The Mass of Saint Gregory

S C HOOL OF S A N J OSE DE LOS N ATURALES 1
Mass oj Saint
Gr~~ory
1539
Feathers on wood with touches of paint
261;.. x 22 in. (68 x 56 cm)
Musee d'Auch , France
The earliest Peninsular reference to feather paint­
ings occurs in Felipe de Guevara's sixteenth­
century Comentarios de la pintura:
We must justl>' concede that the Indian s brought
somethi ng new and rare to art with bird-feather
painting. Using the diversity ofcolored feathers
created by nature, which they industriously plucked ,
divided , separated, and mixed , these indigenous art­
ists modeled realistic clothing, flesh, and objects. 1
Guevara undoubtedly \'.'rites as an eyewitness,
having had the chance to appreciate. in ship­
ments from New Spain to Philip's court, manu­
scripts, precious stones, silver and gold jewelry,
and feather paintings, among many other objects
that shovved the Indians' skill as artisans.
Hernan Cortes also expressed admiration
for thes e indigenous works in a letter w ritten
to Charles V from Mexico in I5 20:
[Moctezuma has] all the things to be found under
the heavens in [his] dom ain, fas hioned in gold and
silver and jewels and feathers ; and so realistic in
gold and silver that no smith in the world could
have done better, and in jewels so fine that it is
impossible to imagine with what instruments they
were cut so perfectly; and those in feathers more
wo nderful than anythi ng in wax or embroidery. 2
Two years later Cortes had a magni ficent tteasure
shipped to Spai n in which gold and pre-H is panic
feathe rwork formed the bulk of consignments
destined for churches , monasteries, and civil
and ecclesiastical dignitaries, as well as for the
emperor h.imseLf.3 In 15 2 4, moreover, Diego
de Soto carried home three chests of featherwork
that included shields, tufts, crests, large fans,
birds, and "an image of the kings. 114
The excellence that Indian artists achieved
in the art offeatherwork (amantecayot!) during
the late pre-Hispanic period grew out of artisan
centers such as the tlacateo ofTexcoco, where the
children of the ruler were taught the arts and sci­
ences;5 the totocalli, Moctezuma's aviary in Tenoch­
titian, which also housed imperial workshops for
lapidary, gold- and silversmithing, featherwork,
and painting; and the calmecac and the telpuchcalli,
where priests and warriors studied "all kinds of
arts-military, ecclesiastical, mechanical, and
astrological. 116 Sadly the "beautiful books ofpaint­
ings and text" used for teaching these arts 7 were
burned as idolatrous in an excess of Catholic
zeal at the beginning of the conquest. s As a result,
Fray Bernardino de Sahagun's descriptions of the
practice of gold- and silversmithing, lapidary, and
featherwork during the early period of evangeliza­
tion are invaluable. The didactic methodology and
technique of manufacture used in the Franciscan
schools of mechanical arts appear to follow closely
tho se used by the Indians themselves immediately
before the conquest, with the sole innovation of
Christian images as models."
Colon ial feathe rwork reached its pinnacle
du ri ng the sixteenth -century process o f evangeli­
zation , es pecially in the Valley of Mex ico, Mich oa­
can, and perhaps Tlaxcala . Religious chronicl ers
like Fray Ba(tolome de Las Casas have left us de­
tailed information about the importance of this
art Las Casas prais es the fea ther artists (a manteca)
who worked in the school of San Jose de los
Naturales-founded about 1527 by the Flemish
Franciscan lay broth er Pedro de Game on the
exact site where Moctezuma 's aviary and imperial
wo rkshops had stood-but he reserves his high­
est praise for the feather artists ofMichoadn :
Every day they make images and altarpieces and
many other things for us out offeathers, interjecting
gold elements here and there that make the piece
showier, more precious, and universally admi red.
