‘Miraculous’ Image of Guadalupe

Investigative Files

Joe Nickell

Skeptical Briefs Volume 12.2, June 2002

Mexico’s Image of Guadalupe is a sixteenth-century depiction of the Virgin Mary that, according to pious legend, she imprinted miraculously on an Aztec convert’s cloak. The Indian, Juan Diego, is expected to be canonized as a saint, although new evidence confirms skeptics’ claims that the image is merely a native artist’s painting, the tale apocryphal, and “Juan Diego” probably fictitious.
The story of Juan Diego is related in the Nican Mopohua ("an account”) written in the native Aztec language and sometimes called the “gospel of Guadalupe.” According to this account, in early December of 1531 (some ten years after Cortez’s defeat of the Aztec Empire) Juan Diego was a recent convert who supposedly left his village to attend Mass in another. As he passed the foot of a hill named Tepeyac he encountered a young girl, radiant in golden mist, who identified herself as “the ever-virgin Holy Mary, mother of the true God” and asked that a temple be built on the site. Later, as a sign to a skeptical bishop, she caused her self- portrait to appear miraculously on Juan’s cactus-fiber cloak.
The legend obviously contains a number of motifs from the Old and New Testament as well as statements of specific Catholic dogma. Indeed, the tale itself appears to have been borrowed from an earlier Spanish legend in which the Virgin appeared to a shepherd and led him to discover a statue of her along a river known as Guadalupe ("hidden channel”). Moreover, the resulting shrine at Tepeyac was in front of the site where the Aztecs had had a temple for their own virgin goddess Tonantzin (Smith 1983). Thus the Catholic tradition was grafted onto the Indian one, a process folklorists call syncretism.
The image itself also yields evidence of considerable borrowing. It is a traditional portrait of Mary, replete with standard artistic motifs and in fact clearly derived from earlier Spanish paintings. Yet some proponents of the image have suggested that the obvious artistic elements were later additions and that the “original” portions-the face, hands, robe, and mantle-are therefore “inexplicable” and even “miraculous” (Callahan 1981).
Actually, infrared photographs show that the hands have been modified, and close-up photography shows that pigment has been applied to the highlight areas of the face sufficiently heavily so as to obscure the texture of the cloth. There is also obvious cracking and flaking of paint all along a vertical seam, and the infrared photos reveal in the robe’s fold what appear to be sketch lines, suggesting that an artist roughed out the figure before painting it. Portrait artist Glenn Taylor has pointed out that the part in the Virgin’s hair is off-center; that her eyes, including the irises, have outlines, as they often do in paintings, but not in nature, and that these outlines appear to have been done with a brush; and that much other evidence suggests the picture was probably copied by an inexpert artist from an expertly done original.
In fact, during a formal investigation of the cloth in 1556, it was stated that the image was “painted yesteryear by an Indian,” specifically “the Indian painter Marcos.” This was probably the Aztec painter Marcos Cipac de Aquino who was active in Mexico at the time the Image of Guadalupe appeared.
In 1985, forensic analyst John F. Fischer and I reported all of this evidence and more in “a folkloristic and iconographic investigation” of the Image of Guadalupe in Skeptical Inquirer. We also addressed some of the pseudoscience that the image has attracted. (For example, some claim to have discovered faces, including that of “Juan Diego” in the magnified weave of the Virgin’s eyes-evidence of nothing more than the pious imagination’s ability to perceive images, inkblot-like, in random shapes) (Nickell and Fischer 1985).
Recently our findings were confirmed when the Spanish-language magazine Proceso reported the results of a secret study of the Image of Guadalupe. It had been conducted - secretly - in 1982 by art restoration expert José Sol Rosales. Rosales examined the cloth with a stereomicroscope and observed that the canvas appeared to be a mixture of linen and hemp or cactus fiber. It had been prepared with a brush coat of white primer (calcium sulfate), and the image was then rendered in distemper (i.e., paint consisting of pigment, water, and a binding medium). The artist used a “very limited palette,” the expert stated, consisting of black (from pine soot), white, blue, green, various earth colors ("tierras”), reds (including carmine), and gold. Rosales concluded that the image did not originate supernaturally but was instead the work of an artist who used the materials and methods of the sixteenth century (El Vaticano 2002).
In addition, new scholarship (e.g. Brading 2001) suggests that, while the image was painted not long after the Spanish conquest and was alleged to have miraculous powers, the pious legend of Mary’s appearance to Juan Diego may date from the following century. Some Catholic scholars, including the former curator of the basilica Monsignor Guillermo Schulemburg, even doubt the historical existence of Juan Diego. Schulemburg said the canonization of Juan Diego would be the “recognition of a cult” (Nickell 1997).
However, the skeptics are apparently having little if any effect, and Pope John Paul II seems bent on canonizing “Juan Diego” who is as demonstrably popular among Mexican Catholics as he is, apparently, fictitious.

