Monjas coronadas

also: Crowned nuns · Retratos de monjas coronadas

genre 17th-19th centuries Mexico Latin America

Monjas coronadas ('crowned nuns') is a pictorial genre of colonial New Spain: oil portraits of nuns painted at the moment of their solemn profession, when the novice, having died to the world, was crowned as a bride of Christ. Emerging in the seventeenth century and flourishing through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth, the portraits show the sitter adorned with jewels, flowers, and a floral crown, holding candles, crucifixes, palm fronds, or the Christ Child, against a plain background that keeps attention on the figure and her emblems. The iconography encodes convent life and Counter-Reformation mysticism - mystical marriage, asceticism, biblical allusion - and the portraits come in calced (sumptuously adorned) and discalced (sober) variants matching each order's habit. The custom long outlived painting itself: convents in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia still photograph newly professed and deceased nuns with their crowns and flowering palms.

Portrait of Sor Juana de la Cruz Cortés and Arauz from the convent of San Jeronimo de Mexico, misidentified with the writer Sor Juana Inés d
Portrait of Sor Juana de la Cruz Cortés and Arauz from the convent of San Jeronimo de Mexico, misidentified with the writer Sor Juana Inés dPublic domain (credit: Unidentified painter) · source

Defining characteristics

  • The sitter wears a crown or wreath of flowers and jewels given at the profession rite
  • Jewels, pearls, and silver ornaments worn over the monastic habit - lavish for calced orders, austere for discalced ones
  • Held attributes: lit candles, crucifixes, flowering palm fronds, or an image of the Christ Child
  • Static, frontal or three-quarter figures with lowered or direct gaze against a simple background
  • Emblems of the mystical marriage to Christ and the nun's 'death to the world', often with inscriptions

Key figures

  • Miguel Cabrera (1695-1768) — Leading painter of viceregal New Spain whose portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is the genre's best-known image
  • Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695) — New Spain's greatest poet, professed at San Jerónimo; her celebrated portrait is the genre's emblem

Example works

  • Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz — Miguel Cabrera (attributed) (c. 1750)
  • Portrait of Sor Juana de la Cruz Cortés y Arauz — Anonymous (18th century)

Sources

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