The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception is a recurring subject in the art of imperial Spain and its dependencies. Looking at various such images, particularly the Intramuros Virgin from the colonial Philippines, can help in explaining the complexities of these matters.
Mary, Mary
Left: Virgin of the Immaculate Conception by the Workshop of Bartolomé Estebán Murillo, Spanish Baroque, c.1660.Image from The Walters Art Museum.
Right: Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, Hispano-Philippine, 18th century. Image from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In Catholic art, there are two broad varieties of Immaculate Conception images. The first portrays an exalted Virgin Mary, often denoted by her placement amid clouds and above the moon, crowned with stars, and attended by angels. This variety appears to presuppose viewer foreknowledge of what the doctrine or teaching of the Immaculate Conception involves, which in itself is hard to depict as a physical reality.
Virgin in Glory, with symbols of the Immaculate Conception by Cornelis Galle, Spanish Netherlands, 1596–1633. Image from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The second variety provides added symbols to flesh out the notion of the Immaculate Conception. Nonetheless, for the uninitiated, their seeming lack of obvious relation to the Virgin may compound the mystery of what the Immaculate Conception is. The Intramuros Virgin falls within this second category.
Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, Philippines, 18th century, Intramuros Administration Collection. Photograph by Rachel Lucy Choo.
The said Virgin of the Immaculate Conception is a wooden relief carving originally from a family chapel in Polo, Valenzuela, and now belonging to the Philippines’ Intramuros Administration Collection. Intramuros (Spanish for “within the walls”) is the walled city built by Spanish rulers of the Philippines as their fortified base, and is today the old Spanish quarter of Manila. The carving dates from the 18th century. It forms part of the indigenous or indio response to evangelisation, but could also be said to demonstrate the late influence of the Spanish Baroque period.
Here, Mary is again the central figure, atop a downturned crescent moon laid across an orb. A pedestal beneath and a ladder projecting into this scene imply that the viewer turns upward from a mundane realm outside the boundaries of the image, to be privy to a celestial vision. Simultaneously, other symbols alongside the Virgin clamour so prominently for attention as to nearly derail the sense of the celestial. What have all these to do with the Immaculate Conception? And, more fundamentally, what is the Immaculate Conception, and why does it deserve a place in Christian belief or art?
Contrary to Protestant charges that she detracts from the worship of God, the belief in the Immaculate Conception underscores how God himself delights in, and indeed demands purity and perfection from his creatures, because these are the very traits identifiable with him.
The Masterpiece Mirrors the Master
The term Immaculate Conception refers to the Virgin Mary herself, conceived without having in her person the stain of original sin which characterises the rest of mankind.
Catholics believe Mary is a specially made creature of God granted a singular grace, in that she was saved from sin by being entirely prevented from falling into it. This salvation was enacted by her saviour and son Christ Jesus, the second person of the Godhead. As God he precedes her from all eternity. And, as God who also became incarnate in history by becoming man when conceived in her womb, Jesus is the only instance of a son being able to create his own mother. Being God, who himself is perfect, he was able to make her — his creature, when he formed her in her mother’s womb — perfect; that is to say, immaculate. Note, however, that the perfection of the creator is definitively superior to the perfection of the creature. Mary as the Immaculate Conception may be understood as the masterpiece of God the divine artist.
The concern with salvation of souls for the eternal afterlife is the raison d’être of Christianity. Mary as Immaculate Conception is the central exemplar of a creature saved, but not just in the life hereafter. The belief in Mary as a historical person immaculate from the moment of conception is not a statement dead-ending in Mary herself. Rather, it points to the creator capable of effecting such perfection, and to whom worship is owed.
Hence, the spotless mirror at top left of the Intramuros carving. This “reflection of eternal light” into which “nothing defiled gains entrance” (Wis 7:25–26) is originally a descriptive metaphor for God’s wisdom, found in the book of Wisdom. The Church also applies it to the immaculate Virgin. The Old Testament Jewish monarchies generally included the institution of the queen mother — the mother of the king, his wisdom counsellor. Correspondingly, Christ, who is the New Testament perfection of kingship, has his own mother whom the Church identifies with these aspects of divine wisdom.
How Does Your Garden Grow?
The Intramuros Virgin principally casts Mary as the New Eve, victorious over the devil, represented by the serpent coiled around the crescent moon. Her enmity and that of her seed Jesus against the serpent, and their victory over it, are typological — a New Testament type and coming to a head of the enmity between the same serpent and the first Eve of the Old Testament, as originally played out in her temptation into eating the forbidden fruit (Gen 3:1–5; 3:15). The final book of the Bible, Revelation, mentions this victorious woman appearing as a “great portent … in heaven, … clothed with the sun, … moon under her feet, on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Rev 12:1). In the carving, the blazing sun to the Virgin’s right identifies her with the beloved bride lauded in the Song of Solomon — she who is “bright as the sun” (Song 6:10).
This central subject matter is coherent with the Baroque influence on the carving. The Baroque movement was originally the official Catholic artistic counterpunch to the Reformation. If Protestants had done away with images of saints, the Church responded with more of them, addressed with ever greater reality and immediacy to ordinary people in a war for their hearts. The drama inherent in this war surfaces in the exuberantly roiling clouds and clamour of the symbols framing the Virgin’s figure.
