Congratulations #15: Linda Báez Rubí, ‘Vislumbrar y admirar: “La maravilla americana” en los modelos de visión y procesos icónicos de la cultura jesuítica’, in: Los estatutos de la imagen: creación, manifestación, percepción, Linda Báez, Emilie Carreón (eds) México, UNAM-IIE, 2015, 67-86.

Double congratulations to Linda Báez-Rubi on her latest edited volume, produced with Emilie Carreón of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and her chapter in it. The volume comprises the proceedings of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s sixteenth International Colloquium on Art History and the full publication is available here. Linda’s chapter discusses the creation of the Virgin of Guadalupe as an American icon through the comibination of religious and scientific learning and Jesuit agency.

Abstract: ‘During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Jesuit culture influenced the process of forging a symbol of American identity: the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Jesuit erudition was characterized by its capacity for integrating science—or “natural
philosophy” as it was understood in those times—and religion in the resolution of
theological problems. The interest of this culture in optical-catoptrical instruments
played an essential role in the establishment of models of vision, which inevitably
influenced the institution of the religious narrative. These models originated on
the basis of a geometrical optics, which was eventually to give a scientific explanation
of the way in which the image of the Virgin had been “printed” upon the ayate.
The result of this union between the Christian tradition and scientific modernity
was that the process of imprimatura of the Virgin of Guadalupe was connected with
optical and perspectivist traditions.’

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