Acknowledgments

I appreciate the assistance of John Moffit and César Tort who helped update me on this topic, as well as CFI staff members who helped in various ways, including Tim Binga, Kevin Christopher, Ben Radford, and Ranjit Sandhu.

References

• Brading, D.A. 2001. Mexican Phoenix: Our Lady of Guadalupe Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
• Callahan, Philip Serna. 1981. The Tilma under Infra-red Radiation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate.
• El Vaticano. 2002. Proceso, May 19, 29-30.
• Nickell, Joe. 1997. Image of Guadalupe: myth- perception. Skeptical Inquirer 21:1 (January/ February), 9.
• Nickell, Joe, and John F. Fischer. 1985. The Image of Guadalupe: A folkloristic and iconographic investigation. Skeptical Inquirer 9:3 (spring), 243-255.
• Smith, Jody Brant. 1983. The Image of Guadalupe. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday.

Joe Nickell

Joe Nickell, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and "Investigative Files" Columnist for Skeptical Inquirer. A former stage magician, private investigator, and teacher, he is author of numerous books, including Inquest on the Shroud of Turin (1998), Pen, Ink and Evidence (2003), Unsolved History (2005) and Adventures in Paranormal Investigation (2007). He has appeared in many television documentaries and has been profiled in The New Yorker and on NBC's Today Show. His personal website is at joenickell.com.

http://www.csicop.org/sb/show/miraculous_image_of_guadalupe
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The Virgin of Guadalupe

Mexico's Virgin of Guadalupe played an important role in the Catholic colonization of the Americas.  
 
by Brian Dunning

Skeptoid Podcast #201
April 13, 2010
Podcast transcript


Today we're going to travel back to the time of the Conquistadors, when Spanish soldiers marched through Aztec jungles and spread Catholicism to the New World. We're going to examine an object that is central to faith in Mexico: An image called the Virgin of Guadalupe.

The Virgin of Guadalupe is basically Mexico's version of the Shroud of Turin. Both are pieces of fabric, hundreds of years old, on which appears an image said to be miraculous. Both are considered sacred objects. But the Virgin of Guadalupe is a much more powerful icon to many Mexicans. There's hardly anywhere you can go in Mexico and not find a reproduction of the image. Its importance as a religious and cultural symbol cannot be understated, for it came from the very hands of The Most Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas.

A legend well known in Mexico tells how it came to be. In 1531, the Spanish had been occupying Mexico for about ten years. An indigenous peasant, Juan Diego, was walking in what's now Mexico City when he saw the glowing figure of a teenage girl on a hill called Tepeyac. She identified herself as the Virgin Mary, and asked him to build her a church on that spot. Diego recounted this to the Archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga (1468-1548). Zumárraga was skeptical and told Diego to return and ask her to prove her identity with a miracle. Diego did return, and encountered the apparition again. She told him to climb to the top of the hill and pick some flowers to present to the Bishop. Although it was winter and no flowers should have been in bloom, Juan Diego found an abundance of flowers of a type he'd never seen before. The Virgin Mary bundled the flowers into Diego's cloak, woven from common cactus fiber and called a tilma. When Juan Diego presented the tilma to Zumárraga, the flowers fell out and he recognized them as Castilian roses, not found in Mexico; but more significantly, the tilma had been miraculously imprinted with a colorful image of the Virgin herself. This actual tilma, preserved since that date and showing the familiar image of the Virgin Mary with her head bowed and hands together in prayer, is the Virgin of Guadalupe. It remains perhaps the most sacred object in all of Mexico.

The story is best known from a manuscript written in the Aztecs' native language Nahuatl by the scholar Antonio Valeriano (1531-1605), the Nican Mopohua. By the European watermark on its paper, it's known to have been written sometime after 1556. This was widely published in a larger collection in 1649 by the lawyer Luis Laso de la Vega. Zumárraga and Juan Diego were both dead by the time Valeriano wrote it, so where did he get his information?