1
I
MA~~
()I'
~ArNT GREr.ORY
c)'1
consta nt feather supply so overwh elm ed th e Span­
ish captain Berna l Dlaz del Castillo that he felt
And with no prodding on our part, [hey make bor­
ders for chasubles and capes, and veils and sleeves
of crosses for religious processions an d services, as
forced to abstain from enum erating every kind of
well as miters for bishops that . .. could not be more
bird th at was there and its peculiari ty, for there
beautiful nor agreea ble to the sight. The arti sts of
was every thing from the Roya l Eagle . .. down to
[his kind who outstrip all others in New Spain are
tiny birds of many-colo red plumage. [In addition
in th e province of Mech ua ca.n . 10
to others I have m entioned] there were parrots of
Las Casas praises the skill o f the amanteca in
placing a feather so that,
many differe nt colors and there were so many o f
them that I forget their names , not to mention the
beautifully marked ducks. 13
looked at from one angle, it will seem golden while
DP
lacking gold; from another angle, it will have a green
sheen without being green; looked at crosswise, it
will display another lovely color; and the same from
One of the earliest documented exampl es of
feathe rworkwith Christian iconography is the
standard of the Virgin Mary that the Indians of
Huejotzingo financed and produced in 1531 to
honor Nuno de Guzman and his conquest of New
Galicia. The piece is reproduced in the Harkness
Codex, which records t.he superhuman cost in gold,
slaves, feathers, and handiwork that the produc­
tion of such an object implied .14 Unfortunately,
the standard's whereabouts today is unknown.
many other angles, all shimmering marvelom:l;' 11
Since its irid escen ces seemed to correspond
th e transfi guration of divine ligh t, feath er
painting became a favorite medium for all kinds
ofliturgical garments and devotional i mages
during the sixteenth century. The rich feathers
were of a great variety, many coming from far­
away lands through trade routes, From Guatemala
to
came quetzal feathers; from hot climates, those
of hummingbirds, parrots, and other rare birds.
Some birds were raised domestically in order to
pluck and sell their feathers.
The oldest known surviving piece of colonial
featherwork is this Mass ofSaint Gregory.
The importance of the Mass ofSaint Gregory
for the history of evangelical art lies not only in
its technical and artistic excellence, state of pres­
ervation, and size, but also in its unique role as
a document: it is the only feather painting that
records precise information about the time and
place of its production and the names of its recipi­
ent, patron, and donor, as well as those who may
have been responsible for the composition and
for approving its propriety or decorum. All of
this is registered in the dedicatory legend of the
border: "Pau lo III pontifici maxima / en magna
indiaru[m] urbe Mexico / co[m]posita d[omi]no
Didaco guberna /tore cura fr[atr] is Petri a Gante
minoritae A.D. 1539" (Fashioned for Pope Paul III
in the great city ofMexico of the Indies by the
governor Don Diego under the care ofFray Pedro
de Gante of the Minorites , A.D. 1539) .15
The governor mentioned here is, without a
doubt, Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin, nephew and
son-in-law ofMoctezuma II. After being deposed
as lord ofEcatepec by Hernan Cortes, he was
appointed Indian governor (tlatoani) of San Juan
Tenochtitlan from 1539 to 1542 by Antonio de
EI EG
According to Sahagun'S Historia, there were two
techniques used in pre-Hispanic featherwork.
For feather clothing, headdresses, and fans, the
feathers were sewn or tied with maguey thread
in an overlapping pattern onto net fabric or cane
frameworks . For feather mosaic pictures or shields,
patterns were drawn on maguey-Ieaf or fig-tree
paper reinforced with carded cotton and glue. Then
this backing was covered with a bed of trimmed
and glue-basted feathers. Over this bed, precious
feathers, cut to size with copper or obsidian blades,
were applied with bone tools. Fine lines were
created by overlapping the layers so closely that
some co lors almost disappeared, and the contrast
between iridescent and matte feathers was manip­
ulated to create various effects.
