Novo-Hispanic school; second half of the 18th century.

Novo-Hispanic school; second half of the eighteenth century.
"Nun's pectoral with the Virgin of Guadalupe".
Oil on copper.
Measurements: 20, 5 x 15 cm.
The nun's pectoral belongs to the tradition of the European miniatures, taken to America by the Spanish colonizers and adopted in the conventual circles of the New Spain. The pectorals were painted in oil, as in the present case, on round or oval plates, with a frame bordering the main image, in which images of flowers or other ornamental motifs were placed.
The image of the Virgin of Guadalupe occupied a central place in the colonial art of the 18th century, especially in the New Spain, where her cult reached an unprecedented religious, political and identity dimension. Since the strengthening of devotion after her proclamation as patron saint of New Spain in 1737 and the spread of the apparitionist story of Tepeyac, her iconography multiplied in paintings, sculptures, engravings, screens, panels and works of popular art, becoming one of the most reproduced motifs of the period.
In the artistic field, the Guadalupana consolidated a relatively stable iconographic model, the frontal figure, wrapped in a luminous mandorla, supported by the angel and seated on the moon, which allowed infinite formal variations without losing its recognizable identity. Urban and regional workshops reinterpreted it according to their own technical resources and local sensibilities, which favored a wide social circulation of the image, from large canvases destined for temples to small devotional paintings for domestic use.