Until next September 14, the Prado Museum of Madrid offers its visitors the exhibition “so far, so close. Guadalupe from Mexico in Spain”, a sample that analyzes how it was interpreted, reproduced and venerated in America and Europe.
About 70 works, mostly from Spanish heritage, offer a unique look on the iconographic dialogue around the Virgen del Tepeyac, between America and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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The Prado Museum, one of the most important gallows in the world, He wants to offer “A new look at the role of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a revealed image, object of worship and identity symbol in the Hispanic field”, which at the time of apparitions covered the Asian territories of the Philippines, Media Europe and much of the American continent.
In the exhibition you can admire paintings, engravings, sculptures and books in which it is appreciated that this Marian invocation “transcended the novohispanas borders to become a powerful presence in the Spanish collective imaginary.”
And not only in the imaginary, but physically, as can be seen in the cartography documented “the surprising density of Guadalupanas images distributed throughout the Spanish geography.”
In addition, formal connections are established in the iconography of the Guadalupana-Mexican invocation with European Marian icons such as Immaculate or All beautiful.
At the same time, the different “exact copies” of the image that, in a miraculous way, remained in the Tilma of San Juan Diego, the young man whom the Virgin said: “Am I here, I am your mother?” in 1531.
Another aspect that highlights the sample is that, due to the extension of the Spanish Empire, especially in the 16th and 17th centuries, the devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe born in the Viceroyalty of New Spain can be considered as the first globalized “because her cult also radiated towards the current territories of Italy, Portugal, Philippines, under Spanish dominance, and the rest of the Hispanic -American viceroyalties.”
Nicolás de Cárdenas
Born in 1980, I am a Spanish and journalist’s husband and father with more than 20 years of experience in print and digital media, specialized in socio -political and religious information. I have worked more than 10 years in defense of human rights and I have accreditations in journalism and comprehensive communication. Since July 2022, I am a correspondent for ACI Press and Ewtn News in Spain, covering international events of the Catholic Church.