The San Sabá Mission Martyrs and the Novohispanic Hagiographic Pictorial Tradition

Eighteenth century Franciscan martyr portraits became popular in monastic spaces of the Spanish viceroyalties of central Mexico. To visually construct the meritorious life of these martyrs, artists drew inspiration from hagiographic chronicles that distorted Native rebellions, by emphasizing friars’ gruesome deaths. Their martyrdom enticed novices to follow in their footsteps in service to God, and the Crown. These images relied on a mosaic of sources that formally connected them to a variety of printed and painted materials. Of outmost importance for this presentation is the “rhetoric of translation” and the “art of copying:” pictorial conventions that set the visual culture of New Spain apart from the rest of Europe. The painting pictured above - The Destruction of Mission San Sabá in the Province of Texas and the Martyrdom of the Fathers Alonso Giraldo de Terreros, Joseph Santiesteban, a huge 83" by 115" painting commissioned In 1763 by mining magnate Pedro Romero de Terreros and currently on display in the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City – exemplifies this process 

Emmanuel Ortega is the Marilynn Thoma Scholar and Assistant Professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a Scholar in Residence at the Newberry Library for 2022-2023. Ortega lectures nationally and internationally on Mexican landscape painting, and Novohispanic Franciscan martyr paintings. Ortega has curated in Mexico and the United States; his latest endeavor is the exhibition titled Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium, which opened at the New Mexico State University Art Museum and will travel in 2023 and 2024. His book project, Visualizing Franciscan Anxiety and the Distortion of Native Resistance: The Domesticating Mission is under contract with Routledge.