi transmitted a sense of Franciscan spirituality in Mexico. Spanish artist Andrés de la Concha (1549–1612) painted the Stigmata of Saint Francis for the Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary in Cuernavaca and multiple significant retablos of biblical narratives. His paintings were Baroque in style and integrated little Indigenous elements. Other Spanish-born artists such as Sebastián López de Arteaga (1610–1652) also painted Saint Francis receiving the stigmata, further disseminating European artistic traditions of chiaroscuro (De Arteaga, 1650).
Juan Correa's oil painting of the Conversion of Mary Magdalene (c. 1680) portrays Mary Magdalene abandoning a life of prostitution for an ascetic life in the wilderness. Correa shows the transformation of Mary Magdalene and alludes to potential change in viewers’ lives. Rachel Geschwind (2012: p. 120) asserts a parallel link between Magdalene and Venus in European prints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially demonstrated through Magdalene's pose and niche-like setting. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank (2018: p. 325) suggests Correa's clothed depiction of Magdalene appropriates from the Venus pudica, the modest Venus. Correa's Magdalene in the Mexican setting, however, little references Venus but rather the change between an enlightened Magdalene and her legendary hermit life. The light over her head, the spread of luxurious jewels, and wiping off tears with a handkerchief on the left side of the canvas indicate Magdalene's repentant posture. The right side of the canvas emphasizes both a realization of Magdalene's obedience to her calling and a strong contrast between the heavily decorated interior and the lush garden and cave surrounding Magdalene's penitential life.
The paintings and sculptures of the saints serve as a compelling call for the viewers to emulate the moral example of the holy persons. The life narratives of the saints accompanied by the visual images further emphasized the theology of suffering through the brokenness of the body. They also urge believers to seek refuge in the gentle mercy portrayed through the multisensory experiences of sight and touch.
Part Three: Interculturation: Reinventing the Sacredness of Art
Mexican Christian art emerged infused with multiple cultural and religious values from Indigenous Mexico, Europe, and Asia. The following section focuses on how Indigenous artistic traditions interacted with East Asian influences in Christianity. Constantino Reyes-Valerio coined the term Arte indocristiano (Indochristian art) to describe the abundant evidence of Indigenous elements and symbols in Mexican Christian art (Reyes-Valerio, 2018: p. 24). Three major Indigenous artistic traditions survived in colonial Mexico: feather mosaics, inlaid techniques, and alabaster carving. Even though artisans utilized them in pre-Hispanic times, the Catholics viewed these artistic techniques in practical manners. Therefore, as James Córdova (2014: p. 116) shows “friars encouraged feather artists to produce religious images and ecclesiastical trappings using their traditional materials and techniques” in the sixteenth century. 6 The innovative idea of engaging Indigenous materials and techniques with Christian iconography generated a different Indigenous response. Alessandra Russo (2002: pp. 226–250) underscores Indigenous converts perceiving physical materials such as bird feathers as inherently sacred thus a feathered icon of Christ, Mary, or the Saints presented a doubled sacredness for them.
A second native inlay technique, known as embutido, was used in the lacquerware workshops in Peribán, Michoacán (Codding, 2015: p. 83). Franciscan missionary Alonso de la Rea chronicled the technique and praised the Indigenous artisans in his 1639 writing (De la Rea, 1882: p. 40). Mitchell Codding (2015: p. 89) states that Indigenous artists “synthesized the techniques and decorative traditions of Asia, Europe, and the Americas…” in their creation of lacquerware in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
A third Indigenous artistic tradition was carving in alabaster which originated from the precolonial time and was popular in both Peru and Mexico. Mexican artists carved Jesus the Shepherd Boy and the Virgin Mary in alabaster. Mexico's encounter with Asian ivory carving, however, also resulted in a hybrid invention of alabaster carving. Donna Pierce (2015: pp. 68–69) observes that Asian ivories influenced the Mexican alabaster carving.
Most unexpectedly, Indigenous artists adapted Chinese and Japanese artistic traditions in their production of Christian art. The Spanish trade with Asia began in 1565 and Mexico became a nexus of the global trade routes (Pierce, 2015: p. 53). Carr (2015: p. 36) attributes the popularity of Asian artistic traditions in the Americas to missionaries’ positive writings, such as Jesuit missionary Álvaro de Semedo who wrote about mission churches in the Americas which had works of art made by artists in Asia and Amerindian artists in the Americas. Franciscan churches were not exempt from Asian influence. In 1692, a confraternity of chinos commissioned the image of Christ made from ivory at the side altar of the church of Santa Clara in Mexico City (Pierce, 2015: p. 67; De Aspe, 1990: p. 72).
Second, the Martyrs in Nagasaki was another major theme in Mexican Franciscan art in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The theme appeared in the Cathedral of Cuernavaca in Morelos, Mexico (c. 1598), and the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexican City featured San Felipe de Jesús and other Franciscans (Rivero Lake, 2005: pp. 232–237). The sacrifice of Japanese Christians and European missionaries highlighted the spirit of martyrdom and encouraged Christians to emulate the examples of the suffering Christ and other Christian martyrs.
Third, an extraordinary aspect of Christian art in seventeenth-century Mexico was exiled Japanese Christian artists’ presence and artistic creations. Japanese began to reside in Mexico since the first Japanese envoys to Matanchén in 1610 and several Japanese Christians received baptisms in Mexico City in 1611 (Rivero Lake, 2005: pp. 263–267). Associated with the Franciscans, a Christian artist, Emonsaku, moved from Japan first to Manila, the Philippines, and later to Mexico in the 1670s (Rivero Lake, 2005: p. 295). Brother Thaddeus and Kano Domi were two other exiled Japanese Christian artists in Mexico-New Spain in the seventeenth century (Rivero Lake, 2005: pp. 295–297). Rivero Lake (2005: p. 300) asserts that their Namban artistic training and enconchados enriched the techniques employed in contemporary Mexico.
Through intentionally deconstructing and reconstructing Indigenous spirituality through Christian images, Franciscans and Indigenous Catholics navigated the theological tension of gospel and culture within the layered context of conquest and Indigenous agency in Mexico. Franciscans revised their posture of disdaining Mexican meanings of sacredness in the sixteenth century and transitioned to an amalgamated viewpoint, resulting in Indochristian art mixed with European and Asian artistic influences in the seventeenth century. The dynamic interactions between theology and art in mission, idols and icons, and religion and politics illustrate the visual power of transformation in piety and identity.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography
Susangeline Y Patrick, PhD, Visiting Researcher at Boston University, Associate Professor of World Christianity at Nazarene Theological Seminary (Kansas City), and Faculty member at NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community.