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Whenever a young woman in colonial-era New Spain opted to join a religious order for the remainder of her life, she did not simply escape the personal restraints of marriage; she became a “bride of Christ” through the solemn ceremony accompanying her profession of vows. Like weddings in the societal sphere, religious vows to the divine spouse were accompanied by pomp and circumstance; the new nun's patrons commissioned her wedding portrait, a genre that came to be known as monjas coronadas (crowned-nun portraits).The crowned-nun genre has mostly been examined for artistic style and iconography or for how it represented conventual life. James M. Córdova's new monograph brings novel analysis, for its author seeks to explain why demand for these portraits boomed in mid- to late eighteenth-century New Spain, as well as to account for how novohispano crowned-nun portraits differed from those in Europe or other regions of Spanish America. Córdova describes a cloistered world of porous walls, one in which indigenous and Euro-Christian traditions meld and in which nuns and their patrons “negotiate” more favorable terms with ecclesiastical reformers (p. 10).Comparing and contrasting novohispano practices with the Euro-Iberian tradition of portraiture, he draws key conclusions: artistic influences flowed bidirectionally between metropolis and colony, the Iberian tradition of deceased-nun portraits influencing americano practice even as Europeans adopted floral-wreath iconography from New Spain (pp. 51–52); these portraits served a variety of purposes and uses, from historical record to exemplary spiritual model, from religious relic to family status symbol (p. 68); and, while general consistencies of format and iconography across religious orders “established a kind of corporate religious identity among New Spain's nuns” (p. 68), the genre also allowed for individuation through representation of family ties, social status, religious order, or particular convent (pp. 58–64).Córdova cogently demonstrates that the crowned-nun portrait in New Spain is not reducible to Euro-Christian precedents — garden symbolism, wedding nuptials linked to the mystical life, or the image of Mary as Tota Pulchra (Song of Songs) — but is also a product of indigenous influences (pp. 101–18). Drawing evidence from artistic representations of indigenous marriage rites, colonial-era literary works on painting theory and practice, missionary texts (e.g., the Florentine Codex), and pre-Hispanic manuscripts (the Codex Borgia), Córdova shows how elements from indigenous culture persisted in novohispano practice. He notes, for example, the visual and conceptual “overlap” between elaborate headdresses of Aztec goddesses and those represented in crowned-nun portraits (p. 115). Other indigenous carryovers include the “flower mountain” motif (found in both Mayan and Teotihuacan art), the prominent place of birds and butterflies, and the occasional use of feather mosaics (in Nahuatl, amantecayotl). Attributing the prominence of such elements in portraits of Hispanic criollo women to the art-making role of indigenous servants, he argues that hybrid cultural forms emerged rather naturally in such a multicultural environment “where Spanish, Creole, African, Amerindian, and ethnically mixed women came into contact and expanded each other's base of cultural knowledge” (p. 118).Important to Córdova's study is the distinction between calced and discalced religious orders and convents, for his central thesis is that monjas coronadas proliferated just when bishops implemented reforms that required communities of private-life nuns to adhere to the stricter regulations that already characterized the communal-life convents. Having been rebuffed in their protests against such reforms, some of the calced religious orders finally complied in a manner reminiscent of the well-known “obedezco pero no cumplo” of Spanish colonial administrators. As crowned-nun portraits became even more popular (see table, pp. 136–37), paintings of nuns from the formerly calced orders became more muted, less ostentatious. Even so, there persisted a certain accretion of accoutrements not specified yet permitted in the constitutions and rules of the religious orders in question. Picturing such continuity with their religious past implied that nun and convent were in compliance with traditional interpretations of rule and constitution (pp. 142–44).In an era of conventual reform, notes the author, “religious profession became a highly contested ritual” (p. 142). The resulting portraiture symbolizes agency on the part of nuns and the patronage networks of mutual dependence to which they belonged. However, as Córdova astutely observes, such agency was not intentionally subversive; instead, nuns and their patrons “strategically utilized a vocabulary of mainstream gender norms to preserve some degree of autonomy and institutional culture for their religious communities” (p. 147).Finally, Córdova situates these very popular eighteenth-century representations of nuns alongside other protonational symbols like Our Lady of Guadalupe. In response to the anticriollo prejudices of Bourbon reformers, the crowned-nun portrait was a visual assertion of “the unique religious character of New Spain” (p. 157). Yet interestingly, the monja coronada never appeared in hagiographies of New Spain's holy women. Instead, printed images of nuns renowned for heroic sanctity privileged themes like penitence, enclosure, and humility, attitudes that endorsed male ecclesiastical authority (p. 164). However, located in the cultural interstices between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, the monja coronada genre represents a novohispano product that emerged when “artists, nuns, and patrons conflated local understandings of religious orthodoxy and practices with established cultural and pictorial conventions to produce New Spanish models of religious women's spiritual distinction” (p. 165). Ironically, the author argues in conclusion, the increasingly popular hagiographic genre may have stimulated demand for crowned-nun art during the late Bourbon era “by animating society's esteem for nuns” (p. 172).
Ronald J. Morgan (Thu,) studied this question.