The naturalistic floral-foliate wreath of the Intramuros depiction, and indeed the relief of the entire wooden carving, go beyond the illusionism of paint in many other Immaculate Conception portraits striving to convey the ethereality of a crown of stars. The carving makes the coronation materially perceptible to human touch, while still representing an evanescent vision of a heavenly queen bestowed with heavenly honour. The doubling down on the Baroque principle of merging art and reality is furthered by the ladder at bottom right of the scene, as if inviting the viewer to personally ascend closer to the action. At the same time, the ladder stands for Mary herself, who as the human mother of God the Son, is like the ladder of Jacob and “gate of heaven” (Gen 28:10–17) in facilitating the descent and ascent between heaven and earth.
The Baroque’s adaptability to local conditions well suited Spanish missionaries, who promoted the Immaculate Conception devotion as a model of female chastity in the Philippines upon encountering local women who were bare-breasted and bathing naked with men in the rivers. The modestly attired and Asian-faced Intramuros image was likely carved by a local craftsman familiar with similarly modest European depictions, while infusing indigenous elements to enhance its relatability to the indios.
To accept that God only fully dwells in what is pure and perfect conversely entails accepting that only when a person is able to completely conform to perfection, may they dwell fully with God for eternity. The belief in purgatory therefore, correlates naturally to the belief in the Immaculate Conception.
To the left of the orb is the rose of Sharon (Song 2:1), associated in St. Jerome’s Letter LXXV with the destruction of death enacted by Christ coming from the wilderness of a virgin’s womb. The depicted bloom and serrated leaves resemble those of chrysanthemum — an East Asian flower which after its discovery by Europeans gained associations with the Virgin Mary. To the right of the orb is supposedly a cone of the exalted cedar of Lebanon (Sir 24:13), the evergreen symbolising incorruptibility and therefore immortality. The cone may well be a visual pun for a pineapple, its thorny crown supplied by the leaves of the adjacent lilies doing double duty. Consider thence the carved “lily of the valleys … lily among brambles” (Song 2:1–2) alluding to Mary’s purity amidst sin. The pineapple had been imported to the Philippines from the Americas by the Spanish. As a novelty to Europeans, pineapples were so highly prized as to be suitable gifts for royalty, which may shed a perspective on the anomalous Intramuros coronation “pineapple”.
The carving’s remaining motley symbols, drawn from the Song of Solomon, are the stock-in-trade of the second variety of Immaculate Conception images. The Song is a book about ideal love. Its solo voices, male and female, constitute the dialogue of not only a faithful human couple, but ultimately God in relation to his bride Israel. With the coming of Christ, it is the immaculate Virgin who symbolically personifies this divine bride. Having been made perfect in order to bear God incarnate in her womb, she prefigures the new Israel which is the Church to be perfected by the salvific acts of Christ.
Thus, the carving compares Mary’s neck to the crenellated tower of David, just as the male singer of the Song deems the neck a point of strength in his bride (Song 4:4). In warriors the neck is usually a vulnerability; with regard to the Virgin it implies a woman without chinks in her armour against sin.
Below, the sealed fountain and locked garden (Song 4:12) signify things precious and protected exclusively for their owner. In biblical lands, water was often scarce and so were the gardens dependent on them. The fountain and garden are metaphors for the woman, whose unsullied beauty is the preserve of her lover or God. The walled garden (in Latin, hortus conclusus) synonymous with the Virgin is common from medieval art onwards. On the other side of the carved Virgin, the well of living water (Song 4:15) refers to her as a spring of spiritual grace, flourishing in ability to participate in divine life.
The Intramuros Virgin may be decoded through its horticultural and related allusions which build a picture of Mary as a “garden” embodying perfection and impregnability to sin, beautiful and precious to God, and therefore beloved and honoured by him.
Quite Contrary?
Critics of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception typically challenge the possibility of a mere woman being formed sinless, and question the need for such a wondrous creature, given Catholicism’s claims to be monotheistic.
Answering these objections comes down to understanding the fundamental purpose of Christianity. That being, to direct the human person towards choosing the good, true and beautiful over the false glamour of evil, that they may be faithful to the image and likeness of God in which they were created, thereby attaining salvation and admission to his abode in paradise.
The inviolate perfection of the Virgin Mary, the enclosed garden, is the blueprint for that image and likeness. Contrary to Protestant charges that she detracts from the worship of God, the belief in the Immaculate Conception underscores how God himself delights in, and indeed demands purity and perfection from his creatures, because these are the very traits identifiable with him. To accept that God only fully dwells in what is pure and perfect — be that a place (like paradise, or the metaphorical walled garden) or a person (like the Immaculate Conception) conversely entails accepting that only when a person is able to completely conform to perfection, may they dwell fully with God for eternity. The belief in purgatory therefore, as a place of God’s mercy, where the blessed dead bound for paradise but not yet pure enough to enter it are first purged of sin and error, correlates naturally to the belief in the Immaculate Conception.
Immaculate Conception depictions like the Intramuros Virgin are key artistic means for reminding the faithful of the divine plan for human salvation. The prerogatives and honours conferred upon Mary, as illustrated by the superlative imagery of her spotless fidelity to God, invincibility, and victorious queenship, show the model of human perfection enabled through his workings in his most esteemed creature.
Rachel Lucy Choo has a master’s degree in art history from the University of London, and is interested in the relationship between art and Catholic doctrine. She thanks C. Forbes-Kelly and I. Fushimi for inspiring the writing of this article.
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