A red flag that a number of historians have put forth is that Bishop Zumárraga was a prolific writer. Yet, in not a single one of his known letters, is there any mention of Juan Diego, his miraculous apparition, the roses, or the cloak bearing the image, or any other element of the story in which Zumárraga was alleged to have played so prominent a role.

Not everyone agrees. In the 2000 book in Spanish, Juan Diego, una Vida de Santidad que Marcó la Historia (A Life of Holiness that Made History), author Eduardo Chavez Sánchez gives, at some length, various quotations from letters by Zumárraga that he believes confirms the Juan Diego narrative. I found his list to be extraordinarily unconvincing, and I would honestly describe it as really desperate scraping of the bottom of the barrel to find a quote-minable quote. In fact, the only quote from Zumárraga I found that was remotely close was:

An Indian goes to Brother Toribio and all will be in praise of God.

That sounds great because he mentions an Indian talking to a Catholic figure, but there's no mention of this Indian's name, no mention in the Juan Diego stories of a Brother Toribio (that I could find), and no elements of the Juan Diego story included in this single-sentence snippet. So unless some more of Zumárraga's writings come to light, I'm going to agree with the historians who say Zumárraga wrote nothing of these events, which casts doubt on his role in something that would have been of such great importance to him.

The name Juan Diego itself suggests that the story was a fictional invention. It basically translates as John Doe, a generic everyman, whose identity is unimportant. This doesn't prove anything, since there certainly were real people named Juan Diego, but it is an intriguing element.

It is the actual image of Mary itself that tells us the most about its true history. As every schoolchild knows, Hernán Cortés (1485-1547) was the Spanish Conquistador who overthrew the Aztec empire and placed much of Mexico under Spanish control in 1521. He was born in a region of Spain called Extremadura, and grew up to revere Our Lady of Guadalupe, a statue of a black version of the Virgin Mary, at the Santa María de Guadalupe monastery in Extremadura. This statue is credited with miraculously helping to expel the Moors from Spain in the Reconquista. Cortés brought reproductions of this European image of Mary with him when he went to the New World. Her dark skin resembled the Aztecs, and she became the perfect icon for the missionaries who followed Cortés to rally the natives into Christianity.

One such missionary was Fray Pedro de Gante (1480-1572), a Franciscan monk from Belgium (born Pieter van der Moere) who learned the Aztec language and created the first European-style school in Mexico, San Jose de los Naturales. One of his promising art students was a young Aztec man with the Christian name Marcos Cipac de Aquino, one of three known prolific Aztec artists of the period. In 1555, the newly arrived Archbishop of Mexico, Alonso de Montúfar (1489-1572), successor to the deceased Zumárraga, was looking to commission a portrait of the Virgin Mary, as a sort of teaching aide to help convert the Aztecs. Montúfar found the young artist Marcos at de Gante's school. And so, in 1555, the Aztec artist Marcos Cipac de Aquino painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary, with dark skin, with head slightly bowed and hands together in prayer, on a common cactus-fiber canvas. The painting was named the Virgin of Guadalupe according to the tradition Cortés brought from Spain. Although the Extremadura statue was not in this pose, the pose was still one of European tradition. The most often cited example of Mary in this exact pose is the painting A Lady of Mercy, attributed to Bonanat Zaortiga and on display at the National Art Museum of Catalunya, painted in the 1430's. Marcos followed more than a century of European tradition.

There was a pragmatic element to Montúfar's introduction of this painting and allowing it to be worshipped. Before the Conquistadors, Tepeyac was home to an Aztec temple, built to honor the Aztecs' own virgin goddess, Tonantzin. So rather than replacing the Aztec goddess, Montúfar's plan was simply to introduce Mary by giving Tonantzin a name and a face (recall that Marcos had painted the Virgin with dark skin). This process of using an existing belief system to graft on a new one has been called syncretism. Understandably, this exploitation of a pagan idol caused discomfort among some of the Franciscan priests, while many of the Dominicans welcomed the way it helped baptize 8,000,000 Aztecs.

