Acolman: The Church Murals

This is the first in a survey of the colonial murals of Acolman, in tandem with posts on its architecture and sculpture on our sister site.

On the northern heights overlooking the Valley of Mexico close to the pyramids of Teotihuacan, stands the imposing monastery of San Agustín Acolman. Founded as a Franciscan house, in 1539 the monastery was ceded to the Augustinians who built their grand new priory around the Franciscan shell. The building is a formidable presence set in green cornfields framed by cool blue hills.
   Acolman is especially rich in murals from different colonial periods. Important, well preserved sequences of frescoes adorn the church and continue throughout the convento. We start with those in the church.

The Church Murals 

Inside the vast cool nave, the eye is immediately drawn towards the east end. Beneath an intricate web vault, the five-sided apse blazes with striking black, white and orange murals, that scale the walls and reach into the vault itself. Long covered by whitewash, the murals were rediscovered and restored in 1895.

 

Probably painted around 1600, the murals depict rows of gigantic figures of Augustinians seated on thrones. Above the bottom rank of lowly friars, stern-visaged cardinals and bishops line the two middle tiers, with popes at the top, an imposing hierarchy deliberately linked to the elevated position and traditional authority of the Order in the history of the Church. 

In the lunettes at the top, venerable apostles and Old Testament prophets sit uneasily among mythological figures borrowed from classical antiquity—naked youths, grotesque beasts and even prophetic sibyls—whose only other appearance is in the 16th century frescoes of the Casa del Deán in Puebla—all intended as further legitimizing sources for Augustinian authority, under question in the New World when the murals were painted.

   Overall, the apsidal frescoes recall the stairway murals at Actopan, and even those of the Sistine Chapel.

Vestiges of early murals survive in other corners of the church—we spotted this striking frieze fragment back of the choir loft with a foliated Leviathan like dragon.

text © 2018 Richard D. Perry

photography by the author, and courtesy of Marina Hayman and Carolyn Brown