The Virgin of Guadalupe, Extremadura, Spain

The Spanish Virgin of Guadalupe venerated in the monastery of Guadalupe, Extremadura, defies easy categorization. This Marian icon cannot be characterized as a single object as the perception of her authenticity, from which she gains her numinous power, draws on two distinct representations, one nested inside the other. The original effigy, a Romanesque black Madonna, is almost completely occluded by her pyramidal robes (Figs. 1, 2). How the devotee experiences this venerable effigy is profoundly embedded in her various material aspects. Both dressed and undressed figures are crucial to Guadalupe’s miraculous legend and thus her sacrality. My brief narrative will explore the (literally) layered history of this doubling. The play between the wooden, darkened core and the more familiar clothed devotional image, provide a fascinating excursion into the controlled viewing practices of liturgical theater as well as the theological dilemma, acute in a post-Tridentine period, of disengaging matter from the divine prototype it represents.

Stripped of her ornate shell, the titular Virgin of Guadalupe is a surprisingly diminutive sculpture just over two feet in height (59 cm) but growing another foot once dressed and on her pedestal. The polychromed cedar sculpture is of an enthroned Madonna with the Christ Child. The icon assumes its rightful hieratic composition and theological function when the Christ child is seated frontally on his mother’s lap, conforming to a genre referred to as the Throne of Wisdom (sedes sapientiae), that disseminated outward from Northern Europe between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.¹ The Virgin of Guadalupe belongs to a large corpus of Black Madonnas,² although the symbolic and racial valences of her blackness cannot be addressed here.³

The Extremaduran Mary is also one of the many imágenes de vestir (dressed images) that populated the Iberian peninsula. Since at least 1389, the first dated inventory of her wardrobe, the wooden figures have been encased in lavishly embroidered vestments, allowing only their faces and hands to appear.⁴ The underlying sculpture has remained essentially unknown and rarely published.⁵

Layers of fabric also shielded the Virgin of Guadalupe, as she was located in a curtained tabernacle high on the main altarpiece; the public’s sight of her image was carefully orchestrated, revealing and concealing the icon at certain moments during Mass. Moreover, the process of changing her robes and mantles was as guarded as her liturgical viewing was restricted. One “hidden staircase” allowed access to her¹⁰ and strictest protocol governed the few who could dress and undress the “Celestial Princess.” In 1631, fray Diego de Montalvo explains that these precautions were in order “to keep in check the bad manners of the many men who …want to see and know everything,” adding that “no one has tried to see what is inside [the clothing] nor the workmanship of her body, nor the materials of which she is made; all of this because of the great reverence of those who touch her. No one knows anything about her with certainty nor have they seen whether she is one single sculpture nor even if she is seated or standing.”¹¹ It is telling that the word used for undressing (desnudando) emphasizes the improper removal of clothing to the naked state, no matter that the wooden sculpture was fully clothed.¹² These prescriptions in the handling of Guadalupe, like other devotional images, reveal an acute awareness of the precarious divide between representation and presence. Her dressing and undressing, processing, hiding, and revealing, confer an animation on the sculpture, even if dependent on human assistance. In this the Virgin of Guadalupe becomes more than a conduit for expressing divine power and moves into the dangerous terrain of possessing divine power.

Whether sequestered within her architectural shell or hidden beneath layers of costly fabrics, Guadalupe was protected and concealed as part of the staging of her hierophany. This attitude about the sacra is well articulated by the influential Bishop of Bologna, Gabriele Paleotti when he wrote that sacred objects should be hidden behind a cloth or a crystal pane so as not to too readily disclose the “secrets of God.”¹³ Like a saint’s relic encased in an elaborate reliquary, aspects of the Guadalupe icon were off limits, beyond normal sight and comprehension, in order to ensure that her charisma remained intact.