Among the feathers used were those of the
quetzal, hummingbird, parrot, heron , spoonbill,
troupial, and blue cotinga. 12 The variety of birds
bred in Moctezuma's royal aviary to provide a
96
SC HOOL OF S AN JOSE D E L OS NATU RALES
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Mendoza, the first viceroy. "" The fact that Alvarado Huanitzin dedicated the feathe rwork to Pope Paul III in the name of his people clearly demon­ strates the prevailing custom among indigenous lords of sending gifts of fealty to both the reign­
ing pope and the emperor. Depictions of the Mass of Saint Gregory de­
rive from what appears to be a fifteenth-century
legend promoting beliefin Christ' s actual pres­
ence in the host of the Eucharist. 17 The story
goes that the si xth-century saint and some dea­
cons, one of them a doubter, witnessed Christ's
bodily presence on the altar at the moment of
the host's consecration. The image of the risen
Christ as the Man ofSorrows surrounded by
instruments of the Passion (Arma Christi) may
have been conftated with representations of the
Mass ofSaint Gregory beca use it had been in
use as a visual mean s of explaining the mystery
of the Eucharist to the faithful since the early
thirteenth century, when the dogma oftransub­
stantiation was promulgated by the Fourth
Latera n Council. IS
Toward the end of the fifteenth and the begin­
ning of the sixteenth centuries, the devotion of
the Mass of Saint Gregory became firmly rooted
in Spain: altarscreens with paintings and reliefs
of the theme proliferated, even in churches dedi­
cated to other devotions. Extraordinary examples
arrived from Flanders, 19 and local artis ts such as
Francisco de Coca and Pedro Berruguete received
commissions to paint the them e. Furthermore,
the impact offoreign engravings of the subject
that arrived in Spain in great numbers via the
fair of Medina del Cam po and o ther channels is
apparent in compositions s uch as the Mass of Saint
Gre.gory in the Confessional of Alo nso de Madrigal
(Sala manca, 1598), 20 which shows strong s imi­
larities to an engraving of 1480-90 by IsraheI van
Meckenem (c. 1445-1503).21 It is thus not surpris­
ing that in the New World the religious orders
charged with evangelizing the Ind ians fervently
espoused devotion to the Eucharis t and promoted
its d lffusion through European engravings of
the Mass ofSaillt Gregory bearing papal indul­
gences . These prints inspired both feather paint­
ings and murals. 22
Among the great variety of engravings of the
Mass ofSa int Gregory, those that come closest to
the feather painting that co ncerns us here were
produced at the end of the fifteenth century by
the prolific engraver Israhel van Meckenem (see,
for example , fig. 56).23 The feather painting, how­
ever, simplifies the composition by eli minating
the elaborate architectural background and altar­
piece, as well as the onlookers beside the alta r.
Obviously, we cannot say with certainty that the
Meckenem engravings served as the precise source
since copies or derivative versions , perhaps Span­
ish , may have been used instead.
The reverse side of the board that supports the
feather painting is covered in polychrome lacquer­
ware, a craft technique practiced in Michoadn
before and after the conquest. The background
is a bright red ocher and displays at its center the
monogram XPS associated with devotion to the
Holy Name oEJesus , which was revitalized by the
Minorite friar Saint Bernardine ofSiena (1380­
1444) and widely diffu sed in New Spain by both
Fra nciscans an d Augustinians.
The Flemish Minorite Franciscan Fray Pedro
de Gante, whose name appears in the inscrip­
tio n of the feadl er painting, was the founder and
guiding spirit of San Jose de los Naturales , a n
artisan school for natives attached to the Francis­
can motherhouse in Mexico City. As such, he was
in charge ofsupervising and inspecting religious
works executed by the natives of the area, and his
special religious devotions seem to be reflected
in the iconography of both the Mass of Saint Gre.gory
and the monogram of the Holy Name ofJesus.
Gante founded the brotherhood of the Holy Sacra­
ment and may also have founded the brotherhood
of the Holy Name of]esus since his cell was one
of those expressly ded icated to meditations on
the Holy Name ofJesll s. 24
The inscribed date of IS39-the earl iest for
an exi sting feath elWork--coincides with the
year the news arrived in Mexico of the papal
bull promulgated by Paul III proscribing the
enslavement ofIndians and defending their
full rationality and conseq uent lawful access
to the sacraments- includi ng the Eucharist.
