Download The Virgin of Guadalupe: The History and Legacy of One of the Catholic Church's Most Venerated Images AudioBook Free
No other artwork on the globe is comparable to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Why is this painting unique - situated in the Basilica of Guadalupe, north of Mexico City - is not specifically its creative quality, as is the situation with the Mona Lisa by Leonardo or The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, nor its place in the evolution of painting. It evidently does not constitute a landmark in skill record, and the most visited painting on the globe is obviously not the summit or the harbinger of a new aesthetic activity, like Dali's melting wristwatches or Vehicle Gogh's Starry Night time. In fact, for a few, the execution of the image is coarse and all its elements fit well known techniques. For others, it is only a copy of your sculpture of the Virgin found in Spain. What distinguishes the Virgin of Guadalupe of Mexico is her universality: unlike any masterpiece of design on the globe, it can be recognized by any nearby resident, certainly the most ubiquitous image in her country. It might be difficult to acquire a Mexican who cannot name her. The other thing that makes the Virgin of Guadalupe incomparable is her power to unite her nation, something that has been widely confirmed throughout record. At different occasions, and increased by different hands, the Virgin of Guadalupe (never the original painting) has led the troops that changed the annals of the territory now known as Mexico. Not a couple of hours had passed after the start of War of Freedom when the rebel army was already holding the image of Guadalupe; in the twentieth century the image was present at the indigenous rebellion in Chiapas in 1994 and also materialized through the Mexican "perestroika" of 2000, which concluded the single-party routine that had lasted for seven decades. Going further back again, during Mexico's conquest, Hernán Cortés carried a graphic of the Virgin that, to the disinterested observer, is actually the prototype of the Mexican Madonna. For some, Guadalupe is the work of a proficient Indian painter, and this work was retouched and embellished by others in later hundreds of years. Nearly all scholars note the way the image "appeared" at a very convenient time in Mexico´s record, when evangelization functioned as the ideological arm of the material conquest of the Aztec empire. There are even reasons to speculate whether the image currently on display in Mexico City is equivalent to in the 17th century since it is well known from testimonies of the time that Mary had a crown on her behalf head. Which means whether it's the same, at the minimum it's been retouched, doctored and tampered with again. Conversely, for the believers, the image was miraculously stamped on the tilma or cloak of a man named Juan Diego. On the list of latter are the majority of the 17 million people who go to the original annually in Mexico City, which makes it the most visited painting on the globe. In comparison, the Mona Lisa at the Louvre in Paris gets six million tourists per year. What nobody questions -believers, skeptics or atheists- is that the Virgin of Guadalupe has been the main symbol, religious or not, in Mexico´s record, some sort of non-official flag. Her impact has propagate even to the Mexican diaspora, where it has turned into a sign of id, pride and resistance among undocumented immigrants in the United States. For Mexicans, you won't need to be religious to believe in the energy of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a unifying image and embodiment of national identity.