The primary corroborating documentation of Marcos' painting is a report from the Church in 1556, when this growing disagreement between the Franciscans and the Dominicans prompted an investigation into the origins of the tilma. Two of the Franciscans submitted sworn statements in which they expressed their concern that worshipping the tilma was leading the Aztecs to return to their traditional pagan ways. One described the image as "a painting that the Indian painter Marcos had done" while another said it was "painted yesteryear by an Indian". Appearing on the side of the Dominicans, who favored allowing the Aztecs to worship the image, was Bishop Montúfar himself. As a result, the construction of a much larger church was authorized at Tepeyac, in which the tilma was mounted and displayed.

Significantly, the 1556 report is the most extensive documentation concerning the Virgin tilma of its century, and it makes no mention whatsoever of Juan Diego, the miraculous appearance of the image, or any other element from the legend. If the miracle story did exist at that time, it seems inconceivable that it could have been omitted from this report. This strongly supports the suggestion that the Juan Diego legend had not yet been conceived. It also supports that Valeriano's Nican Mopohua was written later.

The legend did get its first boost of testable evidence in 1995, which (in a case of suspiciously fortuitous timing) was after Juan Diego's beatification in 1990, while there was still debate over whether he should be canonized (he ultimately was, in 2002). A Spanish Jesuit named Javier Escalada produced a deerskin which pictorially depicted the Juan Diego legend and has become known as the Codex Escalada. The Codex also mentioned several historical people, and even bore the signature of a Franciscan historian, Bernardino de Sahagún (1499-1590), dated 1548. Basically, it was the Perfect Storm of tailor-made evidence proving that the Juan Diego legend was the accepted history at the time. A little too tailor made though; no serious historians have supported its authenticity. The best analysis I've found is by Alberto Peralta of the Proyecto Guadalupe project. Based on its dubious unveiling, numerous inconsistencies, and other factors, Peralta concludes that it's impossible for the document to be authentic.

If the Virgin tilma is indeed a painting, and not a miraculously produced image, then it should be a simple matter to determine that scientifically. There are obvious signs that are hard to argue with, notably that the paint is flaking along a vertical seam in the fabric. But a truly scientific examination involving sampling of the material has not been permitted. The most notable examination was a three hour infrared photographic session by Philip Callahan in 1981, who did note multiple layers of paint covering changes to the hands and crown, but came away with more questions than answers. Callahan found, for example, that most of the entire painting seemed to have been done with a single brush stroke. He recommended a series of more tests, but the only one allowed by the Church was a spectrophotometric examination done by Donald Lynn from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The only result released of his examination was that "nothing unusual" was found.

Much has been made of the claim that figures can be seen reflected in Mary's eyes, with some even identifying these figures as Zumárraga or Juan Diego or other characters from the legend. The Church even went so far in 1956 as to have two ophthalmologists examine the eyes under 2500× magnification. They reported a whole group of figures, including both Aztecs and Franciscans. Why ophthalmologists should be better qualified to identify Aztecs and Franciscans in random blobs of pigment has not been convincingly argued. Photos taken by another ophthalmologist in 1979 have been released, and it's quite obvious that it's simply random noise. I see a dozen or so speckles; if you want to make them into Aztecs, Franciscans, bananas, or Bozo the Clown, then you'll probably also be great at spotting dozens of Bigfoots hiding in any given photograph of a forest.
The Virgin of Guadalupe is yet more one mythical story whose believers are missing out on true facts that are actually more respectful and confer more credit upon them than the myth. The image on the Virgin tilma was painted by a native Aztec artist; and the painting had not only an important role in Mexico's early history as a nation, but also a staggering impact upon its culture ever since. Mexicans with Aztec heritage should take pride in the fact that their original culture, specifically the goddess Tonantzin, was a key ingredient in the spread of modern Catholicism. The Juan Diego myth takes that away, and whitewashes part of Mexican history clean of any Aztec influence. That's a disservice to one of humanity's greatest ancient civilizations, and it's a disservice to history.

When we see the Virgin of Guadalupe image today, most people react in one of two ways: They worship it as a miraculous apparition, or they dismiss it as someone else's religious icon. Both reactions miss the much richer true history. The Virgin of Guadalupe stands not only as an invaluable work of ancient art (possibly the most popular piece of art ever created), but also as a reminder of how the conquest of Mexico was truly accomplished: Not only its military conquest, but one of history's greatest religious conversions as well.

 https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4201
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