The sacramental symbolism contained in both
the theme of the Mass of Saint Gregory and the
monogram that dominates the back of the work
mak es this an especially apt objec t to dedicate
to the pope-even mo re so in light of ili e view
held by Fray Bartolo me de Las Casas and other
missionaries that the art offeather painting
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MASS OF SAINT GREGORY
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(amantecayotl) was evidence of the rationality of
the Indian :
What without a doubt seems to exceed all human
inve ntive ness and will impress all other nations of
the wo rld as m ore new than strange and therefore
to
be adm ired and es teemed is the art and craft that
those Mexican peoples know how to work so per­
fectly, making from natural feathers with their
own natural colors all that which they and other
c :cellent and first-rate painters can produce with
paintbrushes. 25
EI EG
As the ranking native government official in the
Republic ofIndians, Diego de Alvarado Huanitzin
offered an extraordinary gift to Paul III, the pope
who had recently published a series of declarations
protecting the rights of Amerindians. Only two
years earlier, on 9 June 1537, Pope Paul III issued
the bull Sublimis Deus, news ofw hich reached
Mexico in 1539. This papal decree against enslav­
ing the Amerindians and seizing their property
pronounced "Indians and all other people who
may later be discovered by Christians" to be en­
dowed with the "nature and faculties" necessary
to receive the Christian faith solely by "preaching
of the word of God and by the example ofgood
and holy living." With this decree, the pope
strengthened Emperor Charles V's recent order
(probably the one dated 2 August 1530) byadd­
ing the penalty of excommunication for those
who violated imperiallaw. 26 Some jurists today
consider the pope's unprecedented position on
human rights to be the true foundation of inter­
national law. 27
The papal bull was issued in direct response
to an escalating contest over human and material
resources in the Americas. It is within this politi­
cized, ideologically freighted frame of reference
that the significance of this particular Mass of
Saint Gregory must be sought. The Holy Roman
Emperor and the Roman Catholic Church did
not always act in concert as the Sublimis Deus
might suggest. A central issue in what amounted
to a complex power struggle was whether Amer­
indians had the ability to maintain dominion
over their own property, a topic much discussed
by theologians and jurists in Aristotelian terms
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SCHOOL OF SAN JOSE DE LOS NATURALES [I
as dependent on their humanness. Aristo tle dis­
tinguished between two ty pes of enslavement:
through capture and th ro ugh being born "slaves
by nature," constitutionally incapable offully
h uma n powers of reaso ning.
The outcome oEthis debate over the true nature
o f Amerindi ans had o bvious economic im plica­
tions: if they were not fully rational creatures, tbey
were legitimately subject to enslave ment, conve­
niently provid ing the Hapsburg emperor and the
Spanish crown with an ample labor force to extract
silver and gold from Mexican and Peruvian mines.
To speed the deci sion along, the Royal Co uncil
of the Indi es encouraged Juan Gines de Sepulveda,
translator ofa h igh ly respected edition of The
Politics, the text in which Aristotle's crucial discus­
sion ofslavery appears, to justifY war against th e
Amerindians, although they ultimately rejected
his argument. Alternatively, ifAmerindians were
merely immature humans, like children-as
was argued in their behalf-they possessed the
capacity for fully rational thought and only needed
proper guidance. The initial step in this educa­
tional process, as Saint Augustine had maintained,
was their acceptance of the Christian doctrine of
salvation-in other words, baptism.28
Paul III addressed these complicated issues
in no uncertain terms: in the 1537 bull, he sided
with the Dominican Julian Garces, bishop of
Tlaxcala; the Franciscan Juan de Zumarraga,
bishop of Mexico; and other missionarics like
Dominicans Bernardino de Minaya and Bartolome
de Las Casas, all ofwhom defended the Amer­
indians' capacity to be converted by teaching
rather than conquered by force . 29 This contest
for Amerindian souls culminated in a famous
inconclusive debate between Sepulveda and Las
Casas, held in Valladolid, Spain, in 1550-51. The
Mass ofSaint Gregory feather mosaic, however,
was made eleven years earlier, immediately after
Paul Ill's decree reached New Spain, when an
assimilated, Christianized government official
of nobl e Aztec descent like Diego de Alvarado
might have felt optimistic about the future and
deeply grateful to a pope who recognized the
intelligence of the Amerindian peoples.
The iconography of depictions of the Mass
ofSaint Gregory includes both a Man of Sorrows
and the Arms of Christ, associated with the cult
of the Passion, a favorite devotion of the earliest
Franciscans in Mexico and a motif that can be
associa ted with a utop ian conce pt of the uni­
versal Christian church. 30 The imagery on this
featherwork painting was pro bably derived from
a European print similar, or perhaps identical,
to an engraving by Israhel van Meckenem of
about 1490-1500 (fig. 56), one often versions
of the subject by the same artist. 31 A Latin inscrip­
tion below the image in the Eu ropean engraving
indicates that the sheet was intended as an ind ul­
gence granted to whoever recited the requisite
prayers to the instruments of Christ's Passion.
In this connection, it is importa nt to remem­
ber that Saint Gregory the Great, a sixtb-century
pope and on e of the fo ur Latin Church Fathers,
defend ed the religious use of images because they
function as a "Bible for the illiterate. "" As such,
images could dramatically illustrate abstract reli­
gious concepts like the doctrine oftransubstan­
tiation inherent in the mass. There are significant
di fferences, however, between an inexpensive
broadsheet issu ed to pilgri ms and a unique gift
of state crafted in precious, exotic materials and
intended for the chief representative ofChrist
on earth . Given the timing of the gift, the choice
ofsubject sugges ts that Pope Paul III was to be
praised as a latter-day Saint Gregory, no doub t
for hi s strong defense of th e Indians' fully human
capacities. Viewed in this context, tbe featherwork
painting is a magnani mous gestu re, eloquently
rendered in a medium well establish ed in pre­
Columbian times as a form of tribute that both the
Amerindians and thei r European conq uerors con­
sidered the most elevated form of indigenous art. H
On close inspection, the featberwork d iverges
from its print prototype in several respects. The
most striking difference is tb e elimination of rep­
resentatives of the secular cburch w ho stand bes ide
tl1e altar in the prin t and supposedly include Saints
Jerome, Am brose, and Augustin e, Gregory's fe llow
Doctors of the Church. In the feather mosaic, o nly
the kn eel ing assistants and the officiating pope
witness the miracle. It is possib le to read the elim­
ination ofcardinals and bishops from the mosaic
supervised by the Franciscan missionaty Pedro
de Gante as a reference to escalating disp utes
between the regular and sec ul ar clergy. es pecially
si nce the pope and his deacons. as pictured by
Meckenem, coul d also be understood as tonsured
Francisca n friars, members of the regular cl ergy
Fig. 56 .
ISRAHEL VAN MECKENEM, Mass of Saint Gregory,
c. '490-'500, engraving. National Gallery ofArt, Washing·
ton, D.C., Rosenwald Collection, '954.12.C)1. (8-21489).
whose ascetic lifestyle figured promi nently in the
program ofevangelization. During the first few
decades ofspiritual conquest by tbe regular clergy,
in imita tion of the origi nal apostolic era of the
"primitive church," a mission sys tem without
accountability to the secular church hierarchy
had been establis hed . However, tensio n between
the regular and secular clergy over the r ight
to claim Ameri nd ian souls soo n developed , as
attested, among other things , by a letter written
in 153 7 to Charles V at a meeting of the New
Spanis h provincial bishops (who were appointed
fro m the regular clergy a t this time) to review
the prob lems ofevangeliza tion. 34 Two years later,
in r539, the date of this painti ng , the fi rst in a
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MAI:l: np "4 rNT r.IIFr.nIlV
ClCl
The Franciscans in pa rticular were so inter­
ested in lndian hieroglyphics tha t they invented a
hieroglyphic system based on preconquest rebus ­
style script in the belief that Amerindians would
be more receptive to Christian catechism com mu­
nicated in pictures and symbols. 38 The Arms of
Christ are visual signs of the sort that missi onaries
wid ely understood as a pictorial language com pa­
rable to Nahuatl pictograms . This fact in itself is
perhaps less significant in the present context than
the method oflearning involved. In the fea ther
mosaic, the central Christian doctrine of transub­
stantiation is conveyed by the naturalistic depic­
tion ofChrist as the Man ofSorrows rising from
the open sepulcher behind the altar where Holy
Communion is about to be performed. The church
would have considered the depiction ofChrist uni­
versally accessible because of its naturalistic style
of representation. Grouped around this Eucharis­
tic image, prominently displayed against a ground
of bright blue feathers, are the rebuslike signs
of the Passion known as the Arms of Christ. In
the European tradition , these signs are actually
mnemonic devices intended to initiate a series of
associations in the mind of the beholder. Whether
it be the coins ofJudas that signifY his treason,
the crowing cock that signifies Peter's betrayal, the
instruments of the Passion that allude to the cru­
cifixion and to major points of Christian doctrine
simultaneously (for example, the three nails
remind the beholder of the Trinity), each sign
serves as an object ofsustained contemplation.
Just as a person learned in Latin might ruminate
over the many senses ofscripture, attaching in
turn literal, tropological, and anagogical signifi­
cance to the same words, so the visual represen­
tation of Saint Gregory's Mass was intended to
enable an illiterate audience to contemplate the
richness ofChristian doctrine by visual means.
In the Mexican feather mosaic, alongside
conventional signs like the cock, nai ls , sponge,
hammer, column, and flagellum, are some
innovations. To Christ's right, behind the open
sepulcher, is a delicately shaped tree, or perhaps
a small plant, missing in the print source. On
the front ledge of the sepulcher, rest two promi­
nent objects with dark green leaves, perhaps
pineapples or possibly flowers, but apparently
an offering. Perhaps this addition is an intention­
ally bicultural motif, since offerings offruit and
series ofgeneral assemblies was called to resolve
difficul ties and disagree ments over the adminis­
tration of bap tism and marriage.
Although it is tempting to think the fe ather
painting refers to these contempora ry events,
this conclusion is impossible to substantiate in
the absence of external evidence. Nonetheless,
subtle though the changes in subject matter are,
given the historical circumstances just described,
th ey are sufficient to render sixteenth-century
understanding of the iconography to a certain
degree irresolvable and open-ended-like many
artistically and culturally hybrid works of colonial
art. This feather mosaic is the earliest example.
There is no doubt, however, that Fray Pedro
de Gante established innovative meth ods for
teaching Christian doctrine to his Amerindian
neophytes at San Jose de los Naturales, the arti­
san school for natives attached to the Franciscan
monastery in Mexico City.35 As noted, the Arms
ofChrist were a popular devotion among the
first Franciscan missionaries, though the iconog­
raphy is by no means unique to the order. Gante
and other missionaries used visual images exten­
sively during the early years of the conquest when
language was an extreme barrier to communica­
tion, as we know from numerous sources including
the important pedagogical text Rhetorica Christiana
(Perugia, Italy, 1579) written and illustrated by
Gante's pupil Diego Valades, a Franciscan friar
born and raised in Mexico. 36 From his testimony,
and from other material evidence such as atrial
crosses like the one that stood in the forecourt of
the Capilla de los Indios of the Basllica de Guada­
lupe in Mexico City, we know that rebus like signs,
specifically the Arms ofChrist, were used to teach
the catechis m. 37 In his book, Valades provided
engraved illustrations of catechism classes being
taught in the open-air atrium of the Franciscan
motherchurch at San Jose using similar visual
signs. He also introduced a sort of pictographic
syllabary of his own involving signs in the shape
ofsacred hearts, a symbol with connotations on
both sides of the cultural and linguistic divide.
Some of Valades's heart signs include recogniz­
able elements from Nahuatl pictograms. Although
their exact meaning has never been deciphered,
the mann'er in which they function in his text
makes the important point that they are a cultur­
ally hybrid means of communication.
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SCHOOL OF SAN JOSE DE LOS NATURALES
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flo wers were formerly associated with sacrifice in
pre-Columbian ceremonies and not out of place
in Christian settings either. The most striking
addition to the conventional Christian iconogra­
phy, however, is a feature that might have origi­
nated in a misunderstanding of the print source:
whereas Christ's head is bent in humble submis­
sion in Meckenem's engraving, his neck cast
in deep shadow, in the Mexican reinterpretation
the shadow is red. Is blood flowing from the
crown of thorn s or gus bing from a neck wound?
Again, the imagery is unorthodox by European
standards, but its significance is difficult to assess.
In the European prototype imagery, moreover,
blood from the wound in Christ's side flows into
the chalice on the altar table in some examples.
This detail illustrating the central Eucharistic
doctrine of transubstantiation is missing in the
amantecayotL
There too, the conventional setting in a church
interior has been eliminated in favor of an undif­
ferentiated blue background. Isolating each sign
against a brilliantly colored ground makes it easier
to remember the images, as European treatises
devoted to memory training recommend and as
other visual examples of the same motifs, such
as Fra Angelico's mid-fifteenth-century frescoes
in the cells of San Marco monastery in Florence
attest. 39 Yet the choice of color might also be inter­
preted as serving a narrative function by indicating
an outdoor setting for this particular Gregorian
Mass-the priest and his assistants appear to
be kneeling on the bare ground-an especially
inviting hypothesis because outdoor services were
held in open-sided chapels in sixteenth-century
Mexico.
Considered in conjunction, th ese changes in
subject matter prompt speculations about the
artist's motive. In tentionality eludes modern in­
terp reters , however: the transforma tions may
be meaningful, or they may be no more than mis­
understandings on the part of indigenous artists,
although it is likely that Gante himselfa pp roved
the innovations . None of the alterations discussed
here may therefore have been considered to inter­
fere wi th or subvert the orthodox doctrinal content
ofthe image .4o
The mnemonic devices, moreover, attest to
the mental capacity of their users to "recollect,"
that is, to remember the central mysteries ofthe
Christian faith by contemplating the mnemonic
signs that refer to them . Mnemonic signs initi­
ate the inferential process of recollection that is
uniquely human, according to Aristotle and his
commentators from Cicero to Saint Augustine
to Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus. The
crucial task of recollection is retrieval: a memory
image, wrote Aristotle in De memoria (45obrr-2o),
is like an imprint or drawing, causing us to re­
member what is not present; a memory drawing,
like a painted panel, is an object ofcontempla­
tion, a sort of copy and a reminder, like a cue card.
Thomas Aquinas described memory as the faculty
responsible for the conversion of images into
abstractions or universals and reserved the term
recollection to describe a kind of human reason­
ing, a "quasi-syllogistic search. "41 In his account
of the human arts in De quantitate animae, Saint
Augustine defined the third degree of the human
soul as memoria, requiring anima adversio (atten­
tion), proper to man and distinct from the sense
memory ofanimals. 42
In the fifteenth century, Saint Antoine, the
Dominican arch bishop of Florence whose Summa
Theologica was among the earliest books recorded
in New Spain, urged his readers to learn the art of
projecting sacred concepts into memory figures.
In describing and illustrating the basic tenets of
medicv.)l faculty psychology, Valades focused on
the role played by the art of memory in teaching
sacred doctrine to neophytes at San Jose de los
Naturales, where images were placed in strategic
locations along liturgical procession routes. 43
Neo-Aristotelian distinctions about various mental
operations were further institutionalized in early
modern European classifications of the human
sciences, and the arts played a particularly signifi­
cant role in this context. The mental capacity to
recollect, that is, to draw a series of in fe rences,
as Aristotle and his commentators defined the
distinction between the human faculty of mem ory
and the retentive memory of animals, was both
directly cited and indirectly implied throughout
sixtee nth-centu ry discussions o f the Amerind ians
mental capacities. The same texts and arguments
later played a key, and more pernicious, role in
racial theory.
