James Cordova Arts

Retablo, 1990

Hand-carved wood, home-made gesso, water-based natural pigments, piñon-resin varnish, leather.

Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe (Our Lady of Guadalupe)

A sixteenth-century image of the Immaculate Conception of Mary named after a popular Spanish Marian devotion that predates the Mexican Guadalupe. As legend has it, the Virgin Mary appeared to an Indian man, Juan Diego in 1531, just ten years after the conquest of the Aztecs and healed his ailing uncle. She requested that a church be built at the site of the apparition—a hill in Tepeyacoc, a sacred Aztec site. As the archbishop of Mexico did not believe Juan Diego's story initially, Juan Diego brought him a miraculously imprinted image of the Virgin on his cape a proof.