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Sacred Images, Sacred Texts
By Henry Handley
The Marian Library’s art collection is one of the most familiar collections to many people on campus due in part to art loans. When Michael Schreffler, an associate professor in art, art history and design at the University of Notre Dame, wrote to ask about the possibility of a rare books loan for an upcoming exhibit, however, no one could remember sending out rare books on loan before.
Five months, hundreds of miles and several email threads later, seven rare books from the Marian Library are now part of the exhibit Divine Illusions: Statue Paintings from Colonial South America, on view through May 16 at the Snite Museum of Art on the Notre Dame campus. The exhibit, curated by Schreffler, features a selection of 17th- and 18th-century works known as “statue paintings” — images of sculptures associated with miraculous intercession — from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation. The paintings originated in the Andes Mountains in what is now Peru and Bolivia. The books, published in Europe and the Americas between 1616 and 1796, feature illustrations of Marian apparitions such as Our Lady of the Pillar (an inspiration for Marianist co-founder Blessed William Joseph Chaminade) and Our Lady of Guadalupe.
According to the Snite Museum, "By making divine images from distant places present in colonial Peru and positioning them – through painting – in the company of sacred sculptures from the Americas, works in this genre traced a transatlantic spiritual geography conceived in 18th-century Spanish America and extending from the Andes to the Pyrenees and beyond."
All of the exhibit’s text — featured quotations as well as didactic labels — is in both English and Spanish in honor of the origins of the devotional statues and texts.
For more information about the exhibit and its related events, see Divine Illusions: Statue Paintings from Colonial South America on the Snite Museum of Art website.
— Henry Handley is a collections librarian and assistant professor in the Marian Library.
The beginning of the “Divine Illusions" exhibit.
The beginning of the “Divine Illusions" exhibit.
Frontispiece illustration and title page of Compendio de los milagros de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza, by Josef Félix de Amada, 1796.
Frontispiece illustration and title page of Compendio de los milagros de Nuestra Señora del Pilar de Zaragoza, by Josef Félix de Amada, 1796.
Rendered in oil and gold on a copper plate, this image of Nuestra Señora de Copacabana was created by an unknown artist in the 17th or 18th century. She is honored as the patron saint of Bolivia.
Rendered in oil and gold on a copper plate, this image of Nuestra Señora de Copacabana was created by an unknown artist in the 17th or 18th century. She is honored as the patron saint of Bolivia.
For the first page of Antonio Manzilla’s Imagen Iris de hermosura, de fecundidad, y duracion, N. Señora de Valvanera, a creative typesetter combined an ornamental border with rotated type.
For the first page of Antonio Manzilla’s Imagen Iris de hermosura, de fecundidad, y duracion, N. Señora de Valvanera, a creative typesetter combined an ornamental border with rotated type.
Our Lady of Loreto has inspired worldwide devotion, including in Augustin Redel’s Jubilus Marianus (1689).