Introduction

The Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City (Fig. 1) has been the object of intense veneration since the early modern period. A quick glance at the painting is sufficient to reveal that this image, which shows the Virgin standing on a crescent moon surrounded by rays of sunlight, her hands folded in a gesture of prayer, depends on European visual traditions, which were imported to colonial Mexico from Spain mostly through prints. While the amount of scholarly work on the Virgin of Guadalupe is impressive, little attention has hitherto been paid to the iconographical antecedents of the image itself. This seems to be mostly due to its erroneous identification as an early rendering of the Purísima-type depicting the Virgin Immaculate, a perception first articulated in written sources from the seventeenth century, which prevails to this day. It is easily comprehensible that early modern authors, based on the resemblance between the Mexican icon and the iconographical scheme which became established as the orthodox expression of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary sometime after the Council of Trent, identified the Mexican cult image as a visual expression of this theological concept. But it is puzzling that contemporary scholars, as if dazzled by the omnipresence of this doctrine and its impact on art in the Hispanic world, have kept on reiterating this unsubstantiated presumption in various formulations.