[AZTLAN] Blue Virgin of Metztitlan

[Sam Edgerton]

Listeros: I'm posting two more URL images, the first (METZ.4) from the 
16th-century Augustinian convento in Metztitlan: a mural directly adjacent 
to the Crucifixion with the upside down inscription that we looked at 
earlier. It depicts the Immaculate Virgin Mary in her  standard pose as was 
popular all over Catholic Europe at the time, especially in Spain and the 
American colonies. She is conventional except for one intriguing detail: 
her skin, as well as her mantle, are colored entirely in blue. Any ideas 
why?  The mural was certainly done by a Christianized Indian, the same who 
painted the Trinitarian Crucifixion, accenting the water dripping from 
Christ's wound and in the baptismal font in the same blue - that and the 
little bit of red coloring in the dripping blood being the only other 
colors in the mural besides black and white. It's almost as if he wanted to 
"syncretize" Christian symbolism and the ancient native belief in the 
reciprocal relationship between blood and water. Interestingly, in another 
of the great Augustinian missions in Hidalgo, the convento church at 
Ixmiquilpan,  the Indian artist who painted the famous set of battle murals 
there (detail in IXMIQ.jpg) also employed the same hue to color the long 
tendril that curls through and connects each of the several scenes. In and 
out of this tendril human breath, blood and even anal wind flows. Flowers 
bloom from it out of which armed warriors emerge!  Could the blue coloring 
in these colonial instances signify the still held indigenous belief in a 
mystical fluid-like "life force,"  TONAL or CHU'LEL , that energizes all 
life in the universe? And that the Metztitlan artists sensed its source in 
his new goddess, the Virgin Mary?
Sam Edgerton

http://lanfiles.williams.edu/~sedgerto/METZTITLAN4.jpg
http://lanfiles.williams.edu/~sedgerto/IXMIQ.jpg