The s ignificance of this language ofsigns in
a gift destined for Pope Paul III is clarified by the
his torical con text of the po ntiff's Sublimis Deus
1
I
MASS OF SAINT GREGORY
10 1
issued so me ten years after the opening ofSa n
Jose de los Naturales. In 1539, Paul III would have
been ideally well di sposed to understand what was
implied by the choice of both the s ubj ect and the
artistic medium. Indeed , for any be holder attu ned
to the debate, th is Mass of Saint Gregory testifies
to the tru ly human nature ofAmerindian s in terms
that predate the debate ofVa lla do lid by at least
a decade. It is perhaps not an overstatem ent to
clai m tha t, by I539 , the terms on which the Ind i­
a ns ' mental capacities were judged were parr of
an international, transcultural discourse in w hich
the cul turally dispossessed also participatedat least to the limited extent of a few assimilated
members ofthe Amerindian eUte. Ironically, th is
erudite gift offered as evidence of his own human­
ness by a bicultural colonial subject in the lan guage
of the conqueror in a medium prized by both colo­
nized and colonizer apparently never reached its
intended destination in the sixteenth century. Yet,
the same profoundly conceived object can, 450
years later, help explain the checkered histo ry of
the utopian idea that humans by nature belong to
a universal community of mankin d. Culturally
hybrid colonial works of art and, more genera lly,
visual modes of crossing cultural barriers , played
a strategic, multilateral role in the history of this
crucia l modern idea.
CF
102
J U AN BAUTISTA AND/OR JU AN CUIRIS
I2
JUAN BAUTISTA AND/OR JUAN CUIRIS
2
Jesus at the Age of Twelve
Weepillg Virgin
1590- ,600
Inscribed respect ively loan . Bapt. me Fecit. Michuac[anj
and luanes Cuiris Fecit Michuac[anj
Feathers on copper
10 x
71> in . (25 .4
x
,8.2 em) eaeh
I<unsthistorisehes Museum, Vienna
This pair offeather mosaics depicting the yo uthful
Jesus and his mother was produced in Michoacan,
w here th e pre-Hi spa nic art offeather painting
flouri shed in the early colo nial period un der the
auspices of Bishop Vasco de Quiroga (147°7-1565)
at trade schools attached to the region 's Augustin­
ian monasteries, particularly the one in Tiripetlo,
and later in workshops in oth er towns around
Lake patzcuaro. These exam ples are signed, respec­
tively, Juan Bautista and Juan Cuiris , though both
names may identifY the same feathe r painter.
The mosaics rep rese nt the third sorrow of the
Virgin M ary1 expressed in the biblical story usually
depicted in art as Christ among the Doctors, in
which the youthful Jes us slips away fro m his fa m­
ily and remains behind in the temple for three
days questioning the rabbinical scholars . The in­
scription that encircles the face of the Virgi n con­
veys her dismay at her son 's defection : Fili quid
fecisti nobis sic ecce ego et pater tum dolentes quaerebamus
te (Son, why have you treated us s07 Behold , your
father and I have been looking for you anxiously.
Luke 2.48 Revised Standard Version). Jes us ' re­
sponse is inscribed on the oval border around his
image: Quid est quod me quaerabatis nesciebatis quia
in his qua p[at]ris mei sunt oportet me esse (How is it
you sought me? Did you not know that I must be
in my Father's house? Luke 2-49 RSV).
The first mention of these delicate feather
mosaics appears in an early seventeenth-centu ry
invento ry of the treasury of the celebrated art
patron Rudolph II of Prague (1552-1612) ,2 w ho
was named Holy Roman Emperor